After changing his bio to “Chief Twit” and appearing at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, Elon Musk has officially closed his $44 billion purchase of the company.
The deal gives Musk one of the world’s most powerful megaphones and access to the data of nearly 400 million users. In the first 24 hours of Musk’s Twitter, users reported changes to the site, including lifted shadow bans and reverses to users previously limited on the site.
But who exactly is Musk?
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Musk is a South Africa-born billionaire entrepreneur who serves as CEO of Tesla, a popular electric vehicle manufacturer, and SpaceX. Musk made an early fortune founding PayPal in 1999. EBay bought the company in 2002 for $1.5 billion, and Musk made $180 million from the deal, Time Magazine reported.
Soon after, Musk founded SpaceX, which partners with NASA on missions. Musk’s admirers herald him as a visionary thrusting the world into the future. His ultimate goal with SpaceX is to make humanity a “multi-planet” species by colonizing Mars, and another of his projects seeks to integrate a computer into the human brain.
But outside of his ambitious projects, Musk is almost as known for his polarizing online persona. He is popular on Twitter, where he chimes in on politics, talks business openly and embraces the internet’s meme culture. Some of his tweets have landed him in legal trouble.
Multiple news outlets reported Musk closed the deal late Thursday, firing top executives, including the company’s CEO Parag Agrawal.
But on Wednesday, Musk tweeted a video of him carrying a porcelain sink into Twitter’s headquarters.
Musk tweeted a message directed toward Twitter advertisers Thursday morning. “The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence,” Musk wrote.
Musk was born on June 28, 1971.
He grew up in Pretoria, one of South Africa’s three capital cities. His mother is a Canadian-born South African model who was a finalist in the 1969 Miss South Africa competition. His father, Errol Musk, is an engineer. His parents separated in 1980.
In 2021, Musk surpassed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to become the richest man in the world.
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Forbes lists his net worth at $267.1 billion.
Musk was married to Canadian author Justine Wilson from 2000 to 2008. He was also married to English actress Talulah Riley from 2010 to 2016. Musk has six children with Wilson and two children with his ex-girlfriend, singer Grimes.
Musk has founded or co-founded several major companies. The list includes Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, Neuralink, the Boring Company and Starlink.
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Musk graduated in 1995 from the University of Pennsylvania with bachelor’s degrees in physics and business. He dropped out of a physics Ph.D program at Stanford.
Musk said he started his first venture, Zip2, a software company, in 1995 with $15,000 and a later round of $200,000 from investors, including his father. Zip2 sold for $300 million in 1999.
Musk said in a 2018 tweet that he is registered as an independent voter and described his political views as “moderate.” Though he recently indicated he would support Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president in 2024, Musk has donated to both political parties over the years.
Still, opinions on Musk tend to be divided along party lines. Conservatives rallied behind Musk last year as he moved Tesla’s headquarters from California, a blue state, to Texas, a red state, and are supporting him now as he promised “free speech” on Twitter, where they say they have been censored.
Some Democrats were worried about the potential increased spread of misinformation on the platform under Musk’s control and the prospect of former President Donald Trump’s return to Twitter after he was permanently banned last year.
Musk was 41 in 2012 when he became a billionaire, Insider reported.
Twitter, Inc. was co-founded by Jack Dorsey in 2007. It undertook an initial public offering in 2013 and was a publicly traded company until Musk’s acquisition.
Musk’s 18-year-old daughter petitioned in court to change her name to match her gender identity, USA TODAY reported. The teen also cited wanting to sever ties with her father as a reason for requesting the change.
Business Insider reported that Musk welcomed twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at Musk’s Neuralink, in November.
Here is a compiled list of Elon Musk quotes:
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