Unexploded World War II bombs, protests over trees, water and animal habitats, union scrutiny and a labor review have hindered Tesla&#8217;s Berlin Gigafactory plans — but the biggest hurdle may come in the form of strict German regulations.



By Alan Ohnsman, Forbes Staff &amp; Sofia Lotto Persio, Forbes Staff



Tesla had hit its stride in November 2019 when&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/11/12/willkommen-elon-musk-says-next-tesla-gigafactory-will-be-in-germany/?sh=163614f68b03">Elon Musk announced a massive electric car plant in Germany</a>, the heart of European auto-manufacturing. His Silicon Valley company was riding a booming share price fueled by the start of a string of quarterly profits and, more importantly, its Shanghai Gigafactory was coming together at an astonishing pace: It was about to begin making Model 3s just 11 months after the groundbreaking.&nbsp;



Emboldened by that success and cash from an&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/7a3c8d9a-57bb-11e9-a3db-1fe89bedc16e" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">emissions credit sales deal with Fiat Chrysler</a>&nbsp;to fund it, the carmaker’s billionaire CEO and cofounder aimed to replicate it in leafy Grünheide, Germany, site of the future $4.9 billion (€4 billion) plant 24 miles east of Berlin. “Giga Berlin will come together at an impossible-seeming speed,” Musk&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1287598172508958721?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">tweeted</a>&nbsp;in July 2020. It hasn&#8217;t worked out that way.



Physical construction is nearing completion, but the plant may not start making Model Ys until 2022, months after an initial target of July 1–or even later, pending environmental approval from the state of Brandenburg. Tesla has had a much harder road than Musk envisioned. The company had to remove unexploded World War II shells at the site. It’s faced stiff opposition from environmentalists over chopping down hundreds of acres of trees, the plant’s voracious water needs and the disruption of bat and animal habitats. The plant is being <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/top-union-sets-sights-works-council-teslas-german-gigafactory-2021-05-07/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">eyed for organization by IG Metall</a>, Germany’s biggest labor union. The project is also under scrutiny for a possible <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/authorities-open-labour-probe-german-182635315.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">violation of labor laws during construction</a> and may be fined for installing sewer pipes without permission.



“Although things looked good regarding the Tesla facility up to a few weeks ago, a different reality can lie behind a facade,” says Matthias Schimdt, an independent auto analyst based in Berlin. He sees the project unfolding much like the capital city’s new airport, which was built quickly but saw its opening delayed nearly a decade as it struggled to win final approval to operate from German authorities. “This mustn&#8217;t be a carbon copy situation for Tesla, which is located just a stone&#8217;s throw from the new airport that eventually came into service last year,” Schimdt says. “It just goes to highlight that things aren&#8217;t easy in ‘bureaucratic hell’ Germany.”



Delays fulfilling Musk’s quest to tap the lucrative European market complicate the electric-car impresario’s efforts to stay ahead of mounting competition in battery-powered vehicles, especially from German automakers like Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW. Tesla may be the world’s most valuable carmaker, but it’s far from the biggest, having just a fraction of the production capacity of German, U.S., Japanese and Korean auto giants, delivering just under 500,000 vehicles last year versus VW’s 9.3 million. And while the company’s plant in China was a critical addition to its long-time production base in Fremont, California, Tesla can’t meet Musk’s long-held goal of producing millions of electric vehicles annually without Giga Berlin and a second U.S. auto-assembly plant under construction near Austin, Texas.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“It just goes to highlight that things aren&#8217;t easy in &#8216;bureaucratic hell&#8217; Germany.”<cite>Auto analyst Matthias Schmidt </cite></blockquote>



“Coming off the incredibly fast build of the Shanghai factory, they might have miscalculated how quickly they could get Berlin up and running–perhaps not fully accounting for the significant differences in regulatory and environmental standards,” says Garrett Nelson, senior equity analyst at CFRA Research. Construction also happened amid logistical and supply chain headaches related to the Covid-19 pandemic, he says. “Tesla is doing everything possible to stay on track with its guidance, but the reality is that first production could be delayed until early 2022.”



The company hasn’t confirmed reports that&nbsp;<a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/teslas-berlin-gigafactory-to-be-delayed-another-6-months-report-11619992994" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Musk agreed to a six-month delay</a>&nbsp;for the plant a few days after reassuring investors and analysts on Tesla’s April 26 results call that “both Texas and Berlin are progressing well.”



“We expect to have initial limited production from those factories this year and volume production from Texas and Berlin next year,” Musk said on the call. But during a surprise visit to the Grünheide construction site&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/elon-musk-visits-teslas-delayed-european-gigafactory-state-minister-says-2021-05-17/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Monday he told reporters</a>&nbsp;&#8220;I think there could be less bureaucracy. That would be better.&#8221;



&#8220;There should be some kind of active process for removal of rules. Otherwise, over time, the rules will just accumulate and you get more and more rules until eventually you can&#8217;t do anything,&#8221; Musk said, according to Reuters.



Analysts have already adjusted their models for Tesla to reflect the slowdown. “Giga Berlin is an early 2022 story,” says Dan Ives, an equity analyst for Wedbush. “Given the red tape in Europe this timeline remains bumpy but needs to be running by March 2022–otherwise production issues would be hampered.” 



Germany’s role as a global auto powerhouse, with its strong parts supply base and reputation for high-quality engineering, lured Musk over other countries he eyed as sites for Tesla’s European plant. (He&nbsp;<a href="https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/tesla/108395/tesla-gigafactory-europe-to-be-built-in-germany-not-uk-as-elon-musk-blames-brexit" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">considered the U.K.</a>, but uncertainties related to Brexit ultimately proved too big a gamble.) Aside from selling vehicles in Germany, Tesla planted its flag there in 2016 with the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2016/11/08/tesla-buying-germanys-grohmann-engineering-to-automate-accelerate-production/?sh=100c31523354">acquisition of Grohmann Engineering</a>, rebranded Tesla Grohmann Automation. The chance to square off against the country’s auto giants–which are also now aggressively focused on closing the electric vehicle gap with Tesla–on their home turf added to its appeal. For Economics Minister&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-02/germany-promises-musk-whatever-he-needs-for-tesla-berlin-plant" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Peter Altmaier</a>, Tesla’s decision to “build a highly modern factory for electric cars in Germany is further proof of the attractiveness of Germany as an automotive manufacturing base,” he said when the project was announced in 2019.



Given the headaches he’s run into, Musk may be “wondering whether that ‘Made in Germany’ stamp on the underbody of each model leaving the factory was worth it,” says analyst Schmidt.



Grünheide, in the state of Brandenburg, sits in what was East Germany, which&nbsp;<a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/06/east-germany-has-narrowed-economic-gap-with-west-germany-since-fall-of-communism-but-still-lags/ft_19-11-01_eastwestgermanyecon_3/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">remains poorer than the rest of the country</a>&nbsp;since reunification 30 years ago. Local politicians were thrilled at the prospect of a project that would bring thousands of jobs and prestige to the area. “The whole region can look forward to new opportunities of development now thanks to the Tesla project which has really put Grünheide on the map globally,”&nbsp;<a href="https://www.gruenheide-mark.de/m/politik/person/31026/pamela-eichmann" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Pamela Eichmann</a>, chair of the Grünheide (Mark) local council, told&nbsp;<a href="https://www.dw.com/en/locals-views-on-german-tesla-plant-irreconcilable-as-production-start-faces-delay/a-57405731" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Deutsche Welle</a>&nbsp;this month.



While the town’s leaders might be rooting for the factory, plenty of others are not. The plant occupies a space between the A10 highway and Fangschleuse railway station, but it’s also a few miles from the Löcknitztal nature reserve that’s had protected status since 1984 and been registered as a fauna-flora-habitat area (FFH) since 1998. Grünheide literally translates as “Green Heath” from German.



So when one of the first steps to ready the 300-hectare site for Musk’s gigafactory was&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/joergstb/status/1227992011699052545?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">chopping down about 430 acres of forest</a>, it wasn’t the best start–particularly for a company whose motto is “accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”



Environmentalists temporarily blocked tree-cutting operations in early 2020, but Tesla <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/21/tesla-gets-german-court-approval-to-chop-down-trees-for-gigafactory-4.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">won court approval,</a> initially to remove 92 hectares of trees, and then 82.8 hectares more. Musk downplayed the quality of the trees he cut down, tweeting in January 2020 that “this is not a natural forest—it was planted for use as cardboard &amp; only a small part will be used for” the Berlin gigafactory. The company has also pledged to <a href="https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-gigafactory-berlin-reforestation-video/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">plant three times</a> as many trees as it cut down, though <a href="https://www.zmescience.com/science/agriculture-science/cutting-down-trees-and-planting-new-ones-is-wrecking-the-soil/#:~:text=Continuously%20cutting%20down%20forests%20and,crucial%20minerals%2C%20new%20analysis%20shows.&amp;text=It's%20always%20a%20good%20idea,you%20cut%20some%20old%20ones." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">scientists generally warn</a> that planting new trees is not as effective as a carbon-capture strategy as maintaining existing ones. Local environmental groups were also concerned about the disruption deforestation would <a href="https://www.loecknitztal.de/home/stellungnahme-zu-tesla/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">cause to animals</a> inhabiting the forest. Site preparation in Grünheide <a href="https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/tesla-searches-bats-and-resettles-ants-preparation-german-gigafactory" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">included relocating bats and ants</a> living in the forest and removal of <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/germany-defuses-wwii-bombs-at-tesla-gigafactory-site/a-52157407" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">seven unexploded bombs dropped by the U.S. during World War II</a>.



