Pretoria-born inventor and visionary Elon Musk is 21st on the latest Forbes list of most powerful people on the planet. With an estimated fortune of over $11,5 billion, he is also one of the 100 wealthiest.
The CEO of electric motoring firm Tesla and SpaceX, which aims to send humans to Mars, trumped fellow tech icon Apple CEO Tim Cook, but was behind Russian President Vladimir Putin and US president-elect Donald Trump on the list.
The self-made billionaire immigrated to Canada as a teenager and then went on to the USA as a transfer student to the University of Pennsylvania, before making his first fortune as a cofounder of PayPal.
Musk will join IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and Uber Technologies' Travis Kalanick on Trump's advisory panel, the President's Strategic and Policy Forum. He has clashed with Trump on the subject of global warming, which he is aiming to thwart, in the past.
He recently raised eyebrows when he maintained that automation would lead to universal basic income. The idea of universal basic income is that the governments provide citizens with a minimum amount of money to live on.
