Elon Musk, al Like Jeff Bezos And many other millionaires have tried to create the image of a genius that made himself starting from scratch, romantizing an image of the Garage Founding Myth even Apple has been able to sustain In time.
Around Elon Musk They have raised many myths and legends that, although they start from a certain base, have exaggerated or omitted parts to contribute to epic to their career. However, time, which puts everything in place, has been in charge of denying.
To name a few, there is the myth of the emerald mines in Zambia of his father, the Tesla Foundation or the unknown about whether Tesla itself or Space X would have survived if not for some of the government programs that now He is dismantling Doge.
Elon Musk’s beginnings
Elon Musk grew up in a wealthy family in South Africa. His father, Errol Musk, was a hustler with a career full of ups and downs. However, as his father declared in an interviewdid not own The emerald minesbut her shareholder, so she received a certain amount of precious stones for some years in the 80s.
Anyway, Errol Musk describes During the interviewThat Elon Musk’s childhood and his brothers was full of luxuries. Among them that included the plane (which he sold to buy his participation in the Esmeraldas mine) or, as Walter Isaacson said in Elon Musk’s biography, “(…) swam in abundance. He had a Rolls-Royce Corniche Dorado convertible.”
While it is true that during the Musk brothers student stage, Errol Musk was very far from being a millionaire and did not always provide them with enough money, he supported Elon and Kimbal Musk when they started their first venture, selling some of the Erroldas Musk emeralds in Tiffany’s of New York.
In 1995, when the Musk brothers founded their Zip2 Business Board of Directors, their father financed them with $ 28,000 and His mother, Maye Musk, He contributed 10,000 more.
Elon Musk denied this information In an interview For Rolling Stone, although he reduced the tone in his biography ‘Elon Musk: Tesla, Spacex, and The Quest for a fantastic future’ From Ashlee Vance ensuring that his father had participated in 10% of the company’s initial investment, making it clear that his family gave him a great initial economic impulse.
More ambition than management
After the initial family capital, Zip2 opened the door to new investors, including Greg Kouri, who soon realized that Elon Musk did not have enough experience to take the reins and degraded him to technology director, while Rich Sorkin took command.
According to writer Ashlee Vance, the initial code of ZIP2, written mainly by Musk, contained many errors and the engineers who hired They had to rewrite it almost completely. Despite those deficiencies, Elon Musk did not hesitate to download their anger on them shouting in front of everyone who had to “fix their stupid shit code,” Isaacson said in Musk’s biography.
In 1999, ZIP2 sold to Compaq by 307 million dollarswhich made Musk brothers a millionaires. They were the origin of the first 22 million dollars that Elon Musk won.
After the sale of ZIP2, Musk co -founded the platform of Banking online x.comwhich later merged with his main rival: Confinity of Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, to form Paypal.
Although Musk often presents himself as Paypal’s visionary co -founder, the truth is that PayPal’s original technology came from Confinity, not X.com, which contributed the user base. Musk was the CEO of the new company during the first six months, but he was fired by replacing him with Peter Thiel in September 2000, taking advantage of a Musk trip to Australia.
One of the reasons were the constant tensions with Max Levchin for Musk’s trend to risky technological changes, such as replacing all PayPal UNIX infrastructure with Microsoft Windows.
Ironically, “Musk admired Bill Gates, he loved Windows NT and thought Microsoft was a more reliable partner,” Isaacson wrote in Musk’s biography. That admiration It would not last for many years further. Although, as a shareholder, Musk earned a lot of money when Ebay bought Paypal, he was no longer in command of the company. In any case, his fortune had increased in 180 million dollars more for the agreement of 1.5 billion dollars with eBay.
Tesla: Take control and rewrite the story
Many people believe that Elon Musk is one of the founders of Tesla and in part it is because the founders of Tesla allowed it. Actually, Tesla Motors was founded in 2003 by two engineers, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenninglong before Musk got involved.
Musk joined Tesla in 2004, when the company was still not clear what they were going to manufacture. Musk used his money to accelerate the project becoming the main investor. He appointed himself president of the Board of Directors, despite being just an investor, as the co -founders counted In an interview for CNBC.
Over time, Musk took more control of the company and fired the original founders. In 2007, Musk fired Martin Eberhard and held the CEO position he still holds in 2008.
Eberhard sued Musk, accusing him of taking control of the company, orchestrating his dismissal and trying to rewrite the history of Tesla in his efforts to appear in the company’s documents as a founder, when the company already existed when he invested in it. Finally, Eberhard saw forced to give in and sign an agreement in which Musk was allowed present yourself as “co -founder” next to the true founders.
His great achievement was to appropriate a promising company founded by others, and then take advantage of his visionary image of the electric car. This does not mean that Musk has contributed to the success of the brand, but contradicts the idea that he founded Tesla from scratch.
Public money to the rescue of Tesla and Spacex
In addition to private investments, Elon Musk has benefited from billions of public money to build your empire. Tesla’s case is the clearest.
In 2008, Tesla was about to break during the financial crisis, but got the Obama administration He would grant him a federal loan ATVM (Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program) 465 million dollars of the US Department of Energy
Tesla returned the Loan in advance in 2013but this was possible thanks to other aid that the administration granted to ZEV credits (zero emission vehicles). The sale of pollutant emission credits allowed Tesla to obtain extra money to pay the debt, some credits that Doge has now put at your point of view.
ORna research of Los Angeles Times in 2015 assured that Elon Musk’s companies would have benefited from about 4.9 billion dollars in public subsidies of the US government.
Since then, the efficiency of the Spacex rockets has provided many more billions in the form of new contracts with NASA. In 2014, 2.6 billion dollars were assigned as part of this program to develop and carry out Missions crew to the International Space Station (ISS) with your ship Crew Dragon.
In 2021, NASA granted Spacex a contract of 2,890 million dollars to develop a modified version of the Starship rocket that will take astronauts from the astronauts Artemis mission to the moon. Also, Spacex has received multiple contracts from the Department of Defense and the US space force to launch national security satellites.
Only between 2019 and 2024, contracts exceed 2,000 million dollars. In total, Gwynne Shotwell has said that the company has some some 22,000 million dollars In government contracts, as he collected Reuters, of which about 15,000 million come from NASA.
A gaming legend
Elon Musk also actively works to improve his public image, sometimes saying things that are not true. For example, his fondness for video games was well known, but he wanted best players in the world in devil 4. Something unnecessary.
This served him for the younger public to connect with the millionaire during the electoral pre -campaign, but everything jumped through the air when, When examining your online historyThey discovered that Elon Musk’s games was active and achieving “record” scores, at the same time as the billionaire was attending live in Washington for the Donald Trump’s possession January 20, 2025.
Given the tests, Elon Musk had no choice but to admit that He had cheated and? He was not the champion who said to bebut he refused to apologize for deception. Finally, he ended up harassing the user in X That had discoveredHis deception.
In Xataka | Elon Musk has put the US Labor Inspection in Doge Diana: he investigated Tesla for the death of a worker
Image | Flickr (Gage Skidmore, Tesla Owners Club Belgium), Unspash (Dmitry Novikov), Divshub (Trevor Cokley)
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings