Elon Musk, the head of
SpaceX and
Tesla, is celebrating his 50th birthday.
The infamous CEO,
whose tweets move markets and have
caused cryptocurrencies to surge and crash, held the title of
world’s richest person earlier this year – despite strong
competition from
other billionaires.
Mr Musk’s journey to such unimaginable wealth started from a position of financial privilege,
albeit one of emotional abuse. His mother, Maye Musk, was a model who has featured on the covers of numerous magazines including
Time and
Vogue.
In 1969 she was a finalist in the Miss South Africa beauty competition, and one year after that married Elon Musk’s father, Errol Musk. In the mid-1980s, the family profited handsomely from Errol Musk’s purchasing of an emerald mine, after selling their airplane for £80,000 (the
equivalent of £320,000 today).
“We went to this guy’s prefab and he opened his safe and there was just stacks of money and he paid me out, £80,000, it was a huge amount of money,” Errol Musk said, according to
Business Insider. Errol Musk was then made another offer: to spend £40,000 on an emerald mine. “I said, ‘Oh, all right’. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years,” Errol Musk said.
As a result of this, the teenage Elon Musk once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket. His father said: “We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe,” adding that one person would have to hold the money in place with another closing the door. “And then there’d still be all these notes sticking out and we’d sort of pull them out and put them in our pockets.”
Following his teenage years, Mr Musk’s personal wealth multiplied massively through his business ventures. In 1995 Elon Musk, and his brother Kimbal Musk founded the web software company Zip 2. That company was eventually purchased by Compaq in 1999 for $307 million in cash, with Mr Musk receiving $22 million for his seven per cent share.
Mr Musk then founded X.com, an online financial payment company that would merge with the online bank Confinity, founded by Peter Thiel.
It was Confinity’s own money-transfer service, PayPal, that became the official title for the banking venture - but eventually Musk was replaced by Peter Thiel as CEO in 2000 and PayPal was bought by eBay in 2002. Musk, as the largest shareholder in the company, received over $100 million, with reports saying the full figure is somewhere between $165 and $180 million.