Elon Reeve Musk is a business magnate and investor. Elon is the founder, chairman, CEO and chief technology officer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO, product architect and former chairman of Tesla

Musk was born in South Africa, and immigrated to Canada when he was 18. He acquired citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. Musk later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, and received a bachelor degree in economics and physics.

In 1995, he co-founded online city guide software company Zip2. The startup was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999, and with $12 million of the money he made, that same year Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank that merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal.

eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, and that same year, Musk founded SpaceX with the $100 million of the money he made from that sale. In 2004, he became an early investor in electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (re-named to Tesla, Inc.). He became its chairman and product architect, assuming the position of CEO in 2008.


In 2013, he proposed a hyperloop high-speed vactrain transportation system. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. The following year, Musk co-founded Neuralink (a neurotechnology company developing brain-computer interfaces).

In 2022, he acquired Twitter for $44 billion and subsequently merged the company into newly created X Corp. and rebranded the service as X the following year with much controversy. In March 2023, he founded xAI, an artificial-intelligence company.