Thing's About Elun Musk |Twitgist

  

Musk was born to a Canadian mother and White South African father, and raised in Pretoria, South Africa. He briefly attended the University of Pretoria before moving to Canada at age 17. He matriculated at Queen's University and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania two years later, where he received a bachelor's degree in Economics and Physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University but decided instead to pursue a business career, co-founding the web software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. The startup was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. The same year, Musk co-founded online bank X.com, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. The company was bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

In 2002 Musk founded SpaceX, an aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company, of which he is CEO and Chief Engineer. In 2004 he joined electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.) as chairman and product architect, becoming its CEO in 2008. In 2006 he helped create SolarCity, a solar energy services company that was later acquired by Tesla and became Tesla Energy. In 2015 he co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit research company that promotes friendly artificial intelligence (AI). In 2016 he co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology company focused on developing brain–computer interfaces, and founded The Boring Company, a tunnel construction company. He also agreed to purchase the major American social networking service Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion. Musk has proposed the Hyperloop, a high-speed vactrain transportation system. He is the president of the Musk Foundation, which donates to scientific research and education.

Musk has been criticized for making unscientific and controversial statements, and for spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2018 he was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for falsely tweeting that he had secured funding for a private takeover of Tesla. He settled with the SEC but did not admit guilt, temporarily stepping down from his chairmanship and agreeing to some limitations on his Twitter usage. In 2019 he won a defamation case, brought against him by a British caver who had advised in the Tham Luang cave rescue.