115 Facts About Elon Musk

Elon Musk was named Time magazine's Person of the Year in 2021.

Elon Musk graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in the US before moving to California to pursue business ventures.

In 2002, Elon Musk founded the space technology company SpaceX, becoming its CEO and chief engineer; the company has since led innovations in reusable rockets and commercial spaceflight.

Elon Musk joined the automaker Tesla as an early investor in 2004 and became its CEO and product architect in 2008; it has since become a leader in electric vehicles.

Elon Musk has been criticized for making unscientific and misleading statements, including COVID-19 misinformation and promoting conspiracy theories, and affirming antisemitic, racist, and transphobic comments.

Especially since the 2024 US presidential election, Elon Musk has been heavily involved in politics as a vocal supporter of Trump.

Elon Musk was the largest donor in the 2024 US presidential election and is a supporter of global far-right figures, causes, and political parties.

Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28,1971, in Pretoria, South Africa's administrative capital.

Elon Musk's father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, emerald dealer, and property developer, who partly owned a rental lodge at Timbavati Private Nature Reserve.

Elon Musk's maternal grandfather, Joshua N Haldeman, who died when Elon was a toddler, was an American-born Canadian chiropractor, aviator and political activist who wrote far-right, antisemitic conspiracy theories, moved to South African in 1950 in support of apartheid, took his family on record-breaking journeys in a single-engine AviaBellanca airplane, and was said by Errol Musk to have supported Nazism.

Elon Musk has a younger brother, Kimbal, a younger sister, Tosca, and four paternal half-siblings.

Elon Musk was raised in the Anglican Church, in which he was baptized.

Elon Musk later regretted his decision and became estranged from his father.

Elon Musk has recounted trips to a wilderness school that he described as a "paramilitary Lord of the Flies" where "bullying was a virtue" and children were encouraged to fight over rations.

In one incident, after an altercation with a fellow pupil, Elon Musk was thrown down concrete steps and beaten severely, leading to him being hospitalized for his injuries.

Elon Musk described his father berating him after he was discharged from the hospital.

Elon Musk was an enthusiastic reader of books, and had attributed his success in part to having read The Lord of the Rings, the Foundation series, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

At age twelve, Elon Musk sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500.

Elon Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Bryanston High School, and then Pretoria Boys High School, where he graduated.

Elon Musk was a good but unexceptional student, earning a 61 in Afrikaans and a B on his senior math certification.

Elon Musk applied for a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother to avoid South Africa's mandatory military service, which would have forced him to participate in the apartheid regime, as well as to ease his path to immigration to the United States.

Elon Musk arrived in Canada in June 1989, connected with a second cousin in Saskatchewan, and worked odd jobs including at a farm and a lumber mill.

Elon Musk reportedly hosted large, ticketed house parties to help pay for tuition, and wrote a business plan for an electronic book-scanning service similar to Google Books.

Elon Musk decided to join the Internet boom, applying for a job at Netscape, to which he reportedly never received a response.

The Washington Post reported that Elon Musk lacked legal authorization to remain and work in the United States after failing to enroll at Stanford.

Elon Musk developed and marketed an Internet city guide for the newspaper publishing industry, with maps, directions, and yellow pages.

Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash in February 1999, and Elon Musk received $22 million for his 7-percent share.

In 2001, Elon Musk became involved with the nonprofit Mars Society and discussed funding plans to place a growth-chamber for plants on Mars.

Elon Musk instead decided to start a company to build affordable rockets.

However, Elon Musk refused to block Russian state media on Starlink.

In 2023, Elon Musk denied Ukraine's request to activate Starlink over Crimea to aid an attack against the Russian navy, citing fears of a nuclear response.

Elon Musk took an active role within the company and oversaw Roadster product design, but was not deeply involved in day-to-day business operations.

Elon Musk assumed leadership of the company as CEO and product architect in 2008.

In May 2020 Elon Musk resigned from chairman of the board as part of the settlement of a lawsuit from the SEC over him tweeting that funding had been "secured" for potentially taking Tesla private.

Elon Musk has constructed multiple lithium-ion battery and electric vehicle factories, called Gigafactories.

Elon Musk provided the initial concept and financial capital for SolarCity, which his cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive founded in 2006.

In 2014, Elon Musk promoted the idea of SolarCity building an advanced production facility in Buffalo, New York, triple the size of the largest solar plant in the United States.

Employees have complained that pressure from Elon Musk to accelerate development has led to botched experiments and unnecessary animal deaths.

