The Obsession That Made Elon Musk The World’s Richest Person

You may have known Elon Musk for the successes of Tesla or SpaceX companies or the steps he took after taking Twitter. If so, you will be very surprised to learn of his obsession with the letter X.

The world’s most valuable automobile company, the world’s first private space transportation firm, and the world’s most controversial social media platform are now owned by the same person. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $ 46 billion in 2022, “freedom of expression” He started to manage the company by pressing every button after a period of time when he was in trouble.

The sudden and hard-to-explain decisions he made were actually not too surprising for those who knew Musk before. Musk, who offered to give an oxygen cylinder produced by SpaceX to divers to rescue children trapped in a cave in Thailand in 2018, went so far as to call the diver “pedophilia” who rejected this offer for a logical reason; Turns out he wasn’t a regular billionaire at all. The number of such behaviors and attitudes increased over time, just as the number of dollars in his wealth. However, he obsession with the letter X it hasn’t changed at all.

Before we get started, you can watch Elon Musk’s story—through all the companies he’s founded:

Year 1999, one of the first digital banking systems in history, “x.com” is established:

Two newly born fellow entrepreneurs in Palo Alto, California; Elon and Kimbal Musk They’re not even in their 30s yet. However, they sell Zip2 software, a digital city guide system, to Compaq, the technology giant of the time, for $307 million. With this sale, Musk has a boneless $22 million in his pocket, which is a huge fortune if you’re in 1999 -compared to today.

Musk, who became a Silicon Valley millionaire at the age of 28, tells about your achievements in that magazine; he rode in expensive sports cars and wore mannequins on his arm. Young fame and after 1 year of enjoying the wealthIn 1999, he produced a solution to the problem he always had in mind:

“How about we connect banks to the internet?”

In fact, this has been done before, but digital banking was used in very limited areas until Musk stepped in, as internet infrastructures were limited and its potential was not realized before. Musk actually wanted to “digitize money” and with this goal, he bought the X.com domain name and founded the company.

Year 2000, X.com became the world’s first widespread payment system and Musk sold the company: Today we know that company as PayPal…

Elon Musk and his partner Peter Thiel

With a rapid rise, X.com established an infrastructure where people could pay online without using any physical money. It may not sound like a novelty when you hear it today, but at the time, this company seemed to have a motorized carriage. Musk continued to run X.com for a while, which merged with Comnify. Then the name of the company PayPal was changed to.

Transforming into a money sending and receiving service with e-mail and infrared connection, PayPal was acquired by e-commerce company eBay in 2002 for a full 1.5 billion dollars. Musk, who is still in his early 30’s, has left this sale in exchange for his share of only 11.5%. 175 million dollars money won.

The year 2002, Musk buried his love for the letter X in his heart and founded a new company called SpaceX to keep it alive in space:

spacex

Having bought Tesla, a small car company, with the money he earned, Musk founded the SpaceX company with the remaining money. He gathered the most stellar astronomers and space engineers of the period in this company. Its aim was to reduce the costs of sending rockets into Earth orbit and to make states its customers. SpaceX has been doing this with reusable rockets since the early 2010s. reduced cost to 1 in 10indeed became a client of the states.

Year 2015, Tesla Model X, one of the most popular electric SUV models of all time:

tesla model x

The first example of Musk’s unconventional approaches to brand creation always appeared at Tesla. Tesla’s first car, also the first electric super-sports car, after Roadster, Musk respectively The letters that make up the word SEXY started to give new models. He named it 3 because the letter E belonged to another company at the time. However, X had again become part of Musk’s vision. The Model X was launched as a hybrid SUV with sports features.

The year is 2017. Musk, who bought the “X.com” domain name he sold years ago with the statement “I don’t have a big plan for now, but it has great sentimental value to me”, paid about 6 million dollars for it:


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