12 facts you don’t know about billionaire Elon Musk

The Chief Executive of electric car company Tesla, Elon Musk has emerged the world’s wealthiest person, a spot previously claimed by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. Elon Reeve Musk FRS is a business magnate, industrial designer and engineer. He is the founder, CEO, CTO and chief designer of SpaceX; early investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink; and co-founder and initial co-chairman of OpenAI.

His wealth as estimated by CNBC is $185 billion after share price in his company surged in the past year.

Here are some things you didn’t know about Musk:

1. Musk was born in South Africa on June 28, 1971, to Maye and Errol Musk who also gave birth to Kimbal (brother) and Tosca (sister).

2. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 with degrees in economics and physics.

3. He dropped out of Stanford University just after two days into a PhD in applied physics and material sciences. His decision paid off after Zip2, a company which he started after dropping out was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999.

4. Companies he founded and co-founded include Zip2, PayPal (X.com), The Musk Foundation, SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and Thud.

5. He was included in Bloomberg’s list of 50 most influential names and was ranked 25th on the Forbes list of The World’s Most Powerful People in 2018.

1. He made a guest appearance in the movie Iron Man 2, and also appeared in an episode of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory (‘The Platonic Permutation’) and The Simpsons.

2. He has been married thrice and has five sons with his first wife Justine Wilson (one set of twins and one set of triplets). All his children attend a school he set up in a mansion in California which he called Ad Astra.

3. Despite being Tesla CEO, a company founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, Musk earns an annual salary of $1.

4. Musk was recently offered a green card by China, which is a privilege enjoyed by an elite group of foreigners, Nobel laureates and a former NBA star.

1. He donated a whopping sum of five million US dollars to Khan Academy in January 2021, and plans to do more even though he says it’s harder than he thinks.

12.  In a Rolling Stone interview, Musk claimed he was off building rokcets from just a kid. “I’m shocked that I have all my fingers,” said the intrepid entrepreneur.