Why does the world see Elon Musk as a genius?
Billionaire businessman Elon Musk, whom many consider a “genius”, is a matter of curiosity with his challenging and successful life. He managed to become CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, founder of The Boring Company, co-founder of OpenAI and Neuralink. But he also focused on his long-term goal: colonizing Mars.
We took a look at his life, from being bullied at school to becoming a small-time entrepreneur and eventually the CEO of two large companies that seem to have come out of science fiction. The billionaire, who is one of the controversial names in the business world, currently has a fortune of 184 billion dollars. So what do we know more about him? Here is Musk’s life and career…
Early life of Elon Musk
The billionaire businessman was born on June 28, 1971 (age 50) in Pretoria, South Africa. Musk’s mother, Maye, is a Canadian professional dietitian and model. His father, Errol, is a South African born electromechanical engineer and pilot.
After his parents divorced in 1979, 9-year-old Elon Musk and his younger brother Kimbal moved to live with their father. However, after she became famous, her troubled relationship with her father came to light.
According to Business Insider, in 1983, when Musk was 12, he sold a simple game called “Blastar” to a computer magazine for $500. The billionaire describes it as “a trivial game … but better than Flappy Bird.” Still, Musk’s school days were not easy. One day at school, he was beaten to death by a group and thrown from the stairs. He was eventually hospitalized.
After graduating from high school, the famous CEO moved to Canada with his mother Maye, sister Tosca, and brother Kimbal. He studied for two years at Queen’s University in Ontario. However, he completed his education at the University of Pennsylvania, earning degrees in physics and economics.
While studying at the University of Pennsylvania, he rented a 10-bedroom fraternity house with a classmate and turned it into a nightclub. This was his first attempt at entrepreneurship.
Elon Musk has officially dropped out of his doctorate and entered the business world
After graduating, he went to Stanford University to pursue a doctorate, but did not complete school. After spending only two days in California, he postponed his admission and did not return to finish his education, he went into business.
Elon Musk founded Zip2 (software company) with his brother Kimbal. A group of Silicon Valley investors helped fund the company, which provides city travel guides to newspapers like The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. While Zip2 was having its good days, Musk was literally living in the office. Compaq then bought Zip2 in a deal worth $341 million. Thus, it earned Musk $ 22 million.
Later, he founded the online banking company X.com in 1999 with the $10 million from the sale of Zip2. About a year later, X.com merged with Peter Thiel’s financial startup Confinity to form PayPal. The South African businessman was initially chosen as the CEO of PayPal, but it did not last long.
After disagreements between the co-founders, Musk went to Australia for a vacation. This escalated things, and PayPal’s board fired him. But things still worked out for Musk. eBay acquired PayPal in late 2002.
As a shareholder of PayPal, he made $165 million out of the $1.5 billion paid by eBay. When Confinity and X.com merged, Musk, who resisted for X.com instead of PayPal as the product name, bought this name from eBay years later.
Second milestone: SpaceX and Tesla companies
In fact, even before the PayPal sale, Elon Musk dreamed of a plan to send mice or plants to Mars. In early 2002, he founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) with $100 million from the PayPal sale. Musk’s goal was to make space flight 10 times cheaper.
He named one of the first spacecraft “Dragon”. SpaceX’s long-term goal is to make colonizing Mars affordable. In addition, Musk took part in the founding of Tesla Motors in 2003, whose main task is to produce electric cars.
He made his first investment of $70 million in Tesla, founded by Martin Eberhard. Here he played an active role and helped develop his first car, the Roadster. The all-electric Roadster debuted in 2006.
The famous CEO came up with the idea of a Solar energy company called SolarCity. He gave his cousins Peter and Lyndon Rive the working capital to start SolarCity in 2006. In late 2016, Tesla acquired SolarCity in a $2.6 billion deal.
The 2008 Economic Crisis drove Musk into bankruptcy
In 2007, Elon Musk completely removed Eberhard from the CEO seat at Tesla, then from the company’s board of directors and executive positions. The 2008 Economic Crisis also seriously affected him. saved Tesla from bankruptcy; He invested $40 million in Tesla and lent another $40 million to the company. In the same year, he became the CEO of the company.
However, the businessman who made serious investments between SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity he was going bankrupt. He describes 2008 as the worst year of his life. Tesla continued to lose money and SpaceX was having trouble launching its Falcon 1 rocket. By 2009, he was now living on personal loans.
He received two good news in late 2008; SpaceX signed a $1.5 billion contract with NASA to supply space, and Tesla finally found more outside investors. By June 2010, Tesla had a successful IPO. The company raised $226 million in an IPO, making it the first auto company to go public since Ford in 1956.
