With a 100 per cent search all bothering on his wherewithal, it seems it’s only Elon Musk who’s not asking Google his net worth in 2022, in rands, in rupees, in billions, in trillions, in a graph, over time, and, wait for it, ‘Elon Musk net worth calculator’.
Elon Musk’s net worth calculator? We reckon a Nigerian who fantasizes about the naira/dollar or naira/pounds exchange rates asked Google that question.
The 24-year-old search engine then tells him that the business magnate and investor, the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX, the angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, the owner and CEO of Twitter, the founder of the Boring Company, the co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI, and the president of the philanthropic Musk Foundation estimated net worth is $192 billion as of March 27, 2023.
Our friend brings out his calculator and multiplies N460.88 (the naira/dollar exchange rate) by 192 billion. It gives 8.848896e+13.
“That looks strange,” he tells himself.
Never, someone who gives up easily, he asks again: “How to write 8.848896e+13 in words”.
Google, now ‘exasperated’, responds ‘rudely’:
“Your search – how to write 8.848896e+13 in words – did not match any documents,” it said.
“Suggestions: Make sure that all words are spelt correctly. Try different keywords, more general keywords. Try fewer keywords.”
Our Nigerian friend is still on it!
We present Elon Musk net worth and biography.
Related: Cristiano Ronaldo: Net worth, Biography, Goals, Stats, and Achievements
Elon Musk: Birth
Elon Reeve Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on June 28th, 1971, the day the US Supreme Court overturned the draft evasion conviction of Muhammed Ali. A large photo of The Greatest hung on the wall of Elon Musk’s SpaceX office in California. Coincidence? We think not.
At age ten, Elon Musk developed an interest in computing and video games, teaching himself how to program from the VIC-20 user manual. Two years later, he sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for roughly $500.
Elon Musk has British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. His father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, and real estate developer. He was a half-owner of a Zambian emerald mine near Lake Tanganyika.
But his relationship with his father is far from pleasant. It got to a head when Errol Musk admitted to fathering a child with his stepdaughter, Jana Bezuidenhout.
“He was such a terrible human being,” Elon Musk told Rolling Stone in 2017.
“You have no idea.”
Okay. That’s fine.
His mother, Maye Musk (nee Haldeman), was a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan, Canada, and raised in South Africa. At 74, she was the oldest woman to be featured on the Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover.
“I was famous until Elon became famous,” she told The New York Times in 2016.
His parents split in 1980.
Elon Musk is the eldest of three. His siblings are brother Kimbal and sister Tosca. Kimbal is a board member of Tesla, SpaceX, and Chipotle. Tosca is a producer, director, and founder of the streaming service, Passionflix.
Related: President Muhammadu Buhari Biography: Achievements, Net worth, Salary, and More
Elon Musk: Education
Elon Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Bryanston High School, and Pretoria Boys High School. Migrating to the United States of America was always on his mind.
And the easiest way to achieve this was to get a Canadian passport by being born to a Canadian mother. While his application was being processed, he enrolled at the University of Pretoria in January 1989.
Five months later, he was off to Canada. He lived with a second cousin in Saskatchewan for a year, working odd jobs at a farm and lumber mill. In 1990, he enrolled at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
Two years later, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed his studies for a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics. He also earned a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the Wharton School.
Though Elon Musk claims he earned the degrees in 1995, the University of Pennsylvania maintains it awarded them in 1997.
Related: Sanusi Lamido Sanusi Biography: Net worth, Wives, Controversies, and More
Elon Musk’s Business Career
In 1994, Elon Musk held two internships in Silicon Valley. One was at the energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which investigated electrolytic ultra-capacitors for energy storage. The second was at the Palo Alto-based startup Rocket Science Games.
He was accepted into a PhD programme in materials science at Stanford University a year later. Elon Musk, however, decided to join the Internet boom. He dropped out 24 hours after being accepted and applied for a job at Netscape. The company never got back to him.
Not to be deterred, he co-founded the online city guide software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. In 1999, the company was bought by Compaq for $307 million. He then used a part of the proceeds to co-found X.com, a direct bank. In 2000, it merged with Confinity to form PayPal, which eBay bought for $1.5 billion two years later.
