Elon Musk

Elon Musk is arguably the most influential entrepreneur of the 21st century. Born in South Africa in 1971, he co-founded PayPal, then founded SpaceX in 2002 and Tesla in 2004. He has also founded or co-founded Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. SpaceX became the first private company to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft, and has made rocket reusability a commercial reality — dramatically reducing the cost of space access. SpaceX's Starship aims to make humanity multiplanetary. Tesla transformed the automotive industry, forcing every major car manufacturer to accelerate electric vehicle development. At his peak, Musk was the world's wealthiest person with a net worth exceeding $300 billion. Musk's acquisition of Twitter (rebranded X) in 2022 for $44 billion was one of the most controversial corporate takeovers in history. His vision for AI safety led him to co-found OpenAI (which he later departed) and found xAI to develop Grok.