The amount of water the plant will use and its impact on the region also concern local environmentalists, “because most of the factory ground belongs to a drinking water protection area and very close to the factory are two nature protection areas which are very sensitive to changes in the ground water level,” says Christiane Schroeder, managing director at the Brandenburg branch of NABU (Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union), one of the oldest and largest environmental non-profits in Germany, and a leading opponent of the Gigafactory.



Making matters worse, Tesla ran afoul of the district’s water authority, which discovered water pipes that had been installed without its permission. Tesla was allowed to continue construction work on April 12 after a brief suspension, but still faces a potential fine for the infraction, the Brandenburg Ministry for Agriculture, Environment and Climate Protection tells&nbsp;Forbes. Separately, the State Office for Occupational Safety and other agencies are&nbsp;<a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/authorities-open-labour-probe-german-182635315.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported to be investigating whether Tesla violated rules</a>&nbsp;for minimum wages, working hours, conditions and worker housing during plant construction.



Ultimately, the plant won’t be permitted to begin production until it has secured all necessary permits, a process that can grind on, Schmidt says.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“Very close to the factory are two nature protection areas which are very sensitive to changes in the ground water level”<cite>Environmentalist Christiane Schroeder </cite></blockquote>



IG Metall, Germany’s biggest labor union with 2.2 million members, represents workers at Tesla’s engineering unit there and initially&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-tesla-gigafactory-germany-idUKKBN1XM2M0" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">welcomed the company’s gigafactory plan</a>. It had previously attempted to organize Tesla’s Grohmann unit, but the company boosted salaries there to block the effort. The union intends to set up a works council and organize future employees at Giga Berlin, union chief Joerg Hofmann&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/top-union-sets-sights-works-council-teslas-german-gigafactory-2021-05-07/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">told Reuters this month</a>.&nbsp;



That’s anathema to anti-union Musk. In California he’s worked to keep the United Auto Workers out of Tesla’s Fremont plant–a union factory in its previous incarnations as both a Toyota-General Motors joint venture and GM facility. Tesla was found to have&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nlrb.gov/case/32-CA-220777" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">engaged in unfair labor practices by the National Labor Relations Board</a>, including efforts to interrogate workers it suspected were part of the union push at Fremont. That 2019 ruling was&nbsp;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/25/tesla-nlrb-ruling/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">upheld in March 2021</a>&nbsp;and Musk was ordered to delete a&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/998454539941367808?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">2018 tweet</a>&nbsp;discouraging Fremont workers from joining the UAW. (He has yet to do so.)



For now, IG Metall is waiting for operational details for the Grünheide facility, including whether Tesla intends to follow the round-the-clock, three-shift approach used in the U.S. and China, and adhere to German wage and working condition rules. “We give Tesla the benefit of the doubt regarding what the labor standards will look like in the long run,” says Birgit Dietze, IG Metall’s regional head. 



Long-time China auto analyst (and Tesla owner) Michael Dunne, whose ZoZo Go consultancy works with auto and parts makers across Asia, thinks Tesla’s exceptionally fast start in China led it to move too quickly in Germany. “I imagine Tesla thinking something like, ‘China is rife with regulations, licenses and government intervention, but we sorted that out in less than a year. Bring on Berlin!” he says. Powerful government allies eased the way for Tesla in China, that’s not an option in Germany, Dunne says. “One’s a democracy, the other one’s not. It’s rule by whim in China. Unlike in Germany, there&#8217;s no court of public opinion.”



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“I imagine Tesla thinking something like, ‘China is rife with regulations, licenses and government intervention, but we sorted that out in less than a year. Bring on Berlin!”<cite>Zozo Go founder Michael Dunne </cite></blockquote>



In Germany, groups like Schroeder’s NABU have a right to make their opposition known. The environmental activist tells&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;the group has discussed their concerns with Tesla, but that the company has only been receptive to some of the issues raised, the easiest to accommodate. “I think Elon Musk is more into his own business and into new technology than really in preventing climate change,” she says. “He sees a great opportunity to sell his inventions as ‘part of the solution’ but doesn’t realize that he creates new problems as a side effect.”&nbsp;



In retrospect, Musk might have been better off building the plant in adjacent EU countries, says analyst Schmidt. “Perhaps they are slowly starting to ask themselves if they really should have looked just a few kilometers further east toward the Polish or Czech borders, where things would have have been more freewheeling,” he says. “There’s good reason Porsche decided to manufacture the Cayenne SUV–one of their most profitable models–in Slovakia!” &nbsp;

gettyimages-490597722-594×594

The Rules Even Elon Musk Can’t Break

TOPLINE Billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk stirred up the cryptocurrency market with his Twitter account again Sunday when he appeared to hint Tesla would cast out its bitcoin holdings, a move that saw the cryptocurrency plunge.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-facts">KEY FACTS</h3>



When a Twitter user&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/CryptoWhale/status/1393981793813078017?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">speculated</a>&nbsp;Sunday Musk would ditch bitcoin over the hate the billionaire had received after announcing Tesla would&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/05/12/tesla-will-stop-accepting-bitcoin-as-payment-due-to-environmental-worries-musk-says/">no longer accept the cryptocurrency</a>&nbsp;as payment last week, Musk replied with one word: “<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1394001894809427971?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Indeed</a>.”&nbsp;



The vague message was enough to push cryptocurrency investors to sell off their bitcoin, and the price dipped nearly 8.5% down to $44,395 a coin Sunday.



Cryptocurrency is notoriously volatile, but Sunday’s dip was bitcoin’s biggest slump in more than three months and represented one of its biggest drops in value since the price first began to rapidly ramp up in January.&nbsp;



Last week, Musk said Tesla would no longer accept the cryptocurrency until bitcoin, which requires colossal amounts of electricity to work with, shifts to&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1392602041025843203" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">more sustainable energy use</a>,



Musk said at the time Tesla would not sell off the bitcoin it already had.



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">Indeed&mdash; Elon Musk (@elonmusk) <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1394001894809427971?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 16, 2021</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">BIG NUMBER</h2>



$1.5 billion. That’s how much Musk spent on buying bitcoin just&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/08/tesla-buys-1point5-billion-in-bitcoin.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">three months ago</a>, in preparation for using the cryptocurrency at Tesla.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">SURPRISING FACT</h2>



Running bitcoin uses&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">more electricity</a>&nbsp;than some countries, according to a University of Cambridge study published in February. Researchers said the cryptocurrency burns through 121.36 terawatt-hours annually, roughly the equivalent of used by countries like&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Argentina and Norway</a>.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">KEY BACKGROUND</h3>



Just two months ago,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/03/24/bitcoin-surges-as-elon-musk-says-it-can-be-used-to-buy-teslas/?sh=4e37216b3cb2">bitcoin prices soared</a>&nbsp;when Musk announced Tesla would accept the cryptocurrency as payment for Tesla’s pricey electric vehicles. Musk’s quick reversal last week to suspend Tesla bitcoin payments and the cryptocurrency’s loss of value soon after angered many bitcoin investors, who said the billionaire was&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/PeterMcCormack/status/1393971202738302986?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">misinformed</a>&nbsp;about bitcoin’s energy consumption. Musk has&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1393995872413888518?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bickered</a>&nbsp;with and&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1393246529498976258?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">made fun of</a>&nbsp;the bitter investors on Twitter in recent days.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">TANGENT</h3>



Musk is no stranger to playing the cryptocurrency market with his tweets. His current cryptocurrency of choice, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/05/14/dogecoin-stages-a-comeback-amid-cryptos-300-billion-crash-soaring-30-as-elon-musk-and-coinbase-signal-confidence/?sh=258f1752672f">dogecoin</a>, is regularly boosted by the eccentric CEO’s Twitter memes and public enthusiasm. 



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">👀&mdash; Elon Musk (@elonmusk) <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1383103246470811652?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 16, 2021</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">FURTHER READING</h3>



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/05/12/tesla-will-stop-accepting-bitcoin-as-payment-due-to-environmental-worries-musk-says/?sh=39f2924f6e9f">Tesla Will Stop Accepting Bitcoin As Payment Due To Environmental Worries, Musk Says</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2021/05/12/elon-musk-says-tesla-stops-accepting-bitcoin-for-car-purchases-due-to-carbon-energy-use/?sh=34e39d386f85">Bitcoin Tanks After Elon Musk Says Tesla Stops Accepting It Due To Carbon Energy Use</a> (Forbes)



by Carlie Porterfield, Forbes Staff

gettyimages-1130598362-594×594

Elon Musk Sends Bitcoin Tumbling With A One-Word Tweet

TOPLINE&nbsp;Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed he has&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/05/09/elon-musk-reveals-he-has-aspergers-on-saturday-night-live/?sh=6832e336f640">Asperger’s syndrome&nbsp;</a>during his opening monologue while hosting Saturday Night Live, but is far from the first billionaire businessman to divulge he is neurodivergent.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-facts">KEY FACTS</h3>



Fellow billionaire and investment management firm founder Bill Gross revealed in 2019 he too had been&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2019-03-01/bill-gross-on-his-asperger-s-diagnosis-and-its-advantages-video?fbclid=IwAR1H-gbsnDylCQB2hPCnkaQt15MQqS71DtsQMBU2O_jHjpUWqm3HUX_xlLE&amp;sref=q1G25G4a" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">diagnosed with Asperger’s</a>, telling Bloomberg he believes the condition makes him a better investor: “It allows you to focus on longer-term things without getting mixed up in the details,” Gross said.



