Elon Musk
Elon Reeve Musk FRS (/ˈiːlɒn/; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman and investor known for his key roles in the space company SpaceX and the automotive company Tesla, Inc.
Other involvements include ownership of X Corp., the company that operates the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter),
And his role in the founding of The Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink, and OpenAI.
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Elon Musk
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Elon Musk in 2023
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Elon Reeve Musk
June 28, 1971 Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa
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He is one of the wealthiest individuals in the world; as of August 2024 Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$241 billion.
Elon Musk was born in Pretoria to Maye (née Haldeman), a model, and Errol Musk, a businessman and engineer.
Musk briefly attended the University of Pretoria before immigrating to Canada at the age of 18, acquiring citizenship through his Canadian-born mother.
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 dropped out after two days 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 October 2002 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 who provided most of the initial financing in the electric-vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (later Tesla, Inc.), 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 has expressed views that have made him a polarizing figure.
He has been criticized for making unscientific and misleading statements, including COVID-19 misinformation, promoting right-wing conspiracy theories,
And “endorsing an antisemitic theory”; for the latter of which he later apologized.
His ownership of Twitter has been similarly controversial, being marked by layoffs of large numbers of employees,
An increase in hate speech, misinformation and disinformation posts on the website, and changes to Twitter Blue verification.
Early life and education
Childhood and family
Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital. He is of British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry.
His mother, Maye (née Haldeman), is a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan, Canada, and raised in South Africa.
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.
Elon has a younger brother, Kimbal, and a younger sister, Tosca. Elon has four paternal half-siblings.
The family was wealthy during Elon’s youth. Despite both Musk and Errol previously stating that Errol was a part owner of a Zambian emerald mine, in 2023.
Errol recounted that the deal he made was to receive “a portion of the emeralds produced at three small mines.”
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.
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 Bellanca airplane;
Haldeman died when Elon was still a toddler.
Elon has recounted trips to a wilderness school (“veldskool”) that he described as a “paramilitary Lord of the Flies” ,
Where “bullying was a virtue” and children were encouraged to fight over rations.
After his parents divorced in 1980, Elon chose to live primarily with his father. Elon later regretted his decision and became estranged from his father.
Elon attended Bryanston High School.
In one incident, after an altercation with a fellow student, Elon was thrown down concrete steps and beaten severely by the boy and his friends, leading to him being hospitalized for his injuries.
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”.
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?” After the attack, Elon was enrolled in private school.
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.
At age ten, he developed an interest in computing and video games, teaching himself how to program from the VIC-20 user manual.
At age twelve, Elon sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500.
Education
Elon Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Bryanston High School, and then Pretoria Boys High School, where he graduated.
Musk was a good but not exceptional student, earning a 61 in Afrikaans and a B on his senior math certification.
Musk applied for a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother, knowing that it would be easier to immigrate to the United States this way.
While waiting for his application to be processed, he attended the University of Pretoria for five months.
Musk arrived in Canada in June 1989, connected with a second cousin in Saskatchewan, and worked odd jobs including at a farm and a lumber mill.
In 1990, he entered Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
Two years later, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League university in Philadelphia,
Where he earned two degrees: a Bachelor of Arts in physics, and a Bachelor of Science in economics from the university’s Wharton School.
Although Musk has said that he earned the degrees in 1995, the University of Pennsylvania did not award them until 1997.
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.
In 1994, Musk held two internships in Silicon Valley: one at energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute,
Which investigated electrolytic ultracapacitors for energy storage, and another at Palo Alto–based startup Rocket Science Games.
In 1995, he was accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University, but did not enroll.
Musk decided to join the Internet boom, applying for a job at Netscape, to which he reportedly never received a response.
Personal life
In 2002, Elon Musk became a U.S. citizen. From the early 2000s until late 2020, Musk resided in California, where both Tesla and SpaceX were founded.
He then relocated to Austin, Texas, saying that California had become “complacent” about its economic success.
While hosting Saturday Night Live in 2021, Musk stated that he has Asperger syndrome, although he has never been medically diagnosed.
During a South African safari in late 2000, he contracted malaria and was then hospitalized in an intensive care unit back in California.
Musk trained in Brazilian jiu-jitsu while preparing for a proposed fight with Mark Zuckerberg. In his leisure time, he plays video games including Quake, Diablo IV, Elden Ring, and Polytopia.
