Elon Musk
Elon Reeve Musk (/ˈiːlɒn/ EE-lon; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman known for his key roles in Tesla, Inc., SpaceX, and Twitter (which he rebranded as X). Since 2025, he has been a senior advisor to United States president Donald Trump and de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk is the wealthiest person in the world; as of March 2025, Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$343 billion.
Born to a prominent family in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk emigrated to Canada in 1989 and acquired its citizenship though his mother. He moved to the U.S. and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania before moving to California to pursue business ventures. In 1995, Musk co-founded the software company Zip2. After its sale in 1999, he co-founded X.com, an online payment company that later merged to form PayPal, which was acquired by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. That year, Musk also became a U.S. citizen.
In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX and became its CEO and chief engineer. The company has since led innovations in reusable rockets and commercial spaceflight. In 2004, Musk joined Tesla, Inc., as an early investor, and became its CEO and product architect in 2008; it has become a market leader in electric vehicles. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI to advance artificial intelligence research, but left its board in 2018. In 2016, Musk co-founded Neuralink, a company focused on brain–computer interfaces, and in 2017 launched the Boring Company, which aims to develop tunnel transportation. Musk was named Time magazine's Person of the Year in 2021. In 2022, he acquired Twitter, implementing significant changes and rebranding it as X in 2023. In January 2025, he was appointed head of Trump's newly created DOGE.
Musk's political activities and views have made him a polarizing figure. He has been criticized for making unscientific and misleading statements, including COVID-19 misinformation and promoting conspiracy theories. His acquisition of Twitter (now X) was controversial due to a subsequent increase in hate speech and the spread of misinformation on the service. He has engaged in political activities in several countries, including as a vocal and financial supporter of Trump. Musk was the largest donor in the 2024 U.S. presidential election and is a supporter of global far-right figures, causes, and political parties
Early life
Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa's administrative capital.[2][3] He is of British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry.[4][5] His mother, Maye (née Haldeman), is a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan, Canada, and raised in South Africa.[6][7][8][a] His father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, emerald dealer, and property developer, who partly owned a rental lodge at Timbavati Private Nature Reserve.[14][15][16][17] Elon has a younger brother, Kimbal, a younger sister, Tosca, and four paternal half-siblings.[18][19][8][20] Musk was raised in the Anglican Church, in which he was baptized.[21][22]
The Musk family was wealthy during Elon's youth.[17] Despite both Elon and Errol previously stating that Errol was a part owner of a Zambian emerald mine,[17] in 2023, Errol recounted that the deal he made was to receive "a portion of the emeralds produced at three small mines".[23][24] Errol was elected to the Pretoria City Council as a representative of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party and has said that his children shared their father's dislike of apartheid.[2]
After his parents divorced in 1980, Elon chose to live primarily with his father.[4][14] Elon later regretted his decision and became estranged from his father.[25] Elon has recounted trips to a wilderness school that he described as a "paramilitary Lord of the Flies" where "bullying was a virtue" and children were encouraged to fight over rations.[26] In one incident, after an altercation with a fellow pupil, Elon was thrown down concrete steps and beaten severely, leading to him being hospitalized for his injuries.[27] Elon described his father berating him after he was discharged from the hospital.[27] Errol denied berating Elon and claimed, "The boy had just lost his father to suicide and Elon had called him stupid. Elon had a tendency to call people stupid. How could I possibly blame that child?"[28]
Elon was an enthusiastic reader of books, and had attributed his success in part to having read The Lord of the Rings, the Foundation series, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.[16][29] At age ten, he developed an interest in computing and video games, teaching himself how to program from the VIC-20 user manual.[30] At age twelve, Elon sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500.[31][32]
Education
Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Bryanston High School, and then Pretoria Boys High School, where he graduated.[33] Musk was a good but unexceptional student, earning a 61 in Afrikaans and a B on his senior math certification.[34] Musk applied for a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother to avoid South Africa's mandatory military service,[35][36] which would have forced him to participate in the apartheid regime,[2] as well as to ease his path to immigration to the United States.[37] While waiting for his application to be processed, he attended the University of Pretoria for five months.[38]
Musk arrived in Canada in June 1989, connected with a second cousin in Saskatchewan,[39] and worked odd jobs including at a farm and a lumber mill.[40] In 1990, he entered Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.[41][42] Two years later, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied until 1995.[43] Although Musk has said that he earned his degrees in 1995, the University of Pennsylvania did not award them until 1997 – a Bachelor of Arts in physics and a Bachelor of Science in economics from the university's Wharton School.[44][45][46][47][48] He reportedly hosted large, ticketed house parties to help pay for tuition, and wrote a business plan for an electronic book-scanning service similar to Google Books.[49]
In 1994, Musk held two internships in Silicon Valley: one at energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which investigated electrolytic supercapacitors for energy storage, and another at Palo Alto–based startup Rocket Science Games.[50][51] In 1995, he was accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University, but did not enroll.[46][44][52] Musk decided to join the Internet boom, applying for a job at Netscape, to which he reportedly never received a response.[53][35] The Washington Post reported that Musk lacked legal authorization to remain and work in the United States after failing to enroll at Stanford.[52] In response, Musk said he was allowed to work at that time and that his student visa transitioned to an H1-B. According to numerous former business associates and shareholders, Musk said he was on a student visa at the time.[54]
