Elon Musk is worth $US13.1 billion as of September 2015 but allegedly doesn’t believe in the word “business.”
The tech entrepreneur, born in South Africa in 1971, reportedly told Wait But Why earlier this year that “there’s no such thing as a business, just pursuit of a goal.”
Whatever Musk labels his efforts, he sure has involved himself in a bunch of them: major online payment services, building and launching spacecraft, and trying to cover the world with solar panels, to name a few.
The breadth of his reach is astounding, and is enough to make anyone feel exhausted.
To cut through that complexity, we’ve highlighted 18 entities (below) that Elon Musk has reportedly founded, co-founded, invested in, or supported in some capacity.
Musk's first company was Zip2 Corporation -- the web's first yellow pages -- back in 1995.
Musk was 24 when he dropped out of graduate school for physics at Stanford University to launch his first company, Zip2 Corporation -- a dot-com media company that supplied maps and business directories to online newspapers.
He linked digital online maps from Navteq to a business directory and created the internet's first online yellow pages.
Four years later, in 1999, Musk sold the company to computer manufacturer Compaq for $US307 million. At that time it was the largest amount ever paid for an internet company.
Musk also began the Musk Foundation in 2002 with his younger brother Kimbal.
The Musk Foundation's goal is award grants that support research into renewable energy, space exploration, education in science and engineering, and childhood diseases and disorders.
According to Inside Philanthropy, the foundation has given out a total of $US783,700, including a donation of $US250,000 to build a solar power system in Soma City, in the Fukushima prefecture of Japan, following the tsunami disaster there in 2011.
Given the foundation's bold ambitions, its website is pretty hilarious.
In 2004, Musk invested in Tesla Motors to change the world of electric cars.
After investing heavily in Tesla Motors, which was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003, Musk joined the company's board of directors.
Its first car, the Roadster, wowed consumers with its sports car-like ability to accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in under 4 seconds and travel about 250 miles on a single charge.
After the 2008 market collapse, Musk took a more active role and became CEO of the company, a position he still holds today.
Their latest car is so good it broke the Consumer Reports rating system.
Musk also owns a stake in small-satellite company, Surrey Satellite Technology.
Musk reportedly purchased a 10% stake in this small-satellite provider in early 2005, which 'will give SpaceX a window on the thinking of the world's most successful vendor of small, inexpensive spacecraft and ultimately could provide business for SpaceX,' according to Space News.
Surrey Satellite Technology got its start building amateur radio satellites, and now builds, launches, and operates small spacecraft for weather monitoring, communications, and other purposes.
He's invested in fixing our power grid problems with a solar power utility called SolarCity.
Musk has been a long-time proponent of sustainable and green technology.
In keeping with the energy-saving ilk of Tesla, he invested heavily in SolarCity -- one of the country's largest installers of home solar panels -- which was founded in 2006 by his cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive. He now acts as chairman of the company.
SolarCity designs and installs solar-powered clean energy systems. It also audits and builds electric vehicle charging stations. In April 2015 it announced a partnership to incorporate Tesla batteries into a solar battery backup system.
Musk has invested in the question-and-answer site Mahalo.com.
According to Crunchbase, Musk invested in Mahalo when the site was founded in 2007.
Mahalo is like Wikipedia, Ask Jeeves, and Quora all on one website. The site allows people to post and answer questions.
After Google overhauled its search function, however, the company was forced to lay off 10% of its staff in 2011. It has since shifted its strategy to create original how-to videos, plus live, user-generated question-and-answer sessions.
Musk did a series of videos with the website back in 2011.
Musk invested in online payment company, Stripe, which launched in 2010.
Musk is no longer invested in PayPal, but he is invested in one of it's biggest competitors: an online payment startup called Stripe.
The company aims to allow online apps and companies like Lyft and Facebook to accept payments from anyone, anywhere.
It was recently valued at $US5 billion. It also has a new partnership with Twitter that adds 'buy' buttons to tweets.
DNA sequencing company Halcyon Molecular Inc. is one of Musks's few failures -- it shut its doors in 2012.
