How Does Elon Musk Make Money? Elon Musk Net Worth In A Nutshell

Elon Musk is one of the wealthiest people in the world, with his ownership in Tesla making him worth more than two hundred billion dollars. The companies founded by Elon Musk range from electric vehicles and renewable energies, with Tesla, rockets, with SpaceX, infrastructure with The Boring Company, and neurotechnology with Neuralink. In April 2022, Musk placed an acquisition offer for Twitter of about $44 billion, which was finalized and closed in October 2022.

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Elon Musk Story

Perhaps counterintuitively, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk owes much of his financial success to not focusing on making money.

Musk has invested mainly in ideas he is passionate about, with the viability of an idea being a secondary concern to pursuing it.

As a child, he had a passion for code, selling the source code for his first video game for $500 at age 12.

In 1999 he founded X.com, one of the first FDIC-insured online banks in the world.

After seeing promise in its easy payment service, Musk merged his company with Confinity the following year.

In 2001, the company became PayPal and Musk became an 11.7% shareholder.

When eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, Musk received $180 million, which he would later reinvest into some of his most famous passion projects.

Read Also: How Does PayPal Make Money?

He is also a proponent of the spend-money-to-make-money philosophy.

Indeed, Musk is a notorious workaholic who prefers to reinvest capital into his businesses over lavish vacations.

SpaceX

Musk has always had a passion for space exploration. Even before the eBay acquisition of PayPal, he conceived of greenhouses to grow food crops on Mars.

Such was his passion that he traveled to Moscow to purchase intercontinental ballistic missiles that could send payloads into space.

In Moscow, however, Musk was seen as an amateur and rejected. Undeterred, he returned to the U.S. and founded SpaceX in 2002 using $100 million of his own capital.

In 2008, SpaceX received a $1.6 billion NASA grant for rockets to resupply the International Space Station.

The company then became the first to berth a private vehicle with the ISS.

Reusable rockets with large payloads were launched into space and successfully returned to Earth using SpaceX autonomous drone ships.

By March 2018, SpaceX had over 100 launches on its manifest worth approximately $12 billion in revenue. SpaceX’s most recent contract is the $2.89 billion NASA program to carry American astronauts to the moon.

Tesla

Tesla is perhaps the biggest accelerator of Elon Musk’s net worth. When the company debuted on the stock market in 2010, Musk instantly amassed a personal fortune of $2 billion.

Indirectly, the Tesla share price appreciation results from a new wave of younger investors and strong demand for electric vehicles – particularly from China.

A Biden election win has also helped Tesla benefit from legislation designed to bring electric vehicles to the mainstream.

Today Tesla is an electric empire which potential goes way beyond the automotive sector!

tesla-competitors — As an electric automaker and builder of sports cars and now trucks, Tesla’s competitors comprise companies like Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Lamborghini, Audi, Rivian Lucid Motors, Toyota, and more. At the same time, Tesla is an electric energy production and storage company (SolarCity); it competes with Sunrun, SunPower, and Vivint Solar. And as an autonomous driving company, it competes with companies like Zoox, Waymo, and Baidu with self-driving software.

Twitter

In April 2022, Musk formalized an acquisition offer to take over Twitter for $44 billion.

This deal has been the most discussed business deal of the decade, as it was openly debated over Twitter.

After a battle of a few months, which seemed to sink the deal, eventually, the deal closed by October 2022, thus giving Elon Musk full ownership of Twitter!

Thus, Twitter is now among the companies owned and operated by Musk’s team.

Key takeaways

Elon Musk has made most of his money by investing in ideas and companies he is passionate about. After eBay acquired PayPal, he used his significant stake in the company to fund the creation of SpaceX.
After initial teething problems, SpaceX grew to become a company with 100 launches on its manifest worth $12 billion. The company has also made Musk money through several multi-billion dollar contracts with NASA.
Tesla and its rapidly appreciating share price are responsible for much of Musk’s net worth. A sizeable shareholding combined with an influx of young investors and favorable legislation has seen Musk become one of the world’s wealthiest men.

Read Also: Tesla Business Model