Business career
Zip2
In 1995, Musk, his brother Kimbal, and Greg Kouri founded web software company Zip2 with funds borrowed from Musk's father.[55][25] They housed the venture at a small rented office in Palo Alto.[56] The company developed and marketed an Internet city guide for the newspaper publishing industry, with maps, directions, and yellow pages.[57]
According to Musk, "The website was up during the day and I was coding it at night, seven days a week, all the time."[56] The Musk brothers obtained contracts with The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune,[58] and persuaded the board of directors to abandon plans for a merger with CitySearch.[59] Musk's attempts to become CEO were thwarted by the board.[60] Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash in February 1999,[61][62] and Musk received $22 million for his 7-percent share.[63]
X.com and PayPal
In 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company.[64] The startup was one of the first federally insured online banks, and, in its initial months of operation, over 200,000 customers joined the service.[65] The company's investors regarded Musk as inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit CEO Bill Harris by the end of the year.[66] The following year, X.com merged with online bank Confinity to avoid competition.[56][66][67] Founded by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel,[68] Confinity had its own money-transfer service, PayPal, which was more popular than X.com's service.[69]
Within the merged company, Musk returned as CEO. Musk's preference for Microsoft software over Unix created a rift in the company and caused Thiel to resign.[70] Due to resulting technological issues and lack of a cohesive business model, the board ousted Musk and replaced him with Thiel in 2000.[71][b] Under Thiel, the company focused on the PayPal service and was renamed PayPal in 2001.[73][74] In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk—the largest shareholder with 11.72% of shares—received $175.8 million.[75][76] In 2017, Musk purchased the domain X.com from PayPal for an undisclosed amount, stating that it had sentimental value.[77][78]
SpaceX
In 2001, Musk became involved with the nonprofit Mars Society and discussed funding plans to place a growth-chamber for plants on Mars.[79] Seeking a way to launch the greenhouse payloads into space, Musk made two unsuccessful trips to Moscow to purchase intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) from Russian companies NPO Lavochkin and Kosmotras. Musk instead decided to start a company to build affordable rockets.[80] With $100 million of his early fortune,[81] Musk founded SpaceX in May 2002 and became the company's CEO and Chief Engineer.[82][83]
SpaceX attempted its first launch of the Falcon 1 rocket in 2006.[84] Although the rocket failed to reach Earth orbit, it was awarded a Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program contract from NASA, then led by Mike Griffin.[85][86] After two more failed attempts that nearly caused Musk to go bankrupt,[84] SpaceX succeeded in launching the Falcon 1 into orbit in 2008.[87] Later that year, SpaceX received a $1.6 billion NASA contract for Falcon 9-launched Dragon spacecraft flights to the International Space Station (ISS), replacing the Space Shuttle after its 2011 retirement.[88] In 2012, the Dragon vehicle docked with the ISS, a first for a commercial spacecraft.[89]
Working towards its goal of reusable rockets, in 2015 SpaceX successfully landed the first stage of a Falcon 9 on a land platform.[90] Later landings were achieved on autonomous spaceport drone ships, an ocean-based recovery platform.[91] In 2018, SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy; the inaugural mission carried Musk's personal Tesla Roadster as a dummy payload.[92][93] Since 2019,[94] SpaceX has been developing Starship, a reusable, super heavy-lift launch vehicle intended to replace the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.[95] In 2020, SpaceX launched its first crewed flight, the Demo-2, becoming the first private company to place astronauts into orbit and dock a crewed spacecraft with the ISS.[96] In 2024, NASA awarded SpaceX an $843 million contract to deorbit the ISS at the end of its lifespan
Starlink
In 2015, SpaceX began development of the Starlink constellation of low Earth orbit satellites to provide satellite Internet access.[98] After the launch of prototype satellites in 2018, the first large constellation was deployed in May 2019.[99] The total cost of the decade-long project to design, build, and deploy the constellation was estimated by SpaceX in 2020 to be $10 billion.[100][c]
During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Musk provided free Starlink service to Ukraine, permitting Internet access and communication at a yearly cost to SpaceX of $400 million.[103][104][105][106][107] However, Musk refused to block Russian state media on Starlink.[108][109] In 2023, Musk denied Ukraine's request to activate Starlink over Crimea to aid an attack against the Russian navy, citing fears of a nuclear response.[110][111][112]
Tesla
Tesla, Inc., originally Tesla Motors, was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Both men played active roles in the company's early development prior to Musk's involvement.[113] Musk led the Series A round of investment in February 2004; he invested $6.35 million, became the majority shareholder, and joined Tesla's board of directors as chairman.[114][115] Musk took an active role within the company and oversaw Roadster product design, but was not deeply involved in day-to-day business operations.[116] Following a series of escalating conflicts in 2007, and the financial crisis of 2007–2008, Eberhard was ousted from the firm.[117][page needed][118] Musk assumed leadership of the company as CEO and product architect in 2008.[119] A 2009 lawsuit settlement with Eberhard designated Musk as a Tesla co-founder, along with Tarpenning and two others.[120][121]
Tesla began delivery of the Roadster, an electric sports car, in 2008. With sales of about 2,500 vehicles, it was the first mass production all-electric car to use lithium-ion battery cells.[122] Under Musk, Tesla has since launched several well-selling electric vehicles, including the four-door sedan Model S (2012), the crossover Model X (2015), the mass-market sedan Model 3 (2017), the crossover Model Y (2020), and the pickup truck Cybertruck (2023).[123][124][125][126][127]
In May 2020 Musk resigned from chairman of the board as part of the settlement of a lawsuit from the SEC over him tweeting that funding had been "secured" for potentially taking Tesla private.[128][129]
The company has also constructed multiple lithium-ion battery and electric vehicle factories, called Gigafactories.[130] Since its initial public offering in 2010,[131] Tesla stock has risen significantly; it became the most valuable carmaker in summer 2020,[132][133] and it entered the S&P 500 later that year.[134][135] In October 2021, it reached a market capitalization of $1 trillion, the sixth company in U.S. history to do so.[136]
Recorded June 20, 2023