How did Elon Musk become Richer than Jeff Bezos

1 How did Elon Musk Become Richer than Jeff Bezos?

Abstract Elon Musk has become the wealthiest person world, surpassing other billionaires, such as Jeff Bezos, primarily because of his innovative headline-grabbing companies like The Boring Company, SpaceX, and Tesla. However, this achievement did not come easily for him. It required a lot of determination to reach where he is today. He is a man that many entrepreneurs and business leaders can look up to and gain a lot of motivation from. This essay investigates how Elon Musk has managed to build his fortune and become more prosperous than Jeff Bezos.

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2 How did Elon Musk Become Richer than Jeff Bezos?

Introduction Elon Reeve Musk is an investor, entrepreneur, and business magnate. He is the cofounder of OpenAI and Neuralink, an early-stage investor and CEO of Tesla, and SpaceX's founder, CEO, and Chief Engineer. Recently, Musk managed to do what many people thought was impossible – overtaking Jeff Bezos of Amazon to become the world’s richest man.

According to the Forbes real-time billionaires list and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Elon Musk currently has an estimated net worth of around US$279.5 billion as of April 2022 (Bloomberg, 2022; Forbes, 2022). This is almost US$100 billion more than Jeff Bezos’ net worth (Bloomberg, 2022). Over the years, Musk has managed to amass wealth and become more prosperous than Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, and Bill Gates. However, unlike the present-day billionaires, Musk made his money differently. Instead of pursuing one great idea, he pursued several good ones. Also, instead of going for some bright and safe investments, Musk went for some spectacularly risky ones. His success story has made him become the idol and a source of inspiration to many entrepreneurs and business leaders across the globe. This easy looks into Elon Musk’s journey to becoming the world’s most prosperous.

Early Life Elon Musk was born and raised in South Africa to a Canadian mother and a South African Father. Growing up with a father who was an engineer by profession significantly helped cultivate the young Musk’s eyes for design (Makinson, 2021). At 12 years, Musk had already designed his own video game, which he sold to a PC publication company for $500. However, Musk had to leave for Canada at the age of 17 to escape military service in the country's apartheid regime and to attend Queens University in Ontario. He later moved to the University of

3 Pennsylvania, where he graduated in economics and physics (Makinson, 2021). After his graduation, Musk decided to enroll in the physics Ph.D. program at Stanford. Nonetheless, after two days, he had to drop out to pursue his entrepreneurial visions.

Business Accomplishments When Elon Musk graduated, young entrepreneurs realized that the internet could offer more than just being a playground for nerds. Musk decided to take advantage of this new development. Musk and his brother Kimbal formed a company called Zip2 (Makinson, 2021).

The company offered online city guide software to online newspapers. Despite some financial struggles as a startup, the company managed to gain its footing in the market to the extent that such big-name news publishing companies as the Chicago Tribune and New York Times could not keep away from this helpful city guide mapping software. In 1999, the brothers decided to sell Zip2 for $307 million to a then-declining computer manufacturing giant called Compaq (Makinson, 2021). From this sale, Musk managed to net a cool $22 million for his 7% stake in the firm (De la Garza, 2021; Makinson, 2021).

Musk could not afford to sit and let such a pile of money collect dust as an entrepreneur with a vision. In the same year, Elon Musk decided to put the proceeds he obtained from the sale of Zip2 to good use when he co-founded X.com, an online banking startup. In fact, at this time, Musk was already in another venture called Confinity, a payment startup he co-founded with Peter Thiel (Makinson, 2021). X.com grew to become one of the most successful pioneer online banks. The company’s deposits got insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Confinity and X.com merged in 2000 to become PayPal, with Musk as the new company's CEO. Two years later, PayPal was sold to eBay at $1.5 billion. Elon Musk managed to net a whopping $180 million (De la Garza, 2021).

4 Musk did not cheat himself into enjoying himself with all these millions. Driven by the primary objective of colonizing Mars, Elon Musk founded a company called SpaceX in 2002.

