Elon Musk

EARLY LIFE

Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in apartheid-era Pretoria, South Africa, to Maye Musk, a Canadian model and dietitian, and Errol Musk, an engineer who at one time was part-owner of an emerald mine in Zambia. Musk and his father have had a notoriously fraught relationship; they are now estranged, which, by Musk’s own account, is not terribly surprising.

At age 12, the young Elon taught himself programming and sold a space-themed computer game called Blastar for around $500. 

He would later claim to have tested his entrepreneurial mettle by living for a month on just $1 a day. His menu largely consisted of hot dogs and oranges.

As a teenager, he tried (and spectacularly failed) to master the frontside ollie on a beat‑up skateboard. He still prefers walking on Mars to ollieing in Cape Town.

At 17, Musk left South Africa to avoid military service and moved to Canada with his mother and siblings. He studied at Queen’s University in Ontario before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned degrees in Physics and Economics. He briefly enrolled in a PhD program at Stanford University but dropped out after two days—to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions.

BUSINESS CAREER

1995 – Musk co‑founded Zip2, his first software company, which provided an online business directory and mapping service. 

1999 – After selling Zip2, he co‑founded X.com, an online payment company that would later merge into PayPal. 

2000 Musk contracted one of the deadliest strains of malaria after visiting Brazil and South Africa. He nearly died, lost 45 pounds, and took six months to recover. The brush with death allegedly gave him a new sense of focus.

2002 – Following PayPal’s acquisition by eBay, Musk became a naturalized U.S. citizen and founded SpaceX, positioning himself as its CEO and chief engineer. Six years later SpaceX launched its first ever private spacecraft, the Falcon 1 into orbit.

SpaceX CEO Musk in 2019

2004 While he's synonymous with Tesla, he wasn't its founder. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded the company, and in 2004 Musk led Tesla’s Series A funding round, becoming an early investor.

2008 – Musk assumed the roles of CEO and product architect at Tesla, steering it toward mass‑market electric vehicles.

2013 Musk conceptualized the Hyperloop , a high-speed transportation system, although he's primarily focused on his other ventures

In 2000, Musk contracted one of the deadliest strains of malaria after visiting Brazil and South Africa. He nearly died, lost 45 pounds, and took six months to recover. The brush with death allegedly gave him a new sense of focus.

2000 Early in the COVID‑19 pandemic, Musk touted home-made ventilator designs and even shipped surplus Tesla parts to hospitals. He later speculated on Twitter that wearing an N95 mask was “overkill” — though he did quietly slip one on when touring Ford’s EV plant.

2001 Despite (or perhaps because of) his unpredictable persona, Musk was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2021, the same year Tesla became the world’s most valuable carmaker and joined the $1 trillion club. Since that time Musk has been the richest person on the planet.

2022 In October 2022, Elon Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, declaring: “The bird is freed.” It was the start of one of the most chaotic platform overhauls in tech history.

Musk didn’t just buy Twitter—he remixed it. Within days, he fired top executives, dissolved the board, and declared himself "Chief Twit." He slashed the company’s workforce by more than half, reinstated previously banned accounts (including Donald Trump’s), and overhauled Twitter’s verification system—replacing the familiar blue check with a paid subscription under Twitter Blue, which promptly led to a flood of impersonations, pranks, and brand confusion.

In July 2023, Musk made the most dramatic move of all: he killed the Twitter name. The platform was rebranded as X, a nod to Musk’s decades-long obsession with the letter. The blue bird logo was replaced with a minimalist X, and Musk announced plans to turn the platform into an “everything app”—a sort of Western WeChat, combining messaging, banking, shopping, and more.

The rebrand was met with widespread confusion, not least because the word “tweet” had become a globally recognized verb. Musk insisted the change was about moving beyond the original purpose of the platform, tweeting: “Twitter was acquired by X Corp to serve as an accelerant for X, the everything app.”

POLITICAL CAREER

Musk’s political leanings are notoriously fluid. Once a darling of the green left for popularizing electric cars, he later became a libertarian tech messiah and now sometimes sounds like a cranky uncle on Twitter/X  He has described himself at various times as “socially liberal and fiscally conservative,” “moderate,” “independent,” and in 2022 declared he would now vote Republican, claiming the Democratic Party had become “the party of division & hate.”

During Donald Trump's second administration, Elon Musk was placed in charge of a newly created "Department of Government Efficiency," or DOGE, with a mandate to cut federal spending and streamline bureaucracy.

Musk with Trump in 2024

PERSONAL LIFE 

Musk’s eccentricity is not limited to naming his companies “X” and digging tunnels. In May 2020, he and his then-partner, musician Grimes (Claire Boucher), named their son X Æ A-12 (later changed to X Æ A-XII to satisfy California naming laws). Their daughter, born in 2021, was named Exa Dark Sideræl. His children from his first marriage to Justine Wilson have names that sound almost Victorian by comparison: Griffin, Xavier, Kai, Saxon, and Damian.

In 2018, Musk raised eyebrows by smoking cannabis on a live podcast and calling a Thai cave rescue diver a “pedo guy.” 

Musk owns a Lotus Esprit that was used in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. He reportedly wants to convert it into a real-life submarine car.

Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal of Tony Stark in the Iron Man films was partly inspired by Elon Musk.

Musk has made cameo appearances in films and TV shows, including Iron Man 2, The Big Bang Theory, The Simpsons, South Park, and Rick and Morty.

He holds triple citizenship, South African, Canadian, and American.

Elon Musk is a fan of Marvels X-men comics, and has named robots at Tesla factories after X-men characters.

He believes humanity is living in a computer simulation and that life on Earth is essentially doomed—hence his obsession with Mars. It may be pure coincidence, or it may be cosmic irony, that in Wernher von Braun’s 1952 book Project Mars, the Martian colony is led by a man named... Elon.

Source CNBCTV18