{"id":24607,"date":"2022-04-26T23:24:09","date_gmt":"2022-04-26T23:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tahrir2day.com\/news\/2022\/04\/26\/who-is-elon-musk\/"},"modified":"2022-04-26T23:24:09","modified_gmt":"2022-04-26T23:24:09","slug":"who-is-elon-musk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tahrir2day.com\/news\/2022\/04\/26\/who-is-elon-musk\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is Elon Musk?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Elon Musk will take over Twitter, the small but mighty social media platform used by politicians, journalists and neighborhood trolls alike to spread news, hot takes and sometimes misinformation.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As he prepares to put his stamp on the company, let’s take a look at what we know about the billionaire.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Since bursting onto the Silicon Valley scene more than two decades ago, the 50-year-old serial entrepreneur has captivated the public with his business antics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Born in South Africa, Mr Musk showed his talent for entrepreneurship at an early age, going door to door with his brother selling homemade chocolate eggs and developing his first computer game at the age of 12. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He has described his childhood as difficult, marked by his parents’ divorce, bullying at school, and his own difficulties reading social cues due to Asperger’s Syndrome. He soon fled home for college, moving to Canada and then the United States, where he majored in economics and physics at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League college. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In a 2010 essay for Marie Claire, his first wife Justine Musk, a writer who met Mr Musk in college and married him in 2000, wrote that even before his millions, Mr Musk “was not a man who took no for an answer accepted”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“The will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business didn’t magically wane when he got home,” she recalled, adding that while dancing at their wedding, he told her, “I am the alpha in this relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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After being accepted to Stanford University for a physics graduate degree, Mr. Musk quickly dropped out and founded two technology start-up companies during the “dot-com boom” of the 1990s. These included a web software company and an online banking company that eventually became PayPal, which was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He poured his fortune into a new rocket company, SpaceX, which he hoped to make a low-cost alternative to Nasa, and a new electric car company, Tesla, which he chaired until becoming CEO in 2008.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The two companies are credited with turning their industries upside down, even if they were at times on the verge of collapse.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“I’m never really convinced that he knows what he wants to do tomorrow,” says journalist Chris Stokel-Walker. “He leads very much by instinct.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    In a 2015 biography, author Ashlee Vance described Mr Musk as a “confrontational know-it-all” with a “rich ego”. But he also called him an awkward dancer and shy public speaker. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    Divorced three times – twice by the same woman – Mr Musk is open about his vices and regularly discusses his fondness for marijuana.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    He’s been dubbed both a mad genius and Twitter’s biggest troll in the press, known for both his lofty ambitions and his petty struggles \u2014 not to mention the more serious lawsuits he and his companies are facing from regulators, investors, and… others over issues such as racial discrimination and the credibility of his claims.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    “When you list my sins, I sound like the worst person on earth,” Mr Musk said in a recent TED interview. “But when you pit those against the things I’ve done right, it makes a lot more sense.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    All the clutter seems to be part of his appeal \u2014 and it certainly hasn’t stopped him from amassing a fortune.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    Forbes and Bloomberg now rank him as the richest person in the world, with a net worth of about $250 billion — tens of millions more than his closest rival, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    That’s largely based on the value of his shares in Tesla, of which he owns about 17%. The company’s shares have skyrocketed in value since early 2020 — some say unreasonably — up by a factor of 10 as the company’s production ramped up and it began delivering steady earnings.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    Mr. Musk is also a champion of digital currencies and has interests in several other smaller companies, including tunnel builder The Boring Company and experimental brain-computer startup Neuralink.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    Mr Musk, who proudly wears the mantle of the workaholic, has often said he is not in business just to make money – claims he recently repeated via Twitter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    “Elon only meddles in things when he feels like they’re critically important for some reason…for the good of society or humanity,” says friend and Tesla investor Ross Gerber. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    Mr Musk, who became a US citizen in 2002, has resisted efforts to label his politics – calling himself “half Democrat, half Republican”, “political moderate” and “independent”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    That doesn’t mean he shies away from political struggles.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    He moved to Texas and complained about California regulations and high taxes. has clashed with union organizers; and in spring 2020 called corona lockdowns “fascist”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    He was one of the first business leaders to split from former President Donald Trump and leave a White House economic council after Mr Trump pulled the US out of a global climate deal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    But he’s also made it clear that he’s not a fan of President Joe Biden, who he says is snubbing Tesla and promoting electric vehicles.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    His direct political contributions are relatively small for a man of his fortune — just $100,000 since 2004, according to Politico, fairly evenly split between the parties, at least in the early years. He gave to former President Barack Obama in 2011 and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2015, although he has recently focused on Republicans. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    The American Civil Liberties Union, an American non-profit organization known for its commitment to values \u200b\u200bsuch as freedom of expression, has recognized him as a top supporter. However, reports suggest that most of Mr Musk’s donations have gone to charitable foundations he set up himself, which are eventually tasked with disbursing the funds. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    He recently said that he views his deals as a form of philanthropy because they focus on solving big human problems like climate change in the case of Tesla.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    When the head of the United Nations World Food Program called for one-off donations from billionaires last fall to solve the global food crisis, Mr Musk responded to the challenge with skepticism. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    What it will all mean for Twitter – a platform already facing criticism from left and right for its content moderation policies – is unclear.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    “The easiest part for Musk was buying Twitter,” said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. “The hard part is going to be fixing it.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Elon Musk will take over Twitter, the small but mighty social media platform used by politicians, journalists and neighborhood trolls alike to spread news, hot takes and sometimes misinformation. As he prepares to put his stamp on the company, let’s take a look at what we know about the billionaire. Since bursting onto the Silicon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"yoast_head":"\nWho is Elon Musk? - Tahrir News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/tahrir2day.com\/news\/2022\/04\/26\/who-is-elon-musk\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Who is Elon Musk?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Elon Musk will take over Twitter, the small but mighty social media platform used by politicians, journalists and neighborhood trolls alike to spread news, hot takes and sometimes misinformation. 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