What is the fortune of these millionaires?
According to the Bloomberg Millionaires Index, Elon Musk is the world’s wealthiest person, with a net worth of $231 billion, while Zuckerberg is in ninth place, with a net worth of $113 billion.
Who are your parents and how important were they in your companies?
Although these millionaires have made their fortunes grow, the reality is that their family background allowed them to achieve many of the goals they had set for themselves. On the one hand, Musk’s father owned an emerald mine in Africa, which allowed him to amass a fortune.
On the other hand, Zuckerberg also grew up in a wealthy family. His mother, Karen Kempner, is a psychiatrist, while his father, Edward Zuckerberg, was a dentist. Before entering university, the family offered Mark and his three sisters a franchise to start their own business as proof that they really wanted to study or preferred money.
What are Elon Musk’s companies?
His first project was the video game called Blastar, which he developed at the age of 12 and sold to a computer magazine for $500. Although he described it as a trivial game years later, he too said it was better than “Flappy Bird.”
The next project he worked on was X.com, a banking company that merged with Confinity, a financial startup co-founded by Peter Thiel, to form PayPal, where he served as CEO for a few years.
At the beginning of 2002, he founded the SpaceX company with 100 million dollars received from the sale of PayPal to eBay, with the aim of colonizing Mars. Later, in 2004 he made his first investment of 70 million dollars in Tesla and in 2008 he invested another 80 million dollars, in addition to being named CEO of the company.
In 2016, he created The Boring Company, with the mission of creating a network of underground tunnels in cities to be able to drive without traffic problems. For the following year he founded Neuralink, whose purpose is to manufacture devices that can be implanted in the human brain, although it is a company too criticized for its animal research.
More recently, it bought the social network Twitter for 44 billion dollars and, in addition to laying off a large part of its employees and incorporating a subscription model, changed its name to X. It also had an influence on the OpenAI foundation, the company of Artificial Intelligence, famous for developing ChatGPT.
All Zuckerberg companies
Mark Zuckerberg has also been one of the biggest figures in the tech industry for the past decade due to his focus on social media. His first project in this field was Facemash, created during his stay at Harvard, and where students could rate their classmates.
Although the university accused him of stealing the institution’s data, this was the first forerunner for what would become Facebook, a platform that paved the way for Zuckerberg’s entrepreneurial career.
Unlike Musk, Zuckerberg was not a figure who founded his companies. Rather, he had a vision of getting small companies with a future. In 2012, he acquired a small photo app called Instagram for $1 billion, which has become one of the most user-friendly social networks in the world, as well as making huge profits for Facebook.
But that was not Zuckerberg’s only great business, since in 2014 he announced the purchase of WhatsApp for 21.8 billion dollars, which turned out quite well for the businessman, since it is currently the most used app in the world, according to the report. We Are Social, by Hootsuite.
Although in the history of Facebook it had scandals, such as Cambridge Analytica, and other issues related to user privacy, in 2021 it decided to change the name of the company to demonstrate its approach to the metaverse and precisely renamed the company Meta .
Within this field of Virtual Reality, it has also made interesting movements, such as the acquisition of Oculus VR in 2014, for 2,000 million dollars, a company that has been in charge of developing the company’s VR devices.
Despite this focus so marked by Virtual Reality, Zuckerberg has not left social networks aside and recently announced Threads, a microblogging platform that seeks to compete with X, which is why these two businessmen want to fight.