Elon Musk: Biography, Early Life, and Companies

Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa, the eldest of three children of Maye Musk, a model and dietitian, and Errol Musk, an electromechanical engineer.^[1][2] His younger brother Kimbal would later become his first business partner, and his sister Tosca became a filmmaker.^[2]

He was an intensely curious, bookish child who read for hours a day — science fiction, comics and, famously, the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica.^[1][3] Isaacson's biography describes a boy who could disappear into his own thoughts and who later credited books such as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with teaching him that the hard part is often knowing which questions to ask.^[1]

At around age 10 he got his first computer, a Commodore VIC-20, and taught himself to program. At 12 he wrote and sold a space-shooter game called Blastar to a South African computer magazine for about $500 — an early sign of the self-directed engineer he would become.^[2][4]

In 1989, at 17, Musk left South Africa for Canada, where his mother had been born, and worked odd jobs before enrolling at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.^[2][4] In 1992 he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor's degree in physics and a bachelor's degree in economics from the Wharton School.^[2][4][14]

In 1995 he moved to California to begin a doctoral program at Stanford University but left almost immediately. The internet was taking off, and he decided the opportunity to build something could not wait.^[2][4]

With Kimbal, Musk co-founded Zip2 in 1995, a company that put city guides, business directories and maps online for newspapers. Compaq bought Zip2 in 1999 for about $307 million, and Musk, then 28, received roughly $22 million.^[2][4][17]

He immediately put most of it into X.com, one of the first online banks. In 2000 X.com merged with Confinity, the start-up behind the PayPal payments service, and the combined company took the PayPal name. eBay acquired PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion in stock.^[5] The episode is told in detail in Jimmy Soni's history of the "PayPal Mafia," the alumni group that went on to shape Silicon Valley.^[5]

Rather than retire, Musk bet his PayPal fortune on two industries that most investors considered impossible for a newcomer. He founded SpaceX in 2002 with the long-term goal of making humanity multiplanetary, and in 2004 he led Tesla's Series A investment and became its chairman.^[2][6]

Both companies came close to failing in 2008, when SpaceX's first three Falcon 1 launches had failed and Tesla was running out of cash during the financial crisis. A fourth Falcon 1 reached orbit on September 28, 2008, and in December NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion cargo contract; Tesla closed a rescue financing round the same month.^[1][7]

What followed is one of the great runs in industrial history. SpaceX's Falcon 9 became the first orbital-class rocket to land and re-fly its first stage, its Dragon capsule restored America's ability to launch astronauts in 2020, and its Starship became the largest rocket ever flown.^[7][8][18] Tesla launched the Model S, Model X, Model 3 and Model Y, and the Model Y became the world's best-selling car of any kind in 2023.^[6][16]

SpaceX's Starlink satellite-internet network, first launched in 2019, grew into the largest satellite constellation ever built, with more than 12 million subscribers reported in August 2026.^[9] In 2016 Musk co-founded Neuralink to develop brain-computer interfaces, and The Boring Company to build low-cost tunnels.^[2]

In 2022 he acquired Twitter for about $44 billion and later rebranded it as X. His artificial-intelligence company, xAI, founded in 2023, developed the Grok models; xAI later combined with X and was then acquired by SpaceX, where it operates today as SpaceXAI.^[10][15]

Musk's defining habit is reasoning from "first principles" — breaking a problem down to the physics and the raw cost of materials, rather than accepting how things have always been done. He has described this approach in many interviews, including his long conversations with Lex Fridman.^[3][11] It explains decisions such as building rockets in-house instead of buying parts, and designing electric cars from a clean sheet.

Admirers point to the scale of what these methods produced: reusable rockets that cut the cost of reaching orbit, an electric-car company that pushed the whole auto industry toward electrification, and a global internet network reaching remote communities, ships and aircraft. In June 2026 SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq as SPCX in the largest IPO in U.S. history, raising about $75 billion at $135 per share.^[12] Musk was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences, in 2018 for his achievements in space travel and electric vehicles.^[13]