Biography of Elon Musk

Born in Pretoria in 1971, Musk taught himself to program as a child and sold his first software — a game called Blastar — at age 12. Determined to reach the centre of the technology world, he moved to Canada at 17, then to the United States, earning bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He briefly enrolled in a Stanford PhD in 1995 before dropping out within days to start a company as the internet boom took off.

Musk co-founded Zip2, an online city-guide and business-directory company, in 1995; Compaq bought it for $307 million in 1999, netting him about $22 million. He immediately founded the online bank X.com, which merged with Confinity to become PayPal. When eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, Musk — its largest shareholder — walked away with roughly $175 million and a reputation as one of the original "PayPal Mafia." Rather than retire, he bet the entire fortune on much harder problems.

In 2002 Musk founded SpaceX to make spaceflight radically cheaper; in 2004 he led Tesla’s Series A and became chairman, later CEO. Both nearly failed. SpaceX’s first three Falcon 1 launches blew up, and by late 2008 — with Tesla days from payroll failure — Musk was almost broke. Then Falcon 1 reached orbit (September 2008), NASA awarded a $1.6 billion contract that December, and Tesla’s rescue financing closed on Christmas Eve. It was, he has said, the worst and most pivotal year of his life.

Over the next decade Musk’s companies did what experts said couldn’t be done. Tesla shipped the Model S (2012), opened the Supercharger network, and built Gigafactories; SpaceX debuted Falcon 9, became the first private company to reach the ISS (2012), and — most dramatically — landed and then re-flew orbital rockets (2015–2017), upending launch economics. He also co-founded SolarCity and OpenAI, and published the open-source Hyperloop concept.

Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y turned it into the most valuable automaker on Earth, crossing a $1 trillion valuation in 2021; the Model Y became the best-selling car in the world in 2023. SpaceX deployed Starlink to millions, flew the first all-civilian orbital mission, and began testing Starship, the largest rocket ever built. Musk founded Neuralink (2016) and, in 2022, acquired Twitter for $44 billion, rebranding it X. TIME named him Person of the Year in 2021.

Musk founded xAI in 2023 and built the Colossus supercomputer in record time; Neuralink implanted its device in its first humans from 2024; SpaceX caught a returning Starship booster with the launch tower (2024) and now launches the majority of the world’s payload to orbit; Tesla launched a paid Robotaxi service (2025). He became the first person worth more than $400 billion. This era has also been his most politically controversial — the subject of much of this site’s "Myth Busters" and "The Record" sections, which address the criticisms directly and with sources.