Early Life
Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa, to Maye Musk, a Canadian-born model and dietitian, and Errol Musk, a South African electromechanical engineer. He has a younger brother, Kimbal, and a younger sister, Tosca. Musk graduated from Pretoria Boys High School and, as a child, developed an early interest in computing; at age 12 he created and sold the code for a video game called Blastar to a magazine for approximately $500.
In 1988, at age 17, Musk moved to Canada, obtaining citizenship through his Saskatchewan-born mother. He attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, for two years before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, where he earned dual bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics, graduating in 1995. He then briefly enrolled in a Ph.D. program in applied physics at Stanford that same year but dropped out after two days to pursue opportunities in the emerging internet sector.
In 1995, Musk co-founded Zip2 with his brother Kimbal, an online city-guide software company for newspapers. Zip2 secured contracts with major papers including The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. In February 1999, Compaq acquired Zip2 for nearly $300 million in cash and $34 million in stock options; Musk received about $22 million from the sale, his first major financial windfall.
Rise
Using proceeds from the Zip2 sale, Musk co-founded X.com in March 1999, an online financial services and email payment company. In early 2000, X.com merged with Confinity, maker of a money-transfer service called PayPal, and the combined business later adopted the PayPal name. In October 2000, while Musk was on vacation, he was ousted as CEO by the board; he remained a major shareholder. In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in stock, and Musk, the largest shareholder with 11.7% of shares, received approximately $165 million from the sale.
With the proceeds, Musk turned to space exploration, founding Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) in June 2002 with the goal of reducing space transportation costs. He invested $100 million of his own money and served as CEO and chief engineer. SpaceX’s first three launches of the Falcon 1 rocket, between 2006 and 2008, ended in failure, nearly bankrupting the venture.
Simultaneously, Musk joined Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.) in 2004 as a lead investor and chairman of the board after leading its Series A funding round. He did not found Tesla but became deeply involved in product strategy, particularly for the Roadster, the company’s first electric vehicle. He assumed the role of CEO in 2008 amid a worsening financial crisis at Tesla.
Peak
SpaceX achieved its first successful orbital launch on September 28, 2008, when the Falcon 1 rocket reached orbit on its fourth attempt, making SpaceX the first privately funded company to launch a liquid-fueled rocket into orbit. The success came as both SpaceX and Tesla were nearly out of funds. NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract that December under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program to resupply the International Space Station, providing crucial financial validation.
Under Musk’s leadership, SpaceX developed the Falcon 9 rocket, first launched in 2010, and the Dragon spacecraft, which in May 2012 became the first commercial spacecraft to dock with the ISS. SpaceX went on to pioneer reusable rocket technology, with the first successful vertical landing of an orbital-class booster in December 2015 — a breakthrough that drastically cut launch costs.
At Tesla, Musk oversaw the launch of the Model S sedan in 2012 to widespread acclaim, followed by the Model X SUV in 2015 and the more affordable Model 3, which began production in 2017 and became the world’s best-selling electric vehicle by 2018. Tesla’s market capitalization surpassed $1 trillion in 2021.
Musk also founded Neuralink in 2016, developing implantable brain-machine interfaces, and The Boring Company later that year to pursue underground tunneling for urban transport. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a non-profit AI research organization, stepping down from its board in 2018 over potential conflicts of interest with Tesla’s AI work.
Turning Point
In April 2022, Musk began acquiring shares in Twitter, Inc., eventually accumulating a 9.1% stake, making him the largest shareholder. He initially joined the board but declined the position after a week. On April 25, 2022, Musk made an unsolicited offer to purchase Twitter for $44 billion, or $54.20 per share. The offer was accepted by Twitter’s board, triggering a contentious process. Musk later sought to terminate the deal in July 2022, citing concerns about spam and fake accounts, which led to a lawsuit by Twitter to enforce the merger agreement.
Facing an imminent trial in Delaware Chancery Court that was widely expected to go against him, Musk abandoned his effort to exit the deal and completed the acquisition on October 27, 2022, for approximately $44 billion. He took the company private, dismissed top executives including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and general counsel Sean Edgett, and assumed the role of CEO himself. Musk immediately implemented sweeping changes, including a significant workforce reduction—estimates suggest around 80% of Twitter’s staff were laid off or resigned in the months following the takeover—and introduced a new subscription service, Twitter Blue, offering verification for a monthly fee.
The platform was rebranded as “X” in July 2023, with the iconic bird logo replaced by an X. Musk stated the rebranding was part of a vision to transform the platform into an “everything app” offering payments, messaging, and other services, inspired by models like WeChat. The change was met with mixed reactions, including criticism over the loss of brand recognition and concerns about increased hate speech and misinformation under revised content moderation policies. Advertisers paused spending amid uncertainty, though some returned as the platform stabilized.
Legacy and Aftermath
By the mid-2020s Musk had assembled one of the most unusual portfolios in modern business: an electric-car maker that pushed the global auto industry toward electrification, a rocket company that restored American human spaceflight and drove down launch costs through reusable boosters, a satellite-internet network (Starlink) spun out of SpaceX, and a brain-interface venture in Neuralink. Tesla’s rise repeatedly made him, at various points, the wealthiest person in the world on paper, his fortune tied closely to the company’s volatile share price.
His ownership of X, formerly Twitter, placed him at the centre of debates over online speech, content moderation and misinformation, while his growing political engagement made him one of the most polarising figures in technology. Supporters credit him with reviving industries others had written off; critics point to erratic public statements, labour and regulatory disputes, and the concentration of so much strategic infrastructure under a single individual. However his legacy is ultimately judged, Musk has already reshaped the trajectory of multiple global industries and remains a defining — and divisive — figure of his era.