In 2002, Elon Musk founded SpaceX, a spaceflight services company, with $175.8 million. It was quite odd that someone who hadn’t made any tangible goods before started with a rocket.
“Yeah, that’s a hard one,” he said.
“The probability of success was low. In fact, when I started SpaceX, I thought that the most likely outcome was a failure. I think to have any other expectation would have been irrational.”
Then why did he want to do it? Why did he feel like SpaceX needed to be done?
“If you look at the trajectory of space technology and progress, the pinnacle of that progress was around maybe 1969, 1970 with the moon missions. We made incredible progress in the ’60s, and then we were able to land on the moon,” he said.
“Then, with the space shuttle, you could only get to people to low Earth orbit. Now the space shuttle is retired, and there’s no trajectory of improvement. It’s a trajectory to nothing. I kept thinking that there would be some plan to send people to Mars because that’s the obvious next step.
“The actual origin of SpaceX is around 2001 or so, and I was visiting a friend of mine, and he asked me what I was going to do after PayPal. I said, ‘I’ve always been interested in space, but I didn’t think there was anything I could do in space as an individual’.
“My initial plan in space was actually to do a small mission to Mars with a greenhouse, essentially season dehydrated nutrient gel in a little greenhouse that would land.
“You would hydrate the gel. Then you’d grow the plants and have this great shot of green plants on a red background. That would be the money shot, essentially. People tend to respond to precedents and superlatives, and this would be the furthest that life has ever travelled, the first life on Mars, as far as we go.
“That would get people excited. I thought that would result in an increased NASA budget. Then we could send people to Mars. You want to have a future where you’re expecting things to be better, not one where you’re expecting things to be worse. That was how things started out.
“Then, as I learned more, speaking of unbelievable things, I went to Russia three times to negotiate a deal to buy a couple of the ICBMs in the Russian fleet. A strange experience.”
The experience wasn’t that strange when, in 2004, he became an early investor in the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc., now Tesla, Inc. Before he became the company’s CEO in 2008, he was its chairperson and product architect.
“My goal was never to be the CEO of Tesla from the beginning,” he said.
“I had an interest in electric cars that goes back 20 years to when I was in college. In fact, I used to talk to my dates about electric cars. Probably not the best strategy.
“I’ve had a long‑standing interest in electric cars, but since I was doing SpaceX, I knew that if I did try to start an electric car company and run it, it would be extremely painful to run two companies. I really tried my hardest not to be the CEO of Tesla.
“At any point from day one, I could have been the CEO because I had majority control of the company, but I really tried not to. In the end ‑‑ it was at the end of 2008 ‑‑ I had to commit all of my reserve capital to Tesla, which wasn’t allocated to SpaceX. I felt I had to steer the ship directly. It was really not fun, like super not fun.”
In 2006, he helped create SolarCity, a solar energy company that was later bought by Tesla. It became Tesla Energy. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company.
A year later, he co-founded Neuralink—a neurotechnology company developing brain-computer interfaces—and The Boring Company, a tunnel construction company. In 2022, Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion was completed.
To date, only James Clark has built three companies that were worth more than a billion dollars each. The three companies were in the same industry, and he needed the Dot-com bubble to do it.
Elon Musk has done it four times (if you count SolarCity) across different industries and in difficult financial times. But he will not forget 2008 in a hurry. That year, he had to borrow money from friends to pay his rent, and there were launches that were failing.
“It super sucks,” he said.
“2008 was awful because we had the third launch failure in a row of our Falcon 1 vehicle at SpaceX. The Tesla financing round that we were raising fell apart because the economy was going into a tailspin. It was pretty hard to raise money for a startup car company in late 2008 when GM and Chrysler are busy going bankrupt. That was tough.
“Then SolarCity had to deal with Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley had to renege on the deal because they themselves were running out of money. It looked like all three companies were going to die, and I was also going through a divorce. That was definitely a low point. Fortunately, the fourth launch worked.”
A lot of great entrepreneurs in that situation would have been like, “I’ve already put in everything I have in these companies. And I have to pick one”. But he didn’t. Instead, Elon Musk kept doing all three. And one wonders why?
“That was a very tough call,” he said.
“At the end of 2008, that was probably one of the toughest calls I’ve had to make because I could either reserve capital for one company or the other.
