Elon Musk: From Pretoria to Tesla, SpaceX and Beyond
Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX Photo: Debbie Rowe / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Elon Musk, the head of Tesla and SpaceX, is one of the most closely watched business figures in the world. He was born June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa, and over three decades he has built or taken over companies in payments, electric cars, rockets, satellite internet, brain implants and social media.
No connection between Musk and Clatsop County or the Oregon coast turned up in the sources reviewed for this profile, so what follows is a national portrait of a man whose companies reach well beyond any one region.
From Pretoria to Silicon Valley
Musk grew up in South Africa and attended Pretoria Boys High School. Through his Canadian-born mother he held Canadian citizenship from birth, and he emigrated to Canada in June 1989. He entered Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, in 1990, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. Penn awarded him a bachelor’s degree in physics and a second bachelor’s in economics from the Wharton School in 1997. He became a U.S. citizen in 2002.
His first company, Zip2, was founded in 1995 with his brother Kimbal and Greg Kouri. Compaq bought it in 1999 for $307 million, and Musk received about $22 million for his 7 percent stake. He then co-founded X.com in 1999. It merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal, and Musk was removed as chief executive that same year. eBay acquired PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion. In 2017 Musk bought back the X.com domain name.
Rockets, cars and tunnels
In May 2002 Musk founded SpaceX, serving as chief executive and chief engineer. Its Falcon 1 rocket reached orbit in 2008. SpaceX later landed a Falcon 9 booster on land for the first time, in 2015, and in 2020 it flew the first commercial crewed mission to the International Space Station. Its Starlink satellite internet network began deploying in 2019.
Musk joined Tesla as an investor in 2004 and became its chairman. In 2008 he took over as chief executive and product architect. The company has since produced the Roadster, Model S, Model X, Model 3, Model Y and Cybertruck. Tesla bought SolarCity, a solar installer, in 2016 for $2 billion. Musk stepped down as chairman in 2020 under a settlement of a lawsuit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission. In November 2025 Tesla shareholders approved a pay package valued at up to $1 trillion.
He has started other ventures along the way. Neuralink, founded in 2016, develops brain-computer interfaces, and the Food and Drug Administration approved human trials in 2023. Animal welfare concerns and a federal probe followed. The Boring Company, founded in 2017, builds tunnels; its Las Vegas tunnel was completed in 2021. In July 2023 he founded xAI, whose Grok chatbot launched that November.
Twitter, politics and public attention
In October 2022 Musk bought Twitter for about $44 billion and became its chief executive. He later stepped aside from that post, and the service was rebranded X in 2023. The takeover brought mass layoffs and criticism over increases in hate speech and misinformation on the platform.
After President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, Musk advised the administration and was the de facto leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE. Its spending cuts, including to the U.S. Agency for International Development, drew public backlash. Musk left the administration in May 2025, and a public falling-out with Trump soon followed. Critics have also pointed to his statements on social media, while supporters credit his companies with pushing reusable rockets and electric vehicles into the mainstream.
Musk has been described as the world’s wealthiest person since 2025. Most of that fortune is tied to his stakes in Tesla and SpaceX, so his net worth moves with the fortunes of those companies.
Source: Wikipedia’s biography of Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk.
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