Elon Musk: The Man Behind Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI
Who Is Elon Musk?
Elon Musk (born June 28, 1971) is an entrepreneur and former government official, and the CEO and largest shareholder of Tesla and SpaceX. Born into the wealthy Musk family in Pretoria, South Africa, he emigrated in 1989 to Canada, obtaining citizenship through his Canadian-born mother, before graduating with two bachelor's degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 and moving to California to pursue his business ventures. He became a U.S. citizen in 2002.
His first steps in tech date back to the 1990s: in 1995 he co-founded Zip2, a web software company, and after its sale in 1999 he co-founded X.com, an online payment system that merged with Confinity in March 2000 to form PayPal, later acquired by eBay in 2002.
The Industrial Empire: Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI
In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX, an aerospace technology company where he serves as CEO and chief engineer, and has since driven innovation in reusable rockets and commercial spaceflight. Musk joined Tesla as an early investor in 2004 and became its CEO and product architect in 2008; since then the company has become a leader in electric vehicles. Under his leadership, Tesla has launched several successful models, including the four-door sedan Model S (2012), the Model X crossover (2015), the mass-market Model 3 sedan (2017), the Model Y crossover (2020), and the Cybertruck pickup (2023), while also building multiple Gigafactories for lithium-ion batteries and electric vehicles.
On the artificial intelligence front, the path has been rockier: in 2015 Musk co-founded OpenAI to advance AI research, but later distanced himself from it; growing discontent over the organization's direction and leadership during the AI boom of the 2020s led him to found xAI, which became a SpaceX subsidiary in 2026. In March 2025, Musk had announced the sale of the social platform X to xAI in a stock deal that valued X at 33 billion dollars.
The OpenAI chapter closed legally just a few months ago: on May 18, 2026, a jury in Oakland, California, ruled in favor of OpenAI and its executives, finding that Musk's February 2024 allegations, that the company had violated its founding agreement by prioritizing profits over AI safety, were time-barred by the statute of limitations.
The First Trillionaire in History
2026 marks a financial turning point for Musk. He has been the world's richest person since 2025 and became the first and only U.S. dollar trillionaire in mid-June 2026: according to Forbes, as of June 29, 2026, his net worth is estimated at 1,000 billion dollars. The growth has been dizzying: according to Forbes his net worth reached 300 billion in 2021, 400 billion in December 2024, 500 billion in October 2025, 600 and then 700 billion in December 2025, 800 billion in February 2026, and 900 billion in June 2026, before becoming a trillionaire that same month following SpaceX's initial public offering. His net worth then briefly touched 1,400 billion dollars a few days later.
This wealth stems mainly from his holdings: Musk owns approximately 42% of SpaceX and 20% of Tesla. Beyond his two main companies, he has also founded and holds stakes in The Boring Company (tunneling) and Neuralink (brain implants).
The SpaceX and xAI IPO
A key event of 2026 was SpaceX's stock market listing: in June 2026, SpaceX completed its initial public offering (IPO) at 135 dollars per share, valuing the company at roughly 1,770 billion dollars and further boosting Musk's wealth. Shortly before the IPO, xAI had been folded into the SpaceX galaxy: SpaceX acquired xAI in February in a deal that valued the combined company at 1,250 billion dollars, while Twitter, which Musk had purchased in 2022, had already been merged into xAI nearly a year earlier.
To relaunch xAI ahead of the listing, Musk drew on his inner circle of trust: the world's richest billionaire redeployed trusted lieutenants from Starlink and Tesla to oversee certain xAI projects.
Vision: Why He Does All This
At Davos, in early 2026, Musk explained the logic tying together his seemingly disparate companies: they all tackle very difficult technological challenges, but the overarching goal of his companies is to maximize the probability that civilization has a great future; SpaceX's mission stems from the idea that life and consciousness might be extraordinarily rare, while Tesla is focused on sustainable energy. On artificial intelligence, he struck an optimistic note on timelines: he stated that we could have an AI smarter than any human by the end of the year, adding that within five years AI could surpass humanity's collective intelligence.
In Summary
In 2026, Elon Musk finds himself in an unprecedented position: the first trillionaire in history, simultaneously leading an automotive giant (Tesla), a newly public aerospace company (SpaceX), and an AI lab integrated into the same structure (xAI), while also controlling X, Neuralink, and The Boring Company. His trajectory remains volatile, however: much of his wealth depends on the market valuations of companies still in full expansion, and the legal chapter with OpenAI has just closed against him.