Time.news – Elon Musk is ingenious, impulsive and irritating. Terribly irritating. And also a corporate maverickhe is not afraid to throw himself into a myriad of sectors by imposing his rules of the game.
After revolutionizing the auto industry, sending his rocket into space – with his car aboard – and building the biggest fortune in the world, the eccentric billionaire is the new king of social media after completing the acquisition. of Twitter and having fired its top management.
This will give him control of the network over which the world debates, mobilizes, quarrels and casts shadows. The deal will also fuel the fire on his political viewson working methods, on the oversized personality and on the unconventional personal life: flames that do nothing to extinguish.
He is a libertarian and promotes himself as a champion of free speech. He was accused of autocracy and bullying. “The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important for the future of civilization to have a common digital town square“for healthy debate, he said.
Its acquisition of the social media giant crowns a rollercoaster of announcements, counter-announcements and legal maneuvers that has been going on for months.
It is the latest corporate breakthrough for Musk, after adventures in publishing, digital payments, space travel and electric cars.
He is the richest person in the world, a title he snatched from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos last year following the rapid rise of Tesla, the automaker founded in 2003.
Musk’s activities are making headlines for the right reasons: His space transport company SpaceX is partnering with a three-party enterprise that has sent the first completely private mission to the International Space Station.
But his empire also makes news in a less flattering way: Tesla has faced a number of lawsuits for alleged discrimination against black workers and sexual harassment.
Musk had two children by his partner, musician Grimes: a son, X AE A-XII, known as X, and a girl they named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, although her parents will mainly call her Y.
He also had twins with a senior executive in Neuralink, a company he co-founded.
One way or another, Musk has become one of the most ubiquitous figures in the contemporary world, but how did he get to where he is today?
Born in Pretoria on June 28, 1971, the son of a Canadian engineer and modelMusk left South Africa in his late teens to attend Queen’s University in Ontario.
He moved to the University of Pennsylvania after two years and earned his bachelor’s degree in physics and economics.
After graduating from the Ivy League school, Musk abandoned plans to study at Stanford University in California.
Instead he started Zip2, a company that produced online publishing software for the media industry.
He made his first (hundreds of) millions before age 30 when he sold Zip2 to U.S. Compaq for over $ 300 million in 1999.
Musk’s next company, X.com, merged with PayPal, the online payment company bought by internet auction giant eBay for $ 1.5 billion in 2002.
After leaving PayPal, Musk embarked on a series of increasingly ambitious initiatives.
He founded SpaceX in 2002, of which he is now CEO and chief technology officer, and became president of the electric car company Tesla in 2004.
After some first accidents and near missesSpaceX has perfected the art of landing booster engines on solid ocean and land platformsmaking them reusable, and at the end of last year sent four tourists into space, on the first ever orbital mission with no professional astronauts aboard.
With The Boring Company he is promoting an ultra-fast “Hyperloop” rail transport system that aims to carry passengers at near supersonic speeds.
He also said he wanted to make humans an “interplanetary species” establishing a colony of people living on Mars.
To that end, SpaceX is developing a prototype rocket, Starship, which plans to transport crew and cargo to the Moon, Mars and beyond.
Musk, who holds US, Canadian and South African citizenship, has been married and divorced three times: once to Canadian author Justine Wilson and twice to actress Talulah Riley. He has nine children. A tenth child died in infancy.
Forbes estimates his current net worth is $ 222 billion.