With it, Elon Musk intended to determine whether or not a miniature greenhouse located on planet Mars would support food crops growth. In addition, he aimed at making space exploration become one of the primary interests of the public. Elon Musk invested more than $6 million in Tesla in the following years, making him the majority shareholder (Makinson, 2021). He also joined the company’s board of directors as chairman. He went on to become the company’s CEO. Both Tesla and SpaceX significantly struggled in their first few years. However, Musk was so determined to see them succeed that he pumped almost all of his proceeds from the sale of PayPal into the two ventures. As a result, he had to put up with some failed launches at SpaceX, which almost resulted in the company's closure (De la Garza, 2021). On the other hand, Tesla also almost got out of business when its engineers realized that the prototype battery packs it banked on were likely to catch fire. The company was also on the brink of going bankrupt during the Great Recession in 2008.

Nonetheless, Elon Musk’s investment later started to pay off. SpaceX managed to get a $1.6 billion deal with NASA in 2008 (De la Garza, 2021). On the other hand, Tesla began in 2012 to release Model S, its first mass-market car. As a result, Tesla has grown and is now controlling more than half of the electric vehicle market in the United States. Similarly, the undisputed leader in private space exploration is SpaceX. Despite not producing as many vehicles as General Motors and Ford, Tesla’s valuation has increased many times higher than other companies. Over the last two years, the company’s stock price has increased dramatically, pushing Tesla’s market cap over $1 trillion. Musk controls about 17% of Tesla's stock, worth

5 $175 billion (De la Garza, 2021). On the other hand, the value of SpaceX is more than $100 billion, and Musk has a 48% of stake in the company. Musk's net worth is approximately $260 billion (De la Garza, 2021).

Further, Musk has also invested in some other companies. For instance, he founded The Boring Company and Neuralink. Both Neuralink and The Boring Company are worth hundreds of millions of dollars in value (De la Garza, 2021). While the Boring Company purposes of revolutionizing infrastructure, Neuralink aims to build telephonic interfaces with machines.

Chances of these companies succeeding are low, but that is who Elon Musk is, a risk-taker who throws millions of dollars into seemingly tricky projects.

Furthermore, in an SEC filing on April 4, 2022, Twitter also disclosed that Elon Musk had acquired a 9.2% stake in the company (Ray, 2022). The acquisition makes him the largest shareholder in the company. His Twitter stock is worth more than $2.8 billion (Ray, 2022). Such developments come shortly after the billionaire has recently accused Twitter of not adhering to the principles of free speech. Musk has generated a lot of controversies and headlines on the social media platform, with the recent one being his false allegations regarding COVID-19.

Conclusion Despite accumulating vast amounts of wealth and gaining popularity, Elon Musk is an excellent example of a man who continually yearns for more extensive and best prospects. Over the years, he has remained committed to his vision for SpaceX – building a permanent people presence on planet Mars and transporting people to and from that place with its starship rockets.

As for Tesla, Musk aims to have the company produce 20 million vehicles by 2030 and get into such markets as India.

6 The Tesla CEO may be seen as a hero and a villain to others. However, everyone can agree that he has managed to work hard to make himself the worlds' most affluent, and all this started when he created a video game at a very tender age. His success and fast growth may have Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, nipping at his heels. However, Musk’s recent activities show that he is not stopping. His determination to have more electric cars on the roads and see life on Mars will prove to many that it pays to have a plan once Musk's vision is realized fully.

7 References Bloomberg, (2022). Bloomberg billionaires index. https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/ De la Garza, A. (2021). How Elon Musk built his fortune – and became the wealthiest private citizen in the world. Time. https://time.com/6127754/elon-musk-net-worth-person-of-theyear/ Forbes (2022). The world’s real-time billionaires. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/real-timebillionaires/#19cfec9f3d78 Makinson, R. (2021). Elon Musk: The inspirational success story of Tesla’s CEO. https://www.ceotodaymagazine.com/2021/10/elon-musk-the-inspirational-success-storyof-teslas-ceo/#:~:text=In%202008%2C%20Musk%20became%20Tesla's,of%20rocket %20engineer%20Tom%20Mueller.

Ray, S. (2022). Elon Musk acquires 9.2% stake in Twitter. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2022/04/04/elon-musk-acquires-92-stake-intwitter/?sh=3622cf31e2e0