Gross, estimated by&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;to be worth about&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/bill-gross/?sh=6d33e30235b9">$1.5 billion</a>, also said the diagnosis likely explains his trouble maintaining eye contact and his almost obsessive interest in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-07/bond-guru-bill-gross-to-sell-42-2-million-stamp-collection" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">collecting stamps</a>.



Richard Branson, estimated by&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;to have a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/richard-branson/?sh=5a09c9836ff5">$4.2 billion</a>&nbsp;fortune, opened up about being dyslexic in a 2018 blog post, writing that as a child he was labeled “<a href="https://www.virgin.com/branson-family/richard-branson-blog/my-top-three-strategies-dyslexic-children" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">lazy and dumb</a>” for struggling in school: “Dyslexia is just a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.virgin.com/branson-family/richard-branson-blog/my-top-three-strategies-dyslexic-children" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">different, creative way of thinking</a>,” Branson said, adding he thinks the condition makes him&nbsp;<a href="https://www.virgin.com/branson-family/richard-branson-blog/dyslexia-and-imagination" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">more imaginative</a>.



Charles Schwab, who founded the nation’s largest brokerage firm and has an estimated&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/charles-schwab/?sh=71652fdc2e4b">$11.4 billion</a>&nbsp;fortune, has also had lifelong troubles&nbsp;<a href="https://stanfordmag.org/contents/charles-schwab-s-secret-struggle" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reading and writing</a>&nbsp;because of dyslexia.



Late Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad, estimated by&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;to be worth as much as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/maxjedeurpalmgren/2018/01/28/ingvar-kamprad-founder-of-ikea-dead-at-91/?sh=6e3f452c4972">$28 billion</a>&nbsp;between 2005 and 2010, was dyslexic and even decided to give Ikea products their&nbsp;<a href="https://qz.com/1191091/ingvar-kamprad-and-his-ikea-empire-nine-intriguing-facts/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">distinct Swedish names</a>&nbsp;because his diagnosis made working with typical inventory numbers difficult for him.



By Carlie Porterfield, Forbes Staff

Key Speakers At The Satellite 2020 Conference

It’s Not Just Elon Musk — These Billionaires Are Also Neurodivergent

Bill Gates, the co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, has announced on Twitter moments ago that he and his wife of 27 years, philanthropist and businesswoman Melinda Gates, have made a decision to end their marriage &#8220;after a great deal of thought and a lot of work&#8221; on their relationship.



In a combined statement, they added: &#8220;Over the last 27 years, we have raised three incredible children and built a foundation that works all over the world to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives. We continue to share a belief in that mission and will continue our work together at the foundation, but we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in the next phase of our lives. We ask for space and privacy for our family as we begin to navigate this new life.&#8221;



The Gates&#8217; chair the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation, the world&#8217;s largest private charitable foundation. In mid-March 2020, Gates stepped down as a board member of Microsoft, the software firm he founded with Paul Allen (d. 2018) in 1975.



Among the world&#8217;s richest people, Bill Gates is ranked number 4 on Forbes world billionaires list with a real time net worth of $130.5 billion.

French President Receives Bill Gates, the co-Founder of the Microsoft Company At Elysee Palace

Bill And Melinda Gates End 27-Year Marriage

Billionaire Elon Musk saw his net worth fall on Monday, as shares of his electric car company dropped following reports that two people died in a fatal Tesla&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/tesla" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">TSLA</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/tesla">-3.4%</a>&nbsp;crash over the weekend.



Shares of Tesla were down 3.8% as of 3:45 p.m. EST on Monday, shaving $5.6 billion off Musk’s fortune.&nbsp;He’s now worth $174.1 billion, according to&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;estimates. The Tesla CEO and cofounder is the third-richest person in the world—behind Amazon&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/amazon" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AMZN</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/amazon">-0.8%</a>&nbsp;CEO Jeff Bezos, who has a net worth of $195.9 billion, and French luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault, who is worth $180.3 billion.



Tesla’s stock fell on Monday amid&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/two-dead-tesla-crash-texas-that-was-believed-be-driverless-wsj-2021-04-18/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reports</a>&nbsp;that two men died after their 2019 Tesla Model S crashed into a tree north of Houston on Saturday night. Local authorities said that they believed the vehicle was operating without anyone in the driver’s seat—with one of the men reportedly in the front passenger’s seat and the other in the back seat of the Tesla. The vehicle was traveling at high speeds along a curve before veering off the road and bursting into flames at around 11:25 p.m., police said.



Harris County Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman told the media in a statement that it took emergency crews about four hours to put out the Model S fire, saying that the team even contacted Tesla for help. While electric vehicles are not necessarily more dangerous than gas-powered vehicles, high-voltage lithium batteries like the ones used in Tesla can&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-studies/Documents/SR2001.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reignite even after an initial fire is put out</a>, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.



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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">Two men killed after Tesla that may have been in autonomous driving or self driving mode didn’t adhere to a curve, slammed into a tree then burst into flames in the Woodlands, officials say. Firefighters say they had to call Tesla to figure out how to oust the blaze. <a href="https://twitter.com/KPRC2?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@KPRC2</a> <a href="https://t.co/nmhDxKeTHT">pic.twitter.com/nmhDxKeTHT</a>&mdash; Deven Clarke (@KPRC2Deven) <a href="https://twitter.com/KPRC2Deven/status/1383791730575638542?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 18, 2021</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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The crash also raises further questions about Tesla’s Autopilot feature. Authorities were not yet certain if Autopilot was active during the crash which killed the two men, aged 59 and 69, respectively. Nonetheless, the company’s semiautomated driving system has faced mounting scrutiny following a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-crash-suspected-of-involving-autopilot-draws-investigation-11616030206?mod=article_inline" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">series of accidents</a>&nbsp;involving Tesla vehicles in recent months. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said last month that it had launched more than two dozen investigations into crashes of Tesla vehicles, and on Monday&nbsp;<a href="https://news.yahoo.com/fatal-tesla-crash-driverless-200259765.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said</a>&nbsp;that it would also be investigating the most recent crash north of Houston.



Tesla, which does not have a media relations department, does not appear to have issued any statements in the wake of the accident. Both the company and its billionaire CEO, however, have repeatedly&nbsp;<a href="https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">touted the safety</a>&nbsp;of Tesla vehicles and the Autopilot feature. Musk, who is active on Twitter with nearly 52 million followers,&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1383548841438236674?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">posted</a>&nbsp;on Saturday afternoon prior to the accident that a Tesla with Autopilot engaged is nearly ten times less likely to be involved in an accident than an average car.



Update 6:45 pm EST, April 19: Later on Monday, Musk&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1384254194975010826?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">posted</a>&nbsp;on Twitter denying that Tesla’s Autopilot feature was involved in the crash. Data logs recovered from the accident “show Autopilot was not enabled” and that the car did not purchase Full Self-Driving (FSD), the Tesla CEO said in his tweet. “Moreover, standard Autopilot would require lane lines to turn on, which this street did not have,” Musk wrote.



By <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Sergei Klebnikov</a>,Forbes Staff

Billionaire Elon Musk Receives Axel Springer Award

Elon Musk’s Fortune Falls Nearly $6 Billion After Tesla Crash Leaves Two Dead

The world’s fourth-richest person has a plan to save the planet from catastrophic climate change — and it&#8217;s cheaper than you think.



Bill Gates wants you to know two numbers: 51 billion and zero. The former is the number of tons of greenhouse gases typically added to the atmosphere each year as a result of human activities. The latter is the number of tons we need to get to by 2050 in order to avert a climate crisis.



Gates has a plan for how to go from 51 billion to zero, and he’s happy to say it doesn’t come with a price tag in the trillions of dollars. As you might expect from a guy who made his fortune in technology, the billionaire’s suggested solution is tied in large part to innovation.&nbsp;



He spells out his plan in a new book,&nbsp;How To Avoid A Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have And The Breakthroughs We Need,&nbsp;to be released on February 16. Ahead of the book launch, Gates talked to&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;about why he wrote the book. He also shared details the book doesn’t get into, including how much he’s invested in zero-carbon companies, which ones he’s most excited about, including a new kind of nuclear power plant, and what he’s likely to invest in next.



Goal number one of the book, says Gates, is to clearly lay out which sectors of the economy are producing the 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere each year. “The actual numeric framework, which is the most basic thing for any problem you want to tackle&#8230;that’s really been missing,” Gates says in a video interview from a conference room in his offices in Seattle. (See table for the percentage breakdown.)  The goal we as a planet need to aim for: zero emissions by 2050. Gates is optimistic that as hard as it sounds, we can get there.   



