Elon Musk

Elon Reeve Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971, to an engineer father and a Canadian mother. Self-taught as a programmer, at twelve he sold his first video game, Blastar, to a local magazine. To avoid South African military service, he emigrated to Canada in 1989 and in 1997 earned a joint degree in physics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He quickly dropped a Stanford doctorate to found, with his brother Kimbal in 1995, Zip2, an online publishing software company sold to Compaq in 1999 for 307 million dollars. The same year he co-founded X.com, an online bank that merged with Confinity to become PayPal in 2000 ; the service was sold to eBay in 2002 for 1.5 billion dollars. Musk immediately reinvested his gains in two bets : in 2002 he created SpaceX to drive down launch costs — the company achieved the first private orbital flight with Falcon 1 in 2008 and the first propulsive first-stage return in 2015 ; in 2004 he became the principal investor and then chief executive of Tesla Motors, launching the Roadster in 2008, the Model S in 2012 and the Model 3 in 2017, forcing the global automotive industry to electrify. He also founded Neuralink (brain-machine interfaces) and The Boring Company in 2016, OpenAI in 2015 (which he left in 2018), and xAI in 2023. In October 2022 he bought Twitter for 44 billion dollars, laid off much of its staff and renamed the platform X in 2023. From 2024-2025 he has played a growing political role in the United States. A controversial figure, alternately celebrated and criticised, Musk links on this site the Web 2.0 period to the mobile-cloud period through industrial innovation, and through OpenAI and xAI he takes part in the generative-AI period dominated by Geoffrey Hinton's research and Sam Altman's products.