In 2017, Elon Musk founded the Boring Company to construct tunnels, and revealed plans for specialized, underground, high-occupancy vehicles that could travel up to 150 miles per hour and thus circumvent above-ground traffic in major cities.

In early 2017, Elon Musk expressed interest in buying Twitter and had questioned the platform's commitment to freedom of speech.

Days later, Elon Musk made a $43 billion offer to buy Twitter.

Immediately after the acquisition, Elon Musk fired several top Twitter executives including CEO Parag Agrawal; Elon Musk became the CEO instead.

Under Elon Musk, Twitter instituted monthly subscriptions for a "blue check", and laid off a significant portion of the company's staff.

Elon Musk lessened content moderation and hate speech increased on the platform after his takeover.

In late 2022, Elon Musk released internal documents relating to Twitter's moderation of Hunter Biden's laptop controversy in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.

Elon Musk promised to step down as CEO after a Twitter poll, and five months later, Elon Musk stepped down from chief executive officer and transitioned his role to executive chairman and chief technology officer.

Elon Musk has been accused of trying to silence some of his critics by removing their accounts' blue checkmarks, which hinders visibility and is considered a form of shadow banning, or suspending their accounts without justification.

Later that year, Elon Musk unveiled the concept, dubbed the Hyperloop, intended to make travel cheaper than any other mode of transport for such long distances.

In December 2015, Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI, a not-for-profit artificial intelligence research company aiming to develop artificial general intelligence, intended to be safe and beneficial to humanity.

Elon Musk pledged $1 billion of funding to the company, but only donated $50 million.

In July 2023, Elon Musk launched the artificial intelligence company xAI, which aims to develop a generative AI program that competes with existing offerings like OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Elon Musk obtained funding from investors in SpaceX and Tesla, and xAI hired engineers from Google and OpenAI.

Elon Musk uses a private jet owned by Falcon Landing LLC, a SpaceX-linked company, and acquired a second jet in August 2020.

In December 2022, Musk banned the ElonJet account on Twitter, as well as temporary bans on the accounts of journalists that posted stories regarding the incident, including Donie O'Sullivan, Keith Olbermann, and journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Intercept.

Elon Musk is an outlier among business leaders who typically avoid partisan political advocacy.

Elon Musk was a registered independent voter when he lived in California.

Elon Musk supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020, and Donald Trump in 2024.

In 2021, Elon Musk publicly expressed opposition to the Build Back Better Act, a $3.5 trillion legislative package endorsed by Joe Biden that ultimately failed to pass due to unanimous opposition from congressional Republicans and several Democrats.

From June 2023 to January 2024, Musk hosted a bipartisan set of X Spaces with Republican and Democratic candidates, including Robert F Kennedy Jr.

In July 2024, minutes after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, Elon Musk endorsed him for president.

Elon Musk was the largest individual donor of the 2024 election.

In 2025, Elon Musk contributed $19 million to the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, hoping to influence the state's future redistricting efforts and its regulations governing car manufacturers and dealers.

Elon Musk then repeated the gesture to the crowd behind him.

In further response to the events, Elon Musk posted a series of puns about Nazis on Twitter.

Various media outlets, including the Associated Press, reported that regardless of what Elon Musk meant, his gesture was widely embraced by right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis.

In November and December 2024, Elon Musk suggested that the organization could help to cut the US federal budget, consolidate the number of federal agencies, and eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and that its final stage would be "deleting itself".

In January 2025, the organization was created by executive order, and Elon Musk was designated a "special government employee".

Elon Musk is leading the organization and is a senior advisor to the president, although his official role is not clear.

In early 2025, Elon Musk was criticized for his treatment of federal government employees, including his influence over the mass layoffs of the federal workforce.

Elon Musk has prioritized secrecy within the organization and has accused others of violating privacy laws.

Elon Musk's views have been characterized as libertarian and far-right, and after his involvement in European politics, they have received criticism from world leaders such as Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz.

Elon Musk has stated support for universal basic income, gun rights, freedom of speech, a tax on carbon emissions, and H-1B visas.

Elon Musk has expressed concern about issues such as artificial intelligence and climate change, and has been a critic of wealth tax, short-selling, government subsidies.

An immigrant himself, Elon Musk has been accused of being anti-immigration, and regularly blames immigration policies for illegal immigration.

Elon Musk is a pronatalist who believes population decline is the biggest threat to civilization, and believes in the principles of Christianity.

Elon Musk has long been an advocate for space colonization, especially the colonization of Mars.

Elon Musk has repeatedly pushed for humanity colonizing Mars, in order to become an interplanetary species and lower the risks of human extinction.

