Elon Musk
Source: Situation Update 9/12/2023
Judy Byington
Elon Reeve Musk (/ˈiːlɒn/ EE-lon; born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor.
Musk is the founder, chairman, CEO and chief technology officer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO, product architect and former chairman of Tesla, Inc.; owner, chairman and CTO of X Corp.; founder of the Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and president of the Musk Foundation.
He is the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$226 billion as of September 2023, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and $249 billion according to Forbes, primarily from his ownership stakes in both Tesla and SpaceX.[3][4][5]
Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and briefly attended the University of Pretoria before immigrating to Canada at age 18, acquiring citizenship through his Canadian-born mother.[6]
Two years later, he matriculated at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
Musk later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, and received bachelor's degrees in economics and physics there.
He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University.
However, Musk dropped out after two days and, with his brother Kimbal, co-founded online city guide software company Zip2.
The startup was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999, and with $12 million of the money he made, that same year Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank.
X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal.
In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion, and that same year, with $100 million of the money he made, Musk founded SpaceX, a spaceflight services company.
In 2004, he became an early investor in electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.).
He became its chairman and product architect, assuming the position of CEO in 2008.
In 2006, Musk helped create SolarCity, a solar energy company that was acquired by Tesla in 2016 and became Tesla Energy.
In 2013, he proposed a hyperloop high-speed vactrain transportation system.
In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company. The following year, Musk co-founded Neuralink—a neurotechnology company developing brain–computer interfaces—and the Boring Company, a tunnel construction company.
In 2022, he acquired Twitter for $44 billion and subsequently merged the company into newly created X Corp. and rebranded the service as X the following year.
In March 2023, he founded xAI, an artificial-intelligence company.
Musk has expressed views that have made him a polarizing figure.
He has been criticized for making unscientific and misleading statements, including that of spreading COVID-19 misinformation, and promoting conspiracy theories.
His Twitter ownership has been similarly controversial, including laying off a large number of employees, an increase in hate speech on the platform and features such as Twitter Blue and the implementation of limits on the amount of viewable Tweets per day being criticized.
In 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued him for falsely tweeting that he had secured funding for a private takeover of Tesla.
To settle the case, Musk stepped down as the chairman of Tesla and paid a $20 million fine.
Public perception
See also: Elon Musk filmography and List of awards and honors received by Elon Musk
Though Musk's ventures were influential within their own industries in the 2000s, he only became a public figure in the early 2010s.
He has often been described as an eccentric who makes spontaneous and controversial statements, contrary to other billionaires who prefer reclusiveness to protect their businesses.[490][491]
Celebrated by fans and hated by critics, Musk was described by Vance as having become very polarizing because of his "part philosopher, part troll" role on Twitter.[492]
With Steve Jobs and Donald Trump, Musk served as inspiration for the characterization of Tony Stark in the Marvel film Iron Man (2008).[493]
Musk had a cameo appearance in the film's 2010 sequel, Iron Man 2.[494]
Musk has made cameos and appearances in other films such as Machete Kills (2013),[495] Why Him? (2016),[496] and Men in Black: International (2019).[497]
Television series in which he has appeared include
The Simpsons ("The Musk Who Fell to Earth", 2015),[498]
The Big Bang Theory ("The Platonic Permutation", 2015),[499] South Park ("Members Only", 2016),[500][501]
Young Sheldon ("A Patch, a Modem, and a Zantac®", 2017),[502] Rick and Morty ("One Crew over the Crewcoo's Morty", 2019),[503][504]
and Saturday Night Live (2021).[505]
He contributed interviews to the documentaries Racing Extinction (2015) and the Werner Herzog-directed Lo and Behold (2016).[506][507]
Musk was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2018.[508] In 2015, he received an honorary doctorate in engineering and technology from Yale University[509] and IEEE Honorary Membership.[510]
Awards for his contributions to the development of the Falcon rockets include the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics George Low Transportation Award in 2008,[511] the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale Gold Space Medal in 2010,[512] and the Royal Aeronautical Society Gold Medal in 2012.[513]
Time has listed Musk as one of the most influential people in the world on four occasions in 2010,[514] 2013,[515] 2018,[516] and 2021.[517]
Musk was selected as Time's "Person of the Year" for 2021. Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal wrote that "Person of the Year is a marker of influence, and few individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth too".[518][519]
In February 2022, Musk was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering.[520]