If you don’t chance to be born into the Saudi royal family and want to become a millionaire, there are a few options. You could come up with the one truly brilliant concept, such as a new computer operating system or social networking site, and then turn it into a multibillion-dollar corporation as reported by TIME.
Amazing idea
Or you could take the Warren Buffet route, making a decades-long series of shrewd, low–risk investments, and then watch the wealth slowly trickle in.
Musk made his money differently than most of today’s famous billionaires.
Instead of one amazing idea, he had several good ones.
And instead of a bunch of clever, safe investments, he made just a few spectacularly risky ones.
But there was a method to his madness, even if it wasn’t apparent to many at the time.
Childhood
He had an early aptitude with computers, designing his own video game at 12-years-old.
When he was 17, he left for Canada to escape military service in South Africa’s apartheid regime, attending Queens University in Ontario.
In 1992, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied physics and business.
Then it was on to Silicon Valley and—briefly—to grad school.
Together with his brother Kimbal, Musk founded a company called Zip2 as an online business directory, a kind of web-enabled yellow pages with maps—a nifty idea back in the mid-nineties.
Run the company
Elon and Kimbal recruited investors and brought on outside help to run the company, which made deals with publishers like the New York Times.
A year later, Musk wrecked the car—he was trying to show off its acceleration and ended up accidentally launching it into the air like a frisbee.
The million-dollar sports car was not insured.
Musk was named CEO, but in September, while he was on vacation, the board fired him, replacing him with Thiel, partly due to a disagreement over switching the company’s servers.
Musk still had a stake in the company, though.
When eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, Musk netted a $180 million mega-fortune from the deal.
New millions
Musk didn’t end up relaxing with all the things his new millions could buy.
The next year, he sank an initial investment of more than $6 million into Tesla, which was then not much more than a pair of founders and a vision of electric sports cars.
At the time, lithium-ion cells were only being used in small electronic devices, and one of Tesla’s central innovations was scaling them up, which enabled it to create an electric vehicle with a far greater range than previous electric cars had been able to achieve.
Later, Tesla almost went bankrupt during the Great Recession in 2008.
SpaceX is the undisputed leader in private space exploration.
Tesla
Though Tesla produces fewer vehicles than legacy carmakers like Ford and GM, its valuation has soared many times higher than theirs.
It’s anyone’s guess as to whether the company will maintain its massive valuation—if Tesla’s stock falls, so does Musk’s fortune.
And with SpaceX’s value floating at over $100 billion, according to its October funding round, Musk’s 48% stake in the rocket-maker, plus cash and other assets, brings his total net worth to around $266 billion.
Both are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
They’re both highly speculative endeavours—Neuralink is trying to develop telepathic interfaces with machines; The Boring Company aims to revolutionize infrastructure.
Or at least the wealthiest private citizen.
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Source: TIME
