Elon Musk

Elon Musk is the world's most-followed entrepreneur, founder or leader of Tesla (electric vehicles, energy, and robotics), SpaceX (reusable rockets, Starship, and Starlink), xAI (Grok), Neuralink (brain-computer interfaces), and The Boring Company. Born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1971, he studied at Queen's University Canada and the University of Pennsylvania, co-founded Zip2 and X.com (which became PayPal), and rolled his PayPal windfall into founding SpaceX (2002) and joining Tesla (2004). SpaceX made the world's first reusable orbital rocket and dominates commercial launch; Tesla is the world's most valuable automaker and popularised electric vehicles globally. Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022 (rebranded X in 2023) and is a defining, and polarising, figure in global technology, culture, and — via his role in the second Trump administration's DOGE efforts — American politics.