How Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, makes and spends his US$20 billion fortune

Elon Musk may be the world’s richest rocket scientist. With a fortune hovering around US$20 billion, the 46-year-old CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and co-founder of OpenAI has said he won’t be happy until we’ve escaped Earth and colonised Mars. Luckily, he has the mind and the money to make it happen.

A notorious workaholic, Musk doesn’t spend cash on lavish vacations or expensive hobbies. Instead, the entrepreneur spends most of his time at the office or in factories, retreating to one of his four Los Angeles mansions at the end of the day.

Scroll through to find out what we know about how Musk, a father of five, amassed his fortune and how he spends it.

As a child growing up in South Africa, Musk taught himself to code. By the time he was 12, he sold the source code for his first video game for US$500.

Just before his 18th birthday, Musk moved to Canada and worked a series of hard labour jobs, including shovelling grain, cutting logs, and eventually cleaning out the boiler room in a lumber mill for US$18 an hour – an impressive wage in 1989.

Musk got a pay cut to US$14 an hour when he started a summer internship alongside his brother, Kimbal, at the Bank of Nova Scotia after cold-calling – and impressing – a top executive there.

After he arrived for his freshman year at Queens University in 1990, Musk quickly picked up a side hustle selling computer parts and full PCs to other students. “I could build something to suit their needs like a tricked-out gaming machine or a simple word processor that cost less than what they could get in a store,” Musk said.

Within two years, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania on a partial scholarship. To cover the rest of his tuition, Musk and a buddy would turn their house into a speakeasy on the weekends, charging US$5 at the door. “I was paying my own way through college and could make an entire month’s rent in one night,” Musk said.

Musk graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics and an economics degree from the Wharton School and moved to Stanford to pursue his PhD. He left the programme within days to found an internet start-up with his brother. They started Zip2, a city guide software for newspapers, with US$28,000 in seed money from their father.

Four years later, in 1999, they sold Zip 2 for US$307 million, earning Musk US$22 million. He invested more than half of his earnings to cofound X.com, an online banking service. The company quickly merged with its rival and became PayPal with Musk as the majority shareholder. In 2002, eBay bought PayPal and Musk walked away with US$180 million.