When did elon musk become the ceo of tesla

With Elon Musk close to claiming a new role as owner of Twitter after a winning bid to purchase it for $44 billion this week, the billionaire entrepreneur can add the social media app to a long list of business ventures he has led, invested in, and supported over his lengthy career. Here’s a timeline of Musk’s most notable business endeavors—both successful and not—over the past three decades.

1995: Zip2

Along with his brother, Musk founded Zip2, an online business directory, as an online alternative to the standard paper yellow pages. (Google would not launch until 1998.) He sold it for over $300 million in 1999 to Compaq Computer Corporation. Musk was ousted as CEO in 1996, however, when the board of directors decided to install a more experienced leader in his stead.

1999: X.com

Musk invested some of his windfall from the Zip2 sale into his next venture: X.com, an online bank, launched with three other co-founders. X.com’s business model was innovative for its time, in that it incentivized sign-ups and eased the process of transferring funds digitally, with no need for mail or traditional banking infrastructure. In an interview with CBS MarketWatch at the time of the launch, Musk explained his business: “There are no minimum balances. You can open an account and receive a $20 promotional offer in your checking account. You can move $8 to your S&P fund, $3 each to your money market and bond fund, and be left with $6 in your checking.”

He went on to expand more philosophically on the new company: “In my view, the Internet had gone through a couple of stages and was ready for another stage,” he said. “The first stage was where people could trust the Internet for information. This was perhaps ’95 or ’96. The second was to trust the Internet for purchases and begin to use credit cards online to buy books, toys, pet food and that kind of thing. I think we’re at the third stage now where people are ready to use the Internet as their main financial repository.”

2000: PayPal

X.com merged with software company Confinity just one year later, forming PayPal, a secure online payments platform with a foundation in payments conducted for PalmPilots. PayPal would go on to be one of his most successful companies; Musk and his partners, including Confinity co-founder Peter Thiel, sold it to eBay in 2002 for a $1.5 billion stock deal. However, it was a rough start. PayPal was named at one point as one of the “worst business ideas” of 1999, and Musk himself was again removed from his role as CEO while on honeymoon in 2000, replaced by the board with Thiel.

After going public on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 2002, eBay snapped up PayPal. They would hold onto PayPal until 2015, spinning it off into a separate entity.

2002: SpaceX

Musk next set his sights on a lofty goal: space exploration, and the future colonization Mars. In the past 20 years, SpaceX has dealt with a series of rocket launch failures and Starship explosions. But it has also become a heavy-hitter in the space industry with a number of records to its name, including being the first private company to send a craft to the International Space Station and send astronauts to orbit. It is known for its reusable rockets.

SpaceX is also behind the development of Starlink, a constellation of satellites intended to offer commercial internet service around the globe.

2002: The Musk Foundation

Founded as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the Musk Foundation is one of Musk’s least-talked-about endeavors. Its stated goals including supporting renewable energy and pediatric research and education, and the developing of “safe artificial intelligence to benefit humanity.” Between 2002 and 2018 it handed out around $25 million, about half of that to OpenAI, a company owned by Musk himself. (Since 2012, Musk has also been a signatory of The Giving Pledge, in which many of the world’s richest people have committed to giving away the majority of their wealth at some point.)

2004: Tesla

These days, Musk is perhaps best known for his leadership at Tesla, the electric car company named after famed inventor Nikola Tesla. Valued at over $1 trillion at one point in 2021, Tesla was founded in 2003 by two other men; Musk entered a Series A funding round with an investment of $6.5 million, and eventually took an increasingly active role in the company. He has been CEO since 2008. The Model 3 is the most popular electric car in production today, with over one million units sold globally.

Tesla has come in for its fair share of controversy, however, from dealing with long production and fulfillment delays to safety issues with its vehicles and employee complaints about working conditions and management practices.

2006: SolarCity

Founded by his cousins in 2006, SolarCity received Musk’s patronage from the offset; he was their primary financial backer. A solar energy company that became the leading residential solar installer in the U.S. by the mid-2010s, SolarCity installed solar energy systems that were leased to residential users. Musk, via Tesla, acquired SolarCity in 2016 for $2.6 billion in stock and incorporated it into its operations as Tesla Energy.

2015: OpenAI

Musk co-founded OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015, with a for-profit artificial intelligence research lab component; it was started with a $1 billion collective pledge from its founders. Musk has been open about his interest in developing “friendly” AI that supports humanity, but he ended up resigning from the board in 2018 due to conflicts with Tesla’s AI projects.

