Elon Musk
Born in Pretoria in 1971. Sold a video game at 12, left for Canada at 17, built two internet companies before 30, then bet everything on rockets and electric cars. Here is the whole story.
Most of what the world knows about Elon Musk is either a company announcement or a post on X. This is the life underneath, in order, with sources.
Pretoria, 1971–1989
Elon Reeve Musk was born June 28, 1971 in Pretoria to Errol Musk, an engineer and property developer who was elected to the city council the next year, and Maye Haldeman Musk, a Canadian-born model and dietitian. His brother Kimbal arrived in 1972 and sister Tosca in 1974. His parents divorced in 1979; he chose to live with his father, from whom he later became estranged (“a terrible human being,” he told Rolling Stone). Wikipedia Musk family
He read obsessively — the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Asimov's Foundation, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — taught himself to program from a Commodore VIC-20 manual, and at twelve sold the code for a space game called Blastar to a computer magazine for about $500. At Pretoria Boys High he was bullied badly; once he was thrown down a flight of concrete stairs and hospitalised.
In June 1989, at seventeen, he left for Canada on a passport obtained through his mother — partly to avoid South African military service, and because Canada was a path to the United States.
Canada and Penn, 1989–1995
After farm and lumber-mill jobs, he enrolled at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario (1990–92), where he met his future wife Justine Wilson, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. He left with a BA in physics and a BS in economics from Wharton (degrees formally awarded in 1997). In 1995 he was accepted to a Stanford materials-science PhD program and left within two days — he never enrolled — to start a company.
Zip2 and PayPal, 1995–2002
Zip2, founded with Kimbal and Greg Kouri, sold online city guides to newspapers like the New York Times and Chicago Tribune; the brothers slept in the office and showered at the YMCA. Compaq bought it in February 1999 for $307 million. Elon's share: $22 million.
He put about $12 million into X.com, an online bank, which merged in March 2000 with Confinity to become PayPal. That autumn, while he was away on his honeymoon, the board replaced him as CEO with Peter Thiel. He stayed the largest shareholder, and when eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in October 2002 he received roughly $176 million. He became a US citizen the same year.
Rockets and cars, 2002–2008
In 2001 he tried to buy refurbished ICBMs in Moscow to launch a greenhouse to Mars. Rebuffed, he founded SpaceX in May 2002 with about $100 million of his own money. In February 2004 he led Tesla Motors' $6.5 million Series A and became chairman. In 2006 he seeded SolarCity, run by his cousins.
2008 was, in his words, “the worst year of my life.” Falcon 1 failed three times before reaching orbit on September 28; Tesla was weeks from bankruptcy as he became its CEO in October; his first marriage ended. He put his last $40 million into Tesla, closed its rescue round on Christmas Eve, and NASA signed a $1.6 billion cargo contract with SpaceX on December 23. Both companies survived by days. The full SpaceX story is on SpaceX Unpacked; Tesla's on Tesla Unpacked.
Scale, 2010–2020
Tesla went public in June 2010; Dragon reached the space station in 2012; Falcon 9 landed its first booster in December 2015 and Falcon Heavy flew in 2018 with a Tesla Roadster on top. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 (leaving its board in 2018), Neuralink in 2016 and The Boring Company in 2017, and in 2018 took a Tesla pay package that paid nothing unless the company grew tenfold. It did. The same year an “funding secured” tweet cost him the Tesla chairmanship and $20 million in an SEC settlement, and a “pedo guy” tweet about a British cave diver ended in a 2019 jury verdict in his favour.
In May 2020 Crew Dragon carried astronauts to orbit, the first crewed launch from US soil in nine years. That December he moved to Texas and pledged to “own no house.”
Everything at once, 2021–2026
He hosted Saturday Night Live in May 2021 and disclosed he has Asperger's. He was Time's Person of the Year that December as the first person worth $300 billion. In 2022 he bought Twitter for $44 billion, renamed it X, and lost a record $200 billion. He founded xAI in 2023, backed Donald Trump in July 2024, ran the Department of Government Efficiency from January to May 2025, feuded with the President that June and reconciled in September.
2026 compressed a decade: SpaceX bought xAI (February), announced Terafab (March), went public (June 12) and made him the first trillionaire; he then recorded the largest wealth loss in history (July), revealed the flying Roadster (October 15) and opened merger talks between SpaceX and Tesla (October 20). Alex Gibney's documentary Musk reached theaters October 9; he called it “a hit piece that misses.” On Walter Isaacson's podcast in late October he said of DOGE, “I got carried away.”
In his own words
When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.60 Minutes, 2012
- “I'd like to die on Mars, just not on impact.” — SXSW, March 2013
- “With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.” — MIT, October 2014
- “Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” — Twitter, November 2018
- “Sorry to be a free speech absolutist.” — X, March 2022
- “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” — X, August 2022
- “Money won't matter in 2036.” — The Economist, July 2026
- “I'm okay with being disliked.” — The Builders with Walter Isaacson, October 2026
Quotes are sourced in the research notes; a few of the older ones are widely cited but not independently re-verified here.
Honours and firsts
- Fellow of the Royal Society (2018); National Academy of Engineering (2022); Royal Aeronautical Society Gold Medal (2012); Heinlein Prize (2011); Stephen Hawking Medal (2019).
- Time Person of the Year and FT Person of the Year, 2021; Time 100 in 2010, 2013, 2018 and 2021.
- Ukraine's Order of Liberty (Aug 26, 2026) for Starlink's wartime role.
- Guinness World Record (2023) for the largest personal fortune loss — later beaten by his own 2026 drawdown.
- Firsts: first person above $300B, $400B, $500B and $1T; largest one-day gain ever (+$164B); Forbes 400 #1 every year since 2021.
- On screen: Iron Man 2, The Simpsons, The Big Bang Theory, South Park, Rick and Morty (“Elon Tusk”), SNL host.
Controversies, plainly
- SEC, 2018 — the “funding secured” tweet: $20M fines for him and Tesla, three years off the chairmanship, lawyer pre-approval of material tweets.
- Twitter, 2022–23 — half the staff cut in a week; advertiser exodus; the company marked down ~79% by Fidelity in 2024.
- Jan 20, 2025 — a straight-arm gesture at an inauguration rally that many read as a Nazi salute; the ADL said it was not; he mocked critics.
- DOGE — claimed $150B of savings (disputed); mass firings; Tesla showrooms vandalised; approval ratings fell sharply.
- Drug reports — the New York Times (May 2025) reported heavy ketamine use during the campaign; he denied taking drugs while acknowledging past prescription ketamine.
- Grok — antisemitic outputs and non-consensual image edits brought lawsuits and regulators (see Elon's Universe).