Elon Musk was born in 1971, is a businessman known for his key roles in the space company SpaceX and the automotive company Tesla, Inc. Other involvements include ownership of X Corp., the company that operates the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), and his role in the founding of the Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink, and OpenAI.
In November 2024, president-elect Donald Trump announced Musk is set to become co-chair of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the second Trump administration. Musk is the wealthiest individual in the world; as of November 2024 Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$304 billion.
Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and briefly attended the University of Pretoria before immigrating to Canada at the age of 18, acquiring citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. Two years later, he matriculated at Queen's University at Kingston in Canada. Musk later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and received bachelor's degrees in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University but never enrolled in classes, and with his brother Kimbal co-founded the online city guide software company Zip2. The startup was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. That same year, Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. In 2002, Musk acquired US citizenship, and that October eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion. Using $100 million of the money he made from the sale of PayPal, Musk founded SpaceX, a spaceflight services company, in 2002.
In 2004, Musk was an early investor in electric-vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (later Tesla, Inc.), providing most of the initial financing and assuming the position of the company's chairman. He later became the product architect and, in 2008, the CEO. In 2006, Musk helped create SolarCity, a solar energy company that was acquired by Tesla in 2016 and became Tesla Energy. In 2013, he proposed a hyperloop high-speed vactrain transportation system.
In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company. The following year Musk co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology company developing brain–computer interfaces, and The Boring Company, a tunnel construction company.
In 2018 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Musk, alleging that he had falsely announced that he had secured funding for a private takeover of Tesla. To settle the case Musk stepped down as the chairman of Tesla and paid a $20 million fine. In 2022, he acquired Twitter for $44 billion, merged the company into the newly-created X Corp. and rebranded the service as X the following year. In March 2023, Musk founded xAI, an artificial-intelligence company.
In early 2024, Musk became active in American politics as a vocal and financial supporter of Donald Trump, becoming Trump's second-largest individual donor in October 2024. In November 2024, Trump announced that he had chosen Musk to co-lead along with Vivek Ramaswamy a new DOGE department which aims to improve government efficiency through measures such as slashing "excess regulations" and cutting "wasteful expenditures".
Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa's administrative capital. His mother, Maye (née Haldeman), is a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan, Canada, and raised in South Africa. 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 the Timbavati Private Nature Reserve. Elon has a younger brother, Kimbal, and a younger sister, Tosca. After his parents divorced in 1980, Elon chose to live primarily with his father. Elon later regretted his decision and became estranged from his father.
Elon was an enthusiastic reader of books. At age ten, he developed an interest in computing and video games, teaching himself how to program from the VIC-20 user manual. At age twelve, Elon sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500.
Musk graduated from Pretoria Boys High School in South Africa. He attended the University of Pretoria for five months.
Musk applied for a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother. Musk arrived in Canada in June 1989, connected with a second cousin in Saskatchewan, and worked odd jobs including at a farm and a lumber mill.
In 1990, he entered Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Two years later, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied until 1995. 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.
He wrote a business plan for an electronic book-scanning service. In 1994, Musk held two internships in Silicon Valley: one at energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which investigated electrolytic ultracapacitors for energy storage, and another at Palo Alto–based startup Rocket Science Games.
In 1995, he was accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University, but did not enroll. Musk decided to join the Internet boom,
Business
career
Elon Musk has started a number of businesses since 1995, with initial business success and liquidity gained from sales of equity in one business providing the capital for him to start subsequent business enterprises. Musk is widely considered a serial entrepreneur. By the 2020s, several Musk businesses had formed strategic partnerships with some employees playing roles simultaneously in more than one of Musk's companies.
In 1995, Musk, his brother Kimbal, and Greg Kouri founded Global Link Information Network, later renamed to Zip2. The company developed an Internet city guide with maps, directions, and yellow pages, and marketed it to newspapers. They worked at a small rented office in Palo Alto, with Musk coding the website every night. Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash in February 1999, and Musk received $22 million for his 7-percent share.
In March 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company with $12 million of the money he made from the Compaq acquisition. X.com was one of the first online banks that was federally insured, and over 200,000 customers joined in its initial months of operation.
Musk's friends expressed skepticism about the naming of the online bank, fearing it might have been mistaken for a pornographic site. Musk brushed off their concerns, emphasizing that the name was meant to be straightforward, memorable, and easy to type. Although Musk founded the company, investors regarded him as inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit CEO Bill Harris by the end of the year.
In 2000, X.com merged with the online bank Confinity to avoid competition, as the latter's money-transfer service PayPal was more popular than X.com's service.
