Frequently asked questions.

Around ~450 miles of range, increasing battery size leads to a worse car. Range comes from adding cells, and cells add mass, cost, and charging time.

Elon Musk has said Tesla could have shipped a 600-mile Model S in 2021 and chose not to. For 99.9% of driving, the extra pack is dead weight that hurts acceleration, handling, efficiency, and price. Every engineering decision requires weighing a wide variety of tradeoffs. Though many customers would love a longer range vehicle, it is simply not a prudent strategy for Tesla. (At least for mass-manufactured vehicles ;))

Tesla sizes the battery for the range people actually use, then spends the saved mass and money on making the rest of the car better.

Elon Musk currently leads 4 companies: SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and The Boring Company, though each company functions like a portfolio of startups. SpaceX has its Starlink business and SpaceXAI, the artificial intelligence business that includes Grok and projects such as MACROHARD.

He also has the Elon Musk Foundation and previously led U.S. government efficiency work under The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Learn more about each venture's projects here.

This site’s net-worth tracker arithmetic is about $1.08T at today's prices (Tesla equity $229B + SpaceX equity $811B + everything else $40B; see Net Worth Tracker). As of August 14, 2026, Forbes real-time printed $869.9B; Bloomberg was printed around $884B on August 13. Musk briefly topped $1T around the June 2026 SpaceX IPO. Nearly all of that is the market value of his ownership stakes in SpaceX and Tesla, not cash in a bank account.

His fortune grew from early startup exits (Zip2 and PayPal) that he repeatedly reinvested into the next hard company, rather than from a single windfall he left sitting idle.

Elon did not found the very initial start of the company. Tesla Motors was incorporated on July 1, 2003 by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, before Elon Musk was involved.

He joined in February 2004 by leading the Series A round with about $6.5 million of his own money, which made him chairman and the largest shareholder. He later became CEO and the driving force behind the company people know today. In other words, he provided the necessary blood, sweat, tears, and capital needed to make Tesla successful in the first place.

Without Elon, Tesla would have failed and not exist today at all. So while some people can claim Elon wasn't technically a founder of Tesla, they are not accurately representing the impact Elon has had.

Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. He is the eldest of three siblings, ahead of his younger brother Kimbal and his younger sister Tosca.

At 17 he left South Africa for Canada using citizenship through his Canadian-born mother, Maye, then moved to the United States for university. He later became a U.S. citizen while keeping deep ties to the countries that shaped him.

As of 2026, Elon Musk is the father of 14 children (13 living) with four women: Justine Wilson, Grimes, Shivon Zilis, and Ashley St. Clair.

He is openly pro-natalist and has said he is doing his best to help what he calls the underpopulation crisis. He has also been candid about being estranged from one child, his transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson.

No. His first real money came from companies he helped build. Compaq bought Zip2 in 1999 for about $307 million; Elon Musk's roughly 7 percent stake paid him about $22 million at age 27, which he put into X.com, later PayPal.

On the emerald story, his father Errol held only a partial stake in Zambian emerald trading in the 1980s. Fact-checking has not supported full mine ownership as the source of Elon's fortune, and Elon Musk has denied that it was.

The purchase was both a free-speech project and a product bet. In 2022 he concluded that Twitter had become the de facto public town square, and that failing free speech principles undermined democracy.

Weeks before the deal closed, he posted that buying Twitter was an accelerant to creating X, the everything app: payments, messaging, and more under one product. The company was renamed X, and that super-app thesis is being built today.

Yes. On May 8, 2021, while hosting Saturday Night Live, he told the audience he has Asperger's, joking that he was the first person with Asperger's to host SNL, or at least the first to admit it.

Asperger's is an older name for a profile now usually described under autism spectrum disorder. Elon Musk has framed the same wiring that can make small talk harder as an edge for deep focus on engineering problems.

Elon has 2 main motivations for going to Mars. 1. He wants to make sure we have a backup plan for humanity. 2. He wants us to have an exciting future: one we can look forward to and wake up in the morning feeling inspired about.

He founded SpaceX in 2002 to make humanity multiplanetary by reducing the cost of access to space through reusable rockets, then build the spaceships that can settle another planet.

Additionally, if life exists only on Earth, one catastrophe could end everything. Starship is the vehicle designed for getting us to other planets. SpaceX is working on building a self-sustaining city on Mars by building the rapidly reusable transportation needed to take us there and back.