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- Elon Reeve Musk is originally from Pretoria, South Africa. His mother Maye Musk is a renowned model and dietitian, and his father Errol Musk is an electromechanical engineer. Elon Musk moved to Canada and the United States for education; however, he became a US citizen in 2002 at the age of 31.
LOS ANGELES - Talulah Riley, Elon Musk arrives at the 2012 Environmental Media Awards at Warner Brothers Studio in 2012 in Burbank, CA.
Image Source: MegapixlTM
2. South African tech mogul has married thrice, and he has six sons. Following the first child's death, his first wife Justine Wilson gave birth to twins in 2004 and later triplets in 2006 through IVF. They divorced after eight years and now share the custody of their five children. He then married English actress Talulah Riley and remarried her after their divorce. The pair again parted ways in 2016. Musk is now in a relationship with singer Grimes aka Claire Boucher, who recently gave birth to their son. After a lot of public announcements and controversies, the pair has named their son X Æ A-Xii.
3. His five children go to a private school, built in a mansion in California, with a few other kids of SpaceX employees. The school is named as Ad Astra, which means 'to the stars' in Latin.
4. At the tender age of 12, Musk taught himself computer programming. He also developed and sold his video game code for USD 500. The game is active online.
5. He left his PhD at Stanford University in just two days to pursue other career paths. To take advantage of the growing internet popularity in the 1990s, Musk founded his first company Zip2. The company provided maps and business directories to online newspapers. He sold Zip2 in 1999 for USD 307 million and became a millionaire at the age of 28.
LOS ANGELES - Elon Musk at the 2014 Vanity Fair Oscar Party at the Sunset Boulevard in, 2014 in West Hollywood, CA.
Image Source: MegapixlTM
6. The Iron Man movie director recently revealed the astonishing fact that Elon Musk influenced the famous actor Robert Downey Jr.'s persona. Musk did a cameo role in Iron Man 2 and acted in one of The Big Bang Theory's episodes. The famous Simpsons also featured Elon Musk as himself.
7. Musk is a huge fan of comic books, especially Marvel's X-Men, and he calls himself a big Star Wars fan. He has named his Falcon rockets after the movie Franchise. The robots at the Tesla factory have X-Men characters' names. Moreover, Musk has also named his son Xavier, after X-Men's Professor X.
8. His love for cars is very apparent. Musk owns a custom-built Louis Esprit submarine car called Wet Nellie. The vehicle can be seen in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. He once said that he hoped to build underwater vehicles in the future, using Tesla Motors technology.
9. Google co-founder Larry Page has been close friends with Musk for a long time. Larry personally invested in Tesla shares in 2006.
NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida testing site. Image Source: Shutterstock
10. Like the policy followed by technology legends such as Steve Jobs of Apple, Musk takes the annual salary for Tesla Motors as USD 1. His real-time personal net worth is USD 177.2 billion as of January 8, 2021.
11. In 2008, NASA provided a USD 1.6 billion contract to SpaceX, which saved it from bankruptcy. It is rumoured that Elon cried after the deal was sealed.
12. As he is famously known for building Tesla Motors, he is also mistaken as to its founder. However, Elon Musk did not form Tesla; he first became a board of directors after investing in 2004. Later he invested USD 7.5 million through personal funds and became a controlling investor in Tesla. In 2008, he became the CEO and since then he has been leading the company to success.