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<h2 class="has-text-align-center wp-block-heading" id="h-how-it-adds-up-globally-51-billion-tons">How It Adds Up Globally: 51 Billion Tons  </h2>



Emissions dropped about 5% in 2020 due to the pandemic, Gates estimates. But in a normal year the world adds 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, Gates writes in his book.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-style-default"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="594" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screenshot-2021-02-18-at-11.05.34-1024x594.png" alt="" class="wp-image-50037" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screenshot-2021-02-18-at-11.05.34-1024x594.png 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screenshot-2021-02-18-at-11.05.34-300x174.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screenshot-2021-02-18-at-11.05.34-768x446.png 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screenshot-2021-02-18-at-11.05.34-1536x892.png 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screenshot-2021-02-18-at-11.05.34-600x348.png 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screenshot-2021-02-18-at-11.05.34.png 1602w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /><figcaption>Photo by Forbes </figcaption></figure>



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Gates admits, both in his book and when we spoke, that he is an imperfect messenger on climate change. “The very idea that one person is saying they know what we should do —appropriately, there is some pushback,” he says. In his book, he writes, “The world is not exactly lacking in rich men with big ideas about what other people should do, or who think technology can fix any problem.” He admits to owning big houses and flying in private jets, though he tells me that he buys carbon offsets for $400 a ton for the private jet flights he takes. “I can’t deny being a rich guy with an opinion. I do believe, though, that it is an informed opinion, and I am always trying to learn more,” he writes.&nbsp;



Gates presciently warned in a 2015 talk about the dangers of a global pandemic and what we’d need to do to prepare for it. Similarly, this is not his first public prescription for the climate. In 2010 he gave a<a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_innovating_to_zero?language=en" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&nbsp;TED talk</a>&nbsp;calling for the need to eliminate carbon emissions by 2050. He’s continued to consult experts in the field and delve into the latest in climate science and policy. In 2015 he got involved in the Paris Climate Summit, calling France’s then president, Francois Hollande, and encouraging him to get countries to agree to raise their R&amp;D budgets for clean tech innovation. Twenty countries signed on. Says Gates, “Although we did not see all those countries double their R&amp;D budgets, we did see some increase. That’s sort of when the field started to focus on can we get this innovation to take place.”



To help put a framework around progress and the cost of new carbon-free innovations, Gates and his team came up with a term called “Green Premium” and introduced it in his blog,<a href="https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Introducing-the-Green-Premiums" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&nbsp;Gates Notes</a>, in September last year. As he explains it, the Green Premium spells out the difference in cost between a product or process that doesn’t emit carbon with one that does. Green Premiums have fallen in the passenger car sector to the point where more people are buying electric cars (though Gates points out that just 2% of global auto sales are electric vehicles). In the industrial sector, however, Green Premiums are much higher. Says Gates, “The hardest problems to solve are in areas like steel and concrete and even transportation things like aviation fuel.” The problems he’s referring to: coming up with processes to make these products that don’t emit greenhouse gases. The research is in its early stages, and that’s where government R&amp;D can play a role, Gates suggests.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">What’s It All Going To Cost?&nbsp;</h3>



In December, Gates suggested<a href="https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/How-the-US-can-lead-on-climate-change-innovation" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&nbsp;in his blog</a>&nbsp;that the U.S. create a National Institutes of Energy Innovation to help the country take the lead in climate change innovation. The idea is to model it after the National Institutes of Health, the backbone of U.S. medical research, which has an annual budget of about $37 billion. Gates says current U.S. government R&amp;D spending on energy innovation is about $7 billion annually; that would need to be quintupled to match government spending on the NIH.



Another suggestion from Gates: shift the tax credits now available for solar and wind to more nascent areas like offshore wind, energy storage and new types of steel. “If you do that, and maybe double or triple the amount you spend on those tax benefits, then I do think that will be just a monumental contribution from the Biden administration,” he explains.



Whatever tech innovation comes out of the U.S. or elsewhere has to be affordable enough for countries like India to adopt it, Gates points out. Right now, the U.S. accounts for 14% of the world’s emissions. If just the U.S. gets to zero carbon emissions, we won’t be solving the problem globally.&nbsp;



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Where Gates Is Investing</h3>



Gates, whose<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/bill-gates/?sh=68241add689f">&nbsp;$124 billion fortune</a>&nbsp;stems from an estimated 1% stake in Microsoft and a variety of other investments, says in the book he’s put “more than $1 billion” into companies working toward zero emissions. How much more? Altogether, he tells&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;it’s about $2 billion. He describes himself as perhaps the biggest funder of direct air capture technologies—methods to capture carbon from the air. Two of the more well-known companies he’s been an investor in are producing plant-based meats:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2020/07/30/impossible-foods-joins-beyond-on-the-shelves-of-walmart-americas-no-1-meat-seller/?sh=3d7caaf52685">Impossible Foods</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2020/11/16/green-and-lean-beyond-meat-announces-two-new-better-for-you-plant-based-burgers/?sh=49333f12299f">Beyond Meat</a>. Some of his investing he categorizes as philanthropic, like the money he’s put toward an open source climate model that aims to show how electricity generation will work in long periods of tough weather when wind and solar would be shut down.&nbsp;



His biggest bet has been on TerraPower, a nuclear power company with a reactor that uses depleted uranium as its fuel. Gates founded the company with a few others more than a decade ago. In 2017, TerraPower formed a joint venture with a Chinese company and was planning to produce its first reactor in China. That deal was scuttled by the U.S. government, which in late 2019 blocked U.S. cooperation with China on civilian nuclear power. Now the plan is to build a demonstration plant somewhere in the U.S. In October the U.S. Department of Energy awarded<a href="https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/us-department-energy-announces-160-million-first-awards-under-advanced-reactor" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&nbsp;$80 million</a>&nbsp;to TerraPower toward construction of the plant; the agreement is that half of the funding will come from the private sector. Gates says, “That’s coming largely from me.”



His hope is that the demonstration plant will be built within five to seven years. “If things go well, that means that maybe in 10 years, commercial plant builders would take that design and build it ideally in the hundreds—which is what you need to have an impact on climate change.”&nbsp;



Gates has also invested in zero-carbon companies through Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a group he assembled that&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2016/12/12/bill-gates-launches-1-billion-breakthrough-energy-investment-fund/?sh=41728d6a5b7d">launched in December 2016</a>. “It was a lot easier to raise the money than I expected,” he says. “I made about 22 calls and got about 20 yeses for the first billion.” Investors include billionaires such as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/?sh=548de8471b23">Jeff Bezos</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/vinod-khosla/?sh=26fd668a3e07">Vinod Khosla</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/john-arnold/?sh=49c99d011001">John Arnold</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/john-doerr/?sh=53bd068026c5">John Doerr</a>; Gates says he’s the largest investor. So far Breakthrough Energy Ventures has invested in 40 companies; One, QuantumScape, which is developing lithium metal batteries for electric vehicles and has no revenues yet, went public through a SPAC last November. Though many of the companies are still early stage, Gates describes some as “really wild,” including QuidNet, which is working to store electricity by pumping water into pressured underground wells; when energy is needed, the water is released and goes through a turbine, creating electricity.&nbsp;



Breakthrough Energy Ventures raised another $1 billion fund in January, with most of the same initial investors and some newcomers. (Gates didn’t disclose names.) He says he’s the largest investor in the latest fund, too. The new fund will look to invest in more of the industrial processes like low-carbon cement and steel production as well as technologies to capture carbon from the air, Gates says.



Over the next five years, Gates says “I’ll put in at least $2 billion” toward zero-carbon technologies. But while a total of $4 billion is a lot of money, for someone worth more than $120 billion, it’s a small sliver of his overall investments. Says Gates, “It’s more limited by what is out there that can have a high impact.”



One of Gates’ other investments that’s been in the news recently seems to fly in the face of his zero-carbon focus. In early February, Gates’ investment arm, Cascade, partnered with Blackstone Group and private equity firm Global Infrastructure Partners in a $4.7 billion deal to buy Signature Aviation, the world’s largest operator of private jet bases. Private jet travel has been booming during the pandemic, but such travel emits a heck of a lot of greenhouse gases. How does he square the deal with the premise of his book? A spokesperson for Gates did not reply to the question.



Will Gates’ book influence policy makers and move the needle toward innovation in zero-carbon technologies? It helps that combating climate change is already one of the Biden administration’s top four priorities. Given that the book is addressing weighty material, it’s relatively easy to read, sprinkled with Gates’ personal observations&nbsp; and even a photo of him with his son Rory on a visit to a geothermal power plant in Iceland. (Gates says he and Rory liked to visit power plants for fun.) He mentions that he drives an electric car&nbsp;—&nbsp;the Porsche Taycan Turbo, which he describes to&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;as “ridiculously nice and ridiculously expensive” — that sells for $150,000 or more. (He’s such a fan that he got one of the first demo models, he adds.)



If nothing else, Gates wants to get people talking. “My hope is that we can shift the conversation by sharing the facts with the people in our lives— our family members, friends, and leaders.&nbsp;And not just the facts that tell us why we need to act, but also those that show us the actions that will do the most good,” he writes.&nbsp;



A bigger measure of his success will be whether the Biden administration adopts any of his policy proposals. Says Gates, “I do think that with those increases [in spending], we’ll be doing exactly what we need to do, not just for us, but for the entire world.”



By Kerry A. Dolan, Forbes Staff

2019 New York Times Dealbook

How To Solve Climate Change: Bill Gates Wants You To Know Two Numbers

Billionaire Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/16/elon-musks-spacex-raised-850-million-at-419point99-a-share.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reportedly</a>&nbsp;completed an $850 million fundraising round last week, as it looks to raise capital for its ambitious Starlink and Starship projects.&nbsp;



News of the funding was&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/16/elon-musks-spacex-raised-850-million-at-419point99-a-share.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">first reported</a>&nbsp;by CNBC, which said that the private company will now have a valuation of around $74 billion, citing people familiar with the financing. SpaceX did not immediately respond to&nbsp;Forbes’ request for comment.



