Elon Musk

• 1. Introduction

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  Elon Reeve Musk sold a video game he wrote himself at age twelve for approximately $500. The game was called Blastar, built in BASIC, and sold to a magazine called PC and Office Technology. That small transaction points toward something worth understanding: a person who, decades later, would be estimated by Forbes to hold a net worth of $834 billion, the largest personal fortune on Earth.

  Musk was born on the 28th of June, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa's administrative capital. He grew up in a wealthy family, left at eighteen, and by his early thirties had founded or co-founded companies in rockets, electric cars, online payments, solar energy, tunneling, artificial intelligence, and neurotechnology. He also spent five months in 2025 as the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency inside the Trump administration, before leaving in May of that year following a public feud with the president.

  How does a child coding alone at night in South Africa become the most controversial figure in American business and politics? What drove him across continents and industries? And how did a man who once donated to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton end up described by world leaders as a threat to democratic institutions? The story involves a grandfather with fascist sympathies, a near-bankruptcy in the Mojave Desert, a $44 billion social media acquisition, and a gesture at a presidential inauguration that governments across Europe condemned. The questions that follow are not simple ones.

• 2. Roots and Restlessness

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  Joshua N. Haldeman, Elon's maternal grandfather, died in a plane crash when Elon was still a toddler. He had been an American-born Canadian chiropractor, aviator, and political activist in the Technocracy movement who moved to South Africa in 1950. His views included the promotion of far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, what his family described as "fanatical" support of apartheid, and, according to Elon's father Errol, support of Nazism. Elon grew up hearing stories about Haldeman's travels from his grandmother. He has suggested that all of Haldeman's descendants carry the man's "desire for adventure, exploration - doing crazy things."

  Errol Musk, Elon's father, was himself a complicated figure: an electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, emerald dealer, and property developer who was elected to the Pretoria City Council representing the anti-apartheid Progressive Party. After his parents divorced in 1979, Elon, then around nine years old, chose to live with his father largely because Errol owned an Encyclopaedia Britannica set and a computer.

  The schools Elon attended were harsh. He described one wilderness school as a "paramilitary Lord of the Flies" where "bullying was a virtue." After a fight with another pupil, he was thrown down concrete steps and beaten badly enough to require hospitalization. His father's response after he was discharged, Elon recalled, was a berating. Errol denied this, offering instead that the other boy had just lost his father to suicide and that Elon had called him stupid.

  Musk applied for a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother, Maye, partly to avoid South Africa's mandatory military service, which would have required him to serve the apartheid regime. While waiting for the passport, he spent five months at the University of Pretoria. He arrived in Canada in June 1989, found a second cousin in Saskatchewan, and worked odd jobs on a farm and at a lumber mill before enrolling at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in 1990.

• 3. Early Ventures

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  Compaq paid $307 million in cash for Zip2 in February 1999. Musk had co-founded the web software company in 1995 with his brother Kimbal and Greg Kouri, housing the operation in a small rented office in Palo Alto on funding from angel investors. The company built an Internet city guide for newspaper publishers, complete with maps, directions, and yellow pages. Musk has described coding through the night, every night of the week, while the website ran during the day. His 7-percent share of the sale netted him $22 million. The board of directors had blocked his attempts to become CEO.

  That same year, Musk co-founded X.com, one of the first federally insured online banks. More than 200,000 customers joined in its early months. Investors considered Musk too inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit's CEO Bill Harris before the year was out. X.com then merged with an online bank called Confinity, which had been founded by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel and ran a more popular money-transfer service called PayPal.

  Musk returned as CEO of the merged entity, but his preference for Microsoft software over Unix created a rift that caused Thiel to resign. Technological problems and the absence of a cohesive business model led the board to remove Musk again, this time replacing him with Thiel in 2000. Under Thiel the company renamed itself PayPal. In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in stock. Musk, the largest shareholder with 11.72% of shares, received $175.8 million. He purchased the domain X.com back from PayPal in 2017, saying it held sentimental value.

