Engineer, founder, provocateur, and the richest human who has ever lived. The story of how a bullied, book-obsessed kid from Pretoria built rockets, electric cars, brain chips and a media empire — and became the most-watched fortune on the planet.
The arc of Musk’s life reads like a montage — each act bigger and stranger than the last. Here it is, in order.
Elon Reeve Musk is born on June 28 in Pretoria, South Africa, the eldest child of Errol Musk, an electromechanical engineer, and Maye Musk, a model and dietitian. His siblings Kimbal and Tosca follow.
Largely self-taught on a Commodore VIC-20, Musk writes a space-shooter called Blastar and sells the BASIC source code to a magazine for roughly $500. A bookish, relentlessly curious child, he reads encyclopaedias front to back and is severely bullied at school.
At 17, partly to avoid compulsory service in the South African military, Musk emigrates to Canada via his Canadian-born mother, working odd jobs — including cleaning boilers — before enrolling at Queen’s University.
Musk transfers to the University of Pennsylvania, earning a BS in economics from Wharton and a BA in physics. He moves to California for a Stanford PhD in applied physics — and quits after two days to ride the internet wave.
With brother Kimbal and a small loan from their father, Musk founds Zip2, an early online city-guide and business-directory service. He famously sleeps at the office and showers at the YMCA.
Compaq buys Zip2 for about $307 million. Musk, 27, walks away with roughly $22 million — and immediately reinvests almost all of it into his next idea.
Musk launches X.com, an ambitious online bank. It merges with a rival to become PayPal. Ousted as CEO during a 2000 trip, he remains the largest shareholder.
eBay acquires PayPal for $1.5 billion in stock; Musk nets around $175 million. Months later he founds Space Exploration Technologies — SpaceX — with the audacious goal of making humanity multi-planetary.
Musk leads Tesla Motors’ Series A and becomes chairman. He pours his PayPal windfall into both SpaceX and Tesla, nearly going personally bankrupt in 2008 when both teeter on the edge.
Three SpaceX launch failures, the financial crisis, and Tesla burning cash bring Musk to the brink. Then Falcon 1 reaches orbit — the first privately-built liquid-fuelled rocket to do so — NASA awards a resupply contract, and Tesla closes funding on Christmas Eve. He takes over as Tesla CEO.
SpaceX’s Dragon becomes the first commercial spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station. Tesla ships the Model S, which goes on to redefine the electric car. Musk crosses into billionaire territory.
Musk co-founds OpenAI as a non-profit AI lab, launches Neuralink to build brain–computer interfaces, and starts The Boring Company to dig traffic-beating tunnels. Tesla absorbs SolarCity.
Falcon Heavy launches on its maiden flight carrying Musk’s own cherry-red Tesla Roadster — “Starman” — into a solar orbit. The twin side boosters land in synchrony. Tesla also grants Musk a record, all-or-nothing pay package tied to wild performance milestones.
Crew Dragon carries NASA astronauts to orbit — the first crewed launch from American soil since the Shuttle, and the first ever by a private company. Tesla joins the S&P 500; its stock rockets and, with it, Musk’s fortune.
A surging Tesla makes Musk the wealthiest person on Earth. TIME names him Person of the Year. SpaceX’s Starlink begins blanketing the planet with broadband from low Earth orbit.
After a chaotic on-again-off-again saga — and a lawsuit — Musk completes a $44 billion takeover of Twitter, walking into headquarters carrying a sink. He cuts most of the staff and begins a turbulent overhaul.
Musk rebrands Twitter as “X,” pursuing his decades-old vision of an “everything app.” He founds xAI to build artificial intelligence, releasing the Grok chatbot trained on the X firehose.
Neuralink implants its first device in a human patient. In December, Musk becomes the first individual ever estimated to be worth more than $400 billion — a threshold no one had crossed before.
Musk steps onto the political stage, briefly leading a federal cost-cutting effort before a public falling-out. xAI absorbs X; Starship pushes toward routine flight; Tesla bets the company on autonomy and humanoid robots. The estimate on this site has flirted with the trillion-dollar line.
Most people who clear $180 million before turning thirty buy an island. Musk did the opposite. He took nearly every dollar from PayPal and split it across a rocket company everyone said would fail and a car company everyone said would fail — and kept almost nothing in reserve.
By 2008 both were hours from collapse and he was borrowing money to pay rent. The same week SpaceX finally reached orbit and Tesla closed its rescue funding. That refusal to hedge — to bet the whole stack, twice, on the same week — is the through-line of his entire career.