The company raised new funds at $419.99 per share, per CNBC. That price is just a cent below $420 per share, potentially a reference to Elon Musk’s notorious&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026872652290379776" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Twitter post</a>&nbsp;in 2018, when he joked that he would take Tesla private at $420 with “funding secured.”



Musk—who is the world’s second-richest person, behind Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos—owned roughly 48% of SpaceX prior to this latest funding round, according to&nbsp;Forbes’ calculations.&nbsp;



It is not immediately clear if Musk’s ownership was diluted by the new round. If he managed to hold onto all 48%, his stake would now be worth about $32 billion—up from roughly $20 billion previously, according to&nbsp;Forbes’ estimates. That would boost Musk’s net worth by $12 billion—but that’s still not enough for him to pass Bezos and retake the spot of the richest person on the planet.&nbsp;



He is <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/?sh=298803137999">worth</a> $173.4 billion as of market close on Tuesday, February 16, according to Forbes. Most of his fortune lies in his stake in electric car company Tesla, shares of which have more than quadrupled in value over the past 12 months. Musk also serves as CEO of Tesla.



SpaceX was last valued at $46 billion in an August 2020 fundraising round. But some Wall Street banks had put that value even higher: In October, a Morgan Stanley analyst gave SpaceX a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddawkins/2020/10/23/elon-musks-spacex-gets-bullish-100-billion-valuation-from-morgan-stanley-double-what-investors-said-it-was-worth-in-august/?sh=75aaf6b86e79">bullish valuation of $100 billion</a>—double what investors said it was worth in August.&nbsp;



The latest fundraising round comes in the midst of two capital-intensive projects, Starship and Starlink. Starship is the company’s long-term spacecraft project, intended to eventually replace SpaceX’s existing Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon spacecraft. The aim of the project is to develop a fully-reusable launch vehicle that is expected to take cargo, and eventually passengers, into space at a lower cost than other existing spacecraft.&nbsp;



Beyond&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2020/05/25/elon-musks-first-astronaut-launch-is-one-giant-leap-for-space-capitalism/#3df32c382b49">successfully launching</a>&nbsp;U.S. astronauts into space in May of last year, SpaceX said in 2020 that it was seeing “extraordinary demand” for its Starlink satellite broadband service. The project aims to build an interconnected network of about 12,000 small satellites in low Earth orbit. So far, early tests have shown broadbands speeds capable of playing online video games and streaming movies, but the service faces criticism over its&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wtva.com/content/news/State-leader-questions-high-cost-for-Starlink-internet-service-573706251.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">cost</a>&nbsp;and the company’s ability to&nbsp;<a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/isps-step-up-fight-against-spacex-tell-fcc-that-starlink-will-be-too-slow/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">scale capacity</a>.



In addition to raising money for its large-scale projects, SpaceX also completed a secondary transaction in which SpaceX insiders and investors were able to sell an additional $750 million worth of their shares, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/16/elon-musks-spacex-raised-850-million-at-419point99-a-share.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">according to</a> CNBC.



By Sergei Klebnikov, Forbes Staff

Elon Musk’s SpaceX Now Worth $74 Billion After Latest Fundraising Round: Report

South African- born, billionaire technology and space entrepreneur, Elon Musk, made history at the start of 2021, overtaking Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to become the richest man on Earth. While his fortune was made on this planet, his dreams to venture to the final frontier remain. FORBES AFRICA takes a look at his journey to becoming one of the world’s most celebrated innovators and one of the wealthiest men alive.



THE MAN WHO FAMOUSLY SAID THAT HE WOULDN’T BE HAPPY UNTIL WE WERE ALL LIVING ON MARS, IS NOW ONE OF THE RICHEST MEN ON EARTH. WHILE ELON MUSK’S PLANS TO BE BURIED IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY REMAIN UNCHANGED, HE’S STILL GOT MUCH TO CELEBRATE IN THE HERE AND NOW.



On January 8 this year, at approximately 11.30AM on the American East Coast, Musk, known for founding some of the world’s most progressive tech companies, along with his unrelenting space-age ambitions, made yet another historical leap.



His net worth soared by $12.5 billion, to $189.7 billion, making him, for a time, the wealthiest person on the planet, according to Forbes, who broke the news. For the first time, Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, who had held the top spot for a record four years, came second with a cumulative net worth of $185 billion.



However, in a twist of fate, stock in his electric car company, Tesla, fell by 8%, denting his personal wealth by a hefty $14 billion, overnight. But like the man himself, Musk’s wealth wouldn’t be down for long.



<div class="wp-block-image is-style-default"><figure class="aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/GettyImages-1208933748-819x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-49882" width="376" height="470" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/GettyImages-1208933748-819x1024.jpg 819w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/GettyImages-1208933748-240x300.jpg 240w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/GettyImages-1208933748-768x960.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/GettyImages-1208933748-1229x1536.jpg 1229w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/GettyImages-1208933748-1638x2048.jpg 1638w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/GettyImages-1208933748-300x375.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/GettyImages-1208933748-600x750.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/GettyImages-1208933748-scaled.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 376px) 100vw, 376px" /><figcaption>UNIVERSAL CITY, CALIFORNIA &#8211; FEBRUARY 26: Model Maye Musk (Photo by Paul Archuleta/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure></div>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">Elon’s aim is to save the planet and he also loves the thought of going to Mars&#8230;. I get very excited every step of the way. We all do. Kimbal and Tosca [Elon’s siblings] and I go to the main [SpaceX] launches, we can’t go to all the launches, as he has launched, how many now&#8230; 50 rockets? I’m not sure. I lose track. But we go to the main ones, and we are anxious beforehand and excited afterward and we are very proud of him and support him with all this. He just feels that we should be inter-planetary, starting with Mars. Mars seems to be the most friendly [planet], and that is what he would like to explore. <cite>-Elon Musk’s mother Maye Musk, in an interview from Los Angeles with FORBES AFRICA last year about her memoir, A Woman Makes A Plan, released by Jonathan Ball Publishers</cite></blockquote>



Days later, with the swift rebound of Tesla shares by 4.7%, he wrestled the top spot from Bezos with an impressive recovery of $7.8 billion bringing his total net worth to $183.8 billion against the Amazon founder’s, marginal, but impressive, $182.4 billion.



At the time of going to press, the yo-yo action continued. Tesla’s stock volatility returned Bezos to the top spot, making him the world’s richest by just $200 million, with Musk making a close second. The game is set to continue for much of the year, but it won’t do much to change the fact that both billionaires are still over $30 billion richer than their nearest competitor; the third person on the list, French luxury tycoon, Bernard Arnault, according to Forbes estimates.



Musk’s dizzying ascent is quite an achievement given that, in 2014, he ranked 47th on the U.S. Rich List, compiled by Forbes, with his personal net worth hovering at the $9.4 billion mark, at contemporary rates.



Notwithstanding his meteoric rise, most studies of Musk begin at SpaceX, his landmark aerospace manufacturing outfit, launched in 2002 with plans to make space travel more affordable and meet its founder’s often parodied mandate to catalyze humanity’s colonization of Mars.



“I’d like to go to Mars. I suppose it depends on how old I am when I get there&#8230; But it’s not about me going to Mars. We’re developing new technologies to enable a large number of people to go to Mars and be able to develop a self-sustaining city on Mars,” he told Forbes in 2014.



Inter-planetary ambitions aside, Musk’s ideas often overshadow the story of his origins which are rooted in a very down-to-earth Pretoria suburb, a few miles north of Johannesburg, in South Africa. Born in 1971 to a Canadian mother and a South African father, it was clear that Musk was unique from the start.



“The kind of things he would come up with as a youngster was always surprising. When he was very small, he would ask me, ‘where is the whole world?’, when he was three or four. It was these sorts of questions that made me realize that he was a little different,” his father, Errol Musk, noted in a 2012 interview with FORBES AFRICA.



Eccentricities aside, the young Musk was equally academically gifted.



“We called Elon ‘The Encyclopedia’ because he had read the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Collier’s Encyclopedia, and remembered everything. That’s also why we called him ‘Genius Boy’. We could ask him anything. Remember, this was before the internet. I guess now we would call him ‘The Internet’,” his mother, Maye Musk, recalls in her 2019 autobiography, A Woman Makes a Plan.



Attending Pretoria Boys High School (PBHS), often considered one of the most prestigious schools in South Africa, a teenage Musk kept to himself but found plenty of company in computers. He taught himself how to program using an old manual and eventually sold a space-themed video game that he wrote called Blastar, to a computing magazine in 1984, reportedly for $500, arguably the earliest of his tech ventures.



“My impression is that Elon kept to himself and was relatively quiet and reserved. I believe he was involved with the computer club at school, but otherwise was not really visible in mainstream activities,” Gavin Ehlers, head-boy at PBHS in 1988, the same year Musk graduated, told FORBES AFRICA in 2012.



Yet, despite his remarkable talent and comfortable upbringing, Musk’s childhood was blighted with peculiar challenges. As the shortest, smallest, and smartest kid in the class, he was an easy target for bullies, who tormented him until he was 15 years old.



“I was a late bloomer. So I was the youngest and the smallest kid in class for years and years&#8230; The gangs at school would hunt me down – literally hunt me down,” Musk told Rolling Stone magazine in 2017.