2016: Neuralink

Another research endeavor, Musk co-founded Neuralink in 2016 with the goal of working on “brain-machine interfaces,” or BMIs, that can be implanted directly into the body. Neuroscientists have been skeptical of Neuralink’s research and claims. While they currently conduct experiments on animals, they moved plans to begin working on human subjects to 2022.

2016: The Boring Company

Founded with the intention of helping dispel city traffic via underground tunnels as a subsidiary of SpaceX, the Boring Company is one of Musk’s side projects. Its aim: build tunnels. They first experimented by tunneling under the SpaceX factory in California. The Boring Company became an independent entity in 2018, and in 2021 completed a tunnel project in Las Vegas to shuttle visitors beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. It is currently working on further tunnel projects in Las Vegas for underground transport. Other projects are primarily speculative.

Musk once spoke boldly about an ambitious “Hyperloop” system, creating tunnels across the country to revolutionize and speed up underground mass transport between cities. However, Hyperloop mentions have been scrubbed from the Boring Company’s website.

2022: Twitter

After buying up enough stock to make him a majority shareholder by April 1, Musk made the move to purchase Twitter for $44 billion at the end of April. His plans include making Twitter “better than ever” by “enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”

Write to Raisa Bruner at .

Entrepreneur Elon Musk has achieved global fame as the chief executive (CEO) of electric autos maker Tesla Inc. (TSLA) and CEO of the private space company SpaceX. Musk co-founded PayPal (PYPL), was an early investor in several tech companies, and in April 2022 he began negotiations for a deal to take Twitter Inc. (TWTR) private.

His success and personal style has given rise to comparisons to other colorful tycoons from U.S. history, including Steve Jobs, Howard Hughes, and Henry Ford. He was named the richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $220 billion as of June 2022. Musk first achieved that distinction in 2021, surpassing Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos.

Let's look briefly at the life of the man who has scaled the pinnacle of the business world.

• Elon Musk is the charismatic chief executive of electric car maker Tesla and rocket manufacturer SpaceX, and has made a deal to buy Twitter.
• Born and raised in South Africa, Musk spent time in Canada before moving to the U.S.
• Educated at the University of Pennsylvania in physics, Musk started getting his feet wet as a serial tech entrepreneur with early successes like Zip2 and X.com, which merged with a company that became PayPal.
• Musk has behaved eccentrically from time to time. He has said he has Asperger's syndrome.

Investopedia / Bailey Mariner

Elon Reeve Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, the oldest of three children. His father was a South African engineer, his mother a Canadian model and nutritionist. After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk lived primarily with his father. He would later dub his father "a terrible human being… almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done."

“I had a terrible upbringing. I had a lot of adversity growing up. One thing I worry about with my kids is they don’t face enough adversity,” Musk would later say.

Musk attended the private, English-speaking Waterkloof House Preparatory School—he started a year early—and later graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. A self-described bookworm, he made few friends in those places.

“They got my best (expletive) friend to lure me out of hiding so they could beat me up. And that (expletive) hurt,” Musk said. “For some reason, they decided that I was it, and they were going to go after me nonstop. That’s what made growing up difficult. For a number of years, there was no respite. You get chased around by gangs at school who tried to beat the (expletive) out of me, and then I’d come home, and it would just be awful there as well.”

Technology became an escape for Musk. At 10, he became acquainted with programming using a Commodore VIC-20, an early and relatively inexpensive home computer. Before long, Musk had become proficient enough to create Blastar—a video game in the style of Space Invaders. He sold the BASIC code for the game to a PC magazine for $500.

In one telling incident from his childhood, Musk and his brother, planned to open a video game arcade near their school. Their parents nixed the plan.

At 17, Musk moved to Canada. He would later obtain Canadian citizenship through his mother.

After emigrating to Canada, Musk enrolled in Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. It was there that he met Justine Wilson, an aspiring writer. They would marry and have five sons together, twins and triplets, before divorcing in 2008.

After two years at Queen’s University, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. He took on two majors, but his time there wasn’t all work and no play. With a fellow student, he bought a 10-bedroom fraternity house, which they used as an ad hoc nightclub.

Musk graduated with a bachelor of science degree in physics, in addition to a bachelor of arts in economics from the Wharton School. The two majors foreshadowed Musk’s career, but it was physics that left the deepest impression.

“(Physics is) a good framework for thinking,” he would say later. “Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.”

Musk was 24 years old when he moved to California to pursue a Ph.D. in applied physics at Stanford University. But, with the Internet exploding and Silicon Valley booming, Musk had entrepreneurial visions dancing in his head. He left the Ph.D. program after just two days.

