Elon Reeve Musk is an entrepreneur , investor and buisness magnate . He is the founder , CEO, and chief engineer at Spacex, angel investor, CEo , and Product Architect of Tesla Inc, founder of The Boring Company and co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI. With an estimated net worth of around US$252 billion as of April 2022 , Musk is the wealthiest person in the world according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and the Forbes real time billionaire list .
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 Standard University but decided instead to pursue a buisness 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 manufacture and space transport services company, of which he is CEO and Chief Manufacture Tesla Motors, Inc as chairman and product architect , becoming it's CEO in 2008 . In 2006 , he helped create Solarcity , a solar energy services company that was later acquired by Tesla and become Tesla Energy . In 2015 , he co-founded Open AI , a nonprofit research company that promotes friendly artificial intelligence . In 2016 , he co-founded Neuralink a neurotechnology company focused on developing brain - computer interfaces , and founded The Boring Company, a tunel construction company .
Musk made $175.8 million when PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002 . He was first listed on the Forbes Billionaires List in 2012 , with a net worth of $2 billion .
At the start of 2020 , Musk had a net worth of $27 billion . By the years end his net worth had increased by $150 billion , largely driven by his ownership of around 20% of Tesla Stock . During this , Musk's net worth was often volatile . For example , it dropped $16.3 billion in September , the largest single day plunge in the history of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index . In November of that year , Musk passed Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg to become the third richest person in the world . A week later he passed Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to become the second richest In January 2021 , Musk with a net worth of $185 billion , surpassed Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos to become the richest person in the world . Bezos reclaimed the top spot the following month.
