Elon Musk

Elon Musk is a South African-born American entrepreneur, born in Pretoria on 28 June 1971. His net worth stood at $393 billion as of 2025. He founded SpaceX in 2002 to make spaceflight more affordable, became chief executive of Tesla in 2008, and helped build PayPal into a payment service used across eBay.

Musk's father was South African and his mother Canadian, and he showed an early talent for computers and entrepreneurship. At the age of 12 he wrote a video game and sold it to a computer magazine. In 1988 he left South Africa on a Canadian passport, unwilling to serve the apartheid military and seeking wider opportunity in the United States.

He studied at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and in 1992 transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned bachelor's degrees in physics and economics in 1997. He then enrolled in a physics doctorate at Stanford University but left after two days, judging the internet a more powerful agent of change than physics.

Musk founded Zip2 in 1995 as a supplier of maps and business directories to online newspapers. Compaq bought Zip2 in 1999 for $307 million, and Musk then founded the online financial services company X.com.

Confinity was founded in 1998 by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, and it launched the PayPal payment service the following year. By 2000 PayPal had more than a million users and about 40 percent of eBay transactions used the service. Confinity merged with Musk's online bank X.com in 2000 and the combined company adopted the PayPal name a year later.

PayPal went public in 2002 and raised $70.2 million in its initial public offering. In October 2002 eBay acquired the company for $1.5 billion and made it the auction site's official payments provider.

SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Musk as an aerospace company that helped usher in commercial spaceflight. Musk formed it to revolutionize the aerospace industry and make spaceflight more affordable, and it entered the market with its Falcon 1 rocket, a two-stage liquid-fueled craft built to put small satellites into orbit.

Station astronauts Don Pettit and Andre Kuipers grappled Dragon with the Canadarm2 robotic arm on 25 May 2012 and berthed it to the Harmony node. Dragon became the first commercially developed space vehicle to reach the station and restored an American capability to deliver cargo there, and it was scheduled to stay docked for about a week before returning to Earth on 31 May for retrieval. On the first contracted resupply run under NASA's Commercial Resupply Services contract it delivered 882 pounds of supplies, including 260 pounds of crew supplies and 390 pounds of research gear, and brought 1,673 pounds of cargo back, among it 866 pounds of scientific research; NASA expected at least 12 SpaceX cargo missions to the station through 2016 under that contract.

A Falcon 9 first stage touched down about 10km from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral late on a Monday night in December 2015, after the flight had put 11 communications satellites into orbit from an altitude of some 200km. The landing was not the first vertical landing of a booster, but the Falcon 9 flight went twice as high as the smaller New Shepard rocket had done. On its demonstration flight the Falcon Heavy landed two of its three first stages and sent a Tesla Roadster carrying a suited mannequin into orbit around the Sun, and in April 2019 it flew its first operational mission.

Demo-2 was the first launch of SpaceX's Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 with astronauts aboard and an end-to-end test of the crew transportation system. Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley lifted off on 30 May 2020 at 3:22 p.m. EDT from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, the first time since the shuttle program's end in 2011 that astronauts launched to low Earth orbit from American soil. Crew Dragon is designed to dock autonomously while the crews aboard the spacecraft and the station monitor its approach. Crew-1 followed on 15 November 2020 with four astronauts as the first operational flight under NASA's Commercial Crew Program.

The fully stacked Starship, 394 feet tall and powered by 33 Raptor engines, rose from Starbase's launch mount on its first flight on 20 April 2023, but the upper stage failed to separate from the Super Heavy booster and the stack exploded just under four minutes after launch. Starship stands 123 metres tall and is meant to be fully reusable, and NASA hopes to use a version as a lunar lander. On the seventh test mission in January 2025 the upper stage broke up over the Caribbean and forced airlines to alter course, and the FAA told SpaceX to carry out a mishap investigation before the rocket could return to flight.

Musk became one of the major funders of Tesla Motors, the electric car company founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, and in 2008, already its principal backer, he became chief executive officer.

In August 2006 he published the Tesla Motors master plan and set out the Roadster as the company's first product. The plan's stated purpose was to speed the shift from a hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric one, and its strategy was to start at the high end of the market and then drive down to higher volume and lower prices with each model. Musk said the second model would be a sporty four-door at roughly half the Roadster's $89,000 price and the third would be cheaper still.

Tesla introduced the Model S sedan, which drew praise from automotive critics for its performance and design. The Model 3 entered production in 2017 and became the best-selling electric car of all time.

On 7 August 2018 Musk told his 22 million followers that he could take Tesla private at $420 a share with funding already secured. The SEC charged Musk, as Tesla's chief executive and chairman, with securities fraud over a series of false and misleading tweets about a possible take-private deal, alleging that he had not discussed specific deal terms with any potential financing partner and knew the transaction was uncertain. The tweets lifted Tesla's stock by more than six percent that day and caused significant market disruption.

Filed in the Southern District of New York, the complaint sought an injunction, disgorgement, civil penalties and a bar on Musk serving as an officer or director of a public company. Musk agreed to settle the charge, and the SEC also charged Tesla with failing to keep required disclosure controls over his tweets, a charge the company agreed to settle. The settlements removed Musk as Tesla's chairman, barred him from re-election to that post for three years and added two independent directors to the board, with Musk and Tesla each paying a $20 million penalty and neither admitting nor denying the allegations.

Musk launched the Starlink project in 2015 in part to bankroll his ambition of a human colony on Mars. The 2024 Starlink report notes that a third of humanity remains offline and many more have only slow, intermittent or unaffordable connectivity.

By its 2024 progress report Starlink was serving more than 4.6 million customers around the world. It serves aviation, rail and maritime customers as well as homes and businesses on land, and the optimized V2 Mini satellites allow up to 29 satellites to launch on a single Falcon 9 mission. SpaceX opened a 700,000 square foot kit factory in Bastrop, Texas, and produced one million Standard kits there in its first 10 months.

Neuralink was founded in 2016. The US Food and Drug Administration approved its first human trial in May 2023, and the company sought participants aged 22 and above living with quadriplegia. In September 2023 Neuralink announced the trial and began recruiting; the PRIME trial uses a robot to insert the implant's threads into the part of the brain that plans movement. In January 2024 Musk announced that the first human had received an implant and was recovering well. A professor of implantable medical devices called the implant a significant milestone and noted that only a few companies had put such devices in people.

xAI was founded by Musk in March 2023 and became the parent company of X two years later. Grok was launched in November 2023 on X, at first for premium subscribers and later for all users, and xAI describes it as handling text, code, voice, images and video through a single unified API. Grok's conversational style is modeled on Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and is built to answer with wit and sarcasm.

On 2 February 2026 SpaceX completed its acquisition of X.AI Holdings Corp., and xAI became a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX as the company consolidated its AI operations.

Musk completed his $44bn takeover of Twitter as the world's richest man on 28 October 2022, according to a filing with the US government. Twitter's chief executive Parag Agrawal and several other top executives were reportedly fired as Musk took over. The New York Stock Exchange suspended trading in Twitter shares, giving merger effective as the reason. Completion of the deal ended months of legal wrangling but raised questions about the platform's future direction.

In January 2025 Musk took charge of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in President Donald Trump's second administration. He led it for four months before stepping down in May 2025.

Beyond SpaceX, Tesla, X and xAI, Musk started The Boring Company, which began as a division of SpaceX and was spun off in 2018; it dug a 1.8-kilometre test tunnel near Hawthorne, California, for less than $10 million and has outlined plans to expand its tunnels in Las Vegas. Musk helped found OpenAI and left it in 2018; in 2024 he sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of departing from the venture's nonprofit mission.