Elon Musk becomes the first trillionaire in the history of humanity

Elon Musk at a wrestling event that took place in Philadelphia, in the United States.
Matt Rourke/ AP Foto
Elon Musk became this Friday (12) the first trillionaire in history after the debut of SpaceX on Nasdaq, the main technology exchange in the United States, which brings together companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft.
It is worth noting that, even before becoming a trillionaire, Musk was already leading the Forbes list of the richest people in the world. world.
With high expectations, SpaceX arrived on the market with shares priced at US$ 135 in the IPO (initial public offering). The debut increased the company's market value and boosted Musk's fortune.
"He created a telecommunications 'super company'. Only Starlink (an arm of SpaceX) ended up becoming a global business that today is bigger than the space operation itself in terms of revenue", says to g1 Pedro Waengertner, CEO of ACE Ventures.
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Who is Elon Musk, now a trillionaire
The eldest son of a South African and an upper-class Canadian, Musk was born in Pretoria, Africa. South, in 1971. He has been married twice and had eight children. He lived in South Africa until 1989, when he moved to Canada just before his 18th birthday.
He started college at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, but, midway through graduation, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania, in the USA, where he became a naturalized American citizen. He has a bachelor's degree in physics and economics.
Musk taught himself to program and created games as a teenager.
Elon Musk in photo from August 13, 2021
Patrick Pleul/Reuters
His first venture was Zip2, a company he created in 1995 with his brother Kimbal and friend Greg Kouri and which offered a directory to find companies online. The company was sold in 1999 to Compaq.
Shortly after this sale, Musk founded X.com, which was an online financial and email services company. A year after it was created, the company merged with Confinity, which had a money transfer service called PayPal, which ended up becoming the name of the business.
In October 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for US$1.5 billion in shares.
In 2004, Musk became the largest investor and took command of the recently founded electric car manufacturer Tesla, well before traditional automakers bet on this type of vehicle.
A few months earlier, in In 2002, Musk had created his most ambitious company: SpaceX, an aerospace transport company.
An enthusiast of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, he has also dabbled in the fields of solar energy, ultra-fast transport, satellite internet and neuscience.
Elon Musk bought the social network Twitter in October 2022, after a negotiation lasting around six months marked by disputes and attempts to withdraw. The deal was closed for US$44 billion and gave the billionaire full control of the platform.
The trajectory began in March of that year, when Musk acquired 9.2% of the company's shares and became its largest individual shareholder. Months later, he questioned the number of fake accounts on the social network and tried to abandon the business, but Twitter went to court to demand compliance with the agreement.
His first appearance in the "Forbes" magazine's billionaires ranking was in 2012, with his fortune estimated at US$2 billion. Ten years later, he had a total of US$219 billion, when he topped the list for the first time.
In 2021, Musk was elected "Person of the Year" in 2021 by "Time" magazine. In 2023, his biography was released by journalist Walter Isaacson, the same person who wrote the story of Steve Jobs in 2011.
What are the billionaire's companies
⚡TESLA
Tesla opens factory in Shanghai, China
Yilei Sun/Reuters
Since 2004, Musk has been the largest shareholder and chief executive of electric car manufacturer Tesla, founded in 2003 by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.
Based in Austin, Texas, USA, the company entered the field when few brands were investing in this type of vehicle; the first model was launched in 2009. It was from there that he began to gain media attention.
Tesla also gained notoriety for adopting a controversial semi-autonomy system for cars, Autopilot, which allows them to drive alone for a certain time, as long as the driver keeps their hands on the steering wheel.
Some accidents and incidents of drivers sleeping in these vehicles make the feature quite controversial to this day.
Musk pushed the company to grow to the point of opening a factory in China, a major consumer of electric cars, in addition to Germany. With its Tesla Energy arm, the company also produced panels for capturing solar energy.
A company with shares on the New York Stock Exchange, Tesla has, at times, surpassed traditional automakers such as Ford and General Motors, which have much higher production and sales numbers.
SPACEX
SpaceX mission in 2021 was a milestone for space tourism
AFP/Inspiration4
Before joining Tesla, Musk founded, in 2002, SpaceX, focused on aerospace transport. He is also the company's chief executive. SpaceX specializes in the development and launch of reusable rockets, something that did not exist in the industry and that can make travel cheaper.
The company's first rocket launch only took place in 2008. Ten years later, in order to test its most powerful rocket yet, Musk sent a Tesla car into space.
Afterwards, he started sending satellites and has also transported people off Earth. In 2021, SpaceX achieved an important milestone in space tourism with the launch of 4 "ordinary" people into Earth's orbit - which until then had only received professional astronauts.
Musk was not on board, but, with the success of the mission, he somewhat overshadowed his competitors in the segment, fellow billionaires Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, and Richard Branson, from Virgin Galactic.
The rich man is also making plans for the colonization of Mars with SpaceX. To this end, it has been developing superships, such as Starship, with which it has been carrying out tests, still without a crew, since 2023.
STARLINK
First Starlink satellites fly over the CTIO observatory in Chile
Tim Abott/CTIO
Starlink is an arm of SpaceX focused on providing internet via satellite. In this segment, Musk also competes with Bezos and his Blue Origin. Both work in so-called "satellite constellations", which aim to bring connections to remote areas across the planet. SpaceX is ahead in the race.
