Who Is Elon Musk?

1. Pretoria: a difficult childhood and a love of computers

Elon Reeve Musk was born on 28 June 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, the eldest of three children of Errol Musk, an engineer, and Maye Musk, a model and dietitian. His childhood was unhappy: his parents divorced when he was young, he was bullied severely at school, once being beaten so badly that he was hospitalised, and he has described himself as a lonely, bookish child who retreated into reading and computers. At the age of twelve he taught himself to program and sold a video game he had written, called Blastar, to a computer magazine for a small sum, an early sign of the combination of technical skill and commercial instinct that would define his career.

In 1989, at the age of seventeen, Musk left South Africa for Canada, where his mother was born, partly to avoid compulsory military service under the apartheid government and partly because he wanted to move to the United States. He studied at Queen's University in Ontario for two years, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned degrees in economics and physics. He began a PhD in applied physics at Stanford University in 1995, but he left after two days, convinced that the internet, then in its early commercial phase, offered a greater opportunity than academic research. The decision was a gamble, and it paid off.

Musk's early life is often told as a story of a gifted outsider who overcame bullying and isolation through intelligence and determination, and there is truth in that telling. It is also true that he came from a relatively comfortable family, that his father was a successful engineer, and that he had access to education and opportunities that most South Africans of his generation did not. Both parts of the story matter: he was a bullied child, and he was also a privileged one, and the tension between those two facts runs through much of the argument about him today.

2. Zip2 and PayPal: the first fortunes

Musk's first company was Zip2, founded in 1995 with his brother Kimbal, which provided online city guides and maps for newspapers. The brothers worked long hours, sleeping in the office and showering at a nearby public facility, and in 1999 the computer maker Compaq bought Zip2 for a reported sum of more than 300 million dollars in cash and shares. Musk, who was twenty-seven, received a substantial share of the proceeds, and he used the money to found his next company, X.com, an online bank. X.com later merged with a rival, Confinity, and the combined company became PayPal, the online payments service.

PayPal grew rapidly, and in 2002 the online auction site eBay bought it. Musk, who was by then the largest shareholder, received a large sum from the sale, and he was suddenly in a position to fund the ventures he really cared about: space travel and electric cars. His time at PayPal was not without conflict: he was removed as chief executive in 2000, while on honeymoon, after a disagreement with other executives about the company's technology, an episode that taught him, by his own account, the importance of controlling the companies he founded. He has controlled his later companies much more tightly.

The PayPal years established Musk's pattern as an entrepreneur: he identified an industry that he believed was ripe for disruption, invested his own money in it, set himself an ambitious technical goal, and pursued it with an intensity that inspired loyalty in some employees and exhausted others. They also established his reputation in Silicon Valley as a founder who was willing to risk his entire fortune on a new idea, a reputation that would be tested to the limit in the years that followed.

3. SpaceX: reusable rockets and the return to space

SpaceX, the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, was founded by Musk in 2002 with the goal of reducing the cost of space travel and, ultimately, of making it possible for humans to live on Mars. The early years were difficult: the company's first rocket, Falcon 1, failed three times between 2006 and 2008, and by the fourth launch, in September 2008, the company was almost out of money. The fourth launch succeeded, becoming the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to reach orbit, and in December 2008 NASA awarded SpaceX a contract to resupply the International Space Station, a deal that saved the company.

SpaceX's great technical achievement was the reusable rocket. Traditionally, rockets were used once and discarded, which made spaceflight enormously expensive. SpaceX developed the Falcon 9, a rocket whose first stage could land back on Earth, either on land or on a drone ship at sea, and be flown again. The first successful landing of an orbital rocket took place in December 2015, and since then SpaceX has reused boosters routinely, bringing down the cost of launches and transforming the economics of the space industry. The company's Dragon capsule has carried astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA since 2020, ending the United States' dependence on Russian rockets for crewed flights.

SpaceX has also built Starlink, a network of thousands of satellites providing internet access, and Starship, a much larger rocket designed to carry people and cargo to the Moon and Mars. Starlink has been praised for bringing internet access to remote areas and for providing communications in Ukraine after the Russian invasion in 2022, and criticised by astronomers, who say the satellites interfere with observations of the night sky, and by others who worry about the concentration of a critical communications network in private hands. Musk's stated goal, of making humanity a multi-planetary species, is regarded by supporters as visionary and by critics as a distraction from the problems of Earth, and the argument between those two views is unlikely to be settled soon.

4. Tesla: electric cars for the mass market

Musk joined Tesla in 2004, a year after the company was founded, as chairman and the largest investor, and he became chief executive in 2008. At the time, electric cars were widely regarded as slow, impractical and commercially hopeless, and Tesla itself was close to failure in 2008, during the financial crisis. Musk invested his remaining money in the company and took personal control, and the company survived. The Model S, launched in 2012, was a luxury electric sedan that won praise from reviewers and proved that an electric car could be fast, attractive and practical, and the Model 3, launched in 2017, was designed to bring electric cars to a mass market.

Tesla's rise transformed the motor industry. Traditional car makers, who had dismissed electric vehicles, began investing heavily in them, and governments around the world set dates for phasing out petrol and diesel cars. Tesla became the most valuable car maker in the world by market value, and Musk became the public face of the electric car revolution. Supporters credit him with doing more than any other individual to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels in transport, and with proving that a new car company could succeed in an industry dominated by century-old giants.

