Elon Musk

Elon Reeve Musk FRS (/iln/; born June 28, 1971) is an entrepreneur, businessman, and investor. He is the founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX, as well as an early-stage investor, Tesla, Inc.’s CEO and product architect, The Boring Company’s inventor, and the co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI. Musk is the world’s wealthiest person, according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and the Forbes real-time billionaires list, with an estimated net worth of around US $273 billion as of April 2022.

Musk was born in South Africa to a Canadian mother and a South African father in Pretoria. He briefly attended the University of Pretoria before emigrating to Canada at the age of 17 to avoid conscription. He spent two years at Queen’s University before moving to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a bachelor’s degree in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University, but instead decided to pursue a business career, co-founding the online software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. Compaq paid $307 million for the company in 1999. The next year, Musk co-founded online bank X.com, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. In 2002, eBay spent $1.5 billion to acquire the company.

Musk founded SpaceX, a company that manufactures aeroplanes and provides space transportation services, in 2002. He is SpaceX’s CEO and chief engineer. In 2004, he joined Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.) as chairman and product architect, later becoming CEO in 2008. He was a founder member of SolarCity, a solar energy services company purchased by Tesla and renamed Tesla Energy. He co-founded OpenAI, a non-profit research organisation devoted to the promotion of friendly artificial intelligence, in 2015. In 2016, he co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology firm focused on developing brain–computer interfaces, and The Boring Company, a tunnel construction company. Musk has proposed the Hyperloop, a high-speed vacuum tube transit system.

Musk has been attacked for his unusual and unscientific viewpoints, as well as his regularly publicised confrontational remarks. In 2018, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued him for fraudulently stating that he had received financing for a private Tesla acquisition. He negotiated an arrangement with the SEC, surrendering his chairmanship for the time being and agreed to Twitter usage limitations. In 2019, he won a defamation suit brought against him by a British caver who advised on the Tham Luang cave rescue. For disseminating misleading information concerning the COVID-19 outbreak, as well as his opinions on artificial intelligence, bitcoin, and public transit. Musk has also been chastised for his stance on these issues.