At home, things weren’t easier. His parents divorced in 1980.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">If somebody else is working 50 hours and you’re working a 100, you’ll get twice as much done in the course of the year as the other company.</blockquote>



The tumult of his early life did much to shape the man that Musk would later become. Even as a youngster, he held strong to his principles. At the time, in apartheid South Africa, mandatory two-year military service was in force for all white males who had completed their secondary school or tertiary- level education. In his objection, Musk said he didn’t prescribe to what the state was doing to its citizens.



“I don’t have an issue with serving in the military per se, but serving in the South African army suppressing black people just didn’t seem like a really good way to spend time,” he explained in the 2007 book, Rocketeers, by Michael Belfiore.



At 17, Musk relocated to Canada to attend university in 1989. After a number of transfers, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, part of the prominent Ivy League in the United States, with a dual degree in Economics and Physics, setting him firmly on the path of a tech entrepreneur. Like all the greats, he dropped out of his Ph.D. program at Stanford, instead of establishing his first startup, against the euphoria of the dot-com boom of the nineties. He founded the company, Zip2, with his younger brother, Kimbal – who has been a keen business partner to Musk throughout his entrepreneurial career – in 1995.



“When my brother and I were starting our first company, instead of getting an apartment we rented a small office and slept on the couch. We were so hard-up we had just one computer so the website was up during the day and I was coding at night. Seven days a week&#8230; all the time. I briefly had a girlfriend during that period and in order to be with me she had to sleep at the office,” he said with a smile, during a 2014 Commencement Speech at the University of Southern California (USC).



Hard work is a cornerstone of Musk’s entrepreneurial ethos. His constant refrain to anyone who inquires on his success is to outwork the competition, where possible, to get that all important edge.



“If somebody else is working 50 hours and you’re working a 100, you’ll get twice as much done in the course of the year as the other company,” he told the audience at USC.



Clearly, the hard work has paid off for Musk who joined the five-man centi-billionaires club; all with a net worth over $100 billion, in August 2020.



Members include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and veteran tech titan, Bill Gates.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">&#8220;Given that as a South African, he has managed to conquer the industry he’s in should be an inspiration to us and to Africa, in general. There are many sides to him&#8230; But let us draw inspiration from him because he is a product of the public school system in South Africa.&#8221; &#8211;Fred Khumalo, author and journalist, South Africa</blockquote>



However, it hasn’t been an easy ride to the top. In 2018, Tesla was in dire straits, the company was struggling to build a viable product and was hemorrhaging cash almost daily. Musk had already sunk a bulk of his early fortune in the business, some of which came from the $165 million sale of his stake in PayPal, the online payments pioneer, after his exit as CEO.



Leading the company during that time took a toll. In a very personal interview with The New York Times, Musk revealed that he was losing sleep and had spent most of his birthday working on the factory floor, where he was also spending most of his days and nights. The work had taken over to the point of almost missing Kimbal’s wedding, where he was the best man. A disheveled Musk admitted that while he regretted the havoc it wreaked on his life, he had no regrets about being so determined to pull Tesla from the brink of collapse.



“The worst is over from a Tesla operational standpoint. But from a personal pain standpoint&#8230; the worst is yet to come,” he told The New York Times.



Musk’s passion is evident in almost everything he has done, and in every business he has built. After leaving PayPal, and selling his stake in the company, he used a bulk of the $165 million fortune to found the companies that would make his name – SpaceX and Tesla. Any seasoned entrepreneur would have considered the move a risky one but Musk was quite adamant about his ambitions and making them a reality.



“I think there was like literally one week where I actually worked 120 hours and just didn’t leave the factory. I didn’t even go outside,” Musk told American television news magazine program, 60 Minutes, in 2018.



His intense work ethic has not only worked to transform Tesla but has inspired a number of other young entrepreneurs to build the electric car industry and get rich in the process.



For example, William Li, who founded electric car maker, Nio, in 2014, was 12 times richer in 2020 thanks to his shares in the U.S.-listed carmaker. In fact, he’s now among the world’s 500 richest people, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Chinese entrepreneur, He Xiaopeng, chairman of XPeng Motors, has also seen his wealth jump more than 600%. Overall, fortunes of the handful of people tracked by the Bloomberg index in the electric vehicle industry have gone up by over $140 billion including Musk’s $111 billion surge.



However, far removed from his status on the global billionaire league tables, which have come to form the foundation of his popularity, Musk maintains his very own niche but loyal following, all devoted to his Twitter feed; his preferred mode of communication. Muskians, as they are known, see him as an eclectic superhero figure of the modern age where he is at once a conscientious technology entrepreneur and demi-god.



However, in 2020, following statements made on the impact the Trump administration’s Covid-19 policy responses had on his business, Musk received heavy back- lash from the mainstream and even managed to alienate some of his loyal fans. But all is forgotten now that the South African-born entrepreneur is among the world’s richest men.



While his wealth may be a relentless conversation starter, globally, it’s hard to ignore Musk’s legacy in the business arena. The journey from a quiet, intelligent and passionate young entrepreneur to an influential manufacturing magnate has been driven not just by a belief in hard work but by an ability to settle for dreams beyond the stars.



For generations to come, his place in time will always be confirmed by his commitment to not only conjure up ‘moonshot’ ideas but to actively pursue them; to Mars and back.



&#8211;BY MARIE SHABAYA



Get Your Copy Of FORBES AFRICA <a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/product/single-digital-issue-the-billionaires-list-feb-march-2021/">here</a>



<div class="wp-block-image is-style-default"><figure class="alignleft size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/FA-OFC-2021-Feb_March-793x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-49836" width="285" height="367" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/FA-OFC-2021-Feb_March-793x1024.jpg 793w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/FA-OFC-2021-Feb_March-232x300.jpg 232w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/FA-OFC-2021-Feb_March-768x991.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/FA-OFC-2021-Feb_March-1190x1536.jpg 1190w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/FA-OFC-2021-Feb_March-1586x2048.jpg 1586w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/FA-OFC-2021-Feb_March-300x387.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/FA-OFC-2021-Feb_March-600x775.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/FA-OFC-2021-Feb_March-scaled.jpg 1983w" sizes="(max-width: 285px) 100vw, 285px" /></figure></div>

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Rockets To Riches: The Rise And Rise Of Elon Musk

Key Speakers and Interviews at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum

The Forbes Billionaires’ List: Africa’s Richest People 2021

Tesla billionaire Elon Musk is the richest person in the world once again, overtaking Jeff Bezos as shares of Amazon fell on Thursday.



Amazon’s stock fell 1.2%, lowering Bezos’ net worth by $2 billion, to $182.8 billion. Shares of electric-vehicle maker Tesla, on the other hand, lost 1.1% on Thursday, pushing Musk’s net worth down by $1.8 billion.&nbsp;



Musk is now worth $182.9 billion, which again makes him the wealthiest person on the planet, according to&nbsp;Forbes’&nbsp;estimates. The Tesla chief is now just less than $1 billion richer than Bezos, who falls to second-richest person in the world.



The two billionaires have spent much of the last week competing for the title of wealthiest person on the planet. Musk took the number one spot from Bezos&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2021/01/08/elon-musk-is-now-the-richest-person-in-the-world-officially-surpassing-jeff-bezos/">last Friday</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2021/01/12/elon-musk-is-back-at-no-1-richest-person-in-the-world-after-tesla-stock-rebounds/?sh=4352d8de6c68">again on Tuesday</a>,&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;calculates.&nbsp;



Both billionaires are over $30 billion richer than the world’s third-wealthiest person, LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, who is worth $149.4 billion,&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;estimates.



Musk’s net worth has grown at an astonishing rate over the last year, rising more than $150 billion since March 2020, when he was&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/">worth $24.6 billion</a>. Bezos’ fortune has also continued to grow, though not as fast: He’s up from $113 billion in March 2020.

Elon Musk Is The Richest Person In The World—Again

Despite seeing his net worth skyrocket in recent months—and a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-06/musk-close-to-surpassing-bezos-as-world-s-richest-person#:~:text=Elon%20Musk%2C%20the%20outspoken%20entrepreneur,the%20world's%20500%20wealthiest%20people." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">report</a>&nbsp;from Bloomberg on Wednesday that he’s now the world’s richest person—<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/?list=rtb/">Elon Musk</a>&nbsp;remains the second-richest person in the world, according to&nbsp;Forbes’ estimates.



Shares of Musk’s electric-vehicle maker Tesla&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/tesla" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">TSLA</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/tesla">+6.9%</a>&nbsp;rose by 7% as of 2:30 p.m. EST on Thursday, pushing Musk’s net worth up by $9.8 billion, to $175.2 billion. That makes him $22 billion richer than the planet’s third-wealthiest person, French luxury tycoon&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/bernard-arnault/?list=rtb/">Bernard Arnault</a>, but still $11 billion behind the world’s number one, Amazon&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/amazon" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AMZN</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/amazon">+1.8%</a>&nbsp;CEO&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/?list=rtb/">Jeff Bezos</a>.&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;estimates that Bezos has a net worth of $186.8 billion.



