Elon Musk

Elon Musk holds a B.A. in physics from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in business from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, according to the official biography in Tesla's 2026 amendment to its annual report.1

Musk's entrepreneurial career began with internet companies. Musk co-founded Zip2 Corporation, a provider of internet enterprise software and services that Compaq acquired in March 1999, and co-founded PayPal, an electronic payment system that eBay acquired in October 2002.15

Musk also took on clean energy early, serving as chairman of the board of SolarCity, a solar installation company, from July 2006 until Tesla acquired it in November 2016.1

Musk has served as SpaceX's chief executive officer, chief technical officer and chairman since May 2002. The Royal Society notes that, as lead designer, Musk oversees the development of SpaceX's rockets and spacecraft, and that SpaceX's Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to reach orbit, in 2008.15

SpaceX's work soon reached the International Space Station. In May 2012, the SpaceX Dragon commercial cargo craft approached the station for grapple and berthing. On May 30, 2020, SpaceX's Crew Dragon lifted off on a Falcon 9 rocket carrying NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley, which NASA described as the first time in history that NASA astronauts launched from American soil in a commercially built and operated American crew spacecraft.67

Reusability became a SpaceX signature. Falcon Heavy, which first flew on February 6, 2018, is made of three reusable Falcon 9 first-stage boosters, and on that first flight its two side boosters made parallel touchdowns at Landing Zones 1 and 2. In April 2021, NASA chose SpaceX to continue developing the first commercial human lander to carry astronauts to the lunar surface under the Artemis program. Today SpaceX designs, manufactures, and launches reusable rockets and operates a worldwide high-speed, low-latency broadband network.894

Tesla was incorporated in 2003, and Musk joined its board in April 2004. Tesla began selling the Tesla Roadster in 2008, and its 2010 prospectus described Tesla as the first and, at the time, only company to commercially produce a federally compliant, highway-capable electric vehicle. Musk became chief executive officer in October 2008 and also holds the title Technoking of Tesla.31

Under Musk, Tesla now manufactures five consumer vehicles, the Model 3, Model Y, Model S, Model X and Cybertruck, along with the Tesla Semi, a commercial electric vehicle that entered early production in 2022. Tesla also builds the Powerwall and Megapack lithium-ion battery energy storage products.2

Musk's involvement in artificial intelligence reaches back years: the record of a November 2016 Senate hearing on AI describes the then-nonprofit OpenAI as chaired by Sam Altman and Musk. Musk served as chief executive officer and a director of X.AI Corp., an artificial intelligence company, beginning in March 2023, and xAI launched in July 2023 with the stated mission to understand the true nature of the universe. Musk also became chief technology officer and a board member of X Corp., the social media company, in October 2022.10111

xAI introduced Grok in November 2023 as an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and in March 2024 it openly released the weights and architecture of Grok-1, its Mixture-of-Experts language model. Following the March 2025 merger of X and xAI, Musk served as president, treasurer and chief executive officer of X.AI Holdings Corp., which SpaceX acquired in February 2026. SpaceX now spans reusable rockets, Starlink broadband, and a vertically integrated AI platform built around the Grok models.12131144

Musk's companies set sweeping goals. Tesla's 2025 annual report states its mission as building a world of amazing abundance and describes Full Self-Driving (Supervised), the Robotaxi autonomous ride-hailing platform, the purpose-built Cybercab, and Optimus, a general-purpose, autonomous humanoid robot in development.2

Beyond cars and rockets, Musk is a founder of The Boring Company, an infrastructure company whose stated mission is to solve traffic, enable rapid point-to-point transportation, and transform cities, and which designs and manufactures its own tunnel boring machine, Prufrock. Musk is also a founder of Neuralink, a company focused on developing brain-machine interfaces, where Musk serves as chief executive officer. In 2018, the Royal Society elected Musk a Fellow.1155