Elon Musk is a businessman and engineer known for leading several of the most prominent technology companies of the era, including Tesla and SpaceX. Born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, he became, by the 2020s, one of the wealthiest people in the world and one of its most talked about.
Musk grew up in Pretoria, where he was a bookish, introverted child who taught himself computer programming and, at twelve, sold a simple video game he had written. He has described a difficult relationship with his father and a lonely youth softened by science fiction and an appetite for reading anything he could find.
After finishing school in Pretoria, Musk left for Canada and then the United States to pursue greater opportunities, eventually studying physics and economics. He has often said the move was driven by a belief that the cutting edge of technology and ambition lay in America.
Musk co-founded the web software company Zip2 and then the online payments firm that became PayPal. The sale of PayPal in 2002 gave him a substantial fortune and, just as important, the capital and confidence to pursue far more ambitious projects.
That same year he founded SpaceX with the goal of radically lowering the cost of spaceflight. Against long odds and early failures that nearly bankrupted him, the company went on to develop reusable rockets, becoming a major launch provider for NASA and commercial customers and reviving American leadership in spaceflight.
Musk joined the electric car maker Tesla early and, as its chief executive, helped turn it into the world's most valuable automaker and a driving force behind the global shift to electric vehicles, pushing long established manufacturers to follow.
Musk also founded the neurotechnology company Neuralink and the tunneling venture The Boring Company, built the Starlink satellite internet network, and in 2022 bought the social network Twitter, later renaming it X.
Musk's stated long term goal is to make humanity "multiplanetary" by establishing a self sustaining city on Mars, and he has at various points projected crewed Mars missions within a few years. These timelines are aspirational rather than settled engineering, and most independent experts regard a permanent Mars settlement as a distant and unproven prospect.
Musk is a deeply polarizing public figure. Supporters credit him with accelerating electric vehicles and reviving spaceflight; critics point to his management style, his contested public statements on social and political issues, and his regulatory clashes. Assessments of his net impact vary widely and have grown more divided over time.
