Elon Musk Becomes The World's Richest Man

A 4.8% rally in Tesla’s share price boosted Musk past Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Elon Musk’s net worth hit 188.5 billion US dollars at 1015 AM yesterday in New York. The Tesla-chief was only $3 billion behind Bezos on Wednesday.

Here’s a brief of Elon Musk's professional journey

In 1995, Elon Musk and his brother, Kimbal, started Zip2, a web software company. He raised money from a small group of angel investors. The company developed and marketed an internet city-guide for the newspaper publishing industry. There were maps, directions and vector graphics mapping and direction code. Musk did it using Java. Then, in early 1999, City Search acquired Zip2 and Musk got 7% shares along with 22 million dollars.

Next month, Musk co-founded X.com. It was an online financial service and e-mail payment company. Then, a year later, the company merged with Confinity, which had a money-transfer service called PayPal. He sold PayPal to eBay in 2002 and got a whopping 165 million dollars from the deal.

Earlier, to selling off PayPal, Musk ideated a private space mission to Mars. The idea behind this was to “land a miniature experimental greenhouse on Mars, containing food crops growing on Martian regolith, in an attempt to reawaken public interest in space exploration.”

In 2013, Elon Musk envisioned Hyperloop. The idea was to create a fast and competent fast travel machine. Musk assigned a dozen engineers from Tesla and SpaceX who worked for nine months, establishing the conceptual foundations and creating the designs for the transportation system. Musk, in 2017, said that he had received what he described as “verbal government approval” to build a hyperloop from New York City to Washington, D.C., stopping in both Philadelphia and Baltimore. In December 2015, Musk announced the creation of OpenAI, a not-for-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research company. OpenAI aims to develop artificial general intelligence in a way that is safe and beneficial to humanity.

Billionaire genius Elon Musk is in a league of his own.