A Complete Timeline of Elon Musk's Business Endeavors

With Elon Musk shut to claiming a new function as proprietor of Twitter after a triumphing bid to buy it for $44 billion this week, the billionaire entrepreneur can add the social media app to a lengthy listing of commercial enterprise ventures he has led, invested in, and supported over his prolonged career. Here’s a timeline of Musk’s most magnificent commercial enterprise endeavors—both profitable and not—over the previous three decades.

1995: Zip2

Musk and his brother established Zip2, an on line commercial enterprise directory, as an on-line choice to the preferred paper yellow pages. (Google would no longer launch till 1998.) He offered it for over $300 million in 1999 to Compaq Computer Corporation. Musk used to be ousted as CEO in 1996, however, when the board of administrators determined to installation a extra skilled chief in his stead.

1999: X.com

Musk invested some of his windfall from the Zip2 sale into his subsequent venture: X.com, an on line bank, launched with three different co-founders. X.com’s enterprise mannequin used to be revolutionary for its time, in that it incentivized sign-ups and eased the manner of transferring money digitally, with no want for mail or regular banking infrastructure. In an interview with CBS MarketWatch at the time of the launch, Musk defined his business: “There are no minimum balances. You can open an account and acquire a $20 promotional provide in your checking account. You can go $8 to your S&P fund, $3 every to your cash market and bond fund, and be left with $6 in your checking.”

He multiplied extra philosophically on the new company: “In my view, the Internet had long gone via a couple of levels and was once equipped for any other stage,” he said. “Previously, the first phase was that people wanted to trust the internet to get information. This was once perhaps ’95 or ’96. The 2nd used to be to have confidence the Internet for purchases and start to use credit score playing cards on-line to purchase books, toys, pet food, and that sort of thing. I suppose we’re at the 0.33 stage now the place human beings are equipped to use the Internet as their principal monetary repository.”

2000: PayPal

X.com merged with software program enterprise Confinity simply one yr later, forming PayPal, a invulnerable on line repayments platform with a basis in repayments carried out for PalmPilots. PayPal would go on to be one of his most profitable companies; Musk and his partners, consisting of Confinity co-founder Peter Thiel, offered it to eBay in 2002 for a $1.5 billion inventory deal. However, it was once a difficult start. PayPal used to be named at one factor as one of the “worst enterprise ideas” of 1999, and Musk himself used to be once more eliminated from his position as CEO whilst on honeymoon in 2000, changed by means of the board with Thiel.

After going public on the NASDAQ inventory alternate in 2002, eBay snapped up PayPal. They would keep onto PayPal till 2015, spinning it off into a separate entity.

2002: SpaceX

Musk subsequent set his attractions on a lofty goal: area exploration, and the future colonization of Mars. In the previous 20 years, SpaceX has dealt with a sequence of rocket launch disasters and Starship explosions. But it has additionally end up a heavy-hitter in the house enterprise with a quantity of archives to its name, along with being the first non-public enterprise to ship a craft to the International Space Station and ship astronauts to orbit. It is regarded for its reusable rockets.

SpaceX is additionally in the back of the improvement of Starlink, a constellation of satellites meant to provide business net carrier round the globe.

2002: The Musk Foundation

Established as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the Musk Foundation is one of the least talked about businesses. Its noted dreams together with aiding renewable strength and pediatric lookup and education, and the growing of “safe synthetic brain to advantage humanity.” Between 2002 and 2018 it passed out round $25 million, about half of of that to OpenAI, a organization owned by means of Musk himself. (Since 2012, Musk has additionally been a signatory of The Giving Pledge, in which many of the world’s richest human beings have dedicated to giving away the majority of their wealth at some point.)

2004: Tesla

These days, Musk is possibly satisfactory recognised for his management at Tesla, the electric powered automobile employer named after famed inventor Nikola Tesla. Valued at over $1 trillion at one factor in 2021, Tesla used to be established in 2003 through two different men; Musk entered a Series A funding spherical with an funding of $6.5 million, and subsequently took an an increasing number of lively function in the company. He has been CEO because 2008. The Model three is the most famous electric powered automobile in manufacturing today, with over one million devices bought globally.

Tesla has come in for its honest share of controversy, however, from dealing with lengthy manufacturing and achievement delays to protection problems with its cars and worker complaints about working stipulations and administration practices.

2006: SolarCity

Founded with the aid of his cousins in 2006, SolarCity obtained Musk’s patronage from the offset; he was once their predominant monetary backer. A photo voltaic strength business enterprise that grew to become the main residential photo voltaic installer in the U.S. via the mid-2010s, SolarCity mounted photo voltaic strength structures that had been leased to residential users. Musk, by Tesla, received SolarCity in 2016 for $2.6 billion in inventory and integrated it into its operations as Tesla Energy.

2015: OpenAI

Musk co-founded OpenAI as a non-profit in 2015, with a for-profit synthetic brain lookup lab component; it used to be started out with a $1 billion collective pledge from its founders. Musk has been open about his pastime in creating “friendly” AI that helps humanity, however he ended up resigning from the board in 2018 due to conflicts with Tesla’s AI projects.

2016: Neuralink

Another lookup endeavor, Musk co-founded Neuralink in 2016 with the purpose of working on “brain-machine interfaces,” or BMIs, that can be implanted without delay into the body. Neuroscientists have been skeptical of Neuralink’s lookup and claims. While they presently habits experiments on animals, they moved plans to start working on human topics to 2022.

2016: The Boring Company

Founded with the intention of supporting dispel metropolis visitors by means of underground tunnels as a subsidiary of SpaceX, the Boring Company is one of Musk’s facet projects. Its aim: construct tunnels. They first experimented by using tunneling below the SpaceX manufacturing facility in California. The Boring Company grew to be an impartial entity in 2018, and in 2021 executed a tunnel venture in Las Vegas to shuttle site visitors below the Las Vegas Convention Center. It is presently working on similarly tunnel tasks in Las Vegas for underground transport. Other tasks are exceptionally speculative.

Musk as soon as spoke boldly about an formidable “Hyperloop” system, developing tunnels throughout the united states of america to revolutionize and pace up underground mass transport between cities. However, mentions of Hyperloop have been removed from the Boring Company's website.

2022: Twitter

After Musk bought enough shares to become the controlling shareholder by April 1, Musk agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion in April. His plans are to make Twitter "better than ever" by "improving the product with new features, releasing algorithms that build trust, eliminating spambots, and authenticating everyone."