Elon Musk

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Elon Musk

FRS

Musk in 2018

Born Elon Reeve Musk

June 28, 1971 (age 51)

Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa

Education University of Pennsylvania (BA, BS)

 Founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX

Title
 CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.

 CEO of Twitter, Inc.

 President of the Musk Foundation

 Founder of the Boring Company and X.com (now

part of PayPal)
  Co-founder of Neuralink, OpenAI and Zip2
Justine Wilson
Spouses

(m. 2000; div. 2008)

Talulah Riley

(m. 2010; div. 2012)

(m. 2013; div. 2016)

Partner Grimes (2018–2021)[1]

Children 10[a][3]

Parents Errol Musk

Maye Musk

Family Musk family

Awards List of honors and awards

Signature

This article is part of

a series about
Elon Musk

 Awards and honors

 Views
 Filmography
 Companies

 Zip2
 X.com 
o PayPal
 SpaceX 
o Starlink
 Tesla, Inc. 
o Criticism
o Energy
o Litigation
 OpenAI
 Neuralink
 The Boring Company
 Twitter, Inc. 
o Acquisition

In popular culture

 Elon Musk
 Ludicrous
 Power Play
 "Members Only"
 "The Platonic Permutation"
 "The Musk Who Fell to Earth"
 "One Crew over the Crewcoo's Morty"

Related

 Boring Test Tunnel

 Hyperloop
 Musk family
 SolarCity
 Tesla Roadster in space
 TSLAQ

 v
 t
 e
 Elon Reeve Musk FRS (/ˈiːlɒn/ EE-lon; born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and
investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX, angel investor, CEO
and product architect of Tesla, Inc., owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc., founder of The
Boring Company, co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI, and president of the
philanthropic Musk Foundation. With an estimated net worth of around $164 billion as of
December 13, 2022,[4] Musk is the second-wealthiest person in the world according to
both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes's real-time billionaires list.[5][6]
Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa and briefly attended at the University of
Pretoria before moving to Canada at age 18, acquiring citizenship through his
Canadian-born mother. Two years later, he matriculated at Queen's University and
transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received bachelor's degrees in
economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University.
After two days, he dropped out and with his brother Kimbal, co-founded the online city
guide software company Zip2. In 1999, Zip2 was acquired by Compaq and Musk co-
founded the online bank X.com. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal,
and Musk was ousted from PayPal's board of directors.
In 2002, with his $175.8 million from eBay's acquisition of PayPal, Musk founded
SpaceX, a spaceflight services company. In 2004, he was an early investor in the
electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.). He became its
chairman and product architect, eventually assuming the position of CEO in 2008. In
2006, he helped create SolarCity, a solar energy company that was later acquired by
Tesla and became Tesla Energy. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial
intelligence research company. The following year, he co-founded Neuralink—
a neurotechnology company developing brain–computer interfaces—and The Boring
Company, a tunnel construction company. In 2022, Musk purchased the social media
platform Twitter for $44 billion. He has proposed a hyperloop high-
speed vactrain transportation system.
Musk has made controversial statements on politics and technology, particularly on
Twitter, and is a polarizing figure. He has also been criticized for making unscientific
and misleading statements, such as spreading COVID-19 misinformation. In 2018,
the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Musk for falsely tweeting
that he had secured funding for a private takeover of Tesla. Musk stepped down as
chairman of Tesla and paid a $20 million fine as part of a settlement agreement with the
SEC.

Contents

 1Early life
o 1.1Childhood and family
o 1.2Education
 2Business career
o 2.1Zip2
o 2.2X.com and PayPal
o 2.3SpaceX
  2.3.1Starlink
o 2.4Tesla
 2.4.1SEC lawsuit
 2.4.2SolarCity and Tesla Energy
o 2.5Neuralink
o 2.6The Boring Company
o 2.7Twitter
o 2.8Leadership style
 3Other activities
o 3.1Musk Foundation
o 3.2Hyperloop
o 3.3OpenAI
o 3.4Tham Luang cave rescue and defamation case
o 3.52018 Joe Rogan podcast appearance
o 3.6Music
 4Wealth
 5Personal views and Twitter usage
o 5.1Existential threats
o 5.2Politics
o 5.3COVID-19
o 5.4Finance
o 5.5Technology
 6Personal life
o 6.1Sexual misconduct allegations
 7Public perception
o 7.1Media appearances
o 7.2Recognition
 8Notes
 9References
 10Bibliography
 11External links