• 4. Rockets and Ruin

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  In 2001, Musk traveled to Moscow twice to buy intercontinental ballistic missiles from Russian companies NPO Lavochkin and Kosmotras, hoping to use them to launch a greenhouse for plants to Mars. Both trips failed. He returned home and decided to build the rockets himself. With $100 million of his own money, he founded SpaceX in May 2002 and made himself CEO and Chief Engineer.

  SpaceX's first attempt to launch the Falcon 1 rocket, in 2006, failed to reach orbit. Two more failures followed, nearly bankrupting Musk. The fourth launch, in 2008, finally reached orbit. NASA had already awarded SpaceX a Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contract after the first attempt, under NASA administrator Mike Griffin. Later in 2008, SpaceX received a $1.6 billion NASA contract for Dragon spacecraft flights to the International Space Station, intended to replace the Space Shuttle after its 2011 retirement. In 2012, a Dragon vehicle docked with the ISS, the first commercial spacecraft to do so.

  The company's pursuit of reusable rockets produced a landmark in 2015, when SpaceX successfully landed the first stage of a Falcon 9 on a land platform. Later recovery missions used autonomous spaceport drone ships at sea. In 2018, SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy on an inaugural mission that carried Musk's personal Tesla Roadster as a dummy payload. In 2020, SpaceX flew its first crewed mission, the Demo-2, making it the first private company to place astronauts into orbit and dock a crewed spacecraft with the ISS. In 2024, NASA awarded SpaceX an $843 million contract to build a spacecraft to deorbit the ISS at the end of its operational life.

• 5. Tesla and the Electric Turn

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  Tesla, Inc. was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, nearly a year before Musk's involvement. Musk led the Series A round of investment in February 2004, putting in $6.35 million, becoming the majority shareholder, and joining the board as chairman. He oversaw Roadster product design but stayed out of day-to-day operations. A series of escalating conflicts in 2007 and the 2008 financial crisis resulted in Eberhard being ousted. Musk took over as CEO and product architect in 2008. A 2009 lawsuit settlement designated Musk as a co-founder, alongside Tarpenning and two others.

  Tesla began delivering the Roadster in 2008. With sales of about 2,500 vehicles, it was the first mass-production all-electric car to use lithium-ion battery cells. Tesla went on to release the Model S sedan in 2012, the Model X crossover in 2015, the mass-market Model 3 sedan in 2017, the Model Y crossover in 2020, and the Cybertruck pickup in 2023. Tesla became the most valuable carmaker in the summer of 2020 and entered the S&P 500 later that year. In October 2021, it reached a market capitalization of $1 trillion, the sixth company in U.S. history to reach that level.

  In May 2020, Musk resigned as Tesla's board chairman as part of a settlement with the SEC over a 2018 tweet in which he said funding had been "secured" for potentially taking Tesla private. The SEC had filed a securities fraud lawsuit characterizing the tweet as false and misleading; Musk and Tesla each paid $20 million in fines. In November 2025, Tesla approved a pay package worth $1 trillion for Musk, to be paid over ten years if he meets specific goals. Jon McNeill, who served as Tesla's president from 2015 to 2018, published a book in 2026 called The Algorithm, detailing the five-step operational framework used at Tesla and SpaceX during a period when annual revenue grew from $2 billion to $20 billion.

• 6. Twitter, X, and the Platform Wars

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  By early 2022, Musk had accumulated a 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him the largest shareholder. He initially agreed to join the company's board under terms that would have prohibited him from acquiring more than 14.9% of the company. Days after that agreement, he made a $43 billion offer to buy the company outright. By the end of April he had concluded the deal for approximately $44 billion, financed with roughly $12.5 billion in loans and $21 billion in equity. He closed the purchase on the 27th of October, 2022.

