As one of the most popular tweeters on the planet, and someone who frequently expresses his dissatisfaction with Twitter’s existing mechanism, Elon Musk has recently shown how the richest man should be. Style - buy whatever you like.

On April 4, a document disclosed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed that Tesla CEO Musk purchased 9.2% of the shares of the social media company Twitter, which is more than the founder of Twitter. Jack Dorsey’s 2.25% is even more. This move made Musk Twitter's largest external shareholder.

Is Musk crazy? Is there too much money and nowhere to spend it?

But in fact, even before the investment, Twitter had become Musk’s most commonly used public opinion tool. After taking a stake in Twitter, many people speculated that Musk is expected to rewrite Twitter's game rules and further seek to maximize profits.

After Musk bought shares in Twitter, he launched a poll: "Do you need an edit button?"

If you extend the timeline, you will find that in the past For more than 20 years, Musk has actually been repeating actions similar to investing in Twitter: he likes a certain company, then invests heavily, and increases investment when necessary to ensure that he has full control over the company he invests in. Influence.

Most of the invested targets have achieved certain results, either bringing huge financial returns to Musk a few years later, or improving Musk’s business landscape, or bringing value to Musk. His network resources...

In addition to being the Iron Man of Silicon Valley and the world's richest man, Musk is also a successful and excellent investment manager and hot-money catcher. He has a unique vision, and with his amazing insight, he can always find the most potential targets in the nooks and crannies of the world.

Today, Shentu will take you through Musk’s huge and hidden investment territory.

Talking about Musk’s story seems to have to start with Tesla, but before meeting Tesla, Musk had already successfully started two businesses in a row.

In 1995, Musk dropped out of Stanford and founded the Zip website with his brother. Four years later, American computer manufacturer Compaq acquired the startup for the equivalent of 280 million euros. Musk made a profit of nearly 20 million euros from this acquisition.

Subsequently, he used the money to start a business again and founded the online financial services and electronic payment company "X.com" (later merged with another company and renamed PayPal). In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for US$1.5 billion, and Musk gained a huge wealth of US$180 million from this transaction.

Musk, 28, has made a lot of money from his continuous entrepreneurship. From this, he officially started his investment career.

Unlike other big names, the projects Musk invests in are high-tech companies that look ambitious but are likely to fail. These include solar panel installation company SolarCity, data center software company Everdream, artificial search engine company Mahalo, and Tesla.

Source of incomplete statistics from Deep Path/News, CB Insights

Yes, Musk is not the founder of Tesla. He initially played the role of an early investor.

In 2003, Silicon Valley engineers Eberhard and Tarbenning founded an electric car manufacturing company. In tribute to Nikola Tesla, the inventor of alternating current, the company was named Tesla Motors. . Soon the two people's start-up capital was burned out, and they were introduced to Musk, who had become an upstart in Silicon Valley.

This project is committed to subverting the existing fuel vehicle market and thereby promoting the global automotive industry towards a sustainable future. It may seem like a fantasy, but the three people hit it off immediately. Musk invested US$6.5 million in Tesla's Series A financing and became Tesla's largest shareholder and chairman.

After 2010, Musk’s investment projects have undergone relatively large changes. He has expressed concern more than once that artificial intelligence will soon become as smart as humans.

He also said that once this situation occurs, human survival will be threatened.

Instead of fearing it, invest in it. As a result, Musk non-stop participated in several rounds of financing for the AI ??company DeepMind. In 2014, he invested US$40 million in a startup company Vicarious, which is said to be "building the next generation of AI algorithms."

The founders of these projects have more or less connections with him.

For example, with Musk’s advice and encouragement, his cousins ??Peter and Lyndon Rive founded SolarCity in 2006. Tesla ultimately acquired SolarCity for approximately $2.6 billion.

Relying on these personal connections, Musk has established his own entrepreneurial circle.

Musk’s investment projects involve aerospace, new energy, artificial intelligence, brain-computer interface, biological gene sequencing and other fields, but they all have some disadvantages: high risk and too unrealistic. , you can often find these in science fiction magazines.

Faced with high-risk projects, Musk went against the norm and adopted what many investment managers consider to be the worst approach - "ALL IN".

On the one hand, Musk is not willing to be just a simple investor. He has a strong desire to control some outstanding companies. For example, before Tesla's IPO, Musk invested in 9 rounds in one go, constantly increasing his shareholding ratio. In the end, he kicked the founder out of the company and became the real helmsman of Tesla.

On the other hand, Musk often invests in high-risk projects that few people care about. For a long time, he had to pay his own money to maintain the operation of the project.

The biggest crisis was in 2008. He invested all the huge wealth he earned from his first two entrepreneurial ventures.

