11/01/2021
Starting something new. Your morning briefs will be about regular people who started with just a vision and ended up building a business into what they are today.Today's morning brief will be about Elon Musk.
Elon Musk is a South African-born American entrepreneur and businessman who founded X.com in 1999 (which later became PayPal), SpaceX in 2002 and Tesla Motors in 2003. Musk became a multimillionaire in his late 20s when he sold his start-up company, Zip2, to a division of Compaq Computers.
In 1999, Elon and Kimbal Musk used the money from their sale of Zip2 to found X.com, an online financial services/payments company. An X.com acquisition the following year led to the creation of PayPal as it is known today. In October 2002, Musk earned his first billion when PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock.
Musk founded his Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, in 2002 with the intention of building spacecraft for commercial space travel. By 2008, SpaceX was well established, and NASA awarded the company the contract to handle cargo transport for the International Space Station
Musk is the co-founder, CEO and product architect at Tesla Motors, a company formed in 2003. In April 2017, Tesla announced that it surpassed General Motors to become the most valuable U.S. car maker.
In January 2017, Musk launched The Boring Company, a company devoted to boring and building tunnels in order to reduce street traffic. In May 2019 the company, now known as TBC, landed a $48.7 million contract from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to build an underground Loop system to shuttle people around the Las Vegas Convention Center.
In January 2021, Musk reportedly surpassed Jeff Bezos as the wealthiest man in the world. Net worth of 292.6 billion dollars.