Elon Musk, the one-of-a-kind South African boss of Tesla and SpaceX, briefly saw his fortune exceed that of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Here is the life story of the genius who seeks to explore space.
Thanks to the surge in Tesla shares, which rose in value by more than seven fold in 2020, Elon Musk’s fortune reached $188.5bn on 7 January, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The 49-year-old South African, who also runs SpaceX, was for a short time $1.5bn dollars richer than Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, from whom he briefly claimed the title of richest man in the world – ahead of Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, the emperor of luxury brand LVMH Bernard Arnault and Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, who is only 36 years old.
Space invader
The son of a South African electromechanical engineer and a Canadian-born model and dietician, Elon Reeve Musk was born in Pretoria on 28 June 1971 – in the midst of apartheid. Was it living in this padlocked cell that would push him to constantly want to escape? His parents divorced in 1980 when he was 12. Elon, who lived with his father after the divorce, created his first video game, Blastar, inspired by the famous Space Invaders, created five years earlier in Japan.
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He made $500 from it, selling the programme code to a South African computer magazine, PC and Office Technology. Musk reads a lot. He is a comic book enthusiast. This blond boy, who went so far as to name one of his sons Xavier after the teacher in X-Men, was often picked on by his classmates at Pretoria Boys High School, a place that was probably too traditional for him. At 16, he tried to open an arcade with his brother Kimbal. They abandoned the project, but the young Musk was not short of ideas. He was convinced, from that time on, that the US would offer him the opportunity to implement them. He dreamed of Silicon Valley, where the technological world is creating the future…