At that time, Musk had operational problems in several of his companies. SpaceX's first three launches all ended in failure, and Tesla encountered various production, supply chain and design problems. To make matters worse, the financial crisis broke out.

Musk later recalled to the media that he faced a severe choice at the time: "I can keep the money, but these companies will never survive, or invest the rest of my money and maybe return it." There is a glimmer of opportunity." In the end, he chose to invest all his money in the project.

The money he earned soon ran out of money, and he continued to borrow foreign debts in his own name. The Wall Street Journal confirmed Musk's financial troubles with debt. "At times he had to borrow heavily to pay for his business investments and thereby retain control of the companies he ran," the Wall Street Journal wrote.

As of 2017, Musk’s total personal borrowings were US$624 million, mainly used to invest in Tesla. By 2020, Musk's personal financial situation has not improved. The Financial Post reported that Musk received $548 million in personal loans from Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group and Bank of America.

But after surviving the most difficult days, many projects gave him generous rewards.

For example, DeepMind, the company he invested in, was acquired by Google in 2014, and he received a considerable return of US$92 million. In addition, Dell acquired Everdream, and Musk earned $15 million.

Some projects have not yet exited, but have grown into unicorns in just a few years.

In 2011, Musk invested in Stripe, an online payment service company founded by brothers John and Patrick Collison. Ten years later, the company was valued at $95 billion. Some media predict that if the company goes public, it may receive a higher valuation and become one of the largest initial public offerings (IPOs) in history. Once successfully listed, Musk will receive huge exit returns.

Only the DNA sequencing company Halcyon Molecular is one of Musk’s few failed projects. The company closed in 2012.

Of course, the most successful and famous investment is Tesla. In 2004, Musk only spent $6.5 million on Tesla. Now Tesla has made history, surpassing Toyota and Volkswagen in market value, becoming the world's number one car company by market value.

Under such a crazy bet, Musk received astonishing returns, which even helped him become the richest man in the world.

On April 6 this year, the American wealth magazine "Forbes" announced the 2022 list of global billionaires. Musk replaced Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with a net worth of US$219 billion. Bezos), became the world's richest man. Compared with last year, Musk's wealth has increased by US$68 billion.

The wealth growth of the richest man is closely related to the projects he invests in. One is Tesla's shares. Musk currently owns 21% of Tesla's shares, but has pledged more than half of his shares as collateral for loans. The second is Musk’s rocket company SpaceX. In its latest round of financing, SpaceX was valued at US$74 billion.

In 2018, Tesla’s board of directors and CEO Musk reached the largest corporate salary agreement in history. The agreement stipulates that every time Musk leads Tesla's market value and profitability to rise by one level, he will be able to unlock a level of stock option rewards. The agreement includes 20.3 million options divided into 12 tranches. If all targets are achieved, Musk will receive more than $50 billion (approximately RMB 350 billion) in revenue.

The reality is that Musk’s execution ability is too strong. He achieved one of the final goals of the compensation plan 7 years ahead of schedule in 2021 (the market value reached US$650 billion). This compensation plan also gave Musk a huge amount of wealth.

Source / "Forbes"

In the future, Musk's wealth is likely to grow further. On the one hand, Tesla's market value is expected to increase further. And SpaceX has not yet gone public.

In addition, Musk also has a major hidden investment-Bitcoin. Musk once told the media, "Except for Tesla and Space Currency is a very good medium, and there is no doubt that Bitcoin is much better than paper money."

Under the leadership of Musk, Tesla also began to "speculate in currency." However, the crypto market has been ups and downs. The year before last, Tesla made money by "speculating on coins", but last year, it actually suffered a lot of losses on its books. In its most recent financial report, Tesla claimed that in the year ended December 31, 2021, it had made an impairment loss of approximately US$101 million (approximately 642 million yuan) due to changes in the company’s book value of Bitcoin. .

Musk has even become a big figure in the currency circle due to his frequent expressions of his fondness for cryptocurrencies on social media. On December 14 last year, Musk said that Tesla would test using “Dogecoin” to purchase some peripheral products. When the news came out, the price of Dogecoin rose by 24%.

But currently, Musk has not further disclosed how much Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin he holds.

Due to Musk’s long-standing love for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Dogecoin, the market has begun to speculate that Musk is likely to promote Twitter’s development in the field of cryptocurrency.

There is no doubt that Musk’s investment path is crazy. He chose projects that seemed absurd and bizarre. He abandoned traditional investment concepts such as the so-called "moat" and pursued innovation and speed.

But those crazy ideas that conventional investors will not touch are becoming reality one by one: factories around the world are producing pure electric vehicles, the cost of space travel is reduced, and people have the opportunity to explore the universe. .