Similarly, he founded another company in 2016. The Boring Company, whose mission is to dig a network of tunnels under and around cities for high-speed, traffic-free driving.
In late 2015, Musk founded OpenAI, a nonprofit dedicated to researching artificial intelligence and ensuring it doesn’t destroy humanity. He founded another company in 2017; Neuralink, which is trying to produce devices that can be implanted in the human brain.
In November 2019, it launched a new Tesla vehicle; Cybertruck, Tesla’s first and highly anticipated pickup truck. SpaceX went through two major milestones in 2020. First, in May, SpaceX partnered with NASA to complete the first astronaut mission to space. Second, in November, SpaceX completed the first “operational” human spaceflight, sending four astronauts to the International Space Station for a six-month stay.
Finally, Tesla introduced its humanoid robot Tesla Bot on August 20, 2021. Tesla Bot is designed to do everyday tasks that people don’t want to do. The company plans to complete the first prototype next year.
The social-media stars who move markets
A few years ago, Kevin Paffrath, a 29-year-old real-estate broker and father of two who lives in Ventura, Calif., earned most of his income from commissions on home sales, and kept up a side gig recording online videos about home buying.
Today, he’s MeetKevin, a YouTube influencer with 1.7 million subscribers. Most days, he live-streams on the platform for several hours, talking about the stock market and doling out investing advice in a rapid-fire, self-deprecating manner. He banters with commenters, hams it up with silly British accents and sips coffee in front of a wall in his home studio hung with brightly colored cartoon posters and a turquoise electric guitar. In addition to the live streams, he’s made hundreds of videos on a range of investment-advice topics.
“I used to spend three or four hours with one client talking to them about real estate they could buy for below market value, and if I was lucky, maybe after 90 days, that one person would turn into $10,000 dollars in revenue," Mr. Paffrath said. “Today, $10,000 in revenue is a bad day for me. Influencing has crowded everything else out."
Mr. Paffrath says he earned $5 million in the first three months of this year, as page views and demand for his guidance have skyrocketed during the pandemic. Receipts he provided to The Wall Street Journal showing YouTube revenue payments confirm that he earns several million dollars a year in ad revenue alone.
As the U.S. retreated amid the pandemic to its couches, millions of would-be stock pickers—some flush with stimulus cash—fired up social-media and messaging apps and dove headlong into the world of retail investing.
Total users at the six top online brokerages, which are used mainly by individual investors, topped 100 million in 2021. At Robinhood Financial LLC, the investing app popular among younger investors, accounts have grown explosively, from 7.2 million in March of 2020 to 18 million a year later, according to company financial filings.
Along with the rise of commission-free online trading has come demand for advice at the lowest price in the most accessible place: free, and online. Now, a new generation of Jim Cramers has risen up on social media with massive followings as guides to these market newbies.
Many of these influencers have no formal training as financial advisers and no background in professional investing, leading them to pick stocks based on the whims of popular opinion or to dispense money-losing advice.
In addition to MeetKevin, popular finance influencers include Marko Zlatic, who under the name Whiteboard Finance gives advice to 670,000 subscribers on everything from buying a used car to building an investment portfolio based on ideas from hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio.
Some influencers with smaller followings are more colorful. Jack Spencer, a former personal trainer in Ireland, traded fitness-tip videos for stock picking in March of 2020. Mr. Spencer, 23 years old, interviews startup CEOs wearing a shirt that reads “Not A Financial Advisor," with a view of his well-stocked liquor cabinet in the background. Mr. Spencer, who has 94,000 YouTube subscribers, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
On TikTok, podcaster Tori Dunlap (known on the app as @herfirst100k) offers her 1.7 million followers tips for developing “side hustle" businesses and which debts to pay off first. The 27-year-old is developing an app to cultivate a “nonjudgmental investing community" intended to help women feel comfortable trading investment tips and managing investments in their brokerage accounts.
Cameron Newell, aka CamTheMan, a college dropout from central Washington state, started trading penny stocks full-time about three years ago and says he earned $5 million last year from day trading. He doles out stock tips on TikTok and hosts a chat group on Discord—the social app commonly used by videogame enthusiasts—where followers can track and copy his trades, or follow along with periodic investing challenges where he seeks to turn an initial investment of $1,000 into $1 million.
“Traditional finance is a black box," said Sarah Petite, a social-media consultant in Los Angeles. “This generation is looking at their parents and saying, ‘The way you thought about money? That isn’t how it works anymore.’ "
Instead, young people want a road map to how to make big profits, and a strong independent streak draws many of them to online influencers who dole out advice free, rather than paying a traditional investment manager to handle their money for them. Many don’t care much about the qualifications of who’s giving the advice, experts and young investors themselves say.