“Fortunately, SolarCity didn’t need a ton of capital, so they were OK, but between SpaceX and Tesla, it’s like if you’ve got two kids, what do you do? Do you spend all your money to maximize probably the success of one, or do you try to keep both alive? Fortunately, it worked.”
Fortunately, he lived to tell the story. Now, he can advise entrepreneurs on how to make tough decisions.
“One thing that’s important is if you have a choice of a lower valuation with someone you really like or a higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about, take the lower valuation,” he said.
“It’s better to have a higher quality venture capitalist who you think would be great to work with than to get a higher valuation with someone where there’s even a question mark, really. I think that’s important. It’s sort of like getting married. I don’t know. Maybe I haven’t been that good at that.”
Maybe. But will get to that later.
Related: Apostle Johnson Suleman Biography: Net worth, Age, Damascus experience, and Controversies
Elon Musk’s Leadership Style
Some who credit his leadership with the success of his companies, especially Tesla, have praised his leadership. Others see him as callous and his managerial decisions as showing “a lack of human understanding”.
The 2021 book Power Play by Tom Higgins contains anecdotes of Elon Musk berating employees. The Wall Street Journal bestseller reported that, after he insisted on branding his vehicles as “self-driving”, he faced criticism from his engineers for putting customers’ “lives at risk”. Some employees resigned afterwards.
Elon Musk is often described as a micromanager and calls himself a “nano-manager”. The New York Times sees his approach as absolutist. He doesn’t make formal business plans. Rather, he says he prefers to approach engineering problems with an “iterative design methodology” and “tolerance for failures”.
Nobody knows what those phrases meant, but he has forced employees to adopt the company’s jargon and launched ambitious, risky, and costly projects against his advisors’ recommendations. One such was the removal of front-facing radar from Tesla Autopilot.
His handling of employees is akin to Olusegun Obasanjo’s “carrot and stick”. He rewards those “who offer constructive criticism” while being known to threaten, swear at, and fire others who don’t.
Elon Musk said he expects his employees to work for long hours, sometimes for 80 hours per week. His new staff sign strict non-disclosure agreements upon being hired, and he often fires at will. A typical example was during the Model 3 “production hell” in 2018.
In 2022, he revealed plans to disengage 10 per cent of Tesla’s workforce because of his concerns about the economy. A few days later, he suspended remote work at SpaceX and Tesla and threatened to fire employees who did not work 40 hours per week in the office.
Sani Abacha is indeed alive in Elon Musk!
Related: Atiku Abubakar Net Worth, Biography and Political History
Elon Musk’s Net worth
Elon Musk’s estimated net worth is $192 billion as of March 27, 2023. He was first listed on the Forbes Billionaires List in 2012, with a net worth of $2 billion.
In early 2020, he had a net worth of $27 billion. By the end of the year, it has increased by $150 billion. It was mostly driven by his ownership of around 20 per cent of Tesla stock. However, his net worth was often volatile at that time.
In September, it dropped to $16.3 billion, the largest single-day plunge in Bloomberg Billionaires Index’s history. Three months later, though, Elon Musk leapfrogged Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg to emerge as the third-richest person in the world. A week later, he passed Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to become the second-richest.
In January 2021, Elon Musk, with a net worth of $185 billion, surpassed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to become the richest person in the world. A month later, Bezos reclaimed the top spot.
On September 27th, 2021, after Tesla stock surged, Forbes announced that Elon Musk had a net worth of over $200 billion and was the richest person in the world. In November 2021, he became the first person worth over $300 billion.
On December 30th, 2022, Elon Musk was reported to have lost $200 billion from his net worth due to declining stock values in Tesla. He became the first person in history to lose such a large sum of money.
In January 2023, he was recognized by Guinness World Records for experiencing the “largest loss of personal fortune in history” regarding his financial losses since November 2021. Guinness quoted a Forbes estimate of $182 billion.
Related: Who is The Richest Man in Africa 2023
Elon Musk’s Sources of Wealth
About 75 per cent of Elon Musk’s wealth was derived from Tesla stock in November 2020. The proportion fell to about 37 per cent as of December 2022 after selling nearly $40 billion in the company’s shares since late 2021.
