Undoubtedly, most people in the world must have heard the name of Elon Musk, the man who is awarded Person of The Year 2021 by Time magazine. The No.1 richest person in the world. Common questions ; Where does he come from? How does he actually make his money? What is the first company that he founded? The most important question of all is how he becomes Elon Musk as we know today?

Let us go through Elon Musk’s profile and find out together why he made a bid to buy Twitter, and update : He is now on the brink, whether to buy or not the Twitter, only God knows.

From South Africa to the United States

Elon Musk who has just turned 51 last June, was born in Pretoria, South Africa to a South African engineer father and a nutritionist Canadian mother. As early as 12 years old, he actually created a video game like Space Invaders called Blastar and managed to sell it to computer magazine PC and Office Technology for $500. By displaying a very early interest towards computers and entrepreneurship, he and his brother, Kimbal Musk planned to open a video game arcade. The only stopping them was that their city where they were living needed a business city permit which only an adult could apply for.  

Before he moved to the United States in 1990, he actually emigrated to Canada first and enrolled at Queen’s University in Ontario. After two years, he was transferred to University of Pennsylvania where he received bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics. What is interesting about Elon Musk was he actually enrolled in graduate school in physics at Stanford University California but he only took 2 days to leave the school because he saw that the Internet had much more potential to improve society compared to physics.

The Founded Companies

o arrange accordingly his founded companies, he first founded Zip2, a company that provided maps and business directories to online newspapers in 1995 which was sold to Compaq for $307 million. Then, he found X.com which later became Paypal, an online financial services company. Paypal then was bought by the online auction eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. Later in 2004, Elon invested in Tesla Motors, an electric car company that was founded by Martin Eberhad and Marc Tarpenning. Musk successfully convinced both guys to design a Tesla Roadster that could travel 394 km on a single charge and could go from 0 to 97km per hour in less than 4 seconds. It was indeed an electric sports car that debuted in 2008.  

Nevertheless, even with the outstanding performance of Tesla Roadster, Eberhard was ousted from the company following disagreements in 2007, and Elon took over as the CEO of Tesla. Fast forward from Tesla, Elon Musk founded an aerospace transportation services company called SpaceX. Elon acts as the lead designer and successfully developed Falcon 1, its first liquid fuel rocket to orbit. Falcon Heavy then emerged with the performance of the most powerful operational rocket by the factor of two. SpaceX now is developing Starship, a transportation system that will carry crew and cargo to the Moon, Mars and beyond – and Starlink which will deliver high speed broadband internet all over the world. Elon Musk sees the long-term goal of SpaceX is to make humans a multi-planet species by creating a self-sustaining city on Mars. 

The Boring Company continues the visions of Elon Musk in Tesla, where it combines fast affordable tunneling with an all-electric public transportation system. Elon sees the increasing tragic accidents, soul crushing and urban congestion as huge problems especially in the cities. Turned out, the Boring Company is indeed not a boring company at all. 

While he is enthusiastic towards electric transportation and outer-space, Elon is also a CEO of Neuralink which is currently developing an ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine to connect human brain to computers. He visualizes the human brain is able to communicate to computers without any intermediary or external platforms. 

Stories & Controversies

With successful stories of his founded technology companies and their astounding performance, Elon Musk is also no stranger to controversy. He is famous for disrupting the old conventional, buttoned-up CEO style. Known for his brash presence, he loves to create a roller coaster ride to the companies’ shareholders, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and even his fans and followers. 

As the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, he has repeatedly made headlines from smoking marijuana on Joe Rogan’s podcast to calling a British cave diver a “pedo guy” after the diver criticized Elon’s efforts to rescue the 12 boys who were trapped in a Thai cave in June 2018. 

Elon also landed himself in hot water, when in 2018, Elon expressed his plan to consider Tesla private at $420 per share as he tweeted in Twitter that Tesla had “secured funding”. The figure suggested by Elon, represented an 18% premium of the Tesla stock price and sent the Tesla shares at the time soaring.  However, the Tesla private was never materialized but his action caused him to be sued by the US Securities and Exchange Commision (SEC). The SEC alleged him for securities fraud where his tweets were actually false and misleading. 

Crypto & Dogecoin

Just naming a few of Elon’s tweets in Twitter that create waves and trending, affecting stocks or even index prices go soaring and plummeting, Elon Musk also took advantage of his hype to share his portfolios in crypto investment. Back in July 2021, the funky CEO confirmed that he owns a few cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin. He even repeatedly said that he collaborated with Dogecoin developers in a tweet of his own, “They aren’t financial experts or Silicon Valley technologists. That’s why I decided to support Doge – it felt like the people’s crypto.”

Despite the fact that the Dogecoin is created as a joke or a meme cryptocurrency,  Elon Musk endorsing the coin really impacted the “dog coin” news positively. During this article is written, Dogecoin has spiked from around 14 to 17 cents as Elon’s moves towards Twitter takeover unmasked.

Twitter Takeover

The Twitter takeover was reported in April 2022 where Elon offered to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share, valuing the company at about $43 billion. Earlier, Elon confirmed that he had bought more than 9% of the social media company, making him the largest shareholder of Twitter. Elon wants Twitter to be private to unlock its “extraordinary potential”. He believes the company can be the “platform for free speech around the globe”.

“However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form,” Musk wrote and shared the copy of the letter in an SEC filing, through his tweets in Twitter. “Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.” Update : This story left some marks on Elon’s reputation, as the buying has a lot of arguments which are quite confusing as per Elon might be back off from his decision to buy Twitter. 

Update : The news of Elon buying Twitter hasn’t finished yet. For new updates, he is currently under federal investigation over this $44billion Twitter deal.

Conclusions

With his own words, “I operate on the physics approach to analysis. You boil things down to the first principles or fundamental truths in a particular area and then you reason up from there”, Elon Musk is indeed an imperative figure, not only in technology but also in the financial world. To some, Elon has the air of someone who thinks he is the protagonist of reality, but again who does not. But the richer and more famous the person is, Elon Musk’s public persona surely represents an unusual role any CEO has maybe ever accounted for.