Early life
Childhood and family
Further information: Musk family
Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, one of South Africa's capital
cities.[7][8] Musk has British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry.[9][10] His mother is Maye
Musk (née Haldeman), a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan, Canada, and
raised in South Africa.[11][12][13] His father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical
engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, and property developer, who was a half-owner of a
Zambian emerald mine near Lake Tanganyika.[14][15][16][17] Musk has a younger
brother, Kimbal, and a younger sister, Tosca.[13][18]
Musk's family was wealthy during his youth.[17] His father was elected to the Pretoria City
Council as a representative of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party, with his children
sharing their father's dislike of apartheid.[7] His maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman,
was an adventurous American-born Canadian who took his family on record-breaking
journeys to Africa and Australia in a single-engine Bellanca airplane.[19][20][21] After his
parents divorced in 1980, Musk chose to mostly live with his father.[9] Musk regretted his
decision and has become estranged from his father.[22] He has a paternal half-sister and
a half-brother.[19][23]
In his biography of Musk, Ashlee Vance described Musk as an awkward and introverted
child.[24] When Musk was age ten, he developed an interest in computing and video
games, teaching himself how to program from the VIC-20 user manual.[25] At age twelve,
he sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for
approximately $500.[26][27]
Education

Musk graduated from Pretoria Boys High School in South Africa

Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Bryanston High School,

and Pretoria Boys High School, from which he graduated.[28] Musk applied for a
Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother,[29][30] knowing that it would be
easier to immigrate to the United States this way.[31] While waiting for his application to
be processed, he attended the University of Pretoria for five months.[32]
Musk arrived in Canada in June 1989 and lived with a second cousin in Saskatchewan
for a year,[33] working odd jobs at a farm and lumber mill.[34] In 1990, he entered Queen's
University in Kingston, Ontario.[35][36] Two years later, he transferred to the University of
Pennsylvania, where he completed studies for a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and
a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the Wharton School in 1995.[37][38][39][40] 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.[41]
In 1994, Musk held two internships in Silicon Valley: one at the energy storage startup
Pinnacle Research Institute, which investigated electrolytic ultracapacitors for energy
storage, and another at the Palo Alto–based startup Rocket Science Games.[42][43] In
1995, he was accepted to a PhD program in materials science at Stanford University.[44]
[45]
 However, Musk decided to join the Internet boom, instead dropping out two days after
being accepted and applied for a job at Netscape, to which he reportedly never received
a response.[46][29]

Business career
Zip2
Main article: Zip2
 External video

 Musk speaks of his early business

experience during a 2014 commencement

speech at USC on YouTube

In 1995, Musk, his brother Kimbal, and Greg Kouri founded Zip2.[47][48] Errol Musk
provided them with $28,000 in funding.[49] The company developed an Internet city
guide with maps, directions, and yellow pages, and marketed it to newspapers.[50] They
worked at a small rented office in Palo Alto,[51] Musk coding the website every night.
[51]
 Eventually, Zip2 obtained contracts with The New York Times and the Chicago
Tribune.[41] The brothers persuaded the board of directors to abandon a merger
with CitySearch;[52] however, Musk's attempts to become CEO were thwarted.
[53]
 Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash in February 1999,[54][55] and Musk
received $22 million for his 7-percent share.[56]
X.com and PayPal
Main articles: X.com, PayPal, and PayPal Mafia
Later in 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment
company.[57] X.com was one of the first federally insured online banks, and over 200,000
customers joined in its initial months of operation.[58] Even though Musk founded the
company, investors regarded him as inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit CEO
Bill Harris by the end of the year.[59]
In 2000, X.com merged with online bank Confinity to avoid competition,[51][59][60] as
Confinity's money-transfer service PayPal was more popular than X.com's service.
[61]
 Musk then returned as CEO of the merged company. His preference
for Microsoft over Unix-based software caused a rift among the company's employees,
and led Peter Thiel, Confinity's founder, to resign.[62] With the company suffering from
compounding technological issues and the lack of a cohesive business model, the
board ousted Musk and replaced him with Thiel in September 2000.[63][b] Under Thiel, the
company focused on the money-transfer service and was renamed PayPal in 2001.[65][66]
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.[67][68] In 2017, more
than 15 years later, Musk purchased the X.com domain from PayPal for its sentimental
value.[69][70] In 2022, Musk discussed a goal of creating "X, the everything app".[71]