“I have a rule: Don’t pay for something you can get free," said Rex Wu, a 33-year-old investor from Tampa Bay, Fla., who is a regular viewer of Mr. Paffrath and several other online finance-world personalities. He says he has invested a few hundred thousand dollars based on “things I’ve learned online from guys like Kevin." So far this year, his portfolio has returned 23%; year-to-date, the S&P 500 has returned 21%.
“If I were to walk into J.P. Morgan tomorrow, they have the bias of trying to earn my business, and they might be trying to oversell me," Mr. Wu said. “Guys online don’t really have anything they’re trying to sell me."
Still, the online model is entirely new, with influencers judged on the content they produce, rather than their investing track records; and they often get paid based on numbers of subscribers and viewers, rather on the investment income their advice generates for clients.
Rule 1: Be relatable
This new breed of social-media finance gurus has tapped into young people’s innate distrust of the financial establishment, which they see as controlled by Wall Street insiders who come from an older generation to whom they can’t relate.
“No one my age is watching cable TV anymore," said Ms. Petite, who is 24. “I don’t know a single person who regularly watches TV financial news. They’re going to these specialized YouTube channels and social media. Giving their money to some guy in a suit on Wall Street, I just don’t think that’s something that would ever even occur to them."
Building trust is a key part of the YouTube stock-calling business.
Rose Han, a 32-year-old with a finance degree from New York University, quit her job as a currency trader at HSBC five years ago and started making YouTube videos about options trading, fund investing and personal financial accounts.
She has half a million YouTube subscribers and 54,000 followers on Instagram. She says she now makes 10 times as much as she made as a trader selling online investing courses.
“If you turn on CNBC, it’s all these older white guys, and it’s hard to relate to them because I don’t look like them; a lot of my followers don’t look like them," Ms. Han said. “Being a woman, women trust me more, because they’d rather learn from someone like me than from a finance bro." She says she has made $2 million so far this year from a combination of YouTube ads and sales of her own online finance courses.
Rule 2: Sell the dream
Generation Z—roughly the cohort born between 1992 and 2002—is more likely to respond warmly to cultural signifiers of wealth like fancy cars and high-fashion clothes than they are to business degrees, financial certifications or a perch on a TV-news show, experts say. For that reason, there is big potential for fraud and financial ruin, said Ted Klontz, a professor of behavioral finance at Creighton University.
“A lot of this world is a real snake pit, and it’s really scary," Mr. Klontz said. “The human brain doesn’t come into full maturation until age 25. Anyone under that age is highly influenceable. We know that day trading does not produce long-term wealth for the vast majority of people who do it, but these influencers are preying on that part of the human brain that has fewer inhibitions, that thinks: ‘I will be the exception.’ And that leads to speculation and other kinds of very high-risk behavior."
TikTok is filled with promotional accounts like the Daily Trader, a self-professed 19-year-old millionaire who posts videos of himself driving a brand-new Audi R8 sports car, lounging by the pool in what he describes as a $20 million Beverly Hills mansion and eating at Los Angeles’ priciest steakhouses.
These glitzy TikTok videos link to his profile on Discord, where he sells memberships to his “mentorship group," which includes a video tutorial series to help day traders emulate his “trading system," for $294 each. At least 1,600 users have signed up for the course, according to information shared with a Journal reporter after joining the group. The Daily Trader didn’t respond to requests for comment.
This aspirational dynamic creates pressure for creators to deliver only the positive stories that their viewers want, creators say, which can sometimes turn out to be spectacularly off the mark.
Casey Adams, a 20-year-old who grew up near Richmond, Va., has conducted 300 interviews with executives and investors for his YouTube channel, including with Netflix Inc. co-founder Marc Randolph, celebrity startup founder and cryptocurrency investor Tyler Winklevoss and at several points over the past year, Maye Musk, mother of Elon.
He earns about $300,000 a year from ad placements and his own media-consulting business, he says, but recognizes that many of the billionaires and startup founders who agree to come on his show are there for the softball questions and the chance to speak directly to young individual investors.
Last year, Mr. Adams scored a rare half-hour interview with Trevor Milton, the billionaire chief executive of electric-truck startup Nikola Corp.
“You guys are not only crushing it, but you’re paving the way for a completely new industry," the baby-faced Mr. Adams gushed to Mr. Milton at one point in the interview.
Four months later, after Nikola had gone public in a reverse merger, a short seller released a damning report accusing Mr. Milton of improprieties, the startup’s share price fell by more than two-thirds, federal investigators opened a probe into the company and Mr. Milton resigned as executive chairman.
