Elon Musk

Background

Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. He was born to a Canadian mother, Maye Musk, and a South African father, Errol Musk. Musk lived in South Africa until 1989; when he was 17, he applied for a Canadian passport and moved to Saskatchewan, Canada, to avoid entering the South African military service. Before becoming one of the most famous entrepreneurs, he was an introverted child. From a young age, he showed great interest in computers and science; he learned computer programming alone by reading a manual. When he was only 12, he created a code for a video game that he sold for $500. Musk studied several careers; he graduated in 1995 with two Bachelor’s degrees — one in economics and another in physics, from the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S. That same year, he moved to California to pursue a business career. He took two internships in Silicon Valley before he started developing his own companies.

Musk’s entrepreneurship journey is paved with successes. In 1995, using his father’s money ($28,000), he co-founded Zip2, a web software company. The start-up was sold that very same year for the sum of $307 million. That same year, Musk co-founded X.com, today known as PayPal; the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion. The magnate has founded several successful companies and is the CEO of most of them. In 2002 he launched SpaceX, a company that manufactures and launches spacecraft. In 2004 he joined Tesla Motors, today Tesla, Inc; he became the company CEO in 2008. In 2015, Musk founded non-profit artificial intelligence research called OpenAI. And in 2016, he co-founded Neuralink, a company that aims to combine the human brain with artificial intelligence.

Musk is a very controversial personality. He sure is a visionary but Musk’s methods are sometimes accused of being unorthodox and unscientific. Musk had four marriages — the first one was to Justine Wilson, he married Talulah Riley twice, and his most recent marriage was to Canadian musician Grimes. Musk and Grimes split in 2021. The businessman has a total of eight children.