Elon Musk, the current CEO of Tesla is a very famous man. With more than 50 million followers Elon’s tweets have significant power to influence people. The cryptocurrency market saw this first hand when the price of Dogecoin shot up by more than 12000% this year. Elon Musk has his own set of fans, fans who are crazy for the kind of work the entrepreneur is doing – plan to send people to Mars, an all electric future for this world and treating nervous complications with Neuralink. These are all really good projects that can really better the state of the world we are in today.
A vast array of articles and knowledge base is widely available on the life of Elon Musk. Yet, there are some things which hardly find mention in the main stream media today. Things which are very important and can help the readers find the most accurate picture.
Here are the five things that most people, not all but most people don’t now about Elon Musk:
Elon Musk never started Tesla:
Yes, that is correct. Contrary to popular belief, Elon Musk never started Tesla. Tesla was originally incorporated on July 1, 2003, by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Eberhard said he wanted to build “a car manufacturer that is also a technology company”, with its core technologies as “the battery, the computer software, and the proprietary motor. Ian Wright was Tesla’s third employee and together they raised a series A round of $7.5 million from various investors which included Elon Musk.
Elon Musk had to win a court case to call himself co-founder of Tesla:
Yes. You heard that right again. In 2009 Tesla’s cofounder Martin Eberhard had filed a mammoth 146-page complain against Tesla, and claimed that Musk slandered him, broke severance and stock option agreements and caused emotional distress. “Set out to rewrite history by falsely claiming that he was the founder or creator of Tesla Motors” was however, the key complaint. After months of disagreement, Elon Musk and cofounder Martin Eberhard finally made peace and Elon Musk was allowed to call himself a “cofounder”.
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Elon Musk was ousted from PayPal and it was Peter Thiel who took PayPal public which made Elon a cool $180 million:
Long story short. Elon Musk had a company called X.com. Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek had started the company called Confinity in December 1998 which was working in a peer to peer payment system and the first version of the electronic payments system was launched in 1999. In March 2000, Elon Musk’s X.com acquired Confinity. Later in the same year, while en route to Australia for a holiday, Elon Musk was ousted and replaced by Peter Thiel.
The company was renamed to PayPal and Peter Thiel took it public in 2002 which made Elon a cool $180 million.
and finally
Elon Musk is not the actual DogeFather:
In what looks like a repeat of the Tesla story (Did Elon Musk steal Tesla?) many of Elon’s fans who are new to the cryptocurrency domain have started assuming that he is the creator of Doge coin. But that would be absolutely false and any such notions should be nipped in the bud so that the creators who actually created it would never be forgotten. Dogecoin was created by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer who decided to create a payment system as a joke, making fun of the wild speculation in cryptocurrencies at that time.