“My approach is a friendly approach," Mr. Adams said. “The majority of my audience is young people who are looking for insight into financial markets or looking for ways to be more strategic about the investments they’re making, whether it’s NFTs, or crypto, or a founder’s story, and company culture…. I don’t like to think of myself as an expert."
Rule 3: All bulls, no bears
Like most internet content, influencer videos thrive on popularity. And in the midst of a long-running bull market, what’s popular is success stories and hot tips only.
Many influencers report that when they hype an investment, they get the page views they crave. When the message is bearish, however, viewers turn away, or worse, attack the messenger with vicious trolling.
“For their entire adult life, the market has gone up. If you say otherwise, you just don’t get it," said Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at NYU who has been trolled himself after posting skeptical videos about companies.
The real danger in the social-media finance world, he says, is that younger influencers tend to believe the market only goes up. Their followers reinforce this message.
“There is a surrender-to-the-narrative-or-else attitude online, and it’s really frightening, because if you say bitcoin is overvalued, or Tesla is overvalued or whatever popular SPAC is overvalued, these trolls in anonymous accounts come out of the woodwork and start attacking you," Mr. Galloway said.
Critics of cryptocurrency investments are dismissed as spreaders of “FUD" (“fear, uncertainty, doubt") in comment threads by trolls, a way of labeling an influencer as untrustworthy. Female online finance gurus have described sexual harassment in response to negative posts.
Mr. Paffrath, who is mounting a long-shot bid to become the next governor of California following a vote next month on whether to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom, says he is reminded of this dynamic weekly.
On a Wednesday afternoon in late May, he entered his home video studio wearing a necktie and a zip-up sweatshirt to record his daily live stream discussion about the stock market.
The day’s topic was AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., the beleaguered movie-theater chain that saw its share price rocket this spring, swept along by individual investors, many of them young people who live most of their lives online, and the mania for so-called “meme stocks" including GameStop Inc. and Tesla Motors Inc.
AMC’s stock was in the midst of a volatile week, but that day, it happened to close up 10%. Mr. Paffrath cautioned against buying AMC shares—hedge funds appeared to be buying up short positions in the stock, and its share price could collapse at any moment, he said.
“Why you gotta be so negative lol" asked a viewer in the video’s live chat.
“I’m not being negative, I’m just being realistic," responded Mr. Paffrath. “Look, I want AMC to go to the moon, but all I’m suggesting here is, if you’re hanging your hat on something you don’t understand…you just want to be careful."
After the live stream ended, Mr. Paffrath started shedding thousands of subscribers, he said. Most videos with positive titles garner more than 200,000 views, he says, while videos that have negative takes on a company or an industry in the title rarely get more than 60,000 views.
“I have to be an astronaut and show them that the rocket ship is fun, but you can’t look at that your whole life," Mr. Paffrath said.
“I’ll play the momentum game, but let’s be real: True wealth comes from long-run interest. The trouble is, on YouTube, none of my videos about that kind of thing get any views."
This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.
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10 Things You May Not Know About Elon Musk’s Mom, Maye Musk
Maye is known for raising the SpaceX entrepreneur but is a star in her own right.
Tech giant and entrepreneur Elon Musk is known for his roles in PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX. But before he began making electric cars and launching rockets into space, he grew up in South Africa with his mother, Maye Musk. Maye, in addition to raising Elon and his fellow successful siblings Kimbal and Tosca, has lived a life that, while different from Elon’s, rivals his in accomplishments and fascination. Here are 10 things you might not know about the billionaire’s mother:
She’s a supermodel
Maye started modeling at the age of 15. Though she was told this career would be over by the time she was 18, she ended up working for decades as a print and runway model. “My friends tell me: I was famous before Elon was famous,” she told Vanity Fair.
After turning 60, Maye became more successful, which she’s attributed to her decision to stop coloring her hair. With a stylish shock of white hair, she landed jobs that included an ad for Virgin America, the cover of New York magazine in 2011 and a cameo in the video for Beyoncé’s “Haunted.”
By 2015 Maye still had to audition for jobs, but did appear in her first runway show for New York Fashion Week. In 2016 she was signed by IMG, a top agency for models. That year she also made fashion waves when she accompanied Elon to the Met Gala. In 2017, when she was 69, she became an ambassador for CoverGirl. She’s the oldest brand ambassador in the beauty company’s history.
“I think it gives hope to women as they age they can continue to work and be relevant and confident and comfortable with themselves,” Maye told Forbes about her achievement.
