Elon Musk

Elon Reeve Musk (born 28 June 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa) sits as an owner across payments, spaceflight, cars, artificial intelligence and a public speech platform at the same time. SpaceX's Form S-1, filed in May 2026, states it plainly: "Mr. Musk is our founder, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Technical Officer and the Chairman of our board."

More than most figures in this archive, he attracts retelling. This page therefore restricts itself to what his own companies have filed with regulators and what his own organisations have published.

Zip2 and X.com — what the PayPal prospectus says

PayPal, Inc.'s Form S-1 of 28 September 2001 records the director biography: Musk founded X.com Corporation in March 1999; X.com merged with Confinity, Inc. in March 2000; he was CEO of X.com from March 1999 to December 1999 and CEO of PayPal from May 2000 to September 2000. Before that, "Mr. Musk co-founded Zip2 Corp. in 1995 where he worked in a number of roles including Chairman, CEO and CTO from 1995 to February 1999."

Where Zip2 went is recorded in Tesla's 2010 prospectus: "acquired by Compaq in March 1999". PayPal went to eBay on 3 October 2002 — an all-stock deal with an aggregate purchase price of US$1,492,504 thousand, per eBay's Form 10-K for 2002.

SpaceX and Tesla — the word "founder" is used differently

SpaceX was founded in 2002 and its own S-1 calls Musk the founder without qualification. As of 31 March 2026 the company operated approximately 9,600 Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit, serving about 10.3 million subscribers across 164 countries, territories and other markets. For a privately held company, that is a global broadband network under one owner.

Tesla is a different case. The company was incorporated in 2003 — English Wikipedia gives 1 July 2003, by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning — and Musk led its first funding round in February 2004 and became chairman. Tesla's own 2010 prospectus describes him as "Chairman of our board of directors since April 2004", "Product Architect since May 2008" and "Chief Executive Officer since October 2008"; it does not call him a founder of Tesla. Per the same Wikipedia article, a settlement agreed between Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows five people — Eberhard, Tarpenning, Ian Wright, Musk and J. B. Straubel — to describe themselves as co-founders. "Founder of Tesla" is a title that was litigated into place.

OpenAI — co-chair from 2015, off the board in 2018

"Introducing OpenAI", published 11 December 2015, lists him among the funders and states: "OpenAI's co-chairs are Sam Altman and Elon Musk." The funders were said to have committed US$1 billion in total. The departure came in "OpenAI Supporters" on 20 February 2018: "Elon Musk will depart the OpenAI Board but will continue to donate and advise the organization. As Tesla continues to become more focused on AI, this will eliminate a potential future conflict for Elon."

He then started his own AI company. SpaceX's prospectus records "xAI, which was founded in 2023" and dates the launch of its first model, Grok-1, to November 2023. When Stargate was announced in January 2025 he publicly disputed on X, the day after, whether the money behind it existed.

Twitter to X, and a chain of owners

The Twitter acquisition closed on 27 October 2022. Twitter's Form 8-K records consideration of $54.20 per share in cash and states that "Parent is majority-owned and controlled by Mr. Musk". The much-quoted US$44 billion headline figure does not appear in that 8-K.

Ownership then changed twice in three years. On 28 March 2025 xAI acquired X Holdings Corp. — the "X Merger" in SpaceX's filings — and on 2 February 2026 Space Exploration Technologies Corp. completed its acquisition of X.AI Holdings Corp., the "xAI Merger". The corporate chain and the numbers are set out on the X Corp. page.

Regulators and public office

On 29 September 2018 the SEC announced a settled securities-fraud charge over the "funding secured" post about taking Tesla private. The settlement required Musk to step down as Tesla's chairman and Musk and Tesla to pay US$40 million in penalties between them; neither admitted nor denied the allegations.

On public office, SpaceX says it in its own prospectus: "Mr. Musk has also previously served as Senior Advisor to the President of the United States." The same risk-factor paragraph tells investors that "he does not devote his full time and attention to our businesses".

Payments, satellite broadband, frontier AI, and the venue where public argument collects. No earlier figure in computing history has held ownership across that many layers of information infrastructure at once.