Why Is Elon Musk Famous?

Hailed as one of the richest self-made billionaires in the world, Musk is known for his innovations in business and sustainability.

Elon Musk is famous for being an environmental entrepreneur and businessman, as well as one of the richest people in the world. His most famous projects are PayPal, which he has since sold, Tesla Motors, a luxury electric vehicle company, and SpaceX, which manufactures and sends rockets into space.

Find out more about how Musk accumulated his wealth as an entrepreneur below.

How Musk Made His Money

Elon Musk grew up with a passion for innovation, selling his first self-made video game to a computer company at just 12 years old for $500.

He attended Stanford university for just 2 days before dropping out and starting his first real business with brother Kimball Musk.

Musk made his first fortune by founding the company Zip2 in 1995. He later sold it to Compaq for a profit of $22 million.

Investing the money he had earned from previous business ventures, he created the electronic-payment firm PayPal (originally called X.com) in 1999. 

It went on to become one of the most used payment platforms in the world.

Musk was the CEO of PayPal for a year – he was removed after a dispute, although he still held stock in the company. 

He earned $165 in profits when the company was sold to eBay. 

Tesla, Inc.

The businessman has always been a passionate environmentalist.

Perhaps his most famous venture is Tesla Motors, a symbol of sustainability combined with luxury in automobiles.

Tesla was founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, later joined by Musk and 2 others. 

Musk is the CEO of Tesla, and has spoken about his vision for the company to eventually make electric cars affordable to the public.

Tesla is the best selling plug-in automobile manufacturer in the world, and holds significant value in the stock market. The electric car company was the first to go public since Ford.

In July 2020, Tesla surpassed Toyota as the world’s most valuable automaker, with a market capitalization of $206 billion.

Tesla acquired SolarCity, a solar panel manufacturing company, in 2016.

SpaceX

Perhaps Musk’s most interesting venture is Space Exploration Technologies, also known as  SpaceX, which designs and launches rockets into space.

It specializes in aerospace manufacturing and transport, and is regularly funded by NASA.

SpaceX is a continuation of Musk’s sustainable vision, with many of its rockets being made from renewable materials. 

Their spacecraft Falcon 9 was the first orbital rocket to be reused. 

SpaceX is reported to be the first private company to successfully launch and return a spaceship in orbit. The spaceship in question is the famous Dragon, launched in 2010.

The company boasts a list of impressive feats, breaking records as the first private company to launch an orbit into the Sun, as well as to send astronauts to the International Space Station.

It is the largest commercial satellite operator in the world.

Other Ventures

Musk has several other interesting ventures ahead of his time.

One of his most innovative projects is called Hyperloop. It is proposed to be one of the fastest routes of land transport, and is a vactrain designed for passenger transportation.

He proposes a network of sealed tubes around cities, through which people can travel at extreme speeds without congestion. 

Another project of his, Neuralink, is a proposed chip that could be inserted inside a human brain to form a computer-brain interface.

This would put human development on par with that of Artificial Intelligence, which Musk has repeatedly stated is a threat to human existence.

He is famous for being one of the most hardworking, innovative entrepreneurs of the 21st century.

Musk has accumulated a net worth of over $70.5 billion, passing Warren Buffet on the Forbes list of richest people in the world.

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