Elon Musk

Born in Pretoria in 1971, Musk left South Africa for Canada at seventeen and then the United States, and holds South African, Canadian and American citizenship. He sold the city-guide software company Zip2 to Compaq in 1999, and his online bank X.com — merged into what became PayPal — to eBay in 2002. Both exits funded what followed. SpaceX, founded in 2002, was the first private company to put a liquid-fuelled rocket in orbit (Falcon 1, 2008), to land an orbital-class booster (Falcon 9, December 2015) and to fly astronauts to the International Space Station (Crew Dragon, 2020). Reuse cut launch costs by roughly seventy per cent and ended a decades-long plateau in access to orbit; the Starlink constellation, begun in 2019, put broadband where cable does not reach and made satellite internet a strategic asset. He joined Tesla as chairman and investor in 2004 and became chief executive in 2008, and the Model S and Model 3 did more than any policy to make electric cars ordinary. Neuralink and the Boring Company followed in 2016, and the AI company xAI in 2023. He bought Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion and renamed it X, cutting most of the staff and loosening content moderation — which turned a communications platform he owned into an instrument of his own politics. In July 2024 he endorsed Donald Trump and spent heavily through America PAC to elect him. After the inauguration he served as a special government employee directing the Department of Government Efficiency, which cut federal staffing and contracts at speed and drew a large number of legal challenges. He left the role at the end of May 2025, and within days the alliance collapsed into a public quarrel over the administration's spending bill. He has been among the richest people in the world since 2021. The pattern across the companies is the same one: take a business everyone treats as mature — launch, cars, telecoms — and reopen it by attacking the cost structure rather than the product.

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