Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. A self-taught programmer, he sold his first video game at age 12. After studying at Queen's University in Canada, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, earning dual degrees in economics and physics before enrolling in a Stanford PhD program — which he abandoned after two days to pursue entrepreneurship.

His first venture, Zip2, was sold to Compaq for $307 million in 1999. He then founded X.com, an online payments company that merged with Confinity to become PayPal — sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Rather than retiring, Musk invested nearly all his proceeds into SpaceX and Tesla, nearly going bankrupt in 2008 before both companies secured critical funding on the same day.

Today Musk leads six companies simultaneously — Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, X, xAI, and The Boring Company — with a combined enterprise value exceeding $1 trillion. His stated mission: ensure humanity becomes a multiplanetary species and that artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity rather than a narrow elite.