Billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, has acquired Twitter in a $44 billion deal that would cap a bid that began in early April to exert official influence over policies designed to combat abuse on the platform, which Musk has cast as anti-free speech.
On April 4, Musk became the company’s largest shareholder and backed out at the last minute from an agreement to join Twitter’s board of directors.
Now, on the verge of taking over the company, Musk is promising to bring “free speech” to Twitter.
Musk is a South-Africa-born billionaire entrepreneur who serves as CEO of Tesla, the popular electric vehicle manufacturer, and SpaceX. Musk made an early fortune founding PayPal in 1999. EBay bought the company in 2002 for $1.5 billion and Musk reportedly made $180 million from the deal.
Soon after, Musk founded SpaceX, which partners with NASA on space missions. Musk’s admirers herald him as a visionary thrusting the world into the future. His ultimate goal with SpaceX is to make humanity a “multi-planet” species by colonizing Mars and another of his projects seeks to integrate a computer into the human brain.
But outside of his ambitious projects, Musk is almost as known for his polarizing online persona. He is popular on Twitter, where he chimes in on politics, talks business openly and embraces the internet’s meme culture. Some of his tweets have landed him in legal trouble.
Musk was born on June 28, 1971. He is 50 years old.
Musk grew up in Pretoria, one of South Africa’s three capital cities. His mother is a Canadian-born South-African model who was a finalist in the 1969 Miss South Africa competition. His father, Errol Musk, is an engineer. His parents separated in 1980.
In 2021, Musk surpassed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to become the richest man in the world.
Forbes lists his net worth at $267.1 billion.
Musk was married to Canadian author Justine Wilson from 2000 to 2008. He was also married to English actress Talulah Riley from 2010 to 2016. Musk has six children with Wilson and two children with his ex-girlfriend, singer Grimes.
Musk has founded or co-founded several major companies. The list includes Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, Neuralink, the Boring Company and Starlink.
Musk graduated in 1995 from the University of Pennsylvania with bachelor’s degrees in physics and business. He dropped out of a physics PhD program at Stanford University.
