Elon Musk

Musk married Canadian author Justine Wilson in 2000 after meeting her while studying at Queen's University in Ontario. Their first child, Nevada Alexander, died of sudden infant death syndrome at ten days old in 2002. The couple later had twins in 2004 and triplets in 2006 through in vitro fertilization before divorcing in 2008. In 2022, their eldest twin legally changed her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson and took her mother's surname.

In 2010, Musk married English actress Talulah Riley at Dornoch Cathedral in Scotland. The couple divorced in 2012, remarried in 2013, and finalized a second divorce in 2016. Musk later dated Canadian musician Grimes, with whom he shares three children, born in 2020, 2021, and 2022. He also has four children with Shivon Zilis, an executive at Neuralink, and has fathered at least 14 children in total.

Musk resided in California for two decades before moving his primary residence to Texas in late 2020. During a 2021 appearance on Saturday Night Live, he revealed that he has Asperger syndrome, describing how growing up with the condition made understanding literal versus nuanced social cues challenging.

Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. His mother, Maye Musk, is a Canadian-born model and dietitian, and his father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer and property developer. Musk grew up with a younger brother, Kimbal, a younger sister, Tosca, and several half-siblings. He taught himself computer programming at age ten using a home computer manual and sold a BASIC video game called Blastar to a computing magazine at age twelve.

Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Bryanston High School, and Pretoria Boys High School. In 1989, he left South Africa for Canada to avoid mandatory military service under the apartheid system and to simplify his eventual immigration to the United States. After working odd jobs in Saskatchewan and attending Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in physics and a Bachelor of Science in economics from the Wharton School.

In 1995, Musk moved to California and founded Zip2 alongside his brother Kimbal Musk and Greg Kouri. The venture created online city guides and searchable business directories for major newspaper publishers, securing contracts with organizations such as The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. In 1999, computer manufacturer Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million.

Following the sale of Zip2, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and email payment platform. In 2000, X.com merged with Confinity, a software company founded by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel that operated the money-transfer system PayPal. The combined firm adopted the PayPal name under Thiel's leadership and was acquired by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion in stock.

Musk established Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, in May 2002 to reduce the cost of space transportation and pursue the long-term colonization of Mars. After initial failures with the Falcon 1 rocket nearly bankrupted the venture, SpaceX achieved orbit in 2008 and secured a commercial cargo contract from NASA to service the International Space Station with its Dragon spacecraft.

Under Musk's direction as chief engineer and CEO, SpaceX pioneered reusable rocketry by landing Falcon 9 orbital boosters on land and autonomous ocean drone ships. In 2020, SpaceX became the first commercial entity to launch astronauts to orbit aboard the Crew Dragon. The company later developed Starlink, a low Earth orbit satellite internet constellation comprising thousands of operational spacecraft to deliver high-speed global connectivity.

Musk joined electric car startup Tesla Motors in 2004 as its largest investor and chairman of the board, leading the initial funding round shortly after the company was incorporated by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk oversaw vehicle design for the company's initial sports car, the Roadster, and took over as chief executive officer and product architect in 2008.

Under his leadership, Tesla expanded beyond niche sports cars to mass-market electric vehicles, introducing the Model S sedan, Model X SUV, Model 3 sedan, Model Y crossover, and Cybertruck. In 2016, Tesla acquired SolarCity, a rooftop solar installation provider co-founded by Musk's cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive, incorporating its operations into Tesla Energy.

In 2016, Musk co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology firm developing implantable brain-computer interfaces aimed at treating neurological injuries and eventually connecting human cognition with artificial intelligence. In 2017, he founded The Boring Company to construct underground transit tunnels designed to bypass urban road congestion, completing an operational transport loop beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center in 2021.

Musk co-founded the research organization OpenAI in 2015 but departed its board of directors in 2018 over strategic differences. In 2023, he established xAI, an artificial intelligence company that released the Grok family of large language models, designed to integrate with the X platform and other systems.

Musk acquired social network Twitter in October 2022 for approximately $44 billion, subsequently dismissing top leadership, reducing staff, overhauling user verification, and rebranding the service as X in 2023. His management approach relaxed content moderation policies, sparking public debate over platform safety and free speech.

Historically an independent donor who supported candidates across both major political parties, Musk transitioned to prominent Republican political activism in the 2020s. He became the largest individual political donor in the 2024 United States presidential election supporting Donald Trump, and subsequently served as Senior Advisor to the President and de facto leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from January to May 2025.