Elon Reeve Musk born June 28, 1971) is a businessman and U.S. best known for in Tesla, Inc., SpaceX, and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and his ownership of Twitter. Musk is the wealthiest individual in the world; as of February 2025, Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$397 billion.
A member of the wealthy South African Musk family, Musk was born in Pretoria before immigrating to Canada, acquiring its citizenship from his mother. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University, and with his brother Kimbal co-founded the software company Zip2, that was later acquired by Compaq in 1999. That same year, Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank, that later formed PayPal. In 2002, Musk acquired U.S. citizenship, and eBay acquired PayPal. Using the money he made from the sale, Musk founded SpaceX, a spaceflight services company, in 2002. In 2004, Musk was an early investor in electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla and became its chairman and later CEO. In 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Musk for fraud, alleging he falsely announced that he had secured funding for a private takeover of Tesla; he stepped down as chairman and paid a fine. Musk was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2021. In 2022, he acquired Twitter, and rebranded the service as X the following year. In January 2025, he was appointed head of Trump’s newly created DOGE.
His political activities and views have made him a polarizing figure. He has been criticized for making unscientific and misleading statements, including COVID-19 misinformation, affirming antisemitic and transphobic comments, and promoting conspiracy theories. His acquisition of Twitter was controversial due to a subsequent increase in hate speech and the spread of misinformation on the service. Musk has engaged in political activities in several countries, including as a vocal and financial supporter of U.S. president Donald Trump. He was the largest donor in the 2024 United States presidential election, and is a supporter of far-right activists, causes, and political parties.
Early life
Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital.[2][3] He is of British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry.[4][5] His mother, Maye (née Haldeman), is a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan, Canada, and raised in South Africa.[6][7][8][a] His father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, emerald dealer, and property developer, who partly owned a rental lodge at Timbavati Private Nature Reserve.[14][15][16][17] Elon has a younger brother, Kimbal, a younger sister, Tosca, as well as four paternal half-siblings.[18][19][8][20] Musk was raised in the Anglican Church, in which he was baptized.[21][22]
The Musk family was wealthy during Elon’s youth.[17] Despite both Elon and Errol previously stating that Errol was a part owner of a Zambian emerald mine,[17] in 2023, Errol recounted that the deal he made was to receive “a portion of the emeralds produced at three small mines”.[23][24] Errol was elected to the Pretoria City Council as a representative of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party and has said that his children shared their father’s dislike of apartheid.[2]
After his parents divorced in 1980, Elon chose to live primarily with his father.[4][14] Elon later regretted his decision and became estranged from his father.[25] Elon has recounted trips to a wilderness school that he described as a “paramilitary Lord of the Flies” where “bullying was a virtue” and children were encouraged to fight over rations.[26] In one incident, after an altercation with a fellow pupil, Elon was thrown down concrete steps and beaten severely, leading to him being hospitalized for his injuries.[27] Elon described his father berating him after he was discharged from the hospital.[27] Errol denied berating Elon and claimed, “The boy had just lost his father to suicide and Elon had called him stupid. Elon had a tendency to call people stupid. How could I possibly blame that child?”[28]
Elon was an enthusiastic reader of books, and had attributed his success in part to having read The Lord of the Rings, the Foundation series, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.[16][29] At age ten, he developed an interest in computing and video games, teaching himself how to program from the VIC-20 user manual.[30] At age twelve, Elon sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500.[31][32]
Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Bryanston High School, and then Pretoria Boys High School, where he graduated.[33] Musk was a good but unexceptional student, earning a 61 in Afrikaans and a B on his senior math certification.[34] Musk applied for a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother to avoid South Africa’s mandatory military service,[35][36] which would have forced him to participate in the apartheid regime,[2] as well as to ease his path to immigration to the United States.[37] While waiting for his application to be processed, he attended the University of Pretoria for five months.[38]
Musk arrived in Canada in June 1989, connected with a second cousin in Saskatchewan,[39] and worked odd jobs including at a farm and a lumber mill.[40] In 1990, he entered Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.[41][42] Two years later, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied until 1995.[43] Although Musk has said that he earned his degrees in 1995, the University of Pennsylvania did not award them until 1997 – a Bachelor of Arts in physics and a Bachelor of Science in economics from the university’s Wharton School.[44][45][46][47][48] He reportedly hosted large, ticketed house parties to help pay for tuition, and wrote a business plan for an electronic book-scanning service similar to Google Books.[49]
In 1994, Musk held two internships in Silicon Valley: one at energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which investigated electrolytic supercapacitors for energy storage, and another at Palo Alto–based startup Rocket Science Games.[50][51] In 1995, he was accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University, but did not enroll.[46][44][52] Musk decided to join the Internet boom, applying for a job at Netscape, to which he reportedly never received a response.[53][35] The Washington Post reported that Musk lacked legal authorization to remain and work in the United States after failing to enroll at Stanford.[52] In response, Musk said he was allowed to work at that time and that his student visa transitioned to an H1-B. According to numerous former business associates and shareholders, Musk said he was on a student visa at the time.[54]
Business career
Zip2
| External videos | |
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 Musk speaks of his early business experience during a 2014 commencement speech at University of Southern California on YouTube |
In 1995, Musk, his brother Kimbal, and Greg Kouri founded web software company Zip2 with funds borrowed from Musk’s father.[55][25] They housed the venture at a small rented office in Palo Alto.[56] The company developed and marketed an Internet city guide for the newspaper publishing industry, with maps, directions, and yellow pages.[57]
According to Musk, “The website was up during the day and I was coding it at night, seven days a week, all the time.”[56] The Musk brothers obtained contracts with The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune,[58] and persuaded the board of directors to abandon plans for a merger with CitySearch.[59] Musk’s attempts to become CEO were thwarted by the board.[60] Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash in February 1999,[61][62] and Musk received $22 million for his 7-percent share.[63]
X.com and PayPal
In 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company.[64] The startup was one of the first federally insured online banks, and, in its initial months of operation, over 200,000 customers joined the service.[65] The company’s investors regarded Musk as inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit CEO Bill Harris by the end of the year.[66] The following year, X.com merged with online bank Confinity to avoid competition.[56][66][67] Founded by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel,[68] Confinity had its own money-transfer service, PayPal, which was more popular than X.com’s service.[69]
Within the merged company, Musk returned as CEO. Musk’s preference for Microsoft software over Unix created a rift in the company and caused Thiel to resign.[70] Due to resulting technological issues and lack of a cohesive business model, the board ousted Musk and replaced him with Thiel in 2000.[71][b] Under Thiel, the company focused on the PayPal service and was renamed PayPal in 2001.[73][74] In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk—the largest shareholder with 11.72% of shares—received $175.8 million.[75][76] In 2017, Musk purchased the domain X.com from PayPal for an undisclosed amount, stating that it had sentimental value.[77][78]