Musk’s net worth has grown at an astronomical clip over the past year. He has added nearly $150 billion to his fortune since March 2020, when he was&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/">worth $24.6 billion</a>. Much of that increase comes from Tesla’s skyrocketing share price, which rose more than 720% in 2020. It has gained another 10% so far over the first week of 2021.&nbsp;



As Tesla’s stock soared ahead of its inclusion in the S&amp;P 500 Index on December 21, Musk surpassed Facebook&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/facebook" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FB</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/facebook">+1.9%</a>&nbsp;CEO&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg/?list=rtb/">Mark Zuckerberg</a>&nbsp;(who is worth $98.2 billion today) to become the world’s fourth-richest person in early November, then leapfrogged Microsoft&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/microsoft" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">MSFT</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/microsoft">+3%</a>&nbsp;cofounder&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/bill-gates/?list=rtb/">Bill Gates</a>&nbsp;(worth $121.9 billion today) for the number three spot.



Musk owns around 21% of Tesla’s shares, plus a stake in private rocket company SpaceX. Tesla stock still sits at record highs, now trading for over $800 per share. The company’s $765 billion market cap makes it by far the most valuable car company in the world.



-By Sergei Klebnikov, Forbes Staff

No, Elon Musk Is Not The Richest Person In The World—Yet

The SPAC boom—a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2020/11/19/the-looming-spac-meltdown/?sh=7c2c083570d7">money faucet</a>&nbsp;for Wall Street, and a big potential hazard for retail investors—has minted another winner on the inside of a deal.&nbsp;



Eric Wu, cofounder and CEO of Opendoor, became a billionaire on Monday, the day the home-buying firm began trading through a merger with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2020/09/15/home-buyer-opendoor-is-officially-going-public-in-48-billion-deal/?sh=da7adbd134fe">a SPAC</a>&nbsp;called Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings II. At the close of markets, his 6% stake in the firm was worth $1.01 billion. It is unclear whether he will remain a billionaire at the end of after-hours trading.



Wu, 37, published a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.opendoor.com/w/blog/moving-forward-together" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">blog post</a>&nbsp;on Monday morning celebrating the deal. “In 2014, a small group of us dreamt of a future where you could buy and sell a home at the tap of a button,” he wrote. “Like most startups, we’ve faced our fair share of hard problems, but we believed in the potential impact of what we were building and put in the hard work to tackle obstacle after obstacle.”



Through a spokesperson, Wu declined to comment for this article.



Opendoor is the leading business in the “iBuying” market, a relatively nascent industry that lets homeowners quickly offload their houses to the company, which then lists them on its platform. Opendoor uses algorithms to determine how much it pays—too little, and potential customers won’t want to sell; too high and the company could take a loss.&nbsp;



Last year, Opendoor sold nearly 19,000 homes, generating revenue of $4.7 billion, though it posted a net loss of $339 million. Sales dropped off dramatically this year, likely in part due to the pandemic. Through the end of September, revenue fell to $2.3 billion (more than $1 billion less than the same period in 2019), while losses amounted to $199 million.&nbsp;



Those losses, while trending in the right direction, have raised questions about Opendoor’s long-term path to profitability. The company, for its part, says it’s willing to lose money in the near future as it battles for market share. “Five years ago, we were in like two markets, three markets,” cofounder Ian Wong told&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;this fall. “Today we’re in 21.”&nbsp;



iBuying remains a wide open field, even as Opendoor competes with Zillow, Redfin, Offerpad and other startups.&nbsp;<a href="https://therealdeal.com/2020/09/14/hungry-for-cash-opendoor-eyes-ipo/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">According to</a>&nbsp;The Real Deal, the industry still comprises just 0.5% of the $1.6 trillion home-buying market.



Investors clearly aren’t spooked. When Opendoor’s public offering was first announced in September, the company had an enterprise value of $4.8 billion. By Monday morning, its market value stood at nearly $18 billion.&nbsp;



Opendoor joins other newly public tech firms with soaring stock prices, including Airbnb, DoorDash, and Snowflake. Will those gains last? Time will tell, but the valuations sure look lofty.



By Noah Kirsch, Forbes Staff

Key Speakers At Techonomy 2018 Conference

New Billionaire: Opendoor’s Public Debut Is A Big Win For CEO Eric Wu

It’s easy to explain

The Highest-Paid YouTube Stars Of 2020

Jeff Skoll has been funding pandemic preparedness for more than a decade, even longer than Bill Gates. In recent months, he’s increased his philanthropic giving to help combat Covid-19.



Nine years ago, Jeff Skoll’s film company Participant Media partnered with Warner Brothers to put out Contagion, a movie about a global pandemic that started with a virus from a bat. An American businesswoman (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) came home from a trip to China and unknowingly spread a novel, and at times, deadly disease. While many viewed the film as pure science fiction, Skoll had ulterior motives. He hoped the movie would help build support for funding the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and also warn the world about the potential dangers of a global pandemic.



Skoll, 55, became a billionaire just over two decades ago as a result of stock he received as eBay’s first president. He left eBay in 2001 and has since co-produced more than 100 films and TV programs, all with socially relevant themes including the climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth featuring Al Gore, factory farming documentary Food Inc., the miniseries When They See Us and the 2016 Academy Award best picture winner Spotlight, about The Boston Globe’s investigations into child sexual abuse by Catholic priests. 



While his impassioned film-making pretty much ground to a halt temporarily with California’s shelter-in-place orders, his 2011 movie&nbsp;Contagion&nbsp;has become the must watch-at-home hit of the pandemic—it’s the number one selling title to date this year, according to Warner Brothers, the distributor. (It won’t disclose the number of times it’s been rented or sold.) In late March, Participant,&nbsp;Contagion&nbsp;screenwriter Scott Z. Burns and director Steven Soderbergh worked with Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne and other cast members to produce public service announcements about washing your hands and staying home.



Beyond backing a movie about a pandemic, Skoll has been funding pandemic preparedness and prevention since 2009 — six years before Bill Gates’ now well known TED talk warning about them &#8212; through the Skoll Global Threats Fund, to which he pledged $100 million. (The other threats: climate change, water scarcity, nuclear weapons and conflict in the Middle East.)



Since the start of this year, Skoll has contributed an additional $200 million to his charitable foundation—$100 million of which was announced in late April and will go toward fighting Covid-19. He put the other $100 million in earlier this year, he tells Forbes, adding that he hadn’t bothered to publicize it. “I don’t see this as a money squirt,” Skoll explains. “This is a resource allocation to an area we know well. And this is an emergency.”



Newly bulked up, the Skoll Foundation promised to quadruple its grantmaking this year to $200 million. New beneficiaries in 2020 include some of the poorest folks in Los Angeles and the contact tracing program being launched across California.“This is the rainy day we’ve all been saving for,” Skoll says of his charitable giving. “If not now, when?” 



He’s been working up to 20 hours a day in his kitchen in Beverly Hills — on a call in early June, he jokes that it’s his “command center,” equipped with a couple of iPads, a MacBook and some bluetooth devices — talking to people around the globe, taking the pulse of the pandemic and searching out individuals, organizations and companies with new ideas. “Just the science, the learnings of the virus — almost every day there’s some revelation that we didn’t know,” says Skoll.&nbsp;&nbsp;



The pandemics research that Skoll started funding through the Skoll Global Threats Fund spun off into a nonprofit called Ending Pandemics in January 2018, with a seed grant from Skoll. “It’s all about early detection and rapid response,” says Ending Pandemics President Dr. Mark Smolinski.



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Skoll has been funding pandemic preparedness and prevention since 2009 — six years before Bill Gates’ TED talk warning about them — through the Skoll Global Threats Fund, which he spun off into Ending Pandemics in 2018.</h2>



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



Skoll got wind of the novel coronavirus early on, back in December —where it started. “We had colleagues on the ground in Wuhan. We had an idea that a zoonotic disease had jumped to humans,” he says. By January he and his team began to be concerned about countries with trade ties to China — particularly in Africa, where some of the social entrepreneurs that the Skoll Foundation has supported are operating.&nbsp;



In early February, the Skoll Foundation made its first Covid-19 related grant: $3 million to the African Field Epidemiology Network, a group working with the African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (the Africa CDC) to help coordinate African countries’ response and to boost surveillance and detection. The Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation donated to the same group around the same time. Beginning with those two grants, says Africa CDC Director Dr. John Nkengasong, “we were able to rally rapid responders to Addis Ababa [for training] and send them to Nigeria and Cameroon. We were able to scale up diagnostics.” Funding from others then followed, including the MasterCard foundation, Germany, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S.  



In &nbsp;March&nbsp; it made a grant to the Southern African Center for Infectious Disease Surveillance Foundation (SACIDS) and a similar group in East Africa. One outcome: Mozambique, which had the infrastructure to test for Covid-19 but limited money to buy tests, got the needed funds and ramped up testing four-fold, according to Smolinski.&nbsp;



The Skoll foundation’s next move was to quickly create a fund for both its current and past grantees — mostly social entrepreneurs. Sixty-four organizations were given $50,000 grants. “We figured they would need emergency funding,” Skoll explains.



Though the Skoll Foundation has traditionally supported social entrepreneurs who work in lower income countries, in the past few months it has made some donations closer to home. Because Los Angeles County has been particularly hard hit by the pandemic, Skoll reached out to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti to offer assistance. In late April, his foundation made a $2 million gift to the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles, which is providing cash assistance to families hit hardest by Covid-19. 



