एलन मस्क Elon Musk
Elon Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971 and moved to Canada at 17. He made his first fortune from Zip2 and PayPal. He founded SpaceX in 2002 and has led Tesla since 2008. He co-founded OpenAI and Neuralink, bought Twitter in 2022 and founded xAI in 2023. In 2026 SpaceX absorbed xAI and raised a record $75 billion in its stock offering.
Curated by Nikhil Sharma: a Pretoria-born engineer who sold two internet companies by 31 and bet the proceeds on rockets and electric cars. His reusable boosters changed spaceflight. He bought Twitter, spent 130 days at DOGE and won Tesla and Starlink a foothold in India in 2025. Few builders of our time are argued over more.
- 2002 SpaceX founded: Founded in May 2002 with about $100 million
- 2015 First booster landing: A Falcon 9 first stage landed upright on land
- $44bn Twitter bought: Completed on 27 October 2022 and renamed X in 2023
- 2025 India entry: Starlink’s licence in June and Tesla’s Mumbai showroom in July
The facts
- Born
- 28 June 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa (Wikipedia: Elon Musk)
- Parents
- Errol Musk, an electromechanical engineer, and Maye Musk, a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan (Wikipedia: Elon Musk)
- Citizenship
- South African and Canadian from birth. A US citizen since 2002 (Wikipedia: Elon Musk)
- Education
- Queen’s University in Kingston from 1990. A BA in physics and a BS in economics from the University of Pennsylvania (Wikipedia: Elon Musk)
- Now
- CEO of Tesla. CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX, which took over xAI and with it X in 2026 (Wikipedia: Elon Musk)
- Co-founded
- Zip2, X.com (later PayPal), OpenAI, Neuralink and The Boring Company (Wikipedia: Elon Musk)
- Recognition
- TIME Person of the Year for 2021 (Wikipedia: Public image of Elon Musk)
- Wealth
- The first dollar trillionaire on paper after the SpaceX listing in June 2026 (Dawn / Reuters: SpaceX IPO makes Musk the world’s first trillionaire (12 June 2026))
- Family
- Married Justine Wilson and twice married Talulah Riley. At least 14 children (Wikipedia: Elon Musk)
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