Elon Reeve Musk FRS ( born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate, entrepreneur, and investor. He is the co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI, as well as the founder, CEO, and Chief Engineer of SpaceX. He is also an early-stage investor, CEO, and Product Architect of , Inc., and the founder of The Boring Company. Musk is the world's wealthiest individual, according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and the Forbes real-time billionaires list, with an estimated net worth of roughly US$273 billion as of April 2022. 

Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, to a Canadian mother and a South African father. He attended the University of Pretoria for a short time before emigrating to Canada at the age of 17 to evade conscription. He began his studies at Queen's University and later transferred to the University of Toronto.

of Pennsylvania two years later, where he received a bachelor's degree in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University but decided instead to pursue a business career, co-founding the web software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. The startup was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. The same year, Musk co-founded online bank X.com, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. The company was bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX, an aerospace manufacturer, and space transport services company, of which he is CEO and Chief Engineer. In 2004, he joined electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.) as chairman and product architect, becoming its CEO in 2008.He was a founding member of SolarCity, a solar energy services company that was later purchased by Tesla and renamed Tesla Energy. He co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit research organization dedicated to friendly artificial intelligence, in 2015. He co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology business that develops brain-computer interfaces, and The Boring Company, a tunnel construction company, in 2016. Musk has proposed a high-speed vactrain transit system called the Hyperloop. He won a slander suit brought against him by a British caver who assisted in the Tham Luang cave rescue in 2019. Musk has also been chastised for disseminating false information regarding the COVID-19 epidemic, as well as his other viewpoints on AI, bitcoin, and public transportation.

Musk has been chastised for his unconventional and unscientific viewpoints, as well as his widely publicized and divisive utterances. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued him in 2018 after he falsely tweeted that he had secured funds for a private acquisition of Tesla. He reached an agreement with the SEC, temporarily standing down as chairman and consenting to restrictions on his powers.

Family and childhood

Elon Reeve Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on June 28, 1971.Maye Musk (née Haldeman), his mother, is a model and nutritionist who was born in Saskatchewan, Canada but reared in South Africa. Errol Musk is his father, a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, and property entrepreneur who used to own half of a Zambian emerald mine near Lake Tanganyika.  Musk has a younger brother, Kimbal, and a younger sister, Tosca, both born in 1972. (born 1974).  Joshua Haldeman, his maternal grandpa, was an adventurous American-born Canadian who led his family on record-breaking trips to Africa and Australia in a single-engine Bellanca airplane;[16] Musk is of British and Pennsylvania Dutch descent  Musk's adenoids were removed when he was a child by doctors.

His mother initially thought he was deaf, but eventually concluded that he was thinking "in another universe."  In Elon's upbringing, the family was extremely affluent; Errol Musk once stated, "We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe."After his parents split in 1980, Musk spent most of his time in Pretoria and elsewhere with his father, a decision he regretted two years later.  Musk has become distant from his father, whom he sees as "a terrible human being who has done almost every evil thing you can imagine."  On his father's side, he has a half-sister and a half-brother.  As a child, Elon attended an Anglican Sunday school. Musk became interested in computers and video games when he was ten years old, and he bought a Commodore VIC-20.  He learned computer programming from a book and, at the age of 12, sold the code for Blastar, a BASIC-based video game he built, to PC and Office Technology magazine for $500.  Musk, an awkward and reclusive child, was bullied throughout his childhood and was once hospitalized after being thrown down a flight of stairs by a group of boys.  Before graduating from Pretoria Boys High School, he attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School and Bryanston High School. 

PayPal and SpaceX

Musk attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and in 1992 he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where he received a bachelor’s degree in physics and economics in 1997. He enrolled in graduate school in physics at Stanford University in California, but he left after only two days because he felt that the Internet had much more potential to change society than work in physics. In 1995 he founded Zip2, a company that provided maps and business directories to online newspapers. In 1999 Zip2 was bought by the computer manufacturer Compaq for $307 million, and Musk then founded an online financial services company, X.com, which later became PayPal, which specialized in transferring money online. The online auction eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
Musk was long convinced that for life to survive, humanity has to become a multiplanet species. However, he was dissatisfied with the great expense of rocket launchers. In 2002 he founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) to make more affordable rockets. Its first two rockets were the Falcon 1 (first launched in 2006) and the larger Falcon 9 (first launched in 2010), which were designed to cost much less than competing rockets. A third rocket, the Falcon Heavy (first launched in 2018), was designed to carry 117,000 pounds (53,000 kg) to orbit, nearly twice as much as its largest competitor, the Boeing Company’s Delta IV Heavy, for one-third the cost. SpaceX has announced the successor to the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy: the Super Heavy–Starship system. The Super Heavy first stage would be capable of lifting 100,000 kg (220,000 pounds) to low Earth orbit. The payload would be the Starship, a spacecraft designed for providing fast transportation between cities on Earth and building bases on the Moon and Mars. SpaceX also developed the Dragon spacecraft, which carries supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). The dragon can carry as many as seven astronauts, and it had a crewed flight carrying astronauts Doug Hurley and Robert Behnken to the ISS in 2020. Musk sought to reduce the expense of spaceflight by developing a fully reusable rocket that could lift off and return to the pad it launched from. Beginning in 2012, SpaceX’s Grasshopper rocket made several short flights to test such technology. In addition to being CEO of SpaceX, Musk was also a chief designer in building the Falcon rockets, Dragon, and Grasshopper.

Tesla

Musk had long been interested in the possibilities of electric cars, and in 2004 he became one of the major funders of Tesla Motors (later renamed Tesla), an electric car company founded by entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. In 2006 Tesla introduced its first car, the Roadster, which could travel 245 miles (394 km) on a single charge. Unlike most previous electric vehicles, which Musk thought was stodgy and uninteresting, it was a sports car that could go from 0 to 60 miles (97 km) per hour in less than four seconds. In 2010 the company’s initial public offering raised about $226 million. Two years later Tesla introduced the Model S sedan, which was acclaimed by automotive critics for its performance and design. The company won further praise for its Model X luxury SUV, which went on the market in 2015. The Model 3, a less-expensive vehicle, went into production in 2017.


Musk expressed reservations about Tesla being publicly traded, and in August 2018 he made a series of tweets about taking the company private, noting that he had “secured funding.” The following month the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Musk for securities fraud, alleging that the tweets were “false and misleading.” Shortly thereafter Tesla’s board rejected the SEC’s proposed settlement, reportedly because Musk had threatened to resign. However, the news sent Tesla stock plummeting, and a harsher deal was ultimately accepted. Its terms included Musk stepping down as chairman for three years, though he was allowed to continue as CEO.

Dissatisfied with the projected cost ($68 billion) of a high-speed rail system in California, Musk in 2013 proposed an alternate faster system, the Hyperloop, a pneumatic tube in which a pod carrying 28 passengers would travel the 350 miles (560 km) between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 35 minutes at a top speed of 760 miles (1,220 km) per hour, nearly the speed of sound. Musk claimed that the Hyperloop would cost only $6 billion and that, with the pods departing every two minutes on average, the system could accommodate the six million people who travel that route every year. However, he stated that, between running SpaceX and Tesla, he could not devote time to the Hyperloop’s development.