Elon Musk

Overview

Born in 1971, serial entrepreneur Elon Musk is the world's richest person, with a net worth of more than $800B as of April 2026. Originally from South Africa, Musk has spent most of his life founding and leading tech companies—aside from a short stint in the Trump administration in 2025, leading the advisory body known as the Department of Government Efficiency.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, Musk sold his first company, the city guide software company Zip2, for $305M in 1999. He used his share of the profits to create online banking company X.com, which later became PayPal, starting a pattern of serial entrepreneurship.

His most notable ventures include founding SpaceX (which pioneered reusable rockets and launched thousands of communications satellites into orbit) in 2002 after becoming interested in colonizing Mars, joining electric carmaker Tesla with a $6.5M investment in 2004 before becoming CEO in 2008, and his $44B Twitter acquisition in October 2022 (Musk renamed the social media company X in July 2023).

While critics describe Musk as unempathetic to his employees and accuse him of creating toxic workplace cultures, fans praise his multiple successful companies, engineering breakthroughs, and penchant for innovation and efficiency.

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