Elon Musk is the richest person in the world. We know very little about the man behind Tesla and SpaceX, though we admire his genius.
Elon Musk can be found everywhere. Due to its omnipresence, we often have the impression that we know it.
In recent weeks, no one else has garnered as much attention as Elon Musk, CEO of electric vehicle maker Tesla (TSLA).
Musk has nearly eclipsed Western diplomacy since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24. He agreed to send Starlink satellite Internet terminals made by his SpaceX aerospace company to Ukraine to prevent Russia from winning the communications war.
He then proposed a fratricidal duel with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war.
An unhappy and lonely childhood
Musk opened Tesla factories near Berlin, Germany, and Austin, Texas, a few weeks later. At this latest event, billed as the world’s biggest party, he reiterated his promise to make all Tesla vehicles autonomous by the end of 2022.
Such news would have been enough for more than one person, but you have to believe that Musk is not one of them. The serial entrepreneur immediately announced that he had bought 9.1 percent of the microblogging website Twitter, which he used to build the Musk brand. There he has more than 82 million followers, which is almost the population of Germany.
But since he’s the only one who knows the secret, the billionaire made a $43 billion offer to take control of Twitter. Since then, a fierce battle has broken out between Musk and the board of directors, who seem unwilling to help.
As a result, Musk is everywhere. Man, on the other hand, remains a mystery. In a recent Ted Talk interview, the businessman tried to clear up part of the mystery.
He claimed that he had an unhappy and lonely childhood and that he spent much of his time reading rather than playing with other children his age.
“To be honest, I didn’t have a happy childhood,” Musk told Ted Talk host Chris Anderson. “It was a little rough.”
“However, I read a lot of books. I’ve read many books. Little by little I learned more from the books I read and the movies I watched. It took me a while to understand things that most people understand intuitively.”
According to the 50-year-old billionaire, he did not master the social codes. For example, he did not understand social cues. Musk explained that this was due to his Asperger syndrome.
Musk found solace in books and computer programming
“Everyone’s experience will be unique, but I think social cues were not intuitive to me. I was just a bookworm who didn’t understand these.” Musk, the father of seven children, six of whom are boys, also shared his story.
“Others can intuitively understand what something means, I guess. He just had a tendency to take things too literally, believing that the words spoken were exactly what they meant. But that turned out to be wrong because they’re not just saying what they mean. There are a variety of other things that are intended. It took me a while to realize this.”
Asperger syndrome is a type of autism that does not include intellectual disability or language delay. According to scientists, those who suffer from it often have difficulties in relationships and interactions with others. They have difficulty recognizing and understanding other people’s emotions, whether through facial expressions, tone of voice, jokes, irony, or specific gestures. Unlike most people, who understand this intuitively, Aspergers have to learn it. As a result, they find it difficult to form friendly or romantic ties.
He turned to the inner world after failing to understand the outer world. He discovered this world, particularly in computing.
“I found it rewarding to spend all night just programming computers. Most people, I think, don’t enjoy typing weird symbols into a computer by themselves all night,” the tech mogul recalled. “They don’t think it’s funny, but I thought it was. It was fantastic. I used to program all night by myself and it was a lot of fun. But I don’t think that’s normal.”
Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on June 28, 1971, to a South African father and a Canadian mother.
Demonstrated an early aptitude for information technology and entrepreneurship. He created a video game at the age of 12 and sold it to a computer magazine. He left South Africa in 1988, after obtaining a Canadian passport, to avoid supporting apartheid through conscription and to seek economic opportunity in the United States.
Elon Musk’s search for truth
He began his education at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and economics in 1995. At the age of 24, he enrolled in a Ph.D. in physics. she programs at Stanford, but dropped out after just two days because he believed that the Internet had much greater potential to change society than physical research.
“I was absolutely obsessed with the truth, just obsessed with the truth,” Musk explained. “Because of my obsession with the truth, I studied physics, which tries to understand the truth of the universe. Physics is simply the study of what are the testable truths of the universe and what are the truths with predictive power.
He also added:
“Physics was something very natural for me to study,” added the magnate. “Understanding the nature of the universe was intrinsically interesting, and then understanding computer science or information theory was also interesting. Some argue that information theory operates at a more fundamental level than even physics. Physics and information are two topics that interest me a lot”.
This search for the truth, which began early in his life, plunged him into depression.
“I used to be pretty depressed about the meaning of life when I was a young teenager. He was reading religious texts and philosophy books to try to understand the meaning of life. I got into German philosophers, which is definitely not a good idea if you’re a young teenager, as they’re a bit obscure, and it’s much better to read them as an adult,” recalled Musk, who was visibly excited.
He read the famous “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” a sci-fi comedy franchise created by Douglas Adams that tells the story of a man who flees into space with an alien friend to avoid death on Earth.
Musk described it as “actually a philosophy book masquerading as a goofy humor book.”
Photo credit: https://www.cnet.com
Serial Entrepreneur Elon Musk
“I have a worldview proposal or motivating philosophy, which is to understand what questions to ask about the answer of the universe and to agree that we expand the scope and scale of consciousness, biological and digital”, continued the billionaire.
“We’ll be better able to ask these questions, formulate them, and figure out why we’re here, how we got here, and what the hell is going on. That is my driving philosophy: expanding the scope and scale of consciousness to better understand the nature of the universe.”
Before the establishment of SpaceX in 2002 and Tesla in 2003, Musk founded Zip2 in 1995, a company that provided maps and business directories to online newspapers. Zip2 was bought by computer maker Compaq for $307 million in 1999. The billionaire later co-founded X.com, an online financial services company that later merged with software company Confinity Inc. in 2000 to become PayPal.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk, who has lived in Austin since late 2021, is worth $251 billion as of April 16.
Information Source: The Street
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Categories: Technology
Source: vtt.edu.vn