Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 after leaving South Africa
Elon Musk, born 28 June 1971 in Pretoria, emigrated to Canada in 1989 and later built companies spanning software, cars, and rocketry. In 2002 he founded SpaceX, serving as CEO and chief engineer while the firm pushed reusable orbital boosters. Electric-vehicle and other ventures widened the industrial footprint.
His mother Maye, a model and dietitian, was born in Saskatchewan, which gave him Canadian citizenship; his father Errol was an engineer and property developer who received a share of emeralds from small Zambian mines. After his parents divorced in 1979, the nine-year-old chose to live with his father, partly for his encyclopedia set and computer, a decision he later regretted. He taught himself programming from a VIC-20 manual and at 12 sold a BASIC game called Blastar to a magazine for about $500. He left for Canada in June 1989, partly to avoid apartheid-era military service, working on a farm and in a lumber mill before entering Queen's University in 1990. He moved to the University of Pennsylvania, which awarded his physics and economics degrees in 1997, and skipped a Stanford graduate place in 1995.
That year he founded Zip2, an online city guide, with his brother Kimbal and Greg Kouri, coding through the night and dressing up an ordinary computer in a plastic shell to look like a supercomputer for investors. After its 1999 sale he co-founded X.com, one of the first federally insured online banks, which signed up over 200,000 customers in months. It merged with Peter Thiel and Max Levchin's Confinity in 2000; the board ousted Musk as chief executive that year after disputes including his preference for Microsoft software, and eBay bought the renamed PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002.
Drawn to a Mars Society plan for a plant greenhouse on Mars, he twice went to Moscow trying to buy ballistic missiles as launchers, then decided to build cheap rockets himself, putting $100 million into SpaceX. He invested in Tesla in 2004 and took charge in 2008, and co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before leaving it.
Musk was the biggest donor of the 2024 US election, backing Donald Trump, then led the Department of Government Efficiency until May 2025, after which the two fell out publicly. His statements, including COVID-19 misinformation, have drawn wide criticism. Forbes put his fortune at $964 billion in September 2026, after he briefly became the first trillionaire that June.
Source: Elon Musk
