Elon Musk

Elon Reeve Musk is a tech billionaire and currently the richest person in the world, as well as a close ally of President Donald J. Trump, having donated a quarter of a billion dollars to aid his successful 2024 reelection bid. Since the beginning of 2025, he has been the de facto leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an organization that is dismantling the federal administrative state and regulatory agencies while firing thousands of government workers, supposedly to combat wasteful spending.

With his control of a powerful constellation of companies spanning the automotive sector, artificial intelligence, space exploration, biotechnology, and social media, Musk was for years hailed as an innovative entrepreneur. But his increasing right-wing extremism, combined with his antagonistic, trollish statements in interviews and online — where he is also a superspreader of misinformation — have made him a deeply polarizing figure.     

Born to a wealthy family in South Africa in 1971, Musk as a college student traveled to Canada (where his mother, Maye Musk, was born) and obtained citizenship. He ultimately completed his studies at the University in Pennsylvania, earning a degree in physics and another in economics from the university’s Wharton School. He was accepted into a graduate program at Stanford University but did not enroll, and reportedly worked illegally in Silicon Valley instead, though Musk has denied this, saying his student visa transitioned to an H-1B foreign worker visa. He became a U.S. citizen in 2002.

Along with his brother Kimball Musk and a third collaborator, Musk in 1995 co-founded Zip2, a software company that created online directories for businesses and city guides for newspapers. After it was acquired by Compaq, Musk was a millionaire. In 1999, he cofounded X.com, an online payments services company, which later merged with the online bank Cofinity, where the X.com concept was subsumed under the service PayPal. Cofinity’s board soon ousted Musk as CEO, replacing him with co-founder Peter Thiel. Cofinity was renamed PayPal, and when it was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, Musk — the largest shareholder — was one of the company’s many now-prominent alumni, known as the “PayPal Mafia,” to see a massive windfall.

From there, Musk founded the space technology company SpaceX, now a major government contractor via NASA, then became the majority shareholder and board chairman of the electric vehicle company Tesla, Inc. By 2008, Tesla’s original two co-founders had left the company, with Musk assuming CEO duties, and a 2009 lawsuit settlement allows him to call himself a co-founder of the auto manufacturer. In the years since, Musk has continually promised that fully autonomous self-driving Teslas are just around the corner, though to date the company’s limited self-driving features have drawn criticisms around safety and regulatory probes. Even as Tesla’s valuation has soared on public enthusiasm for Musk’s vision, raising his net worth to hundreds of billions of dollars, he has pushed it in unexpected directions, arguing that it should be a leader in AI and overseeing the design of humanoid robots and the steel-paneled Cybertruck. Musk is infamous for unveiling such products in flashy events that misrepresent the company’s progress: when he first announced the Optimus bot in 2021, it was just a performer in a bodysuit, and when real Optimus bots served attendees drinks at a 2024 event, it was later revealed that these were operated remotely by humans. An engineer at the company has also testified in a lawsuit deposition that Tesla staged a 2016 video promoting the self-driving capabilities of its cars.

By the late 2010s, Musk was a well-established media figure thanks in part to his frequent use of Twitter, which began to cause him problems. In 2018, he tweeted that he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 share — possibly one of his frequent joking references to a number associated with cannabis — and that he had “funding secured.” This was false, caught the board by complete surprise, triggered a stock rally, and brought a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission. According to the terms of a settlement, Musk was fined $20 million and had to step down as chairman. That same year, he baselessly accused a critic on Twitter of being a pedophile, which led to a defamation suit that Musk was able to fend off.

In 2022, Musk launched a messy and contentious bid to purchase Twitter for $44 billion, though at one point after the offer had already been accepted, he tried, unsuccessfully, to back out. The acquisition closed in October of that year, with Musk quickly laying off about 80 percent of employees in a purported effort to make the company profitable. His capricious, ill-considered changes to the platform and reinstatement of users banned for extreme hate speech and other community guideline violations caused an exodus of advertisers, with revenue plummeting. As of late 2024, one major investment firm estimated that the site, which Musk rebranded as “X,” was worth 80 percent less than what he had paid for it.       

Although he previously supported Democratic nominees for president, Musk announced during the 2022 midterm elections that he had shifted his support to the Republican party. He began to chime in more frequently on culture war issues, attacking progressive ideas as the “woke mind virus.” That year, one of his children, Vivian Jenna Wilson, legally changed her name and gender, telling a court she wanted to sever all ties to her father; Musk later said in an interview that her transition and estrangement had contributed to his pronounced political shift. He took to frequently amplifying far-right propagandists and demagogues, frequently falling for fake stories and trends that supported his line of attack on transgender people, immigrants, workplace diversity, and Democratic policies.

It’s not known exactly how many children Musk, who peddles the misleading claim that the planet is facing population collapse and advocates for increased procreation, has fathered. His first son with ex-wife Justine Wilson died as an infant, and they went on to have five more children. He fathered another three with the musician Grimes; the pair did not marry and settled a prolonged custody battle in 2024. Musk has four more children with Shivon Zilis, an executive at Neuralink, his brain chip implant company. In 2025, right-wing influencer Ashley St. Clair claimed that she had also given birth to a child by Musk, and that he was ignoring her attempts to communicate about parental responsibilities, but Musk has not acknowledged this child as his own.

Trump insulted Musk and his companies in 2022 after he said the former president was too old to serve again, and he went on to support Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ failed 2024 primary campaign. Musk pledged his support for Trump only once the candidate was injured during an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally in the summer of 2024, and founded a Super PAC that spent hundreds of millions to help him retake the White House. He was one of many wealthy executives and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley to back the Republican nominee, upending the U.S. tech industry’s nominally liberal reputation.

As a special advisor to President Trump, Musk has dispatched DOGE loyalists to gut agencies that have oversight of his companies, with the White House saying that he can decide when certain actions may create a conflict of interest. So far, Musk has not distanced himself from any decisions the group has made, instead continuing to make inaccurate claims about government spending, even while his businesses continue to receive billions in taxpayer money. —Miles Klee