Elon Musk is regarded as one of our generation’s most brilliant entrepreneurs.
Elon Musk, the flamboyant co-founder of PayPal and SpaceX as well as Tesla (TSLA), Neuralink, and The Boring Company, is a visionary entrepreneur. He is the CEO of Tesla as well as the CEO and primary designer of SpaceX.
His meteoric rise has drawn comparisons to Bill Gates, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, and Steve Jobs, among other visionary corporate leaders. His overall net worth is expected to be $151 billion as of 2021. Only Jeff Bezos has surpassed him as the world’s wealthiest person. He has been dubbed “genius”.
Projects that made him climb the ladder of his success are listed below:
Elon Musk’s PayPal:
PayPal’s board of directors and investors include some well-known figures. Traditional paper methods like checks and money orders are replaced by the popular internet payment system. Ken Howery, a former US ambassador to Sweden and co-founder of Founders Fund; Max Levchin, an early investor in Yelp and the founder and CEO of Affirm Inc.; and Peter Thiel, a co-founder of Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund, are among PayPal’s co-founders.
PayPal’s stock is no longer owned by Musk. In 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion, and he left the company. The sale is said to have netted Musk $180 million.
Musk co-founded X.com, online financial services and email payment startup, with a $10 million investment in 1999. The company was combined with Confinity a year later, and in 2001, it was called PayPal.
SpaceX:
Musk established Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, with a large portion of the cash from his PayPal sale. Musk claims that he invested $100 million in SpaceX when it was founded in 2002.
Both financially and technologically, SpaceX has been a huge success. In 2006, NASA gave SpaceX a large contract. Falcon 1 was the first private liquid-propellant rocket to reach space, and it was launched by SpaceX in 2009.
The Dragon spacecraft launched by SpaceX arrived at the International Space Station in 2010. (ISS). NASA awarded SpaceX a second contract in 2012 to assist shuttle crew members in getting to and from the International Space Station (ISS).
Due to the fact that SpaceX is a privately held firm, establishing its value is challenging. In three rounds of investment, SpaceX raised $1.33 billion in 2019. SpaceX was trying to raise $250 million at a price of $220 per share in February 2020, according to people familiar with the company’s funding.
This would increase SpaceX’s worth to about $36 billion, up from $33.3 billion before. It is one of the world’s most valuable private companies, and it is one of the most sought-after pre-IPO corporations.
Musk is SpaceX’s largest stakeholder and CEO, and the company is now worth significantly more than Musk’s first investment of $100 million. Musk is sure to make a large amount of money if the company is ever brought public.
SpaceX has reignited interest in space flight in the general public’s mind. Crew Dragon, Starlink, and Starship are the three ambitious programmes being developed in the most current round of fundraising.
SpaceX has been awarded more than $3.1 billion by NASA to create the Crew Dragon capsule, which represents SpaceX’s aspirations to send humans into orbit.
The Starlink project, which would include establishing a global network of around 12,000 small, interconnected satellites that would give high-speed Internet anywhere in the world, is also part of SpaceX’s attempts to transport humans into space.
DeepMind Technologies:
DeepMind Technologies, a startup that specialises in artificial intelligence (AI), was founded in late 2010 with Musk as a major angel investor.
Google announced the acquisition of the company in January 2014 for an unknown sum; the sale was estimated to be between $400 million and $600 million.
Musk is well-known for his concerns about artificial intelligence surpassing humans, and he is said to have invested in DeepMind not for profit but to gain insight into how quickly AI technology is evolving.
Deep reinforcement learning has been a major emphasis of the firm’s research. Deep reinforcement learning is an AI technique that combines deep learning—which is typically used for pattern recognition—and reinforcement learning, which is based on incentive signals like a gaming score.
In a publication published in 2013, DeepMind named this technique, which was a breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence.
Although Alphabet has used deep reinforcement learning internally to reduce electricity costs for cooling Google’s computers, DeepMind has yet to find any viable commercial applications of the approach.
Tesla Motors:
Elon Musk was not a founder member of Tesla, but he was instrumental in the company’s early funding round in 2004. Even though he was still the CEO of SpaceX, Musk transitioned from being a board member to Tesla’s CEO in 2008.
Tesla went public on Nasdaq on June 28, 2010. The public was able to purchase common stock for $17 per share. Tesla’s stock is worth $888.60.32 as of January 26, 2021.
The objective of the company is to advance sustainable mobility by bringing mass-market electric cars to market.
Companies like United Parcel Service (UPS) and PepsiCo pre-ordered Tesla’s completely electric semi-trucks when they were revealed in November 2017. Model S, Model X SUV, Model 3 sedan, and the high-end Roadster supercar are among the company’s inexpensive and high-quality electric vehicles.
Elon Musk was due to receive $346 million in stock awards as part of a performance-based incentive scheme, according to Reuters, in January 2020.
Elon Musk is paid in stock award options that vest based on the company’s market capitalization and other growth milestones, rather than a salary or cash bonuses. Tesla is owned by Musk, who holds about 241 million shares, or about 25% of the corporation.
Elon Musk established The Boring Company:
In late 2016, Elon Musk established The Boring Company, which specialises in infrastructure and tunnel development. The company was created on the idea that traffic is terrible, and that going above ground is unnecessary when there are miles and miles of unused earth beneath streets.
The company’s mission is to lower tunnelling costs while increasing output. The Boring Company plans to do so by building smaller tunnels and developing its own high-powered boring machines.
Baltimore, Chicago, Hawthorne, Calif., Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. were among the cities where The Boring Company was working in 2020. Elon Musk said that he would begin selling hats with The Boring Company’s logo to help fund the project.
Elon Musk claimed on Dec. 16, 2017, that he has sold 42,000 hats and raised $840,000. Musk began selling the second branded Boring Company product, a flamethrower, after achieving his target of selling 50,000 hats. Musk sold these flamethrowers for $500 each and raised $10 million in just a few days.
The Boring Company secured its first round of outside funding in July of this year. By selling stock to early-stage venture capital firms, the company was able to raise $120 million.
Before this session of funding, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority approved a $48.6 million proposal from The Boring Company to build the LVCC Loop, an underground tunnel that will run beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center and include three stations as well as a pedestrian tunnel, in May 2019.
The first of two planned loop tunnels was completed in February 2020 by The Boring Company. It is estimated that the project will cost $52.5 million.
The Boring Company also released a 505-page report in early 2019 detailing their plan to build a high-speed transit link between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore.
Most of Elon Musk’s innovative ideas and visions became true, the reason behind this was his extremely hard work and mind full of brilliance. Besides these projects, Elon Musk had made investments that acted as a booster to his success.
His knowledge, hard work and patience have made Elon Musk one of the greatest global entrepreneurs in the history of humanity.