The company also operates in Brazil, especially in the Amazon. Ibama has already pointed out that the expansion of Musk's technology also drives illegal activities, such as mining.
OTHER BUSINESSES
NEURALINK: he is also involved in the neuroscience startup that wants to "connect brains to computers". The goal is that, in the future, people with motor limitations will be able to control electronic devices, such as computers and cell phones, just with their thoughts.
Neuralink has already made its first chip implant in a human brain. The company is not the only one investing in this technology.
The billionaire also has the ambition of, later on, using the chip to achieve telepathy. He says this would help humanity prevail in a supposed war against artificial intelligence, but experts say the practice is not viable.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Musk was also one of the founders of Open AI, an artificial intelligence company, which he left in 2018. Four years later, the startup became famous for the creation of ChatGPT. The billionaire, who became a critic of OpenAI, created his own artificial intelligence company, xAI. in 2023.
In February this year, SpaceX announced the purchase of xAI. With the operation, the rocket company also began to control the his son Isaacson.
According to the writer, Musk is obsessed with the idea of humanity being in danger on Earth, especially with the advancement of AI. Hence the idea of colonization on Mars, one of the missions he envisions for SpaceX. This would also explain why the businessman has so many children.
THE LETTER X - The billionaire would also be fascinated by the letter X, an influence on the characters from X-Men. In addition to the lyrics renaming Twitter and naming Tesla car models, it also appears in the eccentric names of Musk's heirs. In 2020, he gave the unpronounceable name X AE A-XII to his sixth child, with his then-girlfriend, the Canadian singer Grimes. Two years later, already separated from Musk, she stated that she also had a daughter with the billionaire, called Exa Dark Sideræl Musk.
And, in 2023, the businessman's biography revealed a third baby for the former couple called Techno Mechanicus.
The website "Business Insider" also reported that, in 2021, he would have had twins with Shivon Zills, an executive at Neuralink, Musk's startup in the field of neuroscience. The author of the billionaire's biography said he met the children, named Azure and Strider, and posted a photo of them with the couple.
Musk was already the father of five children from his marriage to book author Justine Musk: twins born in 2004 and triplets born in 2006 - all with less complicated names, including Xavier (also an X-Men character).
The couple also lost their first baby, who died suddenly a few weeks after the birth. birth. After divorcing Justine, Musk married English actress Talulah Riley, from whom he also separated.
In 2015, Musk took his five eldest children out of a prestigious school for gifted children and created Ad Astra, a private learning center in Los Angeles, USA.
Musk's daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, who is a trans woman, changed her name in 2022 and did not want to keep her father's surname. She justified the change because of her gender identity and "the fact that I don't live or want to be related to my biological father in any way."
MOTHER AND ROLE MODEL - Musk's mother, Maye, is also a regular on social media. A model, she currently has more than 1.5 million followers on Instagram and 1 million on X, where she usually defends her son.
Kimbal Musk, Musk's younger brother, also has public profiles on the networks, where he presents himself as a chef, entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is on the board of Tesla.
Elon Musk and his mother, Maye Musk, at the Met Gala 2022
Dimitrios Kambouris / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP
AUTISM - In May 2021, during an appearance on the American program "Saturday Night Live", Musk revealed that he has Asperger's Syndrome, a type of mild autism.
"I know that "I've said or posted weird things, but that's how my brain works. To anyone I've offended, I just want to say: I've reinvented electric cars and I'm sending people to Mars in a rocket," he said. "Did you think I would be a normal, relaxed guy?"
This is how biographer Isaacson defined Musk to Fantástico: "He kind of has multiple personalities. In a meeting he makes jokes, is kind and inspiring and has great ideas. Then someone says something that triggers him, and he goes into a state that one of his friends calls 'demonic mode', very harsh towards people. And then when he comes back, he barely remembers what he did."
Collector of controversy
Musk is far from being a discreet rich man. He likes to give interviews and posts almost daily on to Joe Rogan's commentator's podcast, in September 2018
Reproduction/YouTube
On the former Twitter, his preferred channel for communicating with millions of followers, he sends messages that could cause "earthquakes" in the stock and cryptocurrency markets.
He was even punished for this by American authorities, after a post about Tesla, in 2018.
Despite being a super active user, Musk has always been critical of Twitter's rules. understood, for example, that the social network "censored" Donald Trump by banning him at the beginning of 2021.
The measure was taken, according to Twitter, due to a violation of the platform's usage policy after the invasion of the Capitol promoted by supporters of the former president who did not accept the result of the 2020 elections - a distrust that Trump fueled in his posts on the networks.
Musk ended up returning the profile to Trump after purchasing the platform, in 2022.
During the pandemic, he also tweeted doubting the coronavirus and criticizing the lockdown and the mandatory vaccination.
One of his most famous arguments online was with a diver who was part of the team that saved children trapped for 9 days in a cave in Thailand, in 2018. The case moved the world.
The billionaire said he could provide a SpaceX mini-submarine for the rescue, which was difficult and delicate Vernon. Unsworth, the diver, called the suggestion a "public relations maneuver" and said that Musk could "stick the submarine where it hurts".
From then on, the two exchanged verbal attacks to the point where the businessman called Unsworth a pedophile. The case ended up in court.

Source: G1