Elon Musk
This wiki covers the companies, projects, and events related to [[Elon Musk]] and his network of businesses. See [[people/elon-musk.md]] for the full biography.
Four days after the IPO, Musk exercised 304 million Tesla stock options at a split-adjusted strike price of $23.34 per share, generating a paper profit of approximately $116 billion and raising his Tesla stake to 19.9 percent.[^c20] The exercise resolved a six-year compensation dispute settled by the Delaware Supreme Court in December 2025.
Musk simultaneously consolidated SpaceX, xAI, and X into a unified corporate group, using a $20 billion bridge loan secured by SpaceX to refinance $17.5 billion in high-yield debt and reduce annual interest costs by nearly $1 billion.[^c7][^c8] He also discussed merging Tesla and SpaceX after the IPO, a combination that would have been valued at approximately $3.4 trillion.[^c9] Musk's AI company xAI was dissolved and folded into SpaceX in May 2026. On June 16, a federal judge dismissed xAI's trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI with prejudice, marking Musk's second legal loss against OpenAI in four weeks.[^c31] Meanwhile, SpaceX confirmed its $60 billion acquisition of AI coding startup [[Cursor]] in an all-stock deal closing in the third quarter,[^c32] and signed a $6.3 billion compute deal with Reflection AI at its Colossus 2 data center.[^c33] SpaceX leased its Colossus supercomputer to competitor [[Anthropic]] in a landmark compute deal worth $1.25 billion per month. In July 2026, Musk acknowledged he had been wrong about Anthropic, calling the company "obviously currently the leader in AI."[^c36] In June 2026, Google agreed to pay $920 million monthly for Colossus compute to help power its Gemini models,[^c45] and X Money — Musk's financial "everything app" offering a 6 percent annual yield on deposits — launched for U.S. Premium subscribers.[^c46][^c48]
To power xAI's energy-intensive AI supercomputing clusters, Musk secretly acquired APR Energy, a mobile gas turbine company, for over $1 billion in a deal discovered through an FTC early termination notice. APR Energy maintains one of the world's largest fleets of mobile gas and diesel turbines with more than 1.1 gigawatts of generation capacity, providing rapidly deployable power to the Colossus supercomputers in Memphis.[^c40][^c41]
On his 55th birthday, June 28, 2026, Musk announced that Grok 4.5 had entered private beta testing at SpaceX and Tesla, built on a 1.5 trillion parameter foundation model with performance approaching or surpassing Anthropic's Opus.[^c30] SpaceXAI publicly launched Grok 4.5 on July 9, 2026, as the first model released since the company went public, priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens.[^c42] SpaceX's S-1 filing disclosed compensation packages tying up to 1.3 billion additional shares to establishing a permanent Mars colony of at least 1 million inhabitants and developing orbital data centers, split across two separate awards: nearly 1 billion shares for the Mars milestone and 302 million shares for the orbital data centers.[^c22]
SpaceX unveiled detailed specifications for its AI1 orbital data center satellite, a 20-meter-tall, 70-meter-wingspan spacecraft delivering 120 kW of sustained compute payload, confirmed the Starmind name for the AI satellite constellation, and outlined a deployment timeline beginning with demonstration launches in late 2027.[^c34] The Terafab semiconductor facility — a $55 billion joint venture with Intel — was formally proposed in Grimes County, Texas, at a cost exceeding Morgan Stanley's $45 billion estimate, targeting 1 terawatt of AI compute annually.[^c23]
Musk's business career began with the founding of Zip2 in 1995, followed by X.com (later PayPal). Since 2002, he has built SpaceX into a dominant launch provider,[^c2] developed the [[Starlink]] satellite internet network (which reached 10.3 million subscribers in Q1 2026),[^c14] and led Tesla through a strategic pivot toward humanoid robots and autonomy after discontinuing the Model S and Model X in April 2026. Tesla's AI5 chip completed tape-out in April 2026 with up to 40 times the compute power of its predecessor,[^c24] and Tesla began mass production of the Optimus Gen 3 humanoid robot and Cybercab in mid-2026. Hundreds of Cybercabs were spotted with logos at Gigafactory Texas in late June, signaling imminent entry into the Robotaxi fleet. Musk publicly questioned Moody's decision to assign SpaceX (Baa1) a higher credit rating than Tesla (Baa3), calling Tesla's rating "ridiculously low" given its $40 billion cash position and consistent profitability.[^c35]
SpaceX's Starship V3, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, completed its debut flight in May 2026, deploying mock Starlink satellites and achieving a controlled splashdown.[^c10][^c15] Starship Flight 13 in July 2026 successfully deployed the first operational Starlink V3 satellites and recovered both stages.
In 2025, Musk served as de facto head of the [[DOGE|Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)]] in Donald Trump's second administration, where DOGE oversaw the dismissal of 300,000 federal workers, before Musk stepped down in May 2025 after publicly criticizing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was signed into law on July 4, 2025.[^c27][^c3][^c5] In July 2025 he founded the [[America Party]], which remained in the concept stage without registered candidates. His public feud with Trump was followed by a reconciliation in January 2026. In May 2026, Musk met Pope Francis at the Vatican with four of his sons, and confirmed on X that his estranged trans daughter Vivian Wilson was the reason for his entry into politics. In June 2026, Musk took legal action against German broadcaster ZDF after it falsely claimed he had called for migrants to be hunted in Northern Ireland; ZDF retracted the segment.[^c21]
A jury unanimously ruled against Musk in his lawsuit against [[OpenAI]] in May 2026 on statute-of-limitations grounds, clearing the way for OpenAI's planned Q4 2026 IPO targeting a $1 trillion valuation.[^c25] Musk announced an appeal to the Ninth Circuit. On July 6, 2026, a federal judge rejected Musk's bid to overturn a separate jury verdict finding he defrauded Twitter investors, upholding estimated damages of $2.6 billion and finding "substantial evidence of falsity" in his public statements during the acquisition process.[^c39] Separately, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Pentagon's supply chain risk designation against Anthropic, ruling the government's actions amounted to "classic First Amendment retaliation" in the [[Anthropic-Pentagon dispute]].[^c28] Apple sued OpenAI on July 10, 2026, alleging that a former engineer who joined the company had stolen hardware secrets, prompting a new public exchange between Musk and Altman on X.[^c37] Altman fired back at Musk, mocking his space-based data center plans and taunting that Musk's renewed obsession proved GPT-5.6 Sol was the best AI model.[^c38]
In a July 2026 interview with The Economist, Musk predicted that AI would surpass the combined intelligence of every human within about five years, that humans might lose meaningful control within ten years, and that by 2036 money itself may stop mattering.[^c47]
Musk's net worth, which briefly exceeded $1 trillion after the SpaceX IPO, fell sharply as both Tesla and SpaceX shares declined. Tesla shares dropped 18% in a single week — their worst weekly performance since 2022 — after second-quarter earnings missed estimates, and SpaceX stock fell below its IPO price.[^c44] By July 24, 2026, his net worth stood at $725.1 billion, though he remained the world's wealthiest person by a wide margin.[^c43]