On 12 June, SpaceX went public, and Elon Musk became the first trillionaire. Forbes put the opening valuation at nearly $2 trillion and said Musk holds 38% of the company, options included. Britannica gives a slightly different picture: 555.6 million shares sold at $135 each, $75 billion raised, a company worth about $1.77 trillion. Either way, a boy from Pretoria who sold a video game for about $500 had reached a number no one had reached before.
From Pretoria to PayPal
Musk was born on 28 June 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, to a South African father and a Canadian mother. By 12 he had written a game, Blastar, and sold it to a computer magazine. In 1988 he left on a Canadian passport, saying he did not want to serve in a compulsory military that propped up apartheid, and he wanted the wider economic chances open in the United States.
He studied at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he took bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics. A graduate place in physics at Stanford lasted two days. He decided the internet would change society faster than physics could, and he walked out.
In 1995 he founded Zip2, which supplied maps and business directories to online newspapers. Compaq bought it in 1999 for $307 million. Musk went straight into X.com, an online payments company that became PayPal. EBay paid $1.5 billion for it in 2002.
Rockets and cars
Musk had long argued that humanity must become a multiplanet species, and he thought launches cost far too much. So in 2002 he founded SpaceX. The Falcon 1 first flew in 2006 and the Falcon 9 in 2010. On 25 May 2012 its Dragon capsule became the first commercial spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station. By 2024, Britannica notes, SpaceX handled more than half of the world’s orbital launches.
Starlink, the satellite network he launched in 2015, had 9,633 active satellites by January 2026, more than half of everything active in orbit. Subscribers topped five million in 2025.
Tesla came in 2004, when Musk became one of its main funders. Forbes says he has run it as CEO since 2008 and owns nearly 11% of it. The Roadster arrived in 2006, the Model S in 2012, the Model X in 2015, and the cheaper Model 3 in 2017, which became the best-selling electric car ever. In November 2025 shareholders approved a pay package worth up to $1 trillion, tied to targets that include lifting Tesla’s market value to about $8.5 trillion.
Twitter, xAI and the rest
In April 2022 Musk disclosed a stake of more than 9% in Twitter, declined a board seat and offered $54.20 a share, $44 billion in all. In July he tried to pull out, claiming the company had not given enough information about bot accounts. Twitter sued. Facing a legal fight, Musk went ahead and the sale closed in October. He laid off about half of the staff, sold blue check marks for $8 a month and brought back many banned accounts. Advertisers fled. In July 2023 the name changed to X.
He founded the AI company xAI in 2023. Its main product is the chatbot Grok. Forbes reports that SpaceX bought xAI in February in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion, and that Twitter had been merged into xAI almost a year earlier.
There were also Neuralink, founded in 2016 to build a brain implant, and The Boring Company, which grew out of his frustration with Los Angeles traffic. Neuralink put its Telepathy chip into a 29-year-old man with quadriplegia by early 2024, and he could move a cursor and play chess by thought.
Fights and politics
Not everything went his way. In 2018 the SEC sued him over tweets about taking Tesla private at $420 a share, and he stepped down as chairman for three years and paid a fine of $20 million, as did Tesla. He left OpenAI in 2018, and in 2024 he sued the company he helped found. Britannica reports that in spring 2026 a jury in California ruled against him, finding he had waited too long to file.
He backed Donald Trump heavily in 2024, spent hundreds of millions of dollars through America PAC, and helped run the Department of Government Efficiency until he left in May 2025. He then fell out publicly with Trump.
Forbes lists him at age 55, living in Austin, Texas, with at least 14 children by four women. In its words, he says he works from a physics approach: “You boil things down to the first principles or fundamental truths in a particular area and then you reason up from there.”
