The 4 Underrated Business Moves That Made Elon Musk Rich

Elon Musk is still the richest man on the planet, although his net worth declined by $7.5 billion year-to-date- yet, still standing at a whopping $221 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Musk is the founder, chairman, CEO, and chief technology officer of SpaceX; CEO of Tesla, Inc.; owner, chairman and CTO of X Corp.; founder of the Boring Company and xAI; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and president of the Musk Foundation. Last, but not least, Musk bought X — formerly Twitter — for an eye-popping $44 billion in 2022.

Here are some of his underrated business moves that made him rich.

As History Computer notes, Musk took a very different approach from many of his fellow billionaires in amassing his wealth — by getting rich thanks to several and diversified business operations instead of a single success path.

Musk founded Zip2 Corporation, a provider of Internet enterprise software and services, which was acquired by Compaq in March 1999 for $307 million, according to CNN. He then went on to found X.com, later named PayPal and sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion in October 2002, pocketing $165 million from the deal, CNN reported. 

Once the company became successful, Musk sold it. Yet, instead of retiring on his laurels, Musk reinvested his money in three more businesses.

Musk was able to satisfy his seemingly insatiable appetite when it comes to business ventures, partly due to the success of his businesses and the profits he reinvested. 

The most recent example is with the 2022 $44 billion Twitter acquisition, for which he had pledged 58% of his Tesla shares as collateral to secure personal indebtedness, according to Bloomberg.

As a Quora user noted, Musk’s early moves were to get in early when there is a technology shift.

“He basically took a start-up type of attitude (innovative, high chance of failure) to cars and rockets, which had both become stagnant industries dominated by aversion to risk and change, and run by bean counters instead of engineers,” according to the user.