Episode 2610
Elon Musk
Tue, 2024-Jun-25 02:19 UTC
Length - 4:04
Direct Link
Welcome to popular Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of a popular Wikipedia page every day.
With 121,853 views on Monday, 24 June 2024 our article of the day is Elon Musk.
Elon Reeve Musk (; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman and investor known for his key roles in space company SpaceX and automotive company Tesla, Inc. Other involvements include ownership of X Corp., formerly Twitter, and his role in the founding of The Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink and OpenAI. He is one of the wealthiest people in the world; as of June 2024, Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$214 billion.
Musk was born in Pretoria, a member of the South African Musk family, and briefly attended the University of Pretoria before immigrating to Canada at age 18, acquiring citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. Two years later, he matriculated at Queen's University at Kingston in Canada. Musk later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and received bachelor's degrees in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University, but dropped out after two days and, with his brother Kimbal, co-founded online city guide software company Zip2. The startup was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. That same year, Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. In October 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion. Using $100 million of the money he made from the sale of PayPal, Musk founded SpaceX, a spaceflight services company, in 2002.
In 2004, Musk was an early investor in electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (later Tesla, Inc.). He became the company's chairman and product architect, assuming the position of CEO in 2008. In 2006, Musk helped create SolarCity, a solar-energy company that was acquired by Tesla in 2016 and became Tesla Energy. In 2013, he proposed a hyperloop high-speed vactrain transportation system. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company. The following year, Musk co-founded Neuralink—a neurotechnology company developing brain–computer interfaces—and The Boring Company, a tunnel construction company. In 2018, the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Musk, alleging that he had falsely announced that he had secured funding for a private takeover of Tesla. To settle the case, Musk stepped down as the chairman of Tesla and paid a $20 million fine. In 2022, he acquired Twitter for $44 billion. He subsequently merged the company into newly created X Corp. and rebranded the service as X the following year. In March 2023, Musk founded xAI, an artificial intelligence company.
Musk has expressed views that have made him a polarizing figure. He has been criticized for making unscientific and misleading statements, including COVID-19 misinformation and appearing to endorse antisemitic conspiracy theories, the latter of which he later apologized for. His ownership of Twitter has been similarly controversial, being marked by layoffs of large numbers of employees, an increase in hate speech, misinformation and disinformation posts on the website, and changes to Twitter Blue verification.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 02:19 UTC on Tuesday, 25 June 2024.
For the full current version of the article, see Elon Musk on Wikipedia.
This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.
Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.
Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.
Until next time, I'm Joanna Standard.
|
|
Buy WotD Stuff!!