Her ongoing success also provides a positive example for her field. “Young girls stop me on the street and say my career gives them hope that if I’m doing this at 70 years old, they can do it at 25,” she told Marketwatch.
Maye and Elon Musk in 2017 Photo: Karwai Tang/Getty Images
She’s a dietitian
Maye holds two master’s degrees, one in dietetics and the other in nutritional science. She built a successful dietitian practice in South Africa and then rebuilt her career after moving to Canada in her 40s. Being a dietitian provided Maye with a stable career when modeling work was slow.
Maye put on weight in her 30s, and in the 1990s she was able to shed about 50 pounds by refocusing on healthier food choices like legumes, vegetables and yogurt. However, she’s been upfront about how hard it is to maintain her weight, particularly because she has a sweet tooth and is tempted by treats such as chocolate and sticky toffee pudding.
She’s a social media maven
Maye disproves the stereotype that older people don’t understand social media. Her Instagram feed garnered interest from IMG Models, and signing with them helped take her modeling career to the next level. Maye has credited connections made on Facebook with leading to her first couture show, which happened when she was 67. Plus, she’s used Twitter to build her career as a dietitian and lecturer.
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Maye documented some of her runway moves on Instagram to raise funds for the struggling fashion industry.
She participated in beauty pageants
A friend once entered a 20-year-old Maye in a beauty pageant. She decided to go through with the competition and won. In 1969, she was a finalist for Miss South Africa.
She has a twin
Maye has a twin named Kaye, with whom she remains close. Their children spent time together growing up; like Maye, Kaye also raised successful entrepreneurs.
Maye Musk in 2019 Photo: DAVID MCNEW/AFP via Getty Images
She had an adventurous upbringing
Maye’s family moved from Canada to South Africa in 1950, when she was almost 3 years old. In winter, the family would venture into the Kalahari desert, taking enough supplies for three weeks. They were hoping to locate the desert’s rumored Lost City, though they were never successful.
She is a domestic abuse survivor
Maye wed Errol Musk in 1970. It was the beginning of a marriage that contained physical and mental abuse, as Errol reportedly beat her and forced her to cut off contact with her family. But splitting up was difficult, as Maye felt embarrassed by her situation. In addition, at the time divorce laws in South Africa didn’t consider abuse a sufficient reason to end a marriage.
After divorce laws changed in 1979, Maye finally felt able to walk away. Years later, she shared details about her marriage in her 2019 book, A Woman Makes a Plan. Maye has also voiced encouragement for women in abusive relationships, telling Page Six, “When you make a big change, it will be scary, but you can’t just stay in a bad situation.”
She worked hard as a single mother
A divorced Maye struggled to make ends meet. She shared in an interview with the Huffington Post, “After my divorce, I had to house and feed three kids without maintenance. Poverty makes you work really hard. I remember crying when one of my kids spilled milk. The saying goes ‘don’t cry over spilled milk.’ I cried because I couldn’t buy another milk that day.”
Maye survived by buying secondhand clothes and used her dietitian skills to provide cheap and nutritious meals, such as peanut butter sandwiches and bean stews. Staying afloat also required hard work. But she explained to CNBC, “I never felt guilty about working full-time, because I didn’t have a choice. Taking care of my children was the top priority; I worked hard to keep a roof over our heads, food in our stomach, and basic clothes on our back.”
When modeling, Maye often brought her three kids to shows. Her children also helped out in her dietitian practice, something Maye did for her own parents' chiropractic practice.
Maye Musk in 2018 Photo: Gotham/GC Images
She created a new life in Canada in her 40s
Thanks to Maye’s being born in Canada, her children were able to obtain Canadian passports. At 18, Elon headed there after graduating from high school. His teenage siblings also wanted to relocate to Canada, so Maye went there to assess the potential move.
While Maye was in Canada, her daughter Tosca made arrangements to sell her mother’s house and car in South Africa. When Maye returned from her trip, she had a decision to make: should she walk away from these possessions, and the career she’d spent years building? She signed the paperwork and took the leap.
However, at the time South Africa limited the amount of money that could be taken out of the country, so most of the proceeds from these sales weren’t available. At one point Maye was working five jobs as she built a new life in Canada, telling Forbes, “I was a research officer at the University of Toronto. I was teaching two nights a week at a nutrition college and two night weeks at a modeling agency. I modeled and I gave talks, and I had a private practice.”
She has no plans to retire
Maye has no plans of slowing down any time soon, telling The New York Times, “I will never retire. My mom never retired. I’ll work until no one wants me anymore, and then I’ll find something else and I’ll still be a dietitian doing nutrition research, which I love.”