He is often related to a comic character Tony Stark because through his companies in the future, he would undertake to redefine travel on Earth and the habitation of Mars.His father, being white, was an engineer; his mother had been a model and also undertook work as a nutritionist.

– Musk sold Zip2 at 28 yrs old in 1999 to Compaq for $307 mn, later to start up an internet-based bank called X. com. After going through several phases, the firm evolved into a payment solution provider company known as PayPal

– The two companies had entered a strategic partnership back in 2002 wherein eBay had acquired PayPal for as low as $1. – Musk attended Queen’s University in Ontario for two years and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and got a degree in both physics and business.

Building a Chain of Revolutionary Companies

Zip2 and X.com/PayPal

1.  After college, Musk founded Zip2 which is an online software and services which deals with the media industry. To newspaper websites it offered maps, directions and business directories.
2. He sold Zip2 to Compaq for $307 million in 1999 when he was only twenty eight years of age, found an internet based bank called X.com which would later rebrand into a payments company called PayPal
3. eBay was onboard with PayPal in 2002 and purchased the organization for $1.5 billion. The effect was the deal presented Musk with $ 180 million

SpaceX

The third company was named Space Exploration Technologies or SpaceX, which was founded in California in 2002 for making people live on other planets, especially on Mars.

• Name: SpaceX or, officially, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is: Products Structures: the rockets, spacecraft and satellites Manufacturing: development of above and space transportation Customer Industries: space. —which has revolutionized this industry with reusable rockets.

It was the first ever to meet all three milestones of launching a spacecraft, placing it into orbit, and recovering it in 2010. Today it supports NASA ISS resupply among other needs for commercial satellite delivery or communications support.

Tesla

2004: Musk becomes chairman of electric car startup Tesla Motors; led Tesla Motors’ Series A round and became CEO. Accordingly, working with the company, Tesla desires to be key in switching over such a sector of transportation urgently into a sustainable model.

While Musk headed Tesla, the company developed relatively affordable long-range electric cars, home, and industrial batteries.The Tesla Model S sedan was the market leader of plug-in electric cars from 2015 through 2020.

Tesla, however, went public in 2010, even when it has never posted a single year of profit. In 2020, high domestic demand for Tesla automobiles hit the company, making it the world’s leading automaker by market value.

SolаrCity

He also was the chairman of this new company and helped it rise into the second largest purveyor of solar power in the USA.Solar leasing products, first in the market to enter, was SolarCity, which was later acquired by Tesla in June 2016 for US$2.6 billion. The deal was highly political but combined Musk’s goals of electric cars and renewable energy.

Hyperloop

• In 2013, Musk first revealed the concept of the Hyperloop, a high-speed concept for movement through pressurized tubes with pods at very high speeds. 
•  Commercially Current, Virgin Hyperloop One, and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies work towards the development of technology for both cargo and passenger SpaceX.
• Musk founded Open in 2015 as a non-profit research development artificial intelligence aimed to advance safe AGI. However, Musk stepped down from the board of OpenAI in 2018 due to differences.
• Musk founded Neuralink in 2016. It is essentially a neuro-technology company created to make links between human brains and computers. He’s making super-high bandwidth brain computer interfaces through headsets and through-the-eye displays.

The Boring Company

This is a firm expected to build the tunnel to bring relief from city traffic. The company sells flame throwers and makes faster, cheaper tunneling technologies.

• 2018 The Boring Company was awarded the contract for the construction of the underground rail between the Las Vegas Convention Center stations – the Loop.

