Elon Musk

Overview

Elon Musk is an entrepreneur born on 28 June 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa. He leads several technology companies, and the best-known are SpaceX, Tesla and xAI. Musk founded SpaceX in May 2002 and served as its CEO and chief engineer.^[1] He became the CEO of Tesla in 2008, after leading Tesla's Series A financing in February 2004.^[1]

Education and early work

Musk received a B.A. in physics and a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1997.^[1] In 1995 he co-founded Zip2, a web software company. Compaq acquired Zip2 in February 1999. The same year he founded X.com, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal.^[1]

Main contributions

Musk's companies have worked on rockets, electric vehicles, online payments and artificial intelligence. Among his companies are SpaceX, which he founded in 2002, and Tesla, which he led from 2004 and later as CEO. He also co-founded Neuralink in 2016 and founded The Boring Company in 2017.^[1]

In the field of AI, Musk co-founded OpenAI in December 2015 and left its board in 2018.^[1][2] On 12 July 2023 he announced xAI, describing its aim as building a “maximally truth-seeking” AI. xAI's chatbot is Grok.^[2]

He completed the acquisition of Twitter, which later became X, on 27 October 2022 for about $44 billion.^[1]

Positions held

In 2025 Musk advised President Trump and was the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency. He left the administration in May 2025.^[1]

He merged xAI with X Corp. in March 2025, and merged xAI with SpaceX on 2 February 2026.^[2][3][1] SpaceX went public in June 2026.^[1]

Influence

Musk's career has covered space launch, electric cars, online payments, social media and artificial intelligence. In 2026 he brought xAI into SpaceX, and SpaceX then went public in June 2026.^[3][1]