  Musk immediately fired several top executives including CEO Parag Agrawal. He implemented monthly subscriptions for the platform's blue verification checkmark, laid off a significant portion of staff, and reduced content moderation. Hate speech increased on the platform after his takeover. In late 2022, he released internal documents about Twitter's handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election. He promised to step down as CEO after a Twitter poll, and five months later did so, taking the title of executive chairman and chief technology officer instead. The platform was rebranded as X in 2023.

  Musk banned the account ElonJet, which tracked his private jet flights, in December 2022, and temporarily banned the accounts of journalists who covered the story, including reporters from The Washington Post, CNN, and The Intercept. X continued to face viral misinformation, antisemitism controversies, and accusations of shadow-banning critics after the transition. Biographer Ashlee Vance described public opinion about Musk as polarized, shaped by what he called Musk's "part philosopher, part troll" persona on the platform.

• 7. Politics and Government

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  Musk supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020. His first vote for a Republican came in 2022, cast for Mayra Flores in Texas's 34th congressional district special election. By the middle of 2024 he had become the largest individual donor of that year's presidential election, supporting Donald Trump. Minutes after Trump survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania in July 2024, Musk wrote on X, "I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery."

  After Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, Musk was designated a "special government employee" and served as Senior Advisor to the President and the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE. A federal judge ruled he had acted as DOGE's de facto leader, while a sworn statement from the director of the White House Office of Administration said Musk held no formal authority to make government decisions. In May 2025, Bill Gates accused Musk of "killing the world's poorest children" through cuts to USAID. Modeling by Boston University estimated those cuts resulted in 400,000 children and 200,000 adults dying by November. Musk left the administration on the 28th of May, 2025, when the special government employee's 130-day deadline expired.

  A public feud with Trump followed. On the 5th of June, 2025, Musk alleged on X that Trump had ties to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump responded by threatening to cut Musk's government contracts. On the 11th of June, Musk publicly apologized and deleted the tweets, saying they "went too far." A February 2025 NBC News analysis found Musk had boosted far-right political movements in at least 18 countries on six continents since 2023. In 2025, he contributed $19 million to a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, seeking to influence future redistricting and regulations governing car manufacturers.

• 8. The Public and Private Reckoning

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  During his speech after Donald Trump's second inauguration, Musk twice made a gesture that was widely interpreted as a Nazi or fascist Roman salute. He thumped his right hand over his heart with fingers spread wide, then extended his right arm outward at an upward angle with the palm down and fingers together, repeating the gesture toward the crowd behind him. As he finished, he said: "My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured." Germany, where such gestures are illegal, widely condemned it. Neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups celebrated it. Multiple European political parties called for Musk to be banned from their countries. The Anti-Defamation League said it was not a Nazi salute, while other Jewish organizations disagreed.

  In October 2025, Musk's company xAI launched Grokipedia, promoted as an alternative to an established online reference. Researchers at Cornell University and NBC News stated that Grokipedia cited sources considered generally unreliable, including the conspiracy site Infowars and the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront. Wired, The Guardian, and Time criticized it for factual errors and for presenting Musk in unusually positive terms while downplaying controversies.

  The New York Times published investigations into Musk's drug use, reporting overuse of ketamine alongside marijuana, LSD, ecstasy, mushrooms, and cocaine, as well as strained family relationships and concern among close associates about his public behavior. Musk has stated he uses doctor-prescribed ketamine for occasional depression. President Trump reportedly described Musk as "a big-time drug addict."

  On the 20th of March, 2026, a jury in San Francisco found Musk liable for misleading investors during his acquisition of Twitter. Plaintiffs' lawyers estimated damages at $2.5 billion, though the calculation had not been finalized. On the 18th of May, 2026, a jury in Oakland decided in favor of OpenAI, finding that Musk's February 2024 claims that the company violated its founding agreement were barred by the statute of limitations. Two verdicts in two months - the legal accounting for a decade of disruption has only just begun.