In recent years, the name Elon Musk has become synonymous with stupendous wealth and even political clout. But who is Elon Musk and how did he manage to go from nearly being broke to astronomically increasing his wealth within a relatively short period of time? What is Elon Musk’s networth?
He was worth just $24.6 billion in 2020, according to Forbes. Notably, his meteoric rise has seen him overtake age-long entrepreneurs and investors like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and many others.
Elon Musk’s Background and Early Life
Elon Reeve Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa on 28 June 1971. His father, Errol Musk is a successful electrochemical engineer, and politician while his Canada-born mom was a famous model and dietician. But the Musks are not native South Africans. He has traced his great-grandfather’s ancestry to the United States, where he currently lives. Musk has a younger brother, Kimbal (born on September 20, 1972) and a sister, Tosca (born on July 20, 1974).
Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Bryanston High School, and then Pretoria Boys High School, where he graduated in 1988. He then decided to emigrate to Canada, partly to avoid mandatory military conscription. While his travel documents were being processed he spent five months attending the University of Pretoria.
Musk eventually arrived in Canada with Kimbal in June 1989. The following year, he enrolled at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Two years later, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in the US, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in Physics and a Bachelor of Science in Economics in 1997. In 1995, he was offered admission to study for a PhD at Stanford University but opted out in order to join the tech boom.
Elon Musk NetWorth Currently
Elon Musk first emerged as the world’s richest man on September 27, 2021, with an estimated net worth of $203.4 billion, according to Forbes. As of January 2025, Forbes estimates that his net worth has more than doubled to $433.9 while Bloomberg puts his net worth at $447 billion. He remains the top billionaire on the planet.
Elon Musk Companies
Elon Musk’s entrepreneurial spirit can be traced back to his early days. At the age of 12, young Elon was able to develop and monetise a software video game he called Blastar. Then as a student at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1990s, he and his friends converted an off-campus apartment they rented into a nightclub. Below are other businesses he has had major involvements in over the years. These companies contributed or are currently contributing to Elon Musk’s impressive networth.
Zip2
It wasn’t until 1995 that Elon, Kimbal and his Lebanese-Canadain friend Gregory Kouri co-founded Global Link Information Network, which later became Zip2. Musk says he was motivated to establish his own company because he was finding it hard to get a job in other companies. One of the companies that turned him down was Netscape.
In 1999, Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million. According to Time Magazine, Musk got $22 million from the sale, from which he would later purchase a McLaren F1 supercar for $1 million.
X.com (PayPal)
In the same 1999, Musk decided to cofound another startup with the money he got from selling Zip2. His new company, X.com, was an internet-based banking and payments platform. The X,com concept was brought about by Musk’s vision of a more efficient and digitalised global financial system.
This vision led to the merger of X.com and Peter Thiel’s Confinity in March 2000 to create PayPal. Two years later, eBay paid $1.5 billion to take over PayPal. The deal fetched Musk $180 million.
SpaceX
Musk’s next business adventure after X.com and PayPal is SpaceX, short for Space Exploration Technologies Corporation. His aims of establishing SpaceX in 2002 include making space travel more affordable and facilitating human colonisation of the Mars continent.
Musk’s love for exploration seems to have come from his grandfather who moved his family from the US to South Africa just to explore the world more. Notably, the older Musk was the first person to fly from South Africa to Australia.
In 2008, SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket became the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to orbit the Earth. The company has gradually grown to become a significant contributor to Musk’s rapidly growing wealth. It is presently one of the most valuable space technology companies in the world with an estimated valuation of $350 billion.
Tesla
Tesla is the brainchild of Silicon Valley engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Both men co-founded the company in July 2003 with the aim of producing fast and fun-to-drive electric vehicles. Eberhard and Tarpenning had met Musk earlier in 2001, after listening to his speech at a Mars Society event held at Stanford University.
Musk joined the Tesla board in February 2004 as the company’s largest investor and emerged as CEO four years later. In an interview a few years ago, Musk revealed that he actually thought Tesla would fail. His prediction nearly came to pass as the young company kept draining his resources till 2008 when he invested the last money he had on it.
But investors came in and Tesla managed to turn its fortunes around. It is now the dominant EV maker with a market share of nearly 50% as of 2024, according to Cox Automotive.
SolarCity
SolarCity was founded in 2006 by Elon Musk’s cousins, Lyndon and Peter Rives based on Musk’s recommendation. In addition to inspiring his cousins to explore solar technologies, Musk also invested significantly in the project, based on his belief in the importance of clean energy to the future of humans.
In August 2016, Tesla acquired SolarCity for nearly $2.6 billion. SolarCity subsequently became part of the EV maker’s energy division whose products include solar panels, solar roof tiles, and energy storage solutions.
OpenAI
Founded as a non-profit AI company in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and seven others. OpenAI is now popular for introducing the ChatGPT chatbot. After initially investing in OpenAI, Musk decided to quit the project in February 2018.
He apparently had differing views about the company’s direction with Altman and other company leaders. Additionally, he says he intended to build something similar inside Tesla and so had to leave OpenAI to avoid a conflict of interest. But Altman says Musk left when he tried and failed to take full unilateral control of the company.
Neuralink
Neuralink Corp. was founded by Elon Musk and a team of eight scientists and engineers in June 2016. It is a neurotechnology company that develops implantable brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).
Musk told “Artificial Intelligence” podcast host Lex Fridman in 2019 that Neuralink was “intended to address the existential risk associated with digital superintelligence.” “We will not be able to be smarter than a digital supercomputer, so, therefore, if you cannot beat ’em, join ’em,” Musk added.
After two previous successful implants, Musk, in January 2025, disclosed that Neuralink has successfully implanted its device in a third human and plans 20 to 30 more procedures in 2025. As of 2024, Neuralink was valued at between $3.5 to $8 billion.
The Boring Company
The Boring Company is a construction firm created by Musk in December 2016 to build underground tunnels that will help ease traffic congestion. He stumbled on the idea after being caught up in the hectic Los Angeles traffic. The Boring Company was initially a SpaceX subsidiary but later became a standalone organisation.
The company’s valuation after its Series C round of funding in 2022 was approximately $5.675 billion. This increased to $7 billion the following year, according to Reuters.
X (Twitter)
In October 2022, Musk completed his acquisition of Jack Dorsey’s Twitter for $44 billion and subsequently rebranded it to X Corporation. He aims to transform X into a platform for innovation and free speech. He also has a long-term vision of making X a “super app” that integrates social media, financial services, and other areas.
Apart from transforming Twitter to X, he has introduced other new features, including a new logo, a subscription model and an alteration of content moderation policies.
xAI
Musk announced the launch of xAI in July 2023 with the goal “to understand the true nature of the universe.” The company’s initial 12-strong team led by Musk included leading researchers sourced from top AI labs such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Microsoft.
However, in April 2024, a member of the team, Kyle Kosic, an ex-OpenAI official, quit xAI to return to OpenAI. It took xAI only 16 months after it launched to achieve a valuation of $50 billion, nearly nine years faster than it took bitter rival OpenAI to achieve the same milestone.
Will Elon Musk Become the World’s First Trillionaire?
The world’s first billionaire emerged in 1916. Since then, no billionaire or anybody else has managed to become a trillionaire. But that could change in 2027, a year Elon Musk has been predicted to become the first among many billionaires to emerge as the world’s very first trillionaire.