Few people run one demanding company. Musk runs an interlocking constellation of them — spanning space, transport, energy, payments, neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
The most valuable private company on Earth and the dominant force in spaceflight. SpaceX pioneered reusable orbital rockets, flies the majority of the world’s payload mass, runs the Starlink satellite-internet network, and is building Starship to carry people to the Moon and Mars.
The company that made electric cars desirable. From the Roadster to the Model 3 and Cybertruck, Tesla reshaped the auto industry, and is now wagering its future on full self-driving software, energy storage, and the Optimus humanoid robot.
Musk’s artificial-intelligence company, maker of the Grok assistant, now merged with the X social platform (the former Twitter) he bought for $44 billion. The combined entity fuses a frontier AI lab with one of the world’s loudest public squares.
A neurotechnology company building implantable brain–computer interfaces. Its first human recipients have used the device to control computers with thought alone; the long-term aim is to treat paralysis and, eventually, merge mind with machine.
Born from a tweet about traffic, it digs tunnels for high-speed underground transit. Its Las Vegas Loop ferries passengers beneath the Strip in Teslas — a first step toward a city-scale network.
The online-payments pioneer that grew from Musk’s X.com. Its 2002 sale to eBay funded everything that came after — and its alumni went on to found a striking share of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies.
Musk’s very first company: software that put newspapers and their advertisers onto the early web. Its sale to Compaq gave a 27-year-old his first real capital — and the conviction to swing bigger.
Musk helped launch and fund the research lab that later built ChatGPT, intending it as a counterweight to corporate AI. He left the board in 2018 and has since become one of its most vocal — and litigious — critics.
Musk’s wealth is not a bank balance — it is mostly equity, locked up in companies he controls. The overwhelming majority sits in his stakes in Tesla and SpaceX, with smaller slices in xAI/X and his private ventures. Because so much of it rides on share prices, his net worth swings by billions in a single day, which is exactly what makes it fun to watch tick.
He crossed into billionaire territory around 2012, became the world’s richest person in 2021, and in December 2024 became the first individual ever estimated above $400 billion. The headline figure on the tracker is an independent, second-by-second estimate — a model, not an official feed.
Behind the headlines is a sprawling, unconventional family life.
Son of Errol Musk, an engineer, and Maye Musk, a dietitian and model who became a celebrated octogenarian cover star. His brother Kimbal is a restaurateur and frequent co-founder; his sister Tosca is a filmmaker.
Married the author Justine Wilson (2000–2008), then the actress Talulah Riley (twice). He later had children with the musician Grimes and with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis, among others.
Father to around a dozen children. His first son died as an infant — a loss he has cited as formative. His kids carry some of the most unusual names on record, including X Æ A-Xii.
Famously sold most of his houses, declaring he’d own “no home,” and is known for working punishing hours, sleeping at his factories, and running his life from his phone.
Musk credits two mental habits above all. The first is reasoning from first principles — breaking a problem down to physics and rebuilding from the ground up rather than copying what already exists. It’s how he concluded that rockets and batteries should cost a fraction of their going rate, then built companies to prove it.
The second is a brute tolerance for risk and failure. “Failure is an option here,” he tells engineers; the goal is to fail fast, cheaply and in public, then iterate. That ethos — exhilarating to some, exhausting to others — defines the culture at every company he runs.
A figure this large attracts storms. An honest profile includes them.
In 2018 Musk tweeted that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share. The funding was not, in fact, locked. The SEC sued; he settled, paid a fine, and gave up the Tesla chairmanship.
Musk frequently feuds publicly — with journalists, regulators, analysts and former allies — often on his own platform. Supporters call it candor; critics call it impulsive and corrosive.
His companies have faced lawsuits and complaints over working conditions, safety, discrimination and the mass layoffs that followed the Twitter takeover.
Once seen as broadly apolitical, Musk moved sharply into political life, using X as a megaphone and briefly leading a federal cost-cutting effort before a high-profile falling-out. Few public figures are now more polarizing.
His personal posts and the content-moderation choices at X have drawn repeated controversy, advertiser boycotts and accusations of amplifying misinformation.
“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”
“I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.”
“Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.”
“Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.”
“I think it’s possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.”
“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
Whatever one makes of the man, the dent is undeniable. Musk dragged the auto industry into the electric age, made rockets reusable and cheap enough to reshape access to space, put broadband over the whole planet, and helped force artificial intelligence onto every boardroom agenda. He has also become a lightning rod — proof that singular technical ambition and deep public controversy can live in the same person.
His stated goal hasn’t changed since 2002: make life multi-planetary and “extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” The fortune tracked on this site is, to him, mostly fuel for that. Whether he gets to Mars or not, his fingerprints are already on the century.