Tesla CEO Elon Musk 'As Close to An Industrialist as Web Has Ever Spawned'
By Scott Doggett September 11, 2009
When Jon Favreau, director of the Marvel superhero film Iron Man, needed a corporate executive for actor Robert Downey Jr. to use as a role model for the flick's hero Tony Stark, he sought out Elon Musk.
Like the fictional Stark, an engineering genius who runs a weaponry company and designs many of its armaments, the 38-year-old Musk is the CEO and top technologist for electric-vehicle maker Tesla Motors and rocketmaker SpaceX.
The two tech execs even tool around in flashy cars: Stark in a superpowered Audi, Musk in a $109,000 zero-emissions battery-electric sports car that was the first vehicle off the assembly line at Tesla Motors, one of his two companies.
Musk appropriately got a smallish role as a scientist in Iron Man. In fact, throw in Musk's one-third interest in SolarCity, a company started by two cousins that has become a leader in solar panels for homes and business, and you have a guy who is probably as close to an industrialist as the Internet has ever spawned.
The son of an electrical engineer, the South African-born Musk holds both economics and physics degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. By the time he was 31, Musk had started and sold off two tech companies -- the second being PayPal, which was snapped up by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
That made Musk worth about $350 million, but over lunch recently he was very cagey about what he's worth now. "I have a very thin net worth outside my companies, maybe 5 percent of that."
That's because Musk has decided to plow much of his fortune into the areas he figures will most transform mankind over the next few years -- and perhaps not so incidentally make him another fortune. The areas are the Internet, space travel, and improving the environment, he says, "and I've already done the Internet."
If you find any of this interesting, go to Business Week. It's where all the above and much more can be found about the always compelling and often controversial Elon Musk.
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