Elon Musk Biography

Elon Reeve Musk is an American entrepreneur, inventor and investor. He is best known for his role as CEO of electric-car manufacturer Tesla Motors, and as co-founder of online money transfer system PayPal, and of commercial space program SpaceX. Besides these, he has participated in a number of other business ventures, including OpenAI, Neuralink, SolarCity, and more.

Musk: South African-born, U.S.-educated

Musk was born in South Africa, where he spent his childhood and adolescence. He was raised primarily by his father, who was an engineer. Musk became interested in computers at a young age and began programming in his teens. After high school, Musk emigrated to Canada, where he attended college, and later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in the United States.

In 1995, Musk started a PhD in applied physics at Stanford University in California, but quickly dropped out to start his own company. He would go on to sell that company, called Zip2, to Compaq, for more than $300 million in 1999. Musk earned $22 million from that deal, later taking that capital to launch X.com in 1999. X.com was an online banking site that later changed its name to PayPal. eBay purchased the company in 2002 for $1.5 billion in stock, of which $165 million went to Musk. That same year, he became an American citizen. (See also: Three Steps Elon Musk Took To Become Successful.)

Flush from the PayPal sale, Musk looked skyward. His next venture was SpaceX, a private, for-profit space program. After a few false starts, the company began developing its own rockets. The company launched a landmark commercial spacecraft in 2009 and again in 2012.

Musk's Projects on Earth and in Space

While planning his exploration of space, Musk also took an interest in more terrestrial matters. After a major investment in 2004, Musk joined the board of Tesla Motors as its chairman. Also contributing as a product architect, he played a role in the designs of the cars Tesla was building. Following the 2008 financial crisis, Musk assumed the mantle of CEO of Tesla, a position he still holds today. (For more, see: Is Elon Musk's Hyperloop Economically Feasible?)

Beyond Tesla and SpaceX, Musk remains involved in a number of futuristic projects. He is connected with a high-speed transportation system called the Hyperloop. He has also been a proponent of a VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) supersonic jet aircraft.

As of October of 2017, Musk’s net worth is nearly $21 billion.