Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971 and moved to Canada in 1989, where he worked odd jobs before entering Queen's University in Ontario in 1990. Two years later he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, which awarded him a bachelor's degree in physics and one in economics from its Wharton School in 1997. In 1995 he was accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University but did not enroll, and instead co-founded Zip2, a web software company, in Palo Alto.
Zip2 was sold in 1999. Musk then co-founded X.com, an online payments company that merged with Confinity in March 2000 to form PayPal. In 2002 he founded SpaceX and became its chief executive and chief engineer, the same year he became an American citizen. He joined Tesla as an early investor in 2004 and became its CEO and product architect in 2008. He went on to co-found Neuralink, a neurotechnology company, in 2016 and to found the Boring Company, a tunneling company, in 2017.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 to advance AI research but later left; his discontent with its direction and leadership led him to set up xAI. He bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X in 2023. Twitter was later merged into xAI, and in February 2026 SpaceX acquired xAI in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. After Donald Trump's inauguration in January 2025, Musk advised Trump and was the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), leaving the administration in May 2025 to return to his companies.
SpaceX went public in June 2026, priced near a $2 trillion valuation, and its shares later fell roughly a third. In November 2025 Tesla approved a pay package for Musk worth $1 trillion over ten years if milestones such as an $8.5 trillion market value are met. Lately Musk has moved into chipmaking: TSMC confirmed talks on Terafab, his $16.8 billion Texas chip project, on condition that TSMC runs the fab. In October he called Micron "reasonable" on memory prices and other suppliers "extortionate", and warned that China's CXMT will make "a LOT of RAM" in 2028.
Sources · written 16 October 2026