Elon Musk was criticized during the COVID-19 pandemic for making unfounded epidemiological claims, defied COVID-19 lockdowns restrictions, and supported the Canada convoy protest against vaccine mandates.

Elon Musk has been critical of Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip during the Gaza war, praised China's economic and climate goals, suggested that Taiwan and China should resolve cross-strait relations, and was described as having a close relationship with the Chinese government.

In Europe, Elon Musk expressed support for Ukraine in 2022 during the Russian invasion, recommended referendums and peace deals on the annexed Russia-occupied territories, and supported the far-right Alternative for Germany in Germany in 2024.

Elon Musk has voiced his support for far-right activist Tommy Robinson and pledged electoral support for Reform UK.

In 2018, Elon Musk was sued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for a tweet stating that funding had been secured for potentially taking Tesla private.

The securities fraud lawsuit characterized the tweet as false, misleading, and damaging to investors, and sought to bar Elon Musk from serving as CEO of publicly traded companies.

Two days later, Elon Musk settled with the SEC, without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations.

Elon Musk has stated in interviews that he does not regret posting the tweet that triggered the SEC investigation.

In 2020, a judge blocked a lawsuit that claimed a tweet by Elon Musk regarding Tesla stock price violated the agreement.

Freedom of Information Act -released records showed that the SEC concluded Elon Musk had subsequently violated the agreement twice by tweeting regarding "Tesla's solar roof production volumes and its stock price".

In February 2024, Judge Laurel Beeler ruled that Elon Musk must testify again.

Elon Musk then relocated to Cameron County, Texas, saying that California had become "complacent" about its economic success.

Elon Musk suffers from back pain and has undergone several spine-related surgeries, including a disc replacement.

Elon Musk has stated he uses doctor-prescribed ketamine for occasional depression and that he doses "a small amount once every other week or something like that"; since January 2024, some media outlets have reported that he takes ketamine, marijuana, LSD, ecstasy, mushrooms, cocaine and other drugs.

Elon Musk plays video games, which he stated has a "'restoring effect' that helps his 'mental calibration'".

Elon Musk once claimed to be one of the world's top video game players but has since admitted to "account boosting", or cheating by hiring outside services to achieve top player rankings.

Elon Musk has justified the boosting by claiming that all top accounts do it so he has to as well to remain competitive.

In 2024 and 2025, Elon Musk criticized the video game Assassin's Creed Shadows and its creator Ubisoft for "woke" content.

Elon Musk posted to X that "DEI kills art" and specified the inclusion of the historical figure Yasuke in the Assassin's Creed game as offensive; he called the game "terrible".

Ubisoft responded by saying that Elon Musk's comments were "just feeding hatred" and that they were focused on producing a game not pushing politics.

Elon Musk has fathered at least fourteen children, one of whom died as an infant.

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2025 that sources close to Elon Musk suggest that the "true number of Elon Musk's children is much higher than publicly known".

Elon Musk had six children with his first wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson, who he met while attending Queen's University in Ontario, Canada; they married in 2000.

In 2002, their first child Nevada Elon Musk died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of 10 weeks.

Elon Musk then dated Amber Heard for several months in 2017; he had reportedly been "pursuing" her since 2012.

Grimes and Elon Musk have three children, born in 2020,2021, and 2022.

Elon Musk has four children with Shivon Zilis, director of operations and special projects at Neuralink: twins born via IVF in 2021, a child born in 2024 via surrogacy and a child born in 2025.

Elon Musk allegedly had a child with author Ashley St Clair in 2024.

Elon Musk is president of the Elon Musk Foundation he founded in 2001, whose stated purpose is to provide solar-power energy systems in disaster areas, with an interest in human space exploration, pediatrics, renewable energy, and "safe artificial intelligence".

The Elon Musk Foundation has been criticized for its "self-serving" donations to efforts close to Elon Musk's family and companies, as well as its low payout ratio.

Elon Musk has been described as an eccentric who makes spontaneous and impactful decisions, while often making controversial statements, contrary to other billionaires who prefer reclusiveness to protect their businesses.

Elon Musk has been described as an American oligarch due to his extensive influence over public discourse, social media, industry, politics, and government policy.

Elon Musk was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018.

In 2022, Elon Musk was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Elon Musk was selected as Times "Person of the Year" for 2021.

Elon Musk was a partial inspiration for the characterization of Tony Stark in the Marvel film Iron Man.

Elon Musk had a cameo appearance in the film's 2010 sequel, Iron Man 2.

Elon Musk contributed interviews to the documentaries Racing Extinction and Lo and Behold.