Elon Musk
Based on Wikipedia: Elon Musk
The boy was thrown down concrete steps and beaten so severely that he required hospitalization. This was not some troubled juvenile facility or a Dickensian nightmare—it was an ordinary school in apartheid-era South Africa, and the boy was Elon Musk. The incident, which Musk himself described decades later, was triggered by an argument with another pupil. His father berated him upon discharge from the hospital. When asked about the episode in 2023, Errol Musk denied wrongdoing: "The [other] boy had just lost his father to suicide, and Elon had called him stupid. Elon had a tendency to call people stupid. How could I possibly blame that child?"
This is perhaps the earliest window into who Elon Musk became—the brilliant, difficult, polarizing figure whose name now commands more attention than any living person on Earth.
Elon Reeve Musk was born June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa—a city that served as the administrative capital of a nation then governed by racist laws. His mother, Maye Haldeman, was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, and raised in South Africa after her own parents moved there. This fact mattered enormously: it gave Musk automatic citizenship by birth in both South Africa and Canada, circumventing what would have become a mandatory conscription into the apartheid military. His father, Errol Musk, was an electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, emerald dealer, and property developer—a man who partly owned a rental lodge at Timbavati Private Nature Reserve.
The elder Musk served in Pretoria's city council as representative of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party. Both Elon and Errol have maintained that their family shared his opposition to apartheid. Yet the marriage dissolved in 1979, when Elon was approximately nine years old. The boy chose to live with his father—a decision he later regretted—because Errol possessed an Encyclopaedia Britannica and a computer.
The younger Musk has recounted attending what he described as a "paramilitary Lord of the Flies" wilderness school where "bullying was a virtue" and children were encouraged to fight over rations. At twelve years old, Elon sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500—equivalent to $1,600 in 2025 currency. He attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Bryanston High School, then Pretoria Boys High School, where he graduated with a 61/100 in Afrikaans and a B on his senior math certification. A decent but unexceptional student.
Musk's mother secured Canadian citizenship through her birth there, enabling him to obtain a Canadian passport—avoiding South Africa's mandatory military service that would have forced participation in the apartheid regime while simultaneously easing immigration to the United States. While awaiting his application, Musk spent five months at the University of Pretoria, then arrived in Canada in June 1989, connecting with a second cousin in Saskatchewan and working odd jobs at farms and lumber mills.
By 1990, he entered Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Two years later, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied until 1995—a timeline that Musk himself claims, though the university did not award his degrees (a Bachelor of Arts in physics and a Bachelor of Science in economics from the Wharton School) until 1997.
Musk reportedly hosted large, ticketed house parties to pay tuition and wrote a business plan for an electronic book-scanning service similar to Google Books. In 1994, he held two internships in Silicon Valley: one at energy storage startup Pinnical Research Institute investigating electrolytic supercapacitors for energy storage, and another at Palo Alto-based Rocket Science Games.
The First Empire
Musk arrived in California in 1995—where his life would permanently reshape global industry. He applied for a job at Netscape, reportedly never receiving a response. Stanford accepted him into a graduate program in materials science that year; he did not enroll.
Instead, Musk chose the Internet boom of the 1990s.
In 1995, he co-founded Zip2 with his brother Kimbal and Greg Kouri—a web software company that would become his first success. The sale in 1999 marked a turning point. With capital from that sale, Musk co-founded X.com, an online payment company that merged to form PayPal—acquired by eBay in 2002. He became an American citizen that same year.
By then, the entrepreneur had already begun his next impossible dream.
To the Stars
In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX—the space technology company where he would serve as both CEO and chief engineer. The company has since led innovations in reusable rockets and commercial spaceflight, achieving what many considered science fiction made real. Falcon 9's first successful landing transformed access to orbit from fantasy into commodity.
Musk joined the automaker Tesla as an early investor in 2004, becoming its CEO and product architect in 2008—assuming leadership during what colleagues described as the company's near-collapse. The company has since become a leader in electric vehicles, reshaping transportation entirely.
In 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI to advance artificial intelligence research—a move that would later catalyze his departure from the organization amid growing discontent regarding its direction and leadership during the AI boom of the 2020s. His establishment of xAI became a subsidiary of SpaceX in 2026, following his exit from OpenAI.
The Platform
In 2022, Musk acquired Twitter—the social network he had long publicly contested—and implemented significant changes, rebranding it as X in 2023. The acquisition proved controversial due to subsequent increases in hate speech and misinformation on the service, following his pledge to decrease censorship.
Musk's political activities have made him a polarizing figure—supporting global far-right figures, causes, and political parties. He was the largest donor in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, supporting Donald Trump. After Trump's inauguration as president in early 2025, Musk served as Senior Advisor to the President and de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a role that attracted public backlash.
After a public feud with Trump, Musk left the Trump administration and returned to managing his companies.
The Empire Beyond
Musk's other ventures include Neuralink, a neurotechnology company he co-founded in 2016, and the Boring Company, a tunneling enterprise founded in 2017. His pay package at Tesla, approved in November 2025, is worth $1 trillion—to be received over ten years if specific goals are met.
The emails Musk sent to Jeffrey Epstein were included in the Epstein files, published between 2025-26 and became a topic of worldwide debate—raising questions about his associations that continue to circulate in public discourse.
The Man
Musk has been criticized for COVID-19 misinformation, promoting conspiracy theories, and affirming antisemitic, racist, and transphobic comments. His role in the second Trump administration attracted particular public backlash, especially in response to DOGE.
He is now the wealthiest person in the world—Forbes estimates his net worth at approximately $852 billion as of February 2026—and since 2025 he has held that title without interruption.
The boy who was thrown down concrete steps and beaten so severely he required hospitalization—who chose to live with a father he later became estranged from, who attended a wilderness school where bullying was treated as virtue—has become something entirely unexpected: perhaps the most consequential businessman of his generation, an entrepreneur whose ventures have already reshaped how humans travel, pay, communicate, and think about intelligence itself.
The bruises healed long ago. The controversies remain.