Elon Musk does not receive a salary from Tesla. In 2018, he agreed with the board to a compensation plan that ties his personal earnings to the company’s valuation and revenue. According to the deal, he only receives compensation if Tesla reaches certain market values. It was the largest deal ever done between a CEO and a company’s board.
He has defended his wealth by saying he’s accumulating resources for humanity’s outward expansion to space. And the investor often calls himself “cash poor” and has “professed to have little interest in the material trappings of wealth”. Material trappings like a private jet?
Related: Top Richest Countries in Africa by GDP 2023
Elon Musk’s Private jet
Elon Musk owns an L-39 Albatross, which he calls his favourite. He also uses a private jet owned by Falcon Landing LLC, a SpaceX-linked company. He got a second jet in August 2020.
Elon Musk’s Houses
From the early 2000s until late 2020, Elon Musk lived in California, where both Tesla and SpaceX were founded. In 2020, he moved to Texas, saying that California had become “complacent” about its economic success.
Elon Musk’s Wives
Elon Musk earlier said that while on a date, the first question he asked the woman was, “Do you ever think about electric cars?”
He may not have asked his first wife, Justine Wilson, a Canadian, when they met while at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. They got married in 2000. In 2002, their first child died of sudden infant death syndrome at 10 weeks.
After his death, the couple decided to use IVF to continue their family. In 2004, they had twins, followed by triplets two years later. In 2008, the couple divorced. They, however, shared custody of their children.
In 2022, one of the twins officially changed her name to reflect her gender identity. She used Wilson as her last name because she no longer wished to be associated with Musk. Ouch.
The father blamed the estrangement of his daughter on what FT.com quoted as “the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists”.
In 2008, Elon Musk started dating Talulah Riley, an English actress. They married two years later at Dornoch Cathedral in Scotland. The marriage was short-lived, as the coupled got divorced in 2012. Before the ink got dry on his divorce paper, Elon Musk married the following year.
After briefly filing for divorce in 2014, Elon Musk finalized a second divorce from Riley in 2016. He then dated Amber Heard for several months in 2017. Elon Musk has reportedly been pursuing her since 2012.
He was later accused by Johnny Depp of having an affair with Heard while she was still married to the actor. Elon Musk and Amber Heard both denied the affair.
In 2018, he and Claire Elise Boucher, the Canadian musician known professionally as Grimes, revealed that they were dating. She gave birth to their son in May 2020. He was named X Æ A-12 (pronounced /ɛks æʃ eɪ ˈtwɛlv/).
The name, however, violated California regulations, as it contained characters that were not in the modern English alphabet. The boy was then renamed X Æ A-Xii.
This was still confusing as Æ is not a letter in the modern English alphabet. The boy was finally named X AE A-XII Musk, with X as a first name, AE A-XII as a middle name, and Musk as a surname.
In December 2021, the couple had a second child, a daughter born via surrogacy. She was named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk. Despite the pregnancy, Elon Musk confirmed reports that the couple were “semi-separated”.
In an interview with Time in December 2021, Elon Musk said he was single. In July 2022, a court document revealed that he had had twins with Shivon Zilis, a director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, in November 2021. The babies were born weeks before Elon Musk and Grimes had their second child via surrogate in December.
The news raised questions about workplace ethics, given that Zilis directly reported to Elon Musk. Also, in July 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk allegedly had an affair with Nicole Shanahan, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in 2021, leading to their divorce the following year. Elon Musk denied the report.
“Do you ever think about electric cars?”
We bet you don’t want to be a part of Elon Musk’s confusing family tree. No?
Related: Richest Footballers in the World
Asperger Syndrome
While hosting Saturday Night Live in May 2021, Elon Musk said that he has Asperger syndrome. It’s a developmental disorder that affects the ability to effectively socialize, communicate, and have an all-absorbing interest in specific topics.
Conclusion
We can say that Elon Musk is the best tech entrepreneur of the modern era. But there are many people who take an inordinate interest in how he lives, breathes, sleeps, dresses, and more. Those interested in his net worth are in the ‘and more’ brackets.
Our Nigerian friend has ditched Google for Firefox. He’s still interested in knowing “how to write 8.848896e+13 in words”!
