How Elon built the fortune
Musk's wealth rests on two companies he runs at the same time. Tesla, the electric carmaker he backed in 2004 and has led as chief executive since 2008, is a listed company in which he holds a large stake. SpaceX, the rocket and satellite business he founded in 2002, remains private, and its value is set through periodic share sales to investors. Together these two holdings account for the great majority of his net worth, which is why his position moves sharply with Tesla's share price and with each new SpaceX funding round.
The money that made those ventures possible came from the dot-com era. He sold his first startup, Zip2, to Compaq in 1999 and put much of his share into X.com, an online payments company. After a merger with Confinity, the business became PayPal and was bought by eBay in 2002. Musk then committed most of his proceeds to SpaceX and Tesla at a time when both were widely seen as long shots, and both came close to running out of cash in 2008.
In later years he added a social network and an artificial intelligence lab to the group. He bought Twitter in 2022, renamed it X, and in 2023 started xAI, which later absorbed X in an all-share deal. These stakes add to his wealth, though they are valued far less precisely than his listed Tesla shares.
Companies and holdings
Musk's main business interests include the following:
- Tesla, maker of electric vehicles, batteries and solar products, where he is chief executive
- SpaceX, the launch provider behind the Falcon rockets, Dragon capsules and the Starlink satellite internet network
- xAI, the developer of the Grok chatbot, which also owns the social platform X
- Neuralink, a company working on brain implants, co-founded in 2016
- The Boring Company, a tunnel construction venture started in 2016
Starlink has become one of the most important parts of SpaceX, giving the company a recurring subscription business alongside its launch contracts with NASA, the US military and commercial customers. Tesla, for its part, has expanded from luxury sedans into mass-market cars, stationary battery storage and self-driving software, and Musk has said he sees robotics and autonomous ride-hailing as its next large markets. His 2016 merger of Tesla with SolarCity, a solar installer founded by his cousins, was challenged in court by shareholders, and Musk won that case.
Early life and career
Elon Reeve Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in June 1971. He taught himself programming as a child and sold the code for a simple video game to a magazine while still a boy. At 17 he moved to Canada, where his mother had been born, and studied at Queen's University in Ontario before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania. There he earned degrees in physics and in economics from the Wharton School.
He was accepted into a graduate program at Stanford in 1995 but left almost immediately to start Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. The company supplied online city guides and maps to newspapers. Its sale gave the brothers their first significant capital, and the PayPal exit a few years later turned Musk into a wealthy man before he was 31.
Philanthropy and public life
Musk set up the Musk Foundation in 2001 and signed the Giving Pledge in 2012. The foundation has given to science education, renewable energy research and disaster relief, and has received large donations of Tesla shares from him. Critics have noted that much of its money has stayed within the foundation or gone to causes connected to his own interests, and he has argued that his companies themselves are his main contribution to humanity.
He is one of the most visible business figures in the world and posts frequently on X. In 2024 he became a major backer of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, and in early 2025 he led the Department of Government Efficiency, a cost-cutting initiative, before stepping back from that role later in the year. His political activity has drawn both strong support and sustained criticism, including from some Tesla investors.