Elon Musk has held the title of the richest person in the world, albeit that title may change at any time depending on company share prices. In addition to serving as the CEO and co-founder of the aerospace company SpaceX, Musk is also the CEO and co-founder of the electric automobile manufacturer Tesla (TSLA). Although he has also received money from passive investments, Elon Musk has made the majority of his money from the companies he founded. Musk’s best investments include PayPal, SpaceX, DeepMind Technologies, Tesla, and The Boring Company.
PayPal
The online financial services and email payment business X.com was launched in 1999 with the help of Musk. which was renamed PayPal in 2001 after merging with X.com, was acquired a year later. EBay paid PayPal $1.5 billion on October 3, 2002, to acquire it. Musk was PayPal’s largest stakeholder at the time of the sale with a stake of 11.7%, owning 7,109,989 shares of the company. PayPal is now free of Musk’s ownership. Following the sale of the business, he gave up his position and invested the money in SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX.
SpaceX
Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., popularly known as SpaceX, in 2002. One of the company’s early goals was to revolutionize space technology, and one of its primary components was to build spacecraft that could transport people to Mars and other planets in the solar system.
NASA awarded SpaceX a substantial contract in 2006. In 2008, SpaceX launched Falcon 1, the first commercial liquid-fueled rocket to reach space. In 2010, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station. (ISS). SpaceX was awarded a second contract in 2012 to assist shuttle crew members traveling between the ISS and Earth. NASA agreed to use its Starship spaceship to transport people from lunar orbit to the moon’s surface in 2021 in exchange for an additional $2.9 billion.
DeepMind Technologies
Musk was one of the company’s primary angel investors when DeepMind Technologies, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup, was established in late 2010. Google said in January 2014 that it has purchased the business for an undisclosed sum equal to Elon Musk’s estimated net worth as of March 6, 2022.
Musk, who is well-known for being concerned that AI would eventually replace humans, reportedly invested in DeepMind, not for financial gain but rather to keep up with how quickly the field of artificial intelligence is progressing. Deep reinforcement learning, an AI technique that combines deep learning—which is mostly for pattern recognition—and reinforcement learning, has been the focus of much of DeepMind’s research.
In a 2013 white paper, DeepMind introduced this form of learning that is based on incentive signals, such as a game’s score. DeepMind’s creation of deep reinforcement learning constituted an advance in AI, although thus far there haven’t been many fruitful commercial applications. The method has been used internally by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, to cut down on the energy expenses related to cooling Google’s servers in data centers.
Tesla Motors
Although he wasn’t a part of Tesla’s original team, Musk oversaw an early round of funding in 2004. In 2008, Musk transitioned from being a Tesla board member to the company’s CEO, all the while continuing to lead SpaceX. Tesla’s initial public offering (IPO) on Nasdaq took place on June 28, 2010, with shares of common stock priced at $17 a share at the time. Shares of Tesla were worth more than $800 as of March 7th, 2022.
Tesla’s goal is to speed up sustainable transportation by making affordable electric vehicles widely available. Companies including United Parcel Service (UPS) and PepsiCo placed preorders for the completely electric tractor-trailer vehicles that Tesla said would be produced in November 2017. The Model S, Model X, Model 3, and premium Roadster supercar are some of the company’s electric vehicles.
Elon Musk owns 177 million shares of Tesla as of December 28, 2021, for a total market value of about $142.3 billion. Elon Musk is still the biggest individual shareholder in the business and heavily influences its long-term strategy and short-term objectives.
Boring
Musk established The Boring Corporation, a company that builds infrastructure and tunnels, in 2017. The business was formed on the idea that, although traffic is terrible, it can be “fixed” by utilizing the millions and miles of earth that lie beneath roads. The corporation wants to increase production efficiency while lowering the cost of tunneling.
The LVCC Loop would be a $48.6 million underground tube that would traverse beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center and include three stops and a pedestrian tunnel. The plan was authorized in March 2019 by the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority. LVCC Loop will be open for business as of April 2021 thanks to The Boring Company. The Boring Company is currently working on a project in Las Vegas and has completed further projects in Hawthorne, California, as of 2022.