Critics tell a different story. They point to repeated missed production targets, to quality problems in Tesla's cars, and to Musk's promises about self-driving technology, which have been made for many years without being fully delivered. Regulators in the United States have investigated Tesla's driver-assistance system, Autopilot, after crashes in which it was in use, and the company has been criticised for the way it describes the system's capabilities. Former employees have alleged a harsh workplace culture, including long hours and pressure to meet production targets, and the company has faced lawsuits alleging racial discrimination at its California factory, which Tesla has denied. These disputes are ongoing, and they are part of why Musk remains such a contested figure.

5. Twitter, X and the politics of speech

In 2022, Musk bought Twitter, the social media platform, after a long and public negotiation, and renamed it X in 2023. He said he was buying the platform to protect free speech, which he argued had been restricted by the company's previous management, and he cut the workforce sharply, relaxed the rules on content moderation, and restored the accounts of users who had been banned, including that of Donald Trump. Supporters of the purchase said that Twitter had become a partisan platform that suppressed conservative views, and that Musk's changes restored open debate. Critics said that the changes allowed misinformation and hate speech to spread, that advertisers left the platform as a result, and that Musk himself used the platform to promote his own political views and to attack his critics.

Musk's own use of social media is central to his public image. He posts frequently, often impulsively, on subjects ranging from his companies to politics to jokes, and his posts have moved markets, provoked lawsuits and caused diplomatic incidents. In 2018 he posted that he had funding secured to take Tesla private, a claim that led to a settlement with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and a fine. His defenders say that his directness is refreshing and that he is held to a different standard from other chief executives; his critics say that his posts are reckless and that they have real consequences for investors, employees and the public.

The purchase of Twitter also changed Musk's relationship with the media and with politics. He became a prominent supporter of Donald Trump, and he used X to promote Trump's candidacy in the 2024 election. After Trump's victory, Musk was given a formal role in the administration, leading an effort known as the Department of Government Efficiency, which aimed to cut federal spending and reduce the size of the federal workforce. Supporters of the effort said it was a necessary attack on waste and bureaucracy; critics said it was chaotic, that it cut essential services, and that it gave an unelected businessman extraordinary power over the government. Musk left the role in May 2025, after several months in which his involvement had become one of the most controversial aspects of the new administration.

6. The other ventures: Neuralink, the Boring Company and Mars

Beyond SpaceX, Tesla and X, Musk has founded or promoted a series of other ventures, each of them aimed at a problem he regards as fundamental. Neuralink, founded in 2016, is developing brain-computer interfaces, devices implanted in the brain that could allow people with paralysis to control computers and, in Musk's longer-term vision, could allow humans to merge with artificial intelligence. The company has implanted devices in human patients, and its supporters say the technology could transform the lives of people with severe disabilities. Critics, including some neuroscientists, say the claims made for the technology are exaggerated and that the company's animal testing has raised ethical questions.

The Boring Company, also founded in 2016, aims to reduce traffic congestion by building networks of tunnels under cities. It has built a small tunnel system in Las Vegas, and it has proposed larger projects in other cities, but progress has been slow, and critics have questioned whether the concept can work at scale. Musk has also promoted the idea of a Hyperloop, a high-speed transport system using pods travelling through vacuum tubes, although he has not built one himself. These ventures are characteristic of Musk's approach: he identifies a large problem, proposes a radical technical solution, and pursues it publicly, with a confidence that inspires both enthusiasm and scepticism.

The thread that runs through all of Musk's ventures is his stated belief that humanity faces existential risks, from climate change to artificial intelligence to the possibility of a catastrophe on Earth, and that the answer is to develop new technologies and to become a multi-planetary species. Supporters see this as a coherent and inspiring vision; critics see it as a distraction from more immediate problems, and as a justification for accumulating power in the hands of a single individual. The truth, as with so much about Musk, is likely to be debated for a long time, and it will depend on what his companies actually achieve in the years ahead.

7. The argument about Musk: visionary or reckless?

The argument about Elon Musk is, at bottom, an argument about what kind of person should be allowed to shape the future. His supporters point to concrete achievements: reusable rockets that have transformed spaceflight, electric cars that have accelerated the end of the petrol age, and a willingness to risk his own fortune on ideas that others dismissed as impossible. They argue that he is a rare figure, an engineer-entrepreneur who combines technical understanding with commercial ambition, and that the world is better for his work. They also argue that his critics are motivated by jealousy, by politics, or by a dislike of his bluntness.

His critics point to a different record: promises about self-driving cars that have not been kept, a management style that former employees describe as punishing, public statements that have spread misinformation, and a political role that gave a private businessman extraordinary influence over the government. They argue that his achievements depend heavily on government contracts and subsidies, that his companies have benefited from the work of thousands of engineers whose contributions are overlooked, and that his wealth and his platform give him a power that no individual should hold. They also argue that his behaviour on social media, and his attacks on critics, journalists and regulators, are incompatible with the responsibilities that come with his position.

Both sides have evidence, and neither side is likely to persuade the other. What is certain is that Musk is one of the most consequential figures of the twenty-first century, and that his companies have changed spaceflight, the car industry and social media in ways that will last. Whether history remembers him as a visionary who opened the road to Mars, or as a cautionary tale about the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual, will depend on what happens next, and on who writes the history. For now, he remains what he has always been: a figure who inspires strong feelings in almost everyone who encounters him, and a man whose next move is always news.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Elon Musk
• Wikipedia — Elon Musk
• SpaceX — official site
• SpaceX — Launches

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• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.