Elon Musk
Elon Reeve Musk (/ˈiːlɒn/ EE-lon; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman and investor. He is the founder, chairman, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO, product architect, and former chairman of Tesla, Inc.; owner, executive chairman, and CTO of X Corp.; founder of the Boring Company and xAI; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and president of the Musk Foundation. He is one of the wealthiest people in the world; as of April 2024, Forbes estimates his net worth to be $193 billion.[4]
For other uses, see Elon Musk (disambiguation).
Elon Musk
- South Africa
- Canada
- United States
- Founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX
- CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.
- Owner, CTO and Executive Chairman of X (formerly Twitter)
- President of the Musk Foundation
- Founder of The Boring Company, X Corp., and xAI
- Co-founder of Neuralink, OpenAI, Zip2, and X.com (part of PayPal)
-
(m. 2013; div. 2016)
- Kimbal Musk (brother)
- Tosca Musk (sister)
- Lyndon Rive (cousin)
A member of the wealthy South African Musk family, Musk was born in Pretoria and briefly attended the University of Pretoria before immigrating to Canada at age 18, acquiring citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. Two years later, he matriculated at Queen's University at Kingston in Canada. Musk later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and received bachelor's degrees in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University, but 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. That same year, Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. In October 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion. Using $100 million of the money he made from the sale of PayPal, Musk founded SpaceX, a spaceflight services company, in 2002.
In 2004, Musk became an early investor in electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (later Tesla, Inc.). He became the company's 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 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Musk, alleging that he had falsely announced 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. In 2022, he acquired Twitter for $44 billion. He subsequently merged the company into newly created X Corp. and rebranded the service as X the following year. In March 2023, Musk founded xAI, an artificial intelligence company.
Musk has expressed views that have made him a polarizing figure.[5] He has been criticized for making unscientific and misleading statements, including COVID-19 misinformation and antisemitic conspiracy theories.[5][6][7][8] His ownership of Twitter has been similarly controversial, being marked by layoffs of large numbers of employees, an increase in hate speech and misinformation and disinformation on the website, and changes to Twitter Blue verification.
Other activities
Musk Foundation
Musk is president of the Musk Foundation he founded in 2001,[257][258] whose stated purpose is to: provide solar-power energy systems in disaster areas; support research, development, and advocacy (for interests including human space exploration, pediatrics, renewable energy and "safe artificial intelligence"); and support science and engineering educational efforts.[259]
As of 2020, the foundation has made 350 donations. Around half of them were made to scientific research or education nonprofits. Notable beneficiaries include the Wikimedia Foundation, his alma mater the University of Pennsylvania, and his brother Kimbal's nonprofit Big Green.[260] From 2002 to 2018, the foundation gave $25 million directly to nonprofit organizations, nearly half of which went to Musk's OpenAI,[261] which was a nonprofit at the time.[262] The Foundation also allocated $100 million of donations to be used to establish a new higher education university in Texas.[263]
In 2012, Musk took the Giving Pledge, thereby committing to give the majority of his wealth to charitable causes either during his lifetime or in his will.[264] He has endowed prizes at the X Prize Foundation, including $100 million to reward improved carbon capture technology.[265]
Vox said "the Musk Foundation is almost entertaining in its simplicity and yet is strikingly opaque", noting that its website was only 33 words in plain-text.[261] The foundation has been criticized for the relatively small amount of wealth donated.[266] In 2020, Forbes gave Musk a philanthropy score of 1, because he had given away less than 1% of his net worth.[260] In November 2021, Musk donated $5.7 billion of Tesla's shares to charity, according to regulatory filings.[267] However, Bloomberg News noted that all of it went to his own foundation, bringing Musk Foundation's assets up to $9.4 billion at the end of 2021. The foundation disbursed $160 million to nonprofits that year.[268] Reporting by The New York Times found that in 2022, the Musk Foundation gave away $230 million less than the minimum required by law to maintain tax-deductible status, and that in 2021 and 2022 over half the foundation's funds went to causes connected to Musk, his family, or his businesses.[269]