Musk or musco is a perfume obtained from a strong-smelling substance, secreted by a gland of the musk deer or other animals and plants. In English you say musk. Elon Reeve Musk (Pretoria, South Africa, 1971), the richest man in the world with 260,000 million dollars, gives off a strong personality, which he now exhibits through Twitter, the social network of which he is the largest individual shareholder, and for the who has already prepared a takeover bid.
The character runs in the family. Her maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was a Canadian adventurer who flew his offspring by single-engine plane to Africa and Australia, breaking pace records. Elon has British and Pennsylvania German ancestry. His mother, Maye, is a model and dietitian born in Canada but raised in South Africa. His father, South African Errol, is an electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant and property developer who co-owned an emerald mine in Zambia. “We had so much money that sometimes we couldn’t even close the safe,” Elon recalls.
As a child, doctors believed he was deaf, but his mother determined that he thought “in another world.” Musk said a year ago that he has Asperger’s syndrome. He is the oldest of three siblings, and has a half brother and a half sister on his father’s side. After the divorce of his parents in 1980, he lived mostly with his father, which he later regretted. He describes him as “a terrible human being… he’s done just about every bad thing you can think of.”
At the age of 10, he became interested in computing and purchased a Commodore VIC-20. He learned to program from a manual and, at 12, he sold the code for a video game called Blastar to a specialized magazine for $500. Clumsy and introverted, he was bullied and hospitalized after a group of boys threw him down the stairs.
Knowing that it would be easier to enter the US from Canada, Musk applied for a Canadian passport through his mother. While he was waiting, he attended the University of Pretoria for five months; that allowed him to avoid compulsory military service. He came to Canada at the age of 17 and lived for a year with a second cousin in Saskatchewan, doing odd jobs on a farm and in a sawmill. He soon entered Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. There he met his first wife, the writer Justine Wilson. His first child, Nevada Alexander, died of sudden infant death syndrome at 10 weeks old. The couple resorted to in vitro fertilization, giving birth to twins Xavier and Griffin (2004) and triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian (2006).
After two years he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in Physics and Economics. He then did summer internships in Silicon Valley, researching electrolytic ultracapacitors for energy storage, and at a video game firm. He began his doctorate in Materials Sciences at Stanford University (California), but two days later he preferred to join the internet boom. He co-founded with his brother Kimbal the startup Zip2, which managed web directories for the media, and which would be bought by Compaq for 307 million dollars. And he co-founded online bank X.com, which merged with Confinity to form PayPal; eBay would buy it for 1,500 million.
With his $180 million from the sale, Musk founded Space X, and in 2004, Tesla, along with other partners. Its rockets failed and the automaker did nothing but spend. In 2008, he was on the brink of bankruptcy, in the midst of a financial crisis, and he had just gotten divorced. But Space X started to work and got a contract with NASA. And Tesla began to capture the interest of investors.
Musk then helped create solar energy services SolarCity and founded OpenAI, a nonprofit promoting friendly artificial intelligence; Neuralink, for neurotechnology and brain-computer interfaces; and The Boring Company, construction of transport tunnels, which has just raised 675 million in a round of financing. His idea is very similar to the idea of the subway of all life, although Musk boasts that it is revolutionary. He also supports the Hyperloop, a low-pressure tube high-speed train system.
In 2008, he began dating English actress Talulah Riley; they married in 2010, divorced in 2012, remarried in 2013, and broke up for good in 2016. He then dated actress Amber Heard; Johnny Depp accused them of having been together while he was still with her. In 2018, Musk announced that he was dating Canadian musician Grimes, with whom he has a son named X Æ A-12 (sic), and a daughter, Y (sic), by surrogacy. The current relationship between the two is uncertain: as soon as he says that he is single as she considers that they are “very fluid”.
Musk is also uncategorized in politics. He has made controversial statements about the pandemic, criticizing the lockdowns, for example, or defying authorities by reopening the Fremont, California, factory. Regarding the war in Ukraine, he has had a dialectical fight with a Chechen leader, and has lent Starlink satellites to support the invaded country.
He donates money to both Democrats and Republicans, something he considers essential to have a voice in the Administration. He criticized former President Donald Trump for pulling out of the climate accords; he believes that the best way to promote the green transition is to raise carbon taxes, and he is against subsidies, despite the fact that his companies have received significant public support. And he has defended universal basic income.
He has said that the fall in the birth rate is one of the main risks for humanity; she profiled the legal tightening against abortion in Texas (where she has resided since 2020). This same week she has attributed her drop in subscribers to Netflix’s “woke ideology”. He believes that Twitter does not take enough care of freedom of expression, for example with the veto against Trump. But he, more loquacious and controversial than Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates have ever been, continues to express himself on the social network… almost as if it were his own.
Philanthropy
He makes small donations compared to other billionaires. Among his preferences are solar energy in areas that have suffered natural disasters, a museum dedicated to Nikola Tesla or Wikipedia.
He has signed, yes, the popular campaign among the rich Giving Pledge (The promise to give), so that he will donate most of his fortune in life or in his will.
