Elon Musk
Elon Musk is a South African-born American entrepreneur who founded [[SpaceX]], led [[Tesla]] as chief executive officer, and co-founded PayPal. He is also the founder of [[Neuralink]] and The Boring Company, acquired Twitter (renamed X) in 2022, and founded [[xAI]] in 2023. On June 12, 2026, SpaceX began trading on Nasdaq in the largest IPO in history, making Musk the world's first trillionaire with Forbes estimating his net worth at $1.1 to $1.14 trillion.[^c17][^c18][^c19] Shares in SpaceX surged nearly 20% on debut, giving the company a market value of over $2.1 trillion.[^c17] Musk's estimated $690 billion SpaceX stake and $279 billion Tesla stake formed the bulk of his fortune.[^c18]
His tenure as the world's first trillionaire was brief: on June 24, 2026, a global tech sell-off drove SpaceX shares down more than 30% from their peak, reducing his net worth to approximately $946–957 billion.[^c29] He remained the world's richest person by a wide margin. In a June 2026 conversation with entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, Musk argued that AI and robots would eventually make money irrelevant by creating an era of extreme abundance, stating that "money will stop being relevant at some point in the future."[^c29]
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.
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] SpaceX's S-1 filing disclosed compensation packages tying nearly 1 billion additional shares to establishing a permanent Mars colony of at least 1 million inhabitants and developing orbital data centers delivering 100 terawatts of compute annually.[^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]
In 2025, Musk served as de facto head of the [[DOGE|Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)]] in Donald Trump's second administration, overseeing the dismissal of 300,000 federal workers before stepping 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. 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] The dismantlement of USAID by DOGE led to a 57 percent reduction in U.S. foreign assistance, with the State Department ending humanitarian aid in seven African countries.[^c26]