Elon Musk, the visionary tech titan and a multifaceted genius, is known for his innovative and wealthy contributions to the world. Beyond his roles in SpaceX, Tesla, Boring Company, OpenAI, xAI, and Nuralink, he is known for his influence in the blockchain realm and for his witty humor on his social media platform.
As the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk has radical plans for the future, including creating a utopian city called Starbase and colonizing Mars. This article will delve into the fascinating journey of Elon Musk from his childhood days to his latest tweet. Let’s start!
Elon Musk’s Childhood Days: From Bully Victim to Game Developer
Born on June 28th, 1971, Elon Reeve Musk is part of the wealthy South African Musk family. His father, Errol Musk, has delved into multiple ventures, such as being an electromechanical engineer, emerald dealer, sailer, pilot, property developer, and consultant. Elon’s mother, Maye Musk, is a Canadian-born dietician and model.
After his parents divorced, Elon started living primarily with his father, a decision that he changed later in life. He attended the state-run Bryanston High School, but after facing severe bullying from other students, he started attending a private school.
He was very much interested in reading books and spending time in front of the computer. His favorite books were The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Lord of the Rings. After reading a user manual, he got interested in building computer games, a first step into his professional career.
Elon’s Career Timeline: From Game Creator Prodigy to the Richest Man in the World
Whether it is creating computer games or learning physics, he was into multiple interests from his childhood itself. Let’s check each of them in detail till his latest achievement through a timeline.
1980s
- 1984: As a child prodigy who is twelve years old, he created his first computer program, a game named “Blastar”. He sold it to a magazine for about $500.
1990s
- 1995: After temporarily enrolling at Stanford University to seek a PhD in energy physics, he exited after two days to focus on his ambitious business endeavors and moved to Silicon Valley, a major turning point in his life. Together with his brother Kimbal Musk, he co-founded Zip2, a company that offers business directories and maps for newspapers.
- 1999: Compaq Computer Corporation purchased Zip2 for $307 million in cash. Musk established the online financial services business X.com using the money he made from Zip2.
2000s
- 2000: This year saw the creation of PayPal through the upgradation and rebranding of X.com and the merger of Confinity, a business that Peter Thiel co-founded. After serving as CEO for a while, Musk was replaced as he was looking for the next stage of development.
- 2002: Musk became wealthy enough to finance his subsequent endeavors after PayPal was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in stock. With his share, he founded SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation) with the motto of revolutionizing the space industry.
- 2004: He started the collaboration with Tesla Motors (now Tesla, Inc.), first as an investor and then as the board chairman.
- 2008: He formally became a significant investor in Tesla Motors, rising to the position of CEO and firing 25% of the employees.
2010s
- 2013: This year saw the re-introduction of the Hyperloop, a high-speed transit idea that was first prevalent in the 17th century. He released Hyperloop’s alpha version through a whitepaper and
- 2015: He co-founded OpenAI, along with Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba. Dedicated to ensuring that artificial general serves the interests of all people, the platform released ChatGPT in 2022 and SoraAI in 2024.
- 2016: Neuralink was established with the goal of creating brain-to-computer connections. He also established The Boring Company, which specialized in building tunnels and infrastructure for high-speed transit and solving traffic issues.
- 2017: This year saw the completion of Tesla’s acquisition of SolarCity, which allowed the company to incorporate solar energy options into its lineup and decrease the climate crisis.
- 2018: The work on a tunnel in Los Angeles was initiated by The Boring Company. Also, Falcon Heavy, the most potent operational rocket in the world at the time, was successfully launched by Elon’s SpaceX.
2020s
- 2022: Elon paid $44 billion to acquire Twitter, one of the most successful social media platforms, to encourage free speech on the network. Next year, Twitter was rebranded as X.
- 2024: Musk entered the American political scene in 2024, lending financial support to Donald Trump during his presidential campaign and being named a co-leader of Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE.
Elon Musk’s Connection with Cryptocurrency
Elon Musk is a notable figure in the crypto environment, creating impact in the charts through his statements and activities. Since his PayPal has a system similar to Bitcoin, various web3 enthusiasts speculated that he is behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. He denied that claim.
Elon’s transformation as a crypto KOL started with his humorous take on the meme niche of blockchain where he endorsed Dogecoin, a popular meme coin. Whenever he posted a Shiba Inu meme or tweeted about Doge, its price increased significantly. He was even called the Dogefather and did a Doge-based show on the SNL (Saturday Night Live).
He was interested in Bitcoin from its early days, but his real effect on BTC was witnessed by the world when he announced in 2021 that Telsa would accept BTC as a payment. It ignited BTC’s 2021 bull and later went to a downtrend when Elon stopped BTC payments because of the rising climate concerns. He owns Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin.
Elon’s Political Perspectives
Despite his collaboration with the U.S. right-wing government, he considers himself a politically moderate person who holds freedom and liberty as primary values. He propagates freedom of speech, gun rights, climate rights, and universal basic income. In the crypto realm, he is against short selling, calling all the short sellers “leeches” who suck all the hopes and dreams of investors and entrepreneurs.
Final Thoughts: What’s Next for Elon Musk?
Elon Musk has a mission of the “New World” where humans become multi-planetary species, traveling across various planets such as Mars. According to him, Mars is an inevitable destination where we can create a self-sustainable colony. In the earthly realms, his immediate plan is to shift the headquarters of SpaceX from California citing “woke” reasons of the state, to Texas.
He named the new place “Starbase”, and we can expect him to build an advanced Utopian city surrounding the Texas SpaceX. Browse through our website to learn more about key blockchain personalities and other crypto insights.
