Short answers, pulled from the story.
Elon Musk is a businessman born on the 28th of June, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. He is the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, and owns the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). He also co-founded the neurotechnology company Neuralink in 2016 and founded the Boring Company in 2017.
Musk made his first major fortune through the sale of Zip2 to Compaq for $307 million in February 1999, from which he personally received $22 million. He then co-founded X.com, which merged with Confinity to form PayPal; when eBay acquired PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion in stock, Musk received $175.8 million as the largest shareholder with 11.72% of shares.
Musk founded SpaceX in May 2002 with $100 million of his own money. The company launched its first crewed flight in 2020, became the first private company to dock a crewed spacecraft with the International Space Station, and in 2024 received an $843 million NASA contract to build a spacecraft to deorbit the ISS.
Musk served as Senior Advisor to the President and as the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) starting in January 2025. A federal judge ruled he acted as DOGE's de facto leader. He departed on the 28th of May, 2025, when his 130-day special government employee designation expired.
Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter on the 27th of October, 2022, for approximately $44 billion. The deal was financed with roughly $12.5 billion in loans and $21 billion in equity financing. He rebranded the platform as X in 2023.
Musk has fathered at least 14 children. His first child, Nevada Alexander Musk, died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of 10 days in 2002. He had six children with his first wife Justine Wilson, three with musician Grimes, and four with Shivon Zilis, director of operations at Neuralink.