Is Elon Musk The Richest African American?
02/01/2021
Business,Education,Entertainment,Tech
Elon Reeve Musk born June 28, 1971 in Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa. He is a business magnate, industrial designer and engineer. He also 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.
Musk attended the University of Pretoria for five months, just to avoid mandatory service in the South African military but that doesn’t make him a coward just really really smart. Arriving in Canada in June 1989. In 1990, Musk entered Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Two years later, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania; he graduated in 1997 with a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in economics from the Wharton School and a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in physics.
In 1995, Musk was accepted to a Ph.D. program in energy physics/materials science at Stanford University in California. He dropped out of Stanford after two days, deciding instead to join the Internet boom and launch an internet startup. He realized that he want to be BOSS not a work horse so in 1995, Musk and his brother Kimbal, and Greg Kouri founded web software company Zip2 with funds from a group of angel investors. Compaq than acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash in February 1999. Musk received $22 million for his 7 percent share from the sale.
In March 1999, Musk leveled up and co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company, with $10 million from the sale of Zip2. One year later, the company merged with Confinity, which had a money-transfer service called PayPal. The merged company focused on the PayPal service and was renamed PayPal in 2001. In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk received $165 million. Before its sale, Musk, who was the company’s largest shareholder, owned 11.7% of PayPal’s shares.
In 2002 Musk leveled up again when he created SpaceX with the goal of reducing space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars. Major achievements of SpaceX are in the reuse of orbital-class launch vehicles and cost reduction in the space launch industry. The total cost of the decade-long project to design, build, and deploy the constellation is estimated by SpaceX to be about $10 billion, including nearly $900 million in Federal Communications Commission subsidies.
In February 2004, joining Tesla’s board of directors as its chairman. Tesla’s current products include electric cars, battery energy storage from home to grid scale, solar panels and solar roof tiles, as well as other related products and services. Tesla ranked as the world’s best-selling plug-in and battery electric passenger car manufacturer in 2019, with a market share of 17% of the plug-in segment and 23% of the battery electric segment. On January 10, 2020, Tesla become the most valuable American automaker ever, with a market capitalization of $86 billion. On June 10, 2020, Tesla’s market capitalization surpassed those of BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen combined. The next month, Tesla reached a market capitalization of $206 billion, surpassing Toyota’s $202 billion to become the world’s most valuable automaker by market capitalization .In January 2021, Musk became the richest person in the world with a net worth of US$209 billion, passing Jeff Bezos, leveled up to BOSS KING.
Musk gain his United State citizenship in 2002, he also still have his Canada and South Africa citizenship as well. Because he’s a citizen in the U.S., it technically makes him the riches African American in U.S. history. I know what your thinking “This BS”, you can verify this on your own. The link source is in the bottom.
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.