SA’s Elon Musk has world at his feet

RICHEST MAN MOVES IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE Business days with California over as entrepreneur moves assets to Texas.

Whether the topic is transforming the automobile or conquering the next frontier of space, South African-born Elon Musk has shown a knack for captivating an audience beyond investors and science geeks.

The brash Tesla CEO, now the world’s wealthiest person following the electric carmaker’s meteoric rise, was the quintessential Silicon Valley disruptor – except he no longer lives in California.

The norm-shattering entrepreneur, who has more than 41 million followers on Twitter and a fortune now estimated at more than $180 billion, announced last month he had relocated to Texas and could not resist one last dig at the West Coast state.

“If a team has been winning for too long, they do tend to get a little complacent, a little entitled, and then they don’t win the championship anymore,” Musk said at a conference hosted by the Wall Street Journal.

“California has been winning for a long time... and they are taking it for granted.”

On Thursday, Musk surpassed Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos as the world’s wealthiest person.

“How strange,” Musk said on Twitter when informed of the distinction. “Well, back to work...”

Musk, 49, was born in South Africa and holds passports from the US and Canada after completing his studies in Ontario and the state of Pennsylvania.

By 25, he had created Zip2, an online advertising platform, and was a millionaire by age 30, after selling the company to Compaq Computer in 1999.

He followed that success with the creation of the online bank X.com that was later merged into PayPal, which eBay bought in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

But Musk has entered a new stratosphere over the past few years as Tesla has grown and come closer to achieving a mission he said is not economic.

Tesla’s success is very important for the future of the world,” Musk said in 2018. “It’s very important for all life on earth.”

A linchpin of Musk’s larger goal of remaking transportation has been the Tesla Model 3, intended as its first vehicle aimed at the middle market.

After setting ambitious goals for the model’s ramp-up, Musk hit a rough spot in 2018 as Tesla missed targets while burning through cash.

In an especially infamous moment, Musk in August 2018 jolted markets by announcing on Twitter that he was considering taking Tesla private and boasting he had “secured” financing for doing so.

Musk quickly dropped the go-private effort, but became embroiled in a bitter dispute with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which charged him with fraud, slapped him with a $20 million fine and demanded he follow board-supervised protocols on his social media use. –