In 1995, with $15,000 and his younger brother Kimbal at his side, Musk started Zip2, a web software company that would help newspapers develop online city guides.

In 1999, Zip2 was acquired by Compaq Computer Corp. for $341 million. Musk used his Zip2 buyout money to create X.com, a fintech venture before that term was in wide circulation.

X.com merged with a money transfer firm called Confinity, and the resulting company came to be known as PayPal. Peter Thiel ousted Musk as PayPal's CEO before eBay (EBAY) bought the payments company for $1.5 billion, but Musk still profited from the buyout via his 11.7% PayPal stake. "My proceeds from PayPal after tax were about $180 million," Musk said in a 2018 interview. "$100 million of that went into SpaceX, $70 million into Tesla, and $10 million into SolarCity. And I literally had to borrow money for rent."

In 2017, Musk purchased the X.com domain name back from PayPal, citing its sentimental value.

Musk became involved with the electric cars venture as an early investor in 2004, ultimately contributing about $6.3 million to begin with and joined the team, including engineer Martin Eberhard, to help run a company then known as Tesla Motors. Following a series of disagreements, Eberhard was ousted in 2007, and an interim CEO was hired until Musk assumed control as CEO and product architect. Under his watch, Tesla has become the world's most valuable automaker and one of his best-known brands.

In addition to producing electric vehicles, Tesla maintains a robust presence in the solar energy space, thanks to its acquisition of SolarCity. The company currently produces two rechargeable solar batteries. The smaller Powerwall was developed for home backup power and off-the-grid use, while the larger Powerpack is intended for commercial or electric utility grid use.

Musk used most of the proceeds from his PayPal stake to found Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, the rockets developer commonly known as SpaceX. By his own account, Musk spent $100 million to found SpaceX in 2002.

Under Musk's leadership, SpaceX landed several high-profile contracts with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Air Force to design space launch rockets. Musk has publicized plans to send an astronaut to Mars by 2025 in a collaborative effort with NASA.

A frequent poster on the messaging network, Musk disclosed a 9.2% stake in Twitter in April 2022. Twitter responded by offering Musk a seat on the board, which he accepted before declining days later. Musk then sent a "bear hug" letter to Twitter's board proposing to buy the company at $54.20 per share.

Twitter's board adopted a poison pill provision to discourage Musk from accumulating an even larger stake, but they ultimately accepted Musk's offer after he disclosed $46.5 billion in committed financing for the deal in a securities filing.

On Sept. 7, 2018, Musk smoked cannabis during a filmed interview for a podcast.

Just a month earlier, Musk posted an infamous tweet claiming he was considering taking Tesla private and had secured the needed funding. Musk subsequently settled a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) complaint alleging he knowingly misled investors with the tweet by paying a $20 million fine along with the same penalty for Tesla, and agreeing to let Tesla's lawyers approve tweets with material corporate information before posting.

In March 2022 Musk filed a court motion to overturn the consent decree stemming from that case. In April 2022 during a live TED Talk, Musk called the SEC regulators on the case "bastards."

During his May 8, 2021, appearance on the TV show Saturday Night Live, Musk revealed that he has Asperger's syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. "I'm actually making history tonight as the first person with Asperger's to host SNL. Or at least the first person to admit it," he said. How does neurodevelopment condition manifest itself? "I don't always have a lot of intonation or variation in how I speak, which I'm told makes for great comedy," Musk explained.

Elon Musk has been divorced three times—twice from his second wife, Talulah Riley. From 2018 to 2022, he had been in a relationship with the Canadian singer/songwriter Claire Elise Boucher, professionally known as Grimes, with whom he has a son in 2020 and a daughter in 2022. They remain best friends. He also has five sons from his first marriage to Justine Musk.

Elon Musk's net worth was estimated at $220 billion as of June 2022, making him the wealthiest human on the planet.

No, Elon Musk was born into a middle-class family. In 1995, when founded X.com, he reportedly had over $100,000 in student debt and struggled to pay rent.

Elon Musk is officially listed as the co-founder and CEO of Tesla on the company's website. In a 2021 securities filing, the company disclosed an additional Musk title as "Technoking of Tesla."

Elon Musk is a large stakeholder in several companies including Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and Twitter.

Musk’s early interests in philosophy, science fiction, and fantasy novels are reflected in his idealism and concern with human progress—and in his business career. He works in fields he has identified as crucial to humanity's future, notably the transition to renewable energy sources, space exploration, and the Internet. Musk has defied critics, disrupted industries, and made the most money anyone ever has from PayPal, Tesla Motors, SolarCity, and SpaceX—game-changers all, despite the inevitable missteps.