एलन मस्क Elon Musk

Life and career

  1. 1971 · Born in Pretoria. Born on 28 June 1971 in Pretoria. His parents divorced and at about nine he chose to live with his father. At 12 he sold a BASIC game called Blastar for about $500. He finished at Pretoria Boys High School. (Wikipedia: Elon Musk)
  2. 1989 · Canada and Pennsylvania. He reached Canada in June 1989 on his mother’s citizenship. He entered Queen’s University in Kingston in 1990. In 1992 he moved to the University of Pennsylvania for physics and economics. He was accepted to a Stanford graduate programme in 1995 but never enrolled. (Wikipedia: Elon Musk)
  3. 1995 · Zip2. He co-founded Zip2 with his brother Kimbal and Greg Kouri. Compaq bought it in February 1999 for $307 million in cash. His seven percent share came to $22 million. (Wikipedia: Elon Musk)
  4. 1999 · X.com and PayPal. He co-founded X.com in 1999. It merged with Confinity, the maker of PayPal, in March 2000. The board replaced him with Peter Thiel that year. When eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion in stock he was the largest shareholder. He received $175.8 million. (Wikipedia: Elon Musk)
  5. 2002 · SpaceX. He founded SpaceX in May 2002 with about $100 million and became its chief engineer. The first three Falcon 1 launches failed. The fourth reached orbit in 2008. Later that year NASA gave SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract for cargo flights to the space station. In 2012 Dragon became the first commercial craft to dock there. (Wikipedia: Elon Musk · Y Combinator: Elon Musk at AI Startup School (16 June 2025))
  6. 2004 · Tesla. Tesla was founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. He led its first funding round in February 2004 with $6.35 million and became chairman. He took over as CEO in 2008 as Roadster deliveries began. Tesla listed in 2010 and launched the Model S in 2012 and the Model 3 in 2017. (Wikipedia: Elon Musk)
  7. 2015 · A rocket lands and OpenAI begins. In 2015 SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 first stage upright on land for the first time. In December he co-founded OpenAI to build AI that would be safe and beneficial. He left its board in 2018. (Wikipedia: Elon Musk)
  8. 2016 · Neuralink, SolarCity and tunnels. He co-founded Neuralink in 2016 to build brain-computer interfaces. Tesla bought SolarCity, founded by his cousins, for $2 billion that year. He founded The Boring Company in 2017. Its tunnel under the Las Vegas Convention Center was completed in early 2021. (Wikipedia: Elon Musk)
  9. 2018 · Falcon Heavy and the SEC. Falcon Heavy flew for the first time in February 2018 with his own Tesla Roadster as a dummy payload. In August he tweeted about taking Tesla private at $420 a share. The SEC charged him with fraud and he settled in September. He gave up the Tesla chair for three years. (Wikipedia: Elon Musk · SEC press release 2018-226 (29 September 2018))
  10. 2020 · Starlink and crewed flight. The first Starlink satellites went up in May 2019. In 2020 Crew Dragon Demo-2 became the first crewed orbital flight by a private company. By May 2025 about 7,600 Starlink satellites were working. That was roughly 65 percent of all active satellites. TIME made him Person of the Year for 2021. (Wikipedia: Elon Musk · Wikipedia: Public image of Elon Musk)
  11. 2022 · Buying Twitter. He disclosed a 9.2 percent stake in April 2022 and offered $54.20 a share. He tried to walk away in July and Twitter sued him in Delaware. The $44 billion deal closed on 27 October. He fired the chief executive and laid off about half the staff in November. (Wikipedia: Acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk · Daily Maverick / Reuters: Musk begins his Twitter ownership with firings (28 October 2022))
  12. 2023 · X, xAI and Starship. Twitter was renamed X in July 2023. He launched xAI the same month and its Grok chatbot followed in November. Starship made its first integrated flight on 20 April 2023. It broke up in flight. In October 2024 the launch tower caught a returning booster for the first time. (Wikipedia: Elon Musk · Wikipedia: SpaceX Starship)
  13. 2023 · Modi, Starlink and Tesla in India. He met Prime Minister Modi in New York in June 2023 and said “I am a fan of Modi”. They met again at Blair House in February 2025. The Department of Telecommunications licensed Starlink in June 2025. Tesla opened its first Indian showroom at Mumbai’s Bandra Kurla Complex on 15 July 2025. Registrations opened in Mumbai, Delhi and Gurugram. In November 2025 he sat down for a long podcast with Nikhil Kamath. (Business Today: ‘I am a fan,’ says Musk after meeting PM Modi (21 June 2023) · ThePrint: PM Modi meets Elon Musk at Blair House (13 February 2025) · Business Standard: Starlink gets GMPCS licence (6 June 2025) · The Week: Tesla drives into India with Model Y (15 July 2025) · Nikhil Kamath: People by WTF Ep. 16 with Elon Musk (30 November 2025))
  14. 2025 · DOGE. He was the largest individual donor in the 2024 US election. On 20 January 2025 an executive order created the Department of Government Efficiency. He led it as a special government employee until his 130-day term ran out at the end of May. A public feud with President Trump followed in June. (Wikipedia: Elon Musk · Wikipedia: Department of Government Efficiency · Japan Times / Reuters: Musk leaving Trump administration (29 May 2025))
  15. 2026 · SpaceX absorbs xAI and goes public. In February SpaceX bought xAI in the largest merger on record. X had already been folded into xAI. In May a jury rejected his lawsuit against OpenAI as filed too late. In June SpaceX listed on Nasdaq and raised $75 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation. (Dawn / Reuters: SpaceX acquires xAI in record-setting deal (3 February 2026) · Al Jazeera: Elon Musk loses US lawsuit against OpenAI (18 May 2026) · Dawn / Reuters: SpaceX IPO makes Musk the world’s first trillionaire (12 June 2026))

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