Musk then returned as CEO of the merged company.
His preference for Microsoft- over Unix-based software caused a rift among the company's employees, and eventually led Confinity co-founder Peter Thiel to resign. With the company suffering from compounding technological issues and the lack of a cohesive business model, the board ousted Musk and replaced him with Thiel in September 2000. Under Thiel, the company focused on the money-transfer service and was renamed PayPal in 2001.
In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk—PayPal's largest shareholder with 11.7% of shares—received $176 million.
In 2002, Elon Musk founded SpaceX.
In 2004 Elon Musk joined Tesla
as the largest shareholder. In 2008, Elon Musk became CEO of Tesla.
Tesla was founded in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning as Tesla Moto
Musk
founded SpaceX in May 2002 and became the company's CEO and chief engineer.
SpaceX succeeded in launching the Falcon 1 into orbit in 2008. Later that year, SpaceX received a $1.6 billion Commercial Resupply Services contract from NASA for 12 flights of its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS), replacing the Space Shuttle after its 2011 retirement. In 2012, the Dragon vehicle docked with the ISS, a first for a commercial spacecraft.
Working towards its goal of reusable rockets, in 2015 SpaceX successfully landed the first stage of a Falcon 9 on a land platform. Later landings were achieved on autonomous spaceport drone ships, an ocean-based recovery platform. In 2018, SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy; the inaugural mission carried Musk's personal Tesla Roadster as a dummy payload. Since 2019, SpaceX has been developing Starship, a fully-reusable, super-heavy-lift launch vehicle intended to replace the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy. 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. In 2024, NASA awarded SpaceX an $843 million contract to deorbit the ISS at the end of its lifespan.
In 2015, SpaceX began development of the Starlink constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to provide satellite Internet access,[106] with the first two prototype satellites launched in February 2018. A second set of test satellites, and the first large deployment of a piece of the constellation, occurred in May 2019, when the first 60 operational satellites were launched. 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.
During the March 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Musk sent Starlink terminals to Ukraine to provide Internet access and communication. In October 2022, Musk stated that about 20,000 satellite terminals had been donated to Ukraine, together with free data transfer subscriptions, which cost SpaceX $80 million. After asking the United States Department of Defense to pay for further units and future subscriptions on behalf of Ukraine, Musk publicly stated that SpaceX would continue to provide Starlink to Ukraine for free, at a yearly cost to itself of $400 million.
In 2016, Musk co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology startup company, with an investment of $100 million.[185][186] Neuralink aims to integrate the human brain with artificial intelligence (AI) by creating devices that are embedded in the brain. Such technology could enhance memory or allow the devices to communicate with software.[186][187] The company also hopes to develop devices with which to treat neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, dementia, and spinal cord injuries.
In
2017, Musk founded The Boring Company to construct tunnels, and revealed plans
for specialized, underground, high-occupancy vehicles that could travel up to
150 miles per hour and thus circumvent above-ground traffic in major
cities. Early in 2017, the company began discussions with regulatory bodies and initiated construction of a 30-foot wide,
50-foot long, and 15-foot deep "test trench" on the premises
of SpaceX's offices, as that required no permits.
In 2017, Musk expressed interest in buying Twitter and had questioned the platform's commitment to freedom of speech. In 2022, Musk bought Twitter for $44B. Musk discovered fake “Robots” users, Left-Wing infiltration, Conservative voice suppression and laid off 80% of its employees. He renamed it X.
Musk is president of the Musk Foundation he founded in 2001,[267][268] whose stated purpose is to: provide solar-power energy systems in disaster areas; support research, development, and advocacy (for interests including human space exploration, pediatrics, renewable energy and "safe artificial intelligence"); and support science and engineering educational efforts.
As of 2020, the foundation has made 350 donations. Around half of them were made to scientific research or education nonprofits. Notable beneficiaries include his alma mater the University of Pennsylvania, From 2002 to 2018, the foundation gave $25 million directly to nonprofit organizations, nearly half of which went to Musk' The Foundation also allocated $100 million of donations to be used to establish a new higher education university in Texas.
In December 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI, a not-for-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research company aiming to develop artificial general intelligence intended to be safe and beneficial to humanity.
In 2023, Elon Musk launched an artificial intelligence company called xAI, which aims to develop a generative AI program that competes with existing offerings like ChatGPT. The company hired engineers from Google and OpenAI. Musk obtained funding from investors in SpaceX and Tesla.
US president-elect Donald Trump announced on November 12, 2024 that Musk would become an inaugural leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a governmental advisory body. Vivek Ramaswamy would be tasked with leading the department alongside Musk.
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