News

CEO of Tesla, SpaceX & Twitter
No. 1 Rank on 2022 Forbes 400 List $222 B Net Worth as of Nov. 1, 2022
AGE: 51 | SOURCE OF WEALTH: TESLA, SPACEX | SELF-MADE SCORE: 8/10 | RESIDENCE: AUSTIN, TEXAS | CITIZENSHIP: UNITED STATES | MARITAL STATUS: SINGLE | CHILDREN: 10 | EDUCATION: BACHELOR OF ARTS/SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Elon Musk is working to revolutionize transportation both on Earth, with electric car maker Tesla, and in space, with rocket producer SpaceX. Musk, who was born in South Africa, emigrated to Canada and later moved to the U.S. to attend university, has been the world’s richest person since September 2021, as a result of the huge runup in the stock price of Tesla, where he started as an investor and then became the CEO. His net worth peaked at $320 billion in November 2021. Rocket maker SpaceX won a $1.4 billion contract with NASA in August for five additional missions to take astronauts to the International Space Station. Musk was distracted this year by his new obsession and now possession, Twitter: in April 2022 he bid $44 billion to buy the social media company–the deal closed in October 2022 after Musk tried to back out and Twitter sued. A week into owning Twitter, Musk laid off about 50% of the staff. He is now CEO of SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter.

Wealth History
Asset Breakdown As of November 1, 2022🚙 Tesla: $147.7 B

Musk owns about 25% of Tesla between stock and options, but has pledged more than half his stock as collateral for loans; Forbes discounts the pledged shares to factor in the estimated debt owed. He owns 278.6 million vested options, which Forbes values net of their exercise price. Only 25.3 million of the 304 million options from Musk’s lucrative 2018 CEO performance award remain unvested and therefore excluded from Forbes’ net worth calculation. If vested, those options would have been worth another $5.2 billion as of November 1.🚀 SpaceX: $54.3 B

Forbes estimates that Musk owns 43% of the reusable rocket company, which private investors valued at $127 billion after a funding round in May 2022.A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried four astronauts—two Americans, one Japanese and one Russian—to the International Space Station for a six month mission on October 5, 2022.

Joel Kowsky/NASA/Getty Images💵 Twitter: $21.6 B

Musk entered into an agreement with Twitter’s board in April 2022 to buy the social media company for $44 billion. He later tried to back out; Twitter sued in response. The deal closed in late October 2022. To value Musk’s stake, Forbes applied an index of publicly traded social media companies (which fell 40% between April and October 2022) to Musk’s purchase price. Forbes estimates that Musk owns 82% of the company, calculated based on equity commitments from other investors disclosed in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The early November 2022 launch of a new Twitter system that allowed anyone to buy a verified blue checkmark failed spectacularly. A raft of impersonator accounts that looked official were created, with the fake Eli Lilly account claiming that insulin would now be free. Eli Lilly later clarified that insulin would not be free.Elon Musk at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco on Oct. 26, 2022 with a sink. He tweeted “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!”

Twitter account of Elon Musk/AFP🏗️ Boring Company: $3.9 B

Forbes estimates that Musk owns 69% of the infrastructure startup, which constructs underground tunnels. Musk reportedly got the idea for the company while sitting in traffic in Los Angeles. In Las Vegas the company built a 1.7 million loop for the city’s convention center.  It has a contract to build a 29-mile loop in Las Vegas with 51 stations to connect the airport, the Strip and more.  The company was valued at $5.7 billion after a funding round in April 2022.Musk arrived in a modified Tesla to unveil the Boring Company test tunnel in Hawthorne, California in December 2018. The first subterranean rides were described by at least one reporter as “bumpy.”

Robyn Beck/Pool Photo/AP💵 Other assets: $200 M

In June 2020, Musk owned seven homes in California, but declared on Twitter that he would sell them all—and he did. Now he says he lives in a 400-square-foot house on the SpaceX campus in Boca Chica, Texas.💸 Debt: -$5.6 B

Musk used his estimated $13.3 billion of cash and borrowed an estimated $5.6 billion to complete the Twitter purchase. He did not respond to a request for comment from Forbes.“I’m sending a giant statue of the digit ‘2’ to Jeffrey B., along with a silver medal.”

—Elon Musk in an email to Forbes after overtaking Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest person.MORE FROM FORBESElon Musk, Now World’s Richest Person, Told Forbes He’s Sending Jeff Bezos A Silver MedalBy Kenrick Cai
Philanthropy 1/5 Philanthropy Score
Forbes estimates that Musk, who signed the Giving Pledge in 2012, has donated $280 million over his lifetime to charitable causes from his foundation and other charitable vehicles. That is less than 1% of his net worth as of November 1, 2022. Not included: $5.7 billion worth of Tesla shares that Musk transferred to an undisclosed charity in November 2021. That’s because the gift likely went to a donor-advised fund–a philanthropic bank account that is not required to disclose when it distributes funds to nonprofit recipients. Forbes excludes amounts transferred to donor-advised funds from lifetime giving calculations unless the billionaire provides details of where the money from that fund has been donated.