Skoll also connected with California Governor Gavin Newsom and his senior advisor on social innovation, Kathleen Kelly Janus. The Skoll Foundation is donating $8 million to support California’s response to Covid-19, starting with $4.1 million for the public awareness campaign around contact tracing, which Janus says “will be really critical to preventing a second wave of Covid-19.”&nbsp;



Smolinski’s team, which had already partnered with Harvard and Boston Children’s Hospital to build a crowdsourced symptom reporting tracker called Flu Near You in 2012 to show flu trends in neighborhoods and cities, rolled out Covid Near You in early March. The app lets people anonymously report if they’re feeling healthy or not, with zip code info, as  a way to track current and potential hotspots. 



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Skoll’s Ending Pandemics has partnered with governments and public health authorities in 36 countries — 11 of which have surveillance systems tracking Covid-19 and other infectious diseases.</h2>



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



Ending Pandemics has partnered with governments and public health authorities in 36 countries — 11 of which have surveillance systems that Smolinski says are “up to speed.” One is Cambodia, a country of 14 million people, where all four telecom companies support a free mobile app that both receives info about disease and provides information. Calls have gone from 600 a day before the pandemic to 15,000, and the vast majority of the Covid-19 cases in the country were first identified through the hotline, Smolinski says. Cambodia, the country that took in a cruise ship no one else wanted, so far has just 129 cases and no deaths, he adds.



Through the Audacious Project, a philanthropic group with about 30 members launched by TED conference curator Chris Anderson with Jeff Skoll and Richard Branson, Skoll and others are supporting Boston-based Partners in Health, which responded to the Ebola crisis in 2014. The multi-million dollar grant from the Audacious Project enables Partners in Health to share its contact tracing expertise over the coming year with roughly 19 public health departments across the U.S. “We started by helping the state of Massachusetts put together a contact tracing system, and everyone else wanted to know what we were doing,” says Joia Mukherjee, Chief Medical Officer of Partners In Health. “This funding has allowed us to expand our team. What we are hoping is that state and federal money will be forthcoming.” 



Mukherjee applauds Skoll’s approach to philanthropy. “Jeff has always been a systems thinker, and that has been transformative for Partners In Health,” she says.&nbsp;



Skoll also contributed funding to an ambitious global project called the Global Infectious Disease Epidemiology Network — GIDEoN for short —being spearheaded by Columbia University epidemiologist Ian Lipkin, who directs the university’s Center for Infection and Immunity. Lipkin has lined up the equivalent of the National Institutes of Health in 12 countries including India, Brazil and China and together they’ll share information about outbreaks and disease samples. With GIDEoN,&nbsp; Lipkin explains, “we’re trying to upgrade the capacity for detecting infectious agents and toxins, particularly in the developing world.”&nbsp;



While Skoll has been involved in global philanthropy for nearly two decades, he now has an even more personal reason for being involved in the fight against deadly diseases. While working on Ebola in 2014, he contracted a rare tropical disease that took two years to diagnose. He took an 18 month medical leave of absence and is feeling better now.



Despite many challenges, Skoll is an optimist, even about pandemics. Yes, the number of cases will likely increase as U.S. states open back up, he says. But he’s hopeful that a treatment for Covid-19-an existing drug—can work and be scaled up for distribution sometime this summer. “I hope we can get the solutions in place in the next few months. I see a path to it,” he says.



As for future pandemics, Skoll sees a silver lining.  “There are so many zoonotic viruses that jump over from animals to humans. Most of them peter out and turn into something less lethal. I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll see any terrible new pandemic any time soon, says Skoll.  “If anything, the world is on watch now.”



&#8211; <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/">Kerry A. Dolan</a>, Forbes Staff, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/worlds-billionaires">Billionaires</a>

gettyimages-823728672-594×594

How The Billionaire Behind The Movie ‘Contagion’ Is Working To Stop This Pandemic—And The Next One

Elon Musk&#8217;s meteoric rise up the Forbes Billionaire List has continued this month, as he’s ascended past luminaries such as Warren Buffett and Steve Ballmer. As of Monday afternoon, Musk&#8217;s net worth surpassed <a href="https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#11a0831e3d78">$74 billion</a>, meaning he is now the fifth-richest person on the planet.



KEY FACTS



<ul><li>Musk, 49, is the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, the electric vehicle company whose stock price has soared since March.</li></ul>



<ul><li>Tesla shares gained another 9.5% in Monday&#8217;s trading to $1,643.00, giving it a <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/20/cramer-says-moves-in-tech-stocks-are-truly-insane-as-amazon-and-tesla-climb.html" target="_blank">60%</a> rise in just three weeks since June 29, and a nearly 300% increase in 2020 alone.</li></ul>



<ul><li>Tesla is now not only the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/07/01/tesla-is-now-the-worlds-most-valuable-car-company-with-a-valuation-of-208-billion/#64a2c1d05334">world&#8217;s most valuable car company</a>, with a market cap of $304.5 billion, it’s worth more than Ford, Ferrari, General Motors and BMW <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/07/01/tesla-is-now-the-worlds-most-valuable-car-company-with-a-valuation-of-208-billion/#64a2c1d05334">combined</a>.</li></ul>



<ul><li>Musk was ranked <a href="https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/"> No. 31</a> on Forbes&#8217; Billionaires List as recently as mid-March, with a net worth just under $25 billion.</li></ul>



<ul><li>His fortune has nearly tripled since then, skyrocketing to $74.2 billion at the close of trading Monday, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#11a0831e3d78">Forbes calculates.</a></li></ul>



<ul><li>Musk owns 21% of Tesla but has pledged more than half his stake as collateral for loans; Forbes has discounted his stake to take the loans into account.</li></ul>



KEY BACKGROUND: 



Musk first debuted on Forbes’ 400 Wealthiest Americans List in 2012 in 190th place with a net worth of $2.4 billion. On January 1 this year, he was the 37th richest person on earth. However, Tesla&#8217;s sudden and spectacular rise has propelled him near the very top of the world&#8217;s wealthiest humans. Tesla&#8217;s surge has confounded some investors, considering it’s far smaller than its competitors and only recently began to log quarterly profits. Tesla produced&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/07/01/tesla-is-now-the-worlds-most-valuable-car-company-with-a-valuation-of-208-billion/#64a2c1d05334">103,000 vehicles</a>&nbsp;in the first quarter; Toyota produced&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/07/01/tesla-is-now-the-worlds-most-valuable-car-company-with-a-valuation-of-208-billion/#64a2c1d05334">2.4 million vehicles</a>&nbsp;during that same period. In 2019, American automakers General Motors and Ford generated&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/danrunkevicius/2020/07/20/tesla-stock-may-be-rallying-for-this-absurd-reasonand-this-wont-end-well/#794f313f67a6">ten times</a>&nbsp;more sales than Tesla. Late last month, analysts from Morgan Stanley warned that Tesla stock, which was trading at roughly $1,000 per share at that time, was &#8220;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/06/23/tesla-is-overvalued-investors-are-treating-it-too-much-like-a-tech-company-says-morgan-stanley/#15e075f96c74">grossly overvalued</a>&nbsp;and set to plunge.&#8221; Earlier this month, Musk said that Tesla would produce virtually fully autonomous&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/07/09/elon-musk-tesla-will-have-level-5-self-driving-cars-this-year/#1942918a2d1d">self-driving vehicles</a>&nbsp;by the end of 2020, a claim that was met with skepticism by an auto industry accustomed to a heaping of hype from Musk on the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/business/tesla-autopilot-germany.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">capabilities of self-driving technology</a>. Musk has not sold shares of Tesla&nbsp;<a href="http://sites/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">since 2010</a>.



CRITICAL QUOTES:



&#8220;I really couldn&#8217;t care less,&#8221; Musk emailed Forbes about his net worth earlier this month. &#8220;These numbers rise and fall, but what really matters is making great products that people love.&#8221;



&#8220;Moves like we are seeing in Microsoft and Tesla and Amazon are truly insane and unlike any i have ever seen in my life,&#8221;&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/jimcramer/status/1285293615019888640?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">tweeted</a>&nbsp;analyst Jim Cramer on Monday afternoon. When asked if Tesla was a &#8216;Covid Stock,&#8217; Cramer&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/jimcramer/status/1285310934114861057?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">replied</a>, &#8220;i don&#8217;t even know if it is a stock. it is something else entirely, like a new species discovered in the wild.&#8221;&nbsp;



TANGENT:



When Kanye West<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2020/07/08/kanye-west-says-hes-done-with-trump-opens-up-about-white-house-bid-damaging-biden-and-everything-in-between/#4597b0a647aa"> initially announced</a> that he was running for president, he said he had the &#8220;full support&#8221; of Musk, a longtime close friend. In a <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://pagesix.com/2020/07/11/elon-musk-backpedals-on-support-of-kanye-wests-presidential-bid/" target="_blank">since-deleted tweet</a>, Musk responded, &#8220;We may have more differences of opinion than I anticipated.&#8221; However, Musk later told <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://pagesix.com/2020/07/13/elon-musk-on-why-hes-still-backing-kanye-west-for-president/" target="_blank">Page Six</a>, &#8220;Kanye explained afterward some of the reasoning behind why he said what he said. It makes more sense than many people, including me, realized.&#8221; On July Fourth, Musk <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://pagesix.com/2020/07/13/elon-musk-on-why-hes-still-backing-kanye-west-for-president/" target="_blank">tweeted</a>, &#8220;You have my full support!&#8221;



&#8211; <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/">Tommy Beer</a>, Forbes Staff, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/business">Business</a>

Tag: Billionaires

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