Elon Musk cofounded seven companies, including electric car maker Tesla, rocket producer SpaceX and artificial intelligence startup xAI. He owns about 12% of Tesla, which he first backed in 2004, and which he’s led as CEO since 2008. In 2024, a Delaware judge voided Musk’s 2018 deal to receive options equaling an additional 9% of Tesla. Forbes has discounted the options by 50% pending Musk’s appeal.
SpaceX, founded in 2002, is worth $400 billion based on a private tender offer in August 2025. Musk owns an estimated 42% stake.
Musk bought Twitter in a $44 billion (enterprise value) deal in 2022.
He merged it with xAI in March in a deal valuing the combined company at $113 billion including debt. Musk also founded tunneling startup The Boring Company and brain implant outfit Neuralink. The two startups have raised around $2 billion from private investors combined.
Personal Status
| Name | Elon Musk |
| Age | 54 |
| Source of wealth | Tesla, SpaceX, Self-Made |
| Residence | Austin, Texas |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Married Status | Divorced |
Elon Musk Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk showed his talents for entrepreneurship early, going door-to-door with his brother selling homemade chocolate Easter eggs and developing his first computer game at the age of 12.
Early Life
He has described his childhood as difficult, affected by his parents’ divorce, bullying at school and his own difficulty picking up on social cues because of Asperger’s Syndrome.
At the earliest opportunity, he left home for college, moving to Canada and then the US, where he studied economics and physics at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League college.
In a 2010 essay for Marie Claire, his first wife, Justine Musk, a writer whom he met in college and married in 2000, wrote that even before making his millions, Musk was “not a man who takes no for an answer.”
Source Of Income
After being accepted to a physics graduate degree program at Stanford University, Musk quickly dropped out and founded two technology start-ups during the “dotcom boom” of the 1990s. These included a web software firm and an online banking company that eventually became PayPal, which was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5bn (£1.2bn). He ploughed his fortune into a new rocket company, SpaceX—which he aimed to make a cost-effective alternative to Nasa – and a new electric car company, Tesla, where he chaired the board until becoming chief executive in 2008.
Why did Elon Musk team up with Trump?
For a long time Musk, who became a US citizen in 2002, resisted efforts to label his politics, calling himself “half-Democrat, half-Republican”, “politically moderate” and “independent”. He says he voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and—reluctantly—Joe Biden, all of them Democrats. But in recent years he backed Donald Trump, who is a Republican.
Musk officially endorsed Trump for a second term in 2024 after his attempted assassination and became one of the campaign’s foremost backers and influencers. He became critical of the Democrat party’s stance on a number of issues, including the economy, immigration, and gun control – decrying many of its policies as “woke”.
Musk’s America Super PAC also ran a controversial $1m giveaway to voters in battleground states in the last weeks of the campaign, in addition to appearing on Trump’s campaign trail. As Musk polled his X followers on whether a new political party should challenge the status quo, and suggested without evidence that Trump appears in unreleased files related to late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, relations soured further.
The White House condemned the allegation, and Trump suggested the government could save money by cutting subsidies and contracts to Musk’s businesses. Musk then called for Trump to be impeached, and said he’d decommission his Dragon spacecraft, which Nasa relies upon – something he backed down on fairly swiftly.