Musk has stated he uses prescribed ketamine for occasional depression, while The Wall Street Journal has repeatedly alleged he uses it and other drugs recreationally.
Relationships and children
Musk has at least 12 children, one of whom is deceased. He met his first wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson, while attending Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada; they married in 2000.
In 2002, their first child died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of 10 weeks.
After his death, the couple used in vitro fertilization (IVF) to continue their family; they had twins in 2004 followed by triplets in 2006. The couple divorced in 2008 and shared custody of their children.
In 2022, the elder twin officially changed her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson, reflecting her gender identity as a trans woman and using her mother’s surname because she no longer wished to be associated with Musk.
Musk blamed the estrangement of his daughter on what the Financial Times characterized as “the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists”,
And has said that her gender transition is primarily what sparked his drive to “destroy the woke mind virus”.
In a July 2024 episode of Jordan Peterson’s podcast, Musk said regarding Vivian that he had “lost [his] son [sic], essentially” because of gender-affirming care.
He commented: “You know, they call it deadnaming for a reason.
The reason it’s called deadnaming is because your son [sic] is dead”, and went on to state that the eldest twin “is dead, killed by the woke mind virus”.
Vivian responded publicly, criticizing Musk for lying about her and the circumstances of her transition; claiming that Musk was “cold”, “quick to anger”, “uncaring and narcissistic”,
Whose infrequent visits commonly involved him berating her for being feminine.
In 2008, Musk began dating English actress Talulah Riley. They married two years later at Dornoch Cathedral in Scotland. In 2012, the couple divorced, before remarrying the following year.
After briefly filing for divorce in 2014, Musk finalized a second divorce from Riley in 2016. Musk then dated Amber Heard for several months in 2017; he had reportedly been pursuing her since 2012.
In 2018, Musk and Canadian musician Grimes said that they were dating. Grimes gave birth to their son in May 2020.
Musk and Grimes originally gave the baby the name “X Æ A-12”, which would have violated California regulations as it contained characters that are not in the modern English alphabet,
Which they then changed to ““X Æ A-Xii”.
They have received criticism for choosing such an impractical and difficult to pronounce name.
In December 2021, Grimes and Musk had a second child, a daughter born via surrogacy. Despite the pregnancy,
Musk confirmed reports that the couple were “semi-separated” in September 2021; in an interview with Time in December 2021, he said he was single.
In March 2022, Grimes said of her relationship with Musk: “I would probably refer to him as my boyfriend, but we’re very fluid.”
Later that month, Grimes tweeted that she and Musk had broken up again. In September 2023 it was reported that the pair had a third child, a son.
In October 2023, Grimes sued Musk over parental rights and custody of their eldest son.
In July 2022, Insider published court documents revealing that Musk had had twins via IVF with Shivon Zilis, director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, in November 2021.
They were born weeks before Musk and Grimes had their second child via surrogate in December. The news “raise[d] questions about workplace ethics”, given that Zilis directly reported to Musk.
Their third child together was born in early 2024 via surrogacy.
Also in July 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk allegedly had an affair with Nicole Shanahan, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in 2021, leading to their divorce the following year.
Elon Musk denied the report. Musk also had a relationship with Australian actress Natasha Bassett, who has been described as “an occasional girlfriend.”
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Wealth
Elon Musk made $175.8 million when PayPal was sold to eBay in October 2002.He was first listed on the Forbes Billionaires List in 2012, with a net worth of $2 billion.
Personal views and Twitter usage
Since joining Twitter (now known as X) in 2009, Elon Musk has been an active user and has over 163 million followers as of November 2023.
He posts memes, promotes business interests, and comments on contemporary political and cultural issues.
Musk’s statements have provoked controversy, such as for mocking preferred gender pronouns and comparing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler.
The New York Times describes his contributions to international relations as “chaotic”, and critics of Musk argue that there is a lack of separation between his opinions and his business interests.
As CEO of Twitter, Musk emerged as a source of misinformation and right-wing conspiracy theories,
For example by suggesting online details about mass murderer Mauricio Garcia’s apparent interest in Nazism could have been planted as part of a psyop.
Allegations of him being transphobic appeared as well in response to actions taken by Twitter under his guidance.
Musk credits science fiction writers, particularly Robert A. Heinlein, for inspiring many of his personal views and business ventures, including SpaceX, Grok, and his libertarian inclinations.