HERE ARE SOME OF MUSK’S LARGEST DONATIONS TO DATE:$55 M

to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in September 2021 for cancer research$50 M

to fund the XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition (he pledged a total of $100 million in February 2021)$30 M

to public schools and nonprofits in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, where SpaceX builds rockets, announced in March 2021$10 M

to the University of Texas in December 2021 for “population research” (Musk tweeted in July 2021 that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization”)$10 M

in 2016 to YC Org, the funding vehicle for OpenAI, a nonprofit cofounded by Musk and Y Combinator founder Sam Altman to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole.” Musk stepped down from the nonprofit’s board in 2018 to avoid conflicts of interest as Tesla became more AI-focused
History
1980s As a kid in South Africa, Musk taught himself to code. By age 12 he sold his first software—a space game called Blastar—for about $500.

1988 Musk at age three, age eight and age 18. He moved from South Africa to Canada just prior to his 18th birthday.

ARCHIVIO/Redux He immigrated to Canada just before his 18th birthday and first worked a variety of odd jobs, including cleaning the boiler room of a lumber mill. He enrolled at Queen’s University in Ontario, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he got bachelor’s degrees in economics and physics.

1999 Musk passed on a Stanford graduate program to launch software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal, selling it to Compaq in 1999, reportedly for more than $300 million.

2000 PayPal cofounders—and current billionaires—Peter Thiel and Elon Musk in a photo taken in 2000.

AP Photo/Paul Sakuma/File Musk merged an online bank he cofounded, X.com, with a competitor cofounded by Peter Thiel to form PayPal, which was acquired by eBay in 2002 for $1.4 billion. Musk got married in January 2000 to Justine Wilson, a writer and student he’d met at Queen’s University; she signed a postnuptial agreement a few months after their wedding. Their first child, a son named Nevada, died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome at 10 weeks old.

2002 Musk—who inspired the Tony Stark character in the movie Iron Man—at SpaceX in 2004 with a rocket under production.

Paul Harris/Getty Images Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 in El Segundo, California—not far from the Los Angeles airport.

2004 He joined Tesla as an investor and chairman, a year after the company’s founding by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning; he was later granted the title of Tesla cofounder.

2008 Musk filed for divorce from Justine, with whom he shares five sons–twins and triplets. He became CEO of Tesla in October 2008, amid the financial crisis, and immediately laid off dozens of employees. That same year SpaceX launched the first privately developed rocket into orbit (he’s since adopted the title of “Technoking” at Tesla).

2010 When Musk took Tesla public in June 2010, it was the first initial public offering of a U.S. automotive company in half a century. Tesla’s market capitalization surpassed $1 trillion in October 2021, then dropped in 2022.

Daniel Acker/Bloomberg Tesla went public on the Nasdaq in June, with the stock closing at a split-adjusted $1.59 on the first trading day; the company had just under $117 million in revenues that year.

2012-2014 Musk debuted on Forbes’ list of the world’s billionaires with a net worth of $2 billion in March 2012. SpaceX, then valued at $1.8 billion, sent the first private spacecraft to the International Space Station in May. That same year Musk divorced his second wife, actress Talulah Riley. The couple remarried 18 months later, in July 2013. It wasn’t meant to be. Musk filed for divorce a second time on Dec. 31, 2014. The couple did not have any children together.

2016 Tesla acquired SolarCity, a struggling solar panel installer backed by Musk and founded by his cousins, in August, sparking investor lawsuits that dragged into April 2022, when a judge ruled in Musk’s favor.

2018 One consequence of Musk tweeting that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private: The SEC required that he give up the role of chairman. He continues to serve as Tesla’s CEO.

Kiichiro Sato/AP In August, Musk tweeted about taking Tesla private, sending shares soaring and prompting an SEC settlement that now requires lawyers to pre-screen his tweets. Musk was widely criticized for smoking marijuana on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in September and for calling a British diver who helped rescue children from a flooded cave in Thailand “pedo guy.” Musk ultimately won a defamation lawsuit filed by the diver, who had drawn Musk’s ire after labeling a rescue submarine sent to Thailand by SpaceX and Boring Company a “PR stunt.”

2021 Musk hosted the TV show Saturday Night Live in May 2021 on Mother’s day—and brought his mom on the show. On air he gave her a gift she jokingly said she didn’t want: the cryptocurrency Dogecoin.

ZUMAPRESS.com/Newscom In May Musk told television viewers he has Asperger’s syndrome while guest hosting Saturday Night Live. In September, SpaceX launched the first all-civilian crew into orbit, as Musk overtook Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest person for the first time – the third person ever worth $200 billion or more. Tesla’s stock peaked in early November, after Hertz announced a large Tesla order, briefly making Musk the first person worth more than $300 billion. Days later, Musk began selling $16 billion of Tesla shares over two months after polling his Twitter followers, likely resulting in the largest-ever one-year tax bill for an individual (and reportedly prompting an SEC insider trading probe of him and Kimbal).
Also in November, Musk secretly fathered twins with an executive of his brain implant startup, Neuralink. Musk had split with his girlfriend, alt-pop star Grimes, with whom he has two children –son X Æ A-12 born in 2020 and daughter Exa Dark Sideræl born in 2021, the prior year. Musk, who reportedly told his first wife, “I am the alpha in this relationship,” as they danced at their wedding, now has a total of 10 children with three women.

2022 In April, Musk launched a $44 billion hostile takeover bid for Twitter, after delinquently reporting a 9% ownership stake and initially accepting a board seat. Twitter’s board agreed to sell the company to Musk on April 25. He waffled on the deal for months. Twitter sued him to complete the deal and Musk ended up buying the company in late October. He owns an estimated 82% of Twitter; other investors include Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Twitter’s cofounder and former CEO Jack Dorsey and crypto company Binance.
On The Cover: Elon MuskForbes

( left: April 2014; right: September 2015 )
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