This ambitious, future-oriented genetics biotechnology startup was founded by brothers William and Michael Andregg in 2008 with the goal of unlocking the biggest secrets hidden in DNA.
The company stated in 2009 that it wanted to 'sequence 100% complete human genome (sic)' in less than ten minutes for less than $US100, according to Gigaom.
But with many companies competing with the fastest and cheapest DNA sequencing technologies, according to Fierce Biotech, the company shut its doors in 2012.
Musk's personal love of science led him to invest in the Tesla Science Center in New York in 2014.
Musk donated $US1 million in funding to a new science museum (spearheaded by webcomic The Oatmeal) dedicated to Nikola Tesla, one of 'history's most important inventors,' in 2014.
The center is located in Wardenclyffe, New York -- the same place Tesla built a giant transmitter tower to experiment with sending messages and shuttling wireless electricity.
Musk is even going to build a Tesla Supercharger station (the world's quickest charging station) in the science center's parking lot.
Despite his notorious fear of artificial intelligence (AI), Musk has invested in a startup called Vicarious.
Musk doesn't trust artificial intelligence. In fact, he likened it to 'summoning the devil' at MIT's annual AeroAstra Centennial Symposium in late 2014.
It makes sense, though, that Musk has invested in a number of leading AI companies that are researching how to make future smart bots more friendly.
One of these companies is AI startup Vicarious, founded in 2010. Musk contributed to a $US40 million investment in Vicarious in the spring of 2014.
Though this company has been unusually secretive, they are 'building a unified algorithmic architecture to achieve human-level intelligence in vision, language, and motor control,' according to Vicarious' website.
Vicarious founder Scott Phoenix told the WSJ that the goal is to 'have a computer that thinks like a person, except it doesn't need to eat or sleep.'
Another of Musk's AI investments, called DeepMind Technologies, has already been sold off to Google.
In a CNBC newscast, Musk says that his investments in AI technology companies are 'not from the standpoint of actually trying to make any investment return … I like to just keep an eye on what's going on with artificial intelligence. I think there is potentially a dangerous outcome there.'
'There have been movies about this, you know, like Terminator,' Musk continued, according to The Guardian. 'There are some scary outcomes. And we should try to make sure the outcomes are good, not bad.'
Hence, his high-profile investments in an AI company like DeepMind, which was founded in 2011 and later acquired by Google in 2014 (at which time it was renamed Google DeepMind).
The company's goal is to 'solve intelligence' by melding machine learning and neuroscience into powerful, all-purpose computer algorithms.
He's a board member of the X Prize Foundation, a non-profit that awards prizes for humanity-benefiting inventions.
The organisation holds public competitions to encourage technological inventions that will benefit humanity.
Their categories are diverse and promise cash awards for advancements in sustainable fishing, asteroid deflection, invisibility cloaks, and synthetic astrobiology.
Current prizes include the $US30 million Google Lunar XPrize, to land a privately funded robot on the moon, and the $US2 million Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPrize, to help restore ocean ecosystems.
Musk is a member of this foundation's board of trustees.
Musk has invested in the startup NeuroVigil, which develops products that analyse brain signals.
Launched in 2007, NeuroVigil developed the world's first portable brain monitor, called the iBrain. Musk became a principle investor of the company in May 2015.
NeuroVigil focuses on analysing electrical signals from the brain to help drug companies conduct clinical trials as well as diagnose and treat patients with neurological and neurodegenerative diseases.
It also wants to help NASA keep track of the brains of astronauts while they're aboard the International Space Station.
Musk is not officially building his own high-speed travel system concept, the Hyperloop, but he's mentally invested in the idea.
Back in 2013, Musk used SpaceX to publicly announce his concept for making high-speed travel a reality: the Hyperloop. At the same time, he made his research and ideas open-source.
The Hyperloop is a proposed rail system that would ferry people in capsules through tubes at speeds exceeding 500 mph. Musk initially pitched it as a quick, safe, and energy-efficient way to travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Musk and SpaceX announced that they aren't planning on commercialising this technology, though Motherboard has reported otherwise.
Several private companies, such as this LA-based company, are working on commercialising the technology.
