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Elon Reeve Musk (/ˈiːlɒn mʌsk/; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman known for his key roles in the space company SpaceX and the automotive company Tesla, Inc. He is also known for his ownership of X Corp. (the company that operates the social media platform X, formerly Twitter), and his role in the founding of the Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink, and OpenAI. Musk is the wealthiest individual in the world; as of December 2024, Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$439 billion.[2]
A member of the wealthy South African Musk family, Musk was born in Pretoria and briefly attended the University of Pretoria. At the age of 18 he immigrated to Canada, acquiring its citizenship through his Canadian-born mother, Maye. Two years later, he matriculated at Queen’s University at Kingston in Canada. Musk later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and received bachelor’s degrees in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University but never enrolled in classes, and with his brother Kimbal co-founded the online city guide software company Zip2. The startup was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. That same year, Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. In 2002, Musk acquired United States citizenship, and that October eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion. Using $100 million of the money he made from the sale of PayPal, Musk founded SpaceX, a spaceflight services company, in 2002.
In 2004, Musk was an early investor in electric-vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (later Tesla, Inc.), providing most of the initial financing and assuming the position of the company’s chairman. He later became the product architect and, in 2008, the CEO. In 2006, Musk helped create SolarCity, a solar energy company that was acquired by Tesla in 2016 and became Tesla Energy. In 2013, he proposed a hyperloop high-speed vactrain transportation system. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company. The following year Musk co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology company developing brain–computer interfaces, and the Boring Company, a tunnel construction company. In 2018 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Musk, alleging that he had falsely announced that he had secured funding for a private takeover of Tesla. To settle the case Musk stepped down as the chairman of Tesla and paid a $20 million fine. In 2022, he acquired Twitter for $44 billion, merged the company into the newly-created X Corp. and rebranded the service as X the following year. In March 2023, Musk founded xAI, an artificial-intelligence company.
Musk’s actions and expressed 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 ownership of Twitter has been controversial because of large employee layoffs, an increase in posts containing hate speech, misinformation and disinformation on the website, and changes to website features, including verification.
By early 2024, Musk became active in American politics as a vocal and financial supporter of US presidential candidate Donald Trump, becoming his second-largest individual donor in October 2024. After winning the election in November 2024, Trump announced that he had chosen Musk along with Vivek Ramaswamy to co-lead his planned Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) advisory board, which is tasked with removing regulations in order to reduce expenditures and increase government efficiency.
Early life and education
Childhood and family
See also: Family of Elon Musk
Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital.[3][4] He is of British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry.[5][6] His mother, Maye (née Haldeman), is a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan, Canada, and raised in South Africa.[7][8][9] 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 the Timbavati Private Nature Reserve.[10][11][12][13] Elon has a younger brother, Kimbal, and a younger sister, Tosca.[9][14] Elon has four paternal half-siblings.[15][16][17]
The Musk family was wealthy during Elon’s youth.[13] Despite both Elon and Errol previously stating that Errol was a part owner of a Zambian emerald mine,[13] in 2023, Errol recounted that the deal he made was to receive “a portion of the emeralds produced at three small mines”.[18][19] 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.[3]
Elon’s maternal grandfather, Joshua N. Haldeman, was an American-born Canadian who took his family on record-breaking journeys to Africa and Australia in a single-engine AviaBellanca airplane; Haldeman later died when Elon was still a toddler.[16][20][21][22] 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.[23]
After his parents divorced in 1980, Elon chose to live primarily with his father.[5][10] Elon later regretted his decision and became estranged from his father.[24] Elon attended Bryanston High School.[25] In one incident, after an altercation with a fellow pupil, Elon was thrown down concrete steps and beaten severely by the boy and his friends, leading to him being hospitalized for his injuries.[26] Elon described his father berating him after he was discharged from the hospital, saying, “I had to stand for an hour as he yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless.”[26] Errol denied berating Elon but 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?”.[27] After the incident, Elon was enrolled in private school.[26][27]
Elon was an enthusiastic reader of books, later attributing his success in part to having read The Lord of the Rings, the Foundation series, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.[12][28] At age ten, he developed an interest in computing and video games, teaching himself how to program from the VIC-20 user manual.[29] At age twelve, Elon sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500.[30][31]
Education
An ornate school building
Musk graduated from Pretoria Boys High School in South Africa.
Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Bryanston High School, and then Pretoria Boys High School, where he graduated.[32] Musk was a good but unexceptional student, earning a 61 in Afrikaans and a B on his senior math certification.[33] Musk applied for a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother to avoid South Africa’s mandatory military service,[34][35] which would have forced him to participate in the apartheid regime,[3] as well as to ease his path to immigration to the United States.[36] While waiting for his application to be processed, he attended the University of Pretoria for five months.[37]
Musk arrived in Canada in June 1989, connected with a second cousin in Saskatchewan,[38] and worked odd jobs including at a farm and a lumber mill.[39] In 1990, he entered Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.[40][41] Two years later, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied until 1995.[42] 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.[43][44][45][46][47] 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.[48]
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.[49][50] In 1995, he was accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University, but did not enroll.[45][43][51] Musk decided to join the Internet boom, applying for a job at Netscape, to which he reportedly never received a response.[52][34] The Washington Post reported that Musk lacked legal authorization to remain and work in the United States after failing to enroll at Stanford.[51] In response, Musk claimed 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 claimed he was on a student visa at the time.[
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