Elon Musk is popularly known as the man behind Tesla, SpaceX, and now, the richest man in the world. But how did Elon Musk became the richest person in the world and how did he do it?

Musk was able to overtake Amazon’s Jeff Bezos position as the richest man in the world since 2017, which seemed to be impossible. The fight for the sit as the richest man was very close. Musk had a net worth of more than $185 billion, while Jeff Bezos had a net worth of, more or less, $183 billion at the time of writing.

Now that Elon Musk holds the title of the most successful person on the planet, many wonder how he reached it and the story behind his journey. Elon Musk was born in South Africa, and he started his business at an early age. When he was 12 years old, Musk sold his first product, a video game, that he coded himself and managed to earn $500 after selling it to a PC publication.

As the internet develops, Elon Musk, together with his brother Kimbal, produced Zip2 that creates city guides available for online newspapers. And in 1999, 5 years after, Compaq purchased the software, and Musk made $300 million. In the same year, Musk uses the money and co-founded online bank X.com. In 2000, bank X.com merged with Confinity to form PayPal and was later bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

With all the money Musk has, in 2003, he decided to fund a car company incorporated by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning and become the chairperson of the company since most of the fund was from him. In 2008, Elon Musk became the CEO after Eberhard’s departure. Short story short, Elon musk now runs tesla and his current project SpaceX.

There was no secret in Elon Musk’s success aside from his smart decisions, determination, and skills. He becomes the richest man in the world because he is willing to embrace huge levels of risk no matter what the consequence is because he is a man with a plan.