When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.
Elon Reeve Musk (born June 28, 1971) is a South African–born entrepreneur, engineer, and industrialist who has redefined multiple industries through audacious, first-principles thinking. He is the founder, CEO, or key architect of Tesla (electric vehicles), SpaceX (space exploration), Neuralink (brain–computer interfaces), The Boring Company (infrastructure tunneling), xAI (artificial intelligence), and X (social media platform, formerly Twitter). With a real-time net worth often exceeding $200 billion, Musk is among the wealthiest individuals in history. His stated mission—“to extend the light of consciousness” across Earth and beyond—drives projects aimed at sustainable energy, multi-planetary humanity, and AI safety.
Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, to Errol Musk, an engineer and property developer, and Maye Musk, a Canadian model and dietitian. The eldest of three siblings (brother Kimbal, sister Tosca), he endured a turbulent childhood marked by his parents’ divorce at age 9 and a strained relationship with his father.
A voracious reader and self-taught coder, Musk wrote a video game called Blastar at age 12 and sold it for $500. Bullied relentlessly at school, he once required hospitalization after being thrown down concrete stairs. At 17, he left South Africa to avoid mandatory military service, moving first to Canada via his mother’s citizenship, then to the United States.
Musk briefly attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned dual bachelor’s degrees in economics (Wharton School) and physics (College of Arts and Sciences) in 1997. He enrolled in a PhD program in applied physics at Stanford University in 1995 but dropped out after two days to pursue internet entrepreneurship during the dot-com boom.
| Company | Founded | Key Milestones |
|---|---|---|
| Zip2 | 1995 | Online city guide software; sold to Compaq for $307 million (1999) |
| X.com / PayPal | 1999 | Online payments; merged with Confinity, sold to eBay for $1.5 billion (2002) |
| SpaceX | 2002 | First private company to reach orbit (2008), land a reusable rocket (2015), send astronauts to ISS (2020); Starship aims for Mars |
| Tesla | 2004 (joined as chairman; became CEO 2008) | Model S (2012), Model 3 (2017), Cybertruck (2023); world’s most valuable carmaker by 2020 |
| SolarCity | 2006 (co-founded with cousins) | Merged into Tesla (2016) |
| OpenAI | 2015 (co-founder) | Left board 2018 over direction conflicts |
| Neuralink | 2016 | First human implant (2024) |
| The Boring Company | 2016 | Vegas Loop operational (2021) |
| Twitter / X | 2022 (acquired) | Rebranded 2023; introduced Grok AI |
| xAI | 2023 | Released Grok large language model |
Musk’s leadership style is intense and hands-on; he often sleeps on factory floors during production crises (“production hell”). He holds no college degree in engineering yet designs rocket engines and battery systems alongside teams of PhDs.
Musk has been married three times:
He has 11 known living children and is an advocate for pronatalism, warning of population collapse. Musk is a workaholic (80–120-hour weeks), transhumanist, and Asperger’s syndrome self-discloser (SNL 2021). He holds U.S., Canadian, and South African citizenship.
Hobbies include video games (Elden Ring, Diablo IV), sci-fi (The Hitchhiker’s Guide, Foundation), and anime (Evangelion, Spirited Away). He plays the piano and speaks conversational Mandarin.
At 54 (202io 2025), Musk remains hyperactive:
He lives primarily in Austin, Texas, in a modest Boxabl prefab home near SpaceX’s Starbase.
Musk has:
Love or loathe him, Musk embodies the techno-optimist archetype—a real-time fusion of Edison, Ford, and Howard Hughes. His companies employ >120,000 people and touch daily life via cars, internet, energy, and social media. Whether humanity colonizes Mars or reins in rogue AI, the 21st century’s trajectory bears his fingerprints.