Elon Reeve Musk

Elon Reeve Musk was born on 28th June, 1971, at Pretoria, South Africa, is an entrepreneur who cofounded the electronic payment firm PayPal and founded SpaceX, maker of launch vehicles and spacecraft. Musk is the CEO of, the electric car manufacturer Tesla. Musk acquired Twitter, which was later renamed as “X” in 2022. Musk is the world’s richest person, with a net worth of around 400 billion US Dollar, as of 2025.

Musk was born to a South African father-Errol Musk and a Canadian mother Maye Musk. During his early years, Musk displayed a talent for computers and entrepreneurship. He developed a video game at the age of 12 and sold it to a computer magazine. In 1988, after obtaining a Canadian passport, Musk left South Africa because of the greater economic opportunities available in the United States of America. Musk joined Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and in 1992 he was transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where he received bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics in 1997. Musk founded ZIP2 a company that provided maps and business directories to online newspapers in the year 1995. Computer giant Compaq acquired ZIP2 for $307 million in 1999. Musk then founded an online financial services company, X.com, which was renamed as PayPal, which specialized in transferring money online. PayPal was acquired by e-Bay in 2002 for 1.5 billion USD.

In 2002, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) to make more affordable rockets. SpaceX has also established the Starlink satellite network which is a satellite based global broadband internet service. As of 2025 there are about 7,000 LEO satellites launched by Starlink. In addition to its civilian services, the company operates Starshield, a military-grade version of Starlink, and is building a secure satellite system for the U.S. military. In 2004 Musk became one of the major funders of Tesla Motors (later renamed Tesla), an electric car company founded by entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Tesla introduced its first electric car in 2006, which could travel around 400 km on a single charge. In 2010 the company’s IPO (initial public offering) raised about 225 million US Dollars. In 2022, Musk acquired Twitter which was later renamed as X. Nine months after acquiring Twitter (now X) in October 2022, Musk founded a new AI company called xAI, which trains its machine-learning models using user data from X and publicly available sources. In 2016, Musk founded Neuralink with a team of eight neuroscientists, engineers, and biomedical researchers to develop a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) that could be surgically implanted in the human brain and enable wireless interaction with computers and mobile devices controlled purely by thought. Building on decades of existing research, the company’s initial goal was to create a brain chip interfacing device that would alleviate neurological conditions such as paralysis and epilepsy.