Lifestyle/Personality characteristics

• Musk’s net worth exceeds $ 200 billion. He leads the life of a gadabout and a phlegmatic A pleaser. At the same time, he is so tightfisted with something. He has several mansions in California – where he works most of the time – and travels from one to another by plane but has no yacht.
• Musk himself puts in more than 80 hours a week for his companies and has been known to nap or even sleep at times in the Tesla manufacturing plants. He expects out of every employee to deliver to their best by working for many hours at a high rate.
• He has been married thrice, first to an author, Justine Wilson, secondly to an actress, Talulah Riley, and he is currently married to a musician named Grimes. Out of his children born at the end of 2021, Musk has 7 children.
• Musk is a fan of video games, the anime film Death Note, the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory, and the made-up book series titled A Song of Ice and Fire, which became the basis for the popular TV series Game of Thrones.
•  He is embroiled in disputes like throwing tantrums, blunt social media messaging in Twitter, and confrontation with the financial authorities. Musk also tends to bring into focus the hype, public relation stunts, and aggressive timelines .

Philanthropy and Non-Profit Work

Even as there is much complaint today that he is not much into philanthropy, yet there are millions that are being given away by Musk to various charity organizations and causes. In 2021, he joined the The Giving Pledge, launching a philanthropic commitment with nearly 50 signatories from over 20 countries.

His philanthropic initiatives include funding research on renewable energy, pediatric health, science education, and human space exploration through his nonprofit organization, Musk Foundation.

He has so far donated more than $250 million by way of grants to the Musk Foundation—all corporate taxes avoided, incidentally—including grants to Flint’s Michigan State schools for any water-related issue, as well as to a host of others, from Doctors Without Borders to the March of Dimes, the Sierra Club Foundation, the SETI Institute, and, most recently, the catastrophic wildfires in Greece, just to name but a few.

• Water problem to schools under Michigan State of Flint, he assured the funding of any problem related

His net worth is above 200 billion dollars as of September 2022.Musk also gives himself no salary or cash compensations in his companies. For example, he owns stakes in Tesla and SpaceX, controlling 40% and 48% of the value, respectively, in turns placing him among the richest individuals in the world.

• Close to more than 50% of Elon Musk’s’ total wealth comprises Tesla shares. From the year 2010 to more than $700 in 2022, Tesla ramped up in the last few years propelled by the exponential increase in his wealth.
• More than 99 percent of this wealth can be invested in the companies that he owns. He even offered personal stock as security for taking loans.

Pop Culture Icon

• Musk came to be identified as a media figure about an industrialist who is interested in the future of technologies, his vision and personality being next to the ones of the deceased Steven Paul Jobs, the co-founder of Apple.
• Film-makers including but not limited to Jon Favreau had confessed in different forums that Musk was the muse for the character ‘genius billionaire playboy philanthropist inventor’, Tony Stark, in the Iron Man series of movies. Musk has also appeared in inclusions like Iron Man 2, Why Him? among an array of others.
• In the mainstream TV show — The Big Bang Theory — characters even got to idolize Musk. Jim Parsons managed to get an Emmy for a role in which he played a superfan who dreams of meeting Musk.
• And of course, literature, games, music and some other referent media for the plot of any character. Like, mentioned in songs of Kanye West and The Game, in novels of Andy Weir and Isaac Asimov.
• Musk is one of the most powerful and influential leaders in the global business. In 2022 Forbes ranked him number #1 on the power list of billionaires.

The Financial magazine tagged him Businessperson of the Year in 2021 largely for the electric vehicles global market. And thus, he tagged him as a genius inventor and also as a self-made, rich businessman with certain intentions that remain to be confirmed.

In hindsight, it can be said that in random polls among the American population and global polls, Musk is one of the most trusted leaders in society. For example, users themselves rank him as the best CEO on the best lists of Glassdoor.

When he proposed the idea of Hyperloop by simply stating that he’d take it from there relying on the breakdown of a train due to sound barrier, Queen Elizabeth II conferred Musk with an honorary CBE.

Conclusion

He exemplified the moonshot approach to solving many of the world’s most pressing problems-from energy, traffic, and AI to space colonization. A movie script is the history of his life and achievements. But though Musk is considered rather revolutionary of late, especially by the present millennial generation, he was not always that polarizing. Actually, he wants to save Earth by his giant creativity, which he puts in his companies, in order to have humanity turn into a multi-planet, space-faring species.