10 Things You Didn't Know About Elon Musk

In the 2010 film Iron Man 2, Musk appears as himself in a brief scene set at a Monaco Grand Prix, where Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) greets him by name and compliments SpaceX's real Merlin rocket engines.^[1][2] The moment is a knowing wink: screenwriter Mark Fergus and others have said Musk was one of several real entrepreneurs — alongside Steve Jobs — who influenced Downey Jr.'s take on the Stark character, and Downey Jr. has described touring Musk's SpaceX factory as genuinely eye-opening before filming.^[2]

Musk is a citizen of South Africa (by birth), Canada (through his Canadian-born mother, Maye), and the United States (naturalized in 2002).^[3] He obtained Canadian citizenship as a teenager specifically to leave South Africa in 1989, using it as his path to eventually reach the U.S., detailed in Elonpedia's entry on his education and move to North America.^[3]

In 1976, the production of The Spy Who Loved Me built a working submersible version of a Lotus Esprit, nicknamed "Wet Nellie," for underwater filming — it had no engine or wheels for road use but genuinely dove using ballast tanks.^[4][5] Musk bought it at a 2013 RM Sotheby's auction for nearly $1 million after not realizing until after the fact what he'd purchased, and has said he wants to fit it with a Tesla electric powertrain and actually make it transform from car to submarine on demand, a modification not yet completed.^[4][5]

In March 2013, with Tesla's finances still shaky and the Model S ramp in doubt, Musk approached Google co-founder Larry Page about Google acquiring Tesla for $6 billion, with an additional $5 billion commitment to factory expansion, on condition Musk could keep running it as a Google unit for at least eight years.^[6][7] Before the deal closed, Model S sales accelerated and Tesla posted an unexpected quarterly profit, and Musk called off the talks rather than sell a company that no longer needed rescuing.^[6][7]

Alongside CEO, Musk's official SpaceX title is Chief Engineer, and he is listed as an inventor on dozens of patents across SpaceX and Tesla covering rocket, battery and vehicle technology.^[8][9] The title reflects the hands-on technical role documented throughout Elonpedia's entries on his first-principles thinking and leadership style.^[8]

Musk's 58-page 2013 "Hyperloop Alpha" white paper proposed tube-based, near-supersonic ground transport, but he explicitly declined to patent the idea and said he had no plans to build it himself, given his existing commitments to Tesla and SpaceX.^[10] The companies that did try, most notably Virgin Hyperloop One, spent a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars before shutting down in 2023 without a commercial route, detailed further in Elonpedia's Hyperloop entry.^[10]

As a child in South Africa, Musk trained in judo, Kyokushin karate and taekwondo, crediting the training partly with helping him handle the bullying he faced at school.^[11] Decades later, in 2023, he took up Brazilian jiu-jitsu, training with podcaster and BJJ black belt Lex Fridman and other prominent practitioners while a proposed (and never realized) cage match against Meta's Mark Zuckerberg generated widespread public attention.^[11][12]

In December 2021, TIME magazine named Musk its Person of the Year, citing his role at Tesla and SpaceX in accelerating the shift to electric vehicles and reusable spaceflight during a year when both companies posted major milestones.^[13] The honor is awarded to the person judged to have most influenced the year's events, for better or worse, rather than as an endorsement.^[13]

Musk's son with the musician Grimes is named X Æ A-12. Grimes has explained the name publicly: "X" stands for the unknown variable, "Æ" is her stylized elvish spelling of AI, and "A-12" references the Lockheed A-12, an early precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane the couple has said they both admire for combining speed with an unarmed, non-combat design.^[14] Musk has separately confirmed and elaborated on parts of the explanation in public comments.^[14]

Before Zip2, PayPal, Tesla or SpaceX, Musk's first commercial product was Blastar, a space-shooter video game he wrote in BASIC and sold to a South African computer magazine for about $500 in 1984.^[15] Elonpedia's dedicated entry on Blastar covers the game, the original magazine listing, and the fan-made version anyone can still play in a browser today.^[15]