Elon Musk: the space oddity seeking world domination

Elon Musk, the electric-car and space-travel pioneer who wants to move to Mars is now the world’s richest man. If he seems delusional, that’s all part of the plan.

Elon Musk
(Image credit: © BRITTA PEDERSEN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Tesla’s founder Elon Musk has overtaken Amazon’s chief Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest individual. Musk now has a fortune worth $188.5bn at the last count. “How strange,” Musk tweeted wryly when the news broke. “Well, back to work…” There are still plenty of people on Wall Street who maintain that his electric-car company, whose stock has risen sevenfold since the start of 2020, is blowing bubbles more than creating value. But this has been an extraordinary 12 months for Musk – even by his own out-of-the-box standards. In line with Tesla’s surging shares, the South African-born entrepreneur, 49, has seen his personal worth soar by more than $150bn “in what is believed to be the quickest accumulation of wealth in history”, says The Times.

But Musk, who attributes his success to pursuing goals that seem “completely delusional”, has also achieved huge breakthroughs. In May his rocket venture, SpaceX, made history by becoming the first private company to launch astronauts into space. In August he demonstrated a new interest in bionics by wheeling out a pig with a coin-sized chip in her head. And while all this was going on, Musk and his girlfriend, the Canadian musician Grimes, staged a memorable assault on nomenclature norms by naming their newborn son “X Æ A-12”.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.