Elon Musk is often regarded as an eccentric individual that strays away from what would be expected from the world’s richest man, currently with a net worth of 196 billion USD. He is surrounded by a lengthy history of near-fanatical antics, from smoking marijuana on the Joe Rogan podcast to recently posting a video of himself carrying a sink into the Twitter headquarters following his acquisition of the company, as an homage to the phrase: “let that sink in”. It comes to nobody’s surprise that many still wonder how a man of such atypical billionaire-behavior managed to land himself in his throne of wealth.

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, but later moved to Canada when he was 17. Through this, Musk was able to obtain a US citizenship relatively easily in 2002 after completing his studies in the University of Pennsylvania. Though Musk briefly attended Stanford, reading energy physics in 1995, he dropped out after just two days, justifying that he wanted to chip into the internet boom that was just taking off at that time. Musk’s recklessly risky behavior appears to have followed him into his future ventures. Following his dropout, Musk founded Zip2 with his brother Kimbal as well as bankX.com, later known as PayPal, which they were later able to sell to Compaq and eBay by 2002 for a combined total of 1.8 billion USD. Though many individuals may resort to retiring once amassing this much wealth, Musk sought to increase his portfolio once again by founding his commercial space travel company, SpaceX, in 2002. Through this, he was successfully able to secure NASA contracts within six years. Along the way, Musk also heavily invested into a company that largely defines his wealth today. He became the largest shareholder of Tesla Motors in 2004, further pushing the company to become the largest US car maker by 2017, surpassing the likes of General Motors. Aside from his main investments, Musk also takes the reigns of several smaller yet still substantial companies like The Boring Company and Neuralink. Through all this, he was able to enter the esteemed forbes elite list in 2012, which he managed to top within the decade.

Once reaching internet notoriety, Musk’s carefree attitude only seemed to increase tenfold. While naming his child “X Æ A-Xii” does not affect others, pumping the dogecoin cryptocurrency to several times its previous value on his whim, or purchasing a multi-billion dollar company like Twitter by putting his Tesla stock as collateral could be considered reckless by many. While Musk has now become an influential figurehead in modern meme culture as well as a pioneer in our technology-focused society, one must always wonder just how far he can push his luck until he inevitably fails. With his current plans to bend one of the largest social media platforms to his will, all we can do now is sit back and watch what Musk might have planned next.