Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, to Maye Musk, a model and dietitian, and Errol Musk, an engineer. He moved to Canada at 17 before relocating to the United States, where he studied economics and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He briefly began a PhD in applied physics at Stanford University in 1995 before leaving after just two days to pursue the internet business boom, co-founding the startup that would become Zip2.

Musk’s first major payday came from the 1999 sale of Zip2 for around $300 million, followed by the sale of X.com/PayPal to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion, of which Musk’s share was reported at roughly $180 million. He used much of that money to found SpaceX in 2002 and became an early investor and later CEO of Tesla, joining as chairman in 2004 before taking the CEO role in 2008. Both companies faced near-collapse in 2008 before rebounding, a period Musk has described as the most difficult of his career.

Photo: Daniel Oberhaus via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Tesla went public in 2010 and became the world’s most valuable automaker through the 2010s and 2020s, while SpaceX developed reusable rockets that transformed the launch industry and, through Starlink, built the world’s largest satellite internet constellation. Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion and rebranded it as X. He also founded The Boring Company, Neuralink, and xAI, the artificial intelligence company behind the Grok chatbot. In June 2026, SpaceX completed the largest initial public offering in history, pricing at $135 per share and raising about $75 billion, pushing the company’s valuation to roughly $1.77 trillion and making Musk the first trillionaire in world history.

Photo: Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Unlike most people on rich lists, Musk’s wealth is not built from a traditional salary; he has at various points taken only a nominal base salary from Tesla. His “earnings” instead come almost entirely from the appreciation of his equity stakes, particularly a landmark 2018 Tesla compensation package tied to performance milestones that, once vested, became worth tens of billions of dollars, along with his roughly 42% ownership stake in SpaceX.

Musk’s most consequential pay package was the 2018 Tesla CEO compensation plan, a milestone-based stock option award with no fixed salary that ultimately became one of the largest executive compensation packages in corporate history once Tesla hit its performance targets. Shareholders approved a fresh, even larger package in 2025 tied to further growth targets. His SpaceX stake, valued at tens of billions of dollars for years, surged dramatically in value following the company’s 2026 IPO.

Musk does not participate in traditional celebrity endorsement deals in the way athletes or entertainers do; his public profile functions instead as free marketing for his own companies. His primary commercial relationships are the platforms and companies he owns and controls outright — Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, and X — rather than third-party sponsorship arrangements.

Musk’s core holdings are Tesla (electric vehicles and energy storage), SpaceX (rockets and Starlink satellite internet), xAI (artificial intelligence, merged with X in 2025), The Boring Company (tunneling and infrastructure), and Neuralink (brain-computer interfaces). He also holds a government-adjacent public profile through his role leading the Department of Government Efficiency initiative during the Trump administration in 2025, though that role was unpaid and separate from his business holdings.

Musk sold the large majority of his California real estate portfolio in 2020-2021, saying at the time that he intended to own no houses, and has largely lived in relatively modest housing near his companies’ facilities in Texas since. His major personal assets are instead concentrated in his equity stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, along with a private jet and a well-documented collection of vehicles and prototypes.