Elon Musk attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he earned bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics in 1997. He started graduate school in physics at Stanford University but quit after a few days to focus on his business.
Elon Musk cofounded PayPal, and in 2002 he founded SpaceX, a corporation that manufactures rockets and spaceships. He was an early investor in Tesla, which manufactures electric vehicles and batteries, and became its CEO in 2008. In 2016, he also co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology firm. In 2022, Musk purchased the social media site Twitter.
Short Intro
Elon Reeve Musk (born June 28, 1971) is an entrepreneur and investor. Musk is the founder, chairman, CEO, and chief technology officer of SpaceX; an angel investor, Tesla, Inc.’s CEO, product architect, and previous chairman; the owner, chairman, and CTO of X Corp.; the founder of the Boring Company; the co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and the president of the Musk Foundation. He is the world’s wealthiest individual, with a net worth of $226 billion as of 2024, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and $249 billion according to Forbes, owing mostly to his ownership shares in Tesla and SpaceX.
Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and attended the University of Pretoria for a short time before coming to Canada at the age of 18, gaining citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. He enrolled at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, two years later.
Early Life
Musk grew up in a prosperous family. His father was elected to the Pretoria City Council as a representative of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party, and his children embraced their father’s anti-apartheid sentiments. Joshua Haldeman, his maternal grandfather, was an American-born Canadian who led his family on record-breaking trips to Africa and Australia aboard a single-engine Bellanca airplane. Musk elected to live largely with his father after his parents divorced in 1980. Musk ultimately grew to regret his actions and was estranged from his father. He has a half-sister and a half-brother on his father’s side.
