Elon Musk is famous for his business prowess, communication style, and his role as a tech visionary. He's often been hailed as a genius. Musk is the owner of privately held X (formerly Twitter) and the CEO and co-founder of Tesla (TSLA), the electric vehicle company. He's also the CEO and lead designer o🐼f the aerospace company SpaceX.

Elon Musk has generated his wealth primarily through companies that he founded but part of his fortune also comes from 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:passive investments. These make it into the top five.

1. PayPal

Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and email payment company, in 1999. X.com merged with Confinity a year later and renamed PayPal (PYPL) in 2001.

PayPal was purchased by eBay (EBAY) for $1.5 billion on Oct. 3, 2002. Musk owned 7,109,989 shares of PayPal at the time of the sale and this made him the largest shareholder with a stake of 11.7%.

Musk no longer holds a stake in PayPal. He exited his 🐟pos♉ition after the sale of the company and used his proceeds to fund investments including SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity.

2. SpaceX

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly known as SpaceX, in 2002. The company's founding mission is to revolutionize space technology by developing spacecraft that carries humans to Mars and other places in the solar system.

NASA awarded SpaceX a lucrative contract in 2006. SpaceX launched Falcon 1, the first private liquid-propellant rocket to reach orbit, in 2008. SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft reached the International Space Station (ISS) in 2010. NASA granted SpaceX a second contract to help shuttle crew members between the ISS and Earth in 2012.

SpaceX has also been heavily involved in NASA's Artemis program which seeks to place humans on the moon again and eventually Mars. The first contract for SpaceX for the Artemis program was inked in 2021 for $2.9 billion. The goal is to transport astronauts aboard its Starship vehicles from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon. Another contract was awarded in 2022 for $1.15 billion.

3. DeepMind Technologies

The artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepMind Technologies was launched in late 2010 with Musk as one of its key angel investors. Google (GOOGL) announced that it had acquired the company for an undisclosed amount in January 2014.

Musk is famously worried about AI overtaking humans and is re🔯porte⛦d to have invested in DeepMind to stay abreast of how rapidly the technology behind AI is developing rather than to make money.

DeepMind has focused much of its research on deep reinforcement learning which is an AI technique that combines deep learning which is primarily for recognizing patterns with reinforcement learning. DeepMind developed this type of learning based on reward signals such as a score in a game and gave the technique its name in a 2013 white paper.

Google combined two of its AI divisions in 2023: DeepMind and the Brain team from Google Research. The new group was tagged Google DeepMind. Google has used AI to improve some of its core products such as Search, YouTube, and Gmail and it continues to make developments in the AI space.

4. Tesla Motors

Musk was not a founding member of Tesla but he led an early round of financing in 2004. He went from being a board member of Tesla to its CEO in 2008 even while still serving as the CEO of SpaceX.

Tesla launched its initial public offering (IPO) on Nasdaq on June 28, 2010 with shares of common stock initially available to the public at $17 per share. Its share price has peaked at about $400 since then.

Tesla’s mission is to accelerate sustainable transportation by introducing mass-market electric cars to the public. Tesla announced the creation of fully electric tractor-trailer trucks in November 2017. They were preordered by companies including United Parcel Service (UPS) and PepsiCo. The company’s electric vehicles include the Model S, Model Y, Model X, the Model 3, and the high-end Roadster supercar.

5. The Boring Company

Musk founded the infrastructure and tunnel construction company known as The Boring Company in 2017. The company was founded on the premise that traffic is awful but traveling above ground isn’t necessary. Traffic woes can be "solved" by using the miles and miles of earth beneath roadways. The company’s goal is to reduce the cost of tunneling while also making production more efficient.

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority approved a $48.6 million proposal from The Boring Company in March 2019 to build an underground tunnel called the LVCC Loop. It travels beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center and features three stations and a pedestrian tunnel.

The Boring Company officially opened the LVCC Loop in April 2021. The company has additional projects in Hawthorne, California and Las Vegas.

The Bottom Line

Elon Musk has founded, led, and invested in many businesses, most of which have become very successful companies, making him one of t♎he richest people in the world aꦕnd often the richest. Known for his eccentric personality, Musk continues to shape different areas of the world from electric cars to social media to space exploration.