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Biography

Elon Musk.

The engineer who runs SpaceX and Tesla, on one page, as of November 7, 2026.

Updated

Born
June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa
Citizenship
South Africa, Canada, and the United States (since 2002)
Runs
SpaceX (founder, chief executive officer, and chief engineer) and Tesla (chief executive officer)
Also founded
Zip2, X.com (later PayPal), Neuralink, The Boring Company, xAI (now SpaceXSI), and the Musk Foundation
Net worth
About $850 billion (Forbes, November 7, 2026), with the math on the Net Worth Tracker

Early life

Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa, the eldest of 3 children of Errol and Maye Musk. He taught himself to program and, at about 12, sold the code of a space game called Blastar for about $500.

At 17, in 1989, he left for Canada on citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. He studied at Queen's University in Ontario, then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned degrees in physics and economics. He became a United States citizen in 2002.

The first companies

In 1995 Elon and his brother Kimbal founded Zip2, which put city guides and maps online for newspapers. Compaq bought it in 1999 for about $307 million, and Elon put his share into X.com, an online bank he started that year. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 and became PayPal, which eBay bought in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

He put the PayPal money into SpaceX and Tesla, a habit of reinvesting each win that the capital allocation explainer follows from company to company.

SpaceX

Elon incorporated SpaceX on March 14, 2002, to cut the cost of reaching space and, in time, to build a city on Mars. Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit in September 2008, and Falcon 9 boosters now land and fly again as routine.

In May 2020 SpaceX became the first company to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, on Crew Dragon. It also runs Starlink, its satellite internet network, and builds Starship, the largest rocket ever flown.

SpaceX began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX on June 12, 2026, after the largest initial public offering (IPO) on record, which raised about $86 billion. Elon kept about 82 percent of the voting power, and the SpaceX IPO explainer has the details.

Tesla

Elon joined Tesla in February 2004 by leading its first funding round with $6.5 million of his own money, which made him chairman, and he became chief executive in October 2008. He is one of the company's 5 official co-founders.

Tesla's Model S, Model 3, and Model Y brought electric cars to the mass market, and its Megapack batteries store power for utilities. The company also builds the Optimus humanoid robot and the Cybercab, a two-seat robotaxi with no steering wheel.

In 2016 Elon co-founded Neuralink, which builds a brain implant that lets people with paralysis control a computer with their thoughts. Its first human implant took place in January 2024, and Neura Pod tracks every participant since.

The same year he founded The Boring Company, which digs tunnels to move traffic underground. Its Vegas Loop carries riders in Tesla cars under Las Vegas.

Artificial intelligence and X

Elon co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and left its board in 2018. In October 2022 he bought Twitter for about $44 billion, and he renamed it X in July 2023.

He founded xAI in 2023 to build Grok, an artificial intelligence (AI) model designed to be maximally truth-seeking, and xAI acquired X in March 2025. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2, 2026, folded it in as SpaceXAI on May 6, 2026, and renamed the unit SpaceXSI on October 4, 2026.

Government work

In 2025 Elon led the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as a special government employee, an effort to find and cut waste in federal spending. DOGE closed on July 4, 2026, as its founding order required.

Wealth

Nearly all of Elon's fortune is his stakes in SpaceX and Tesla. Forbes counted him as the first person worth $1 trillion when SpaceX began trading in June 2026, and Forbes put his net worth at about $850 billion on November 7, 2026. The Net Worth Tracker follows the figure and the math behind each stake.

Family and ideas

His brother Kimbal is a member of Tesla's board, and the Family page covers his parents, siblings, partners, and children. The habits of thought behind his companies, such as first principles thinking and the five-step algorithm, are on the Key Ideas page, and the Personal Timeline lists his life year by year.

Sources

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