The Story of Elon Musk - Early life, SpaceX, Twitter, Tesla, Politics and DOGE

 The Story of Elon Musk - Early life, SpaceX, Twitter, Tesla, Politics and DOGE

Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. He is a South African-born American entrepreneur who co-founded the electronic payment company PayPal and created SpaceX, which makes launch vehicles and spacecraft. He was also one of the first major investors and the CEO of the electric car company Tesla. In addition, Musk bought Twitter, which later became X, in 2022. He led the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in President Donald Trump’s second administration for four months before resigning in May 2025. As of 2025, Musk is the world’s richest person, with a net worth of $393 billion.

Early life

Musk was born to a South African father and a Canadian mother. He showed an early knack for computers and business. At 12, he created a video game and sold it to a computer magazine. In 1988, after getting a Canadian passport, Musk left South Africa. He did not want to support apartheid by serving in the military, and he wanted to find better economic opportunities in the United States.

PayPal and SpaceX

Musk attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. In 1992, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He earned bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics in 1997.. He then enrolled in graduate school for physics at Stanford University in California.. However, he left after just two days because he believed the Internet had much more potential to change society than pursuing physics. In 1995, he founded Zip2, which provided maps and business directories to online newspapers. In 1999,Compaq, a computer manufacturer, bought Zip2 for $307 million. Musk then founded an online financial services company called X.com, which later became PayPal and focused on transferring money online. The eBay acquired PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

Musk long believed that for life to thrive, humanity must become a multi planet species. He was frustrated by the high cost of rocket launches. In 2002, he founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) to create more affordable rockets. The first two rockets were the Falcon 1, which launched in 2006, and the larger Falcon 9, which launched in 2010. Both rockets aimed to be much cheaper than their competitors. A third rocket, the Falcon Heavy, launched in 2018 and could carry 117,000 pounds (53,000 kg) to orbit. This was nearly double the capacity of Boeing's Delta IV Heavy, at one-third the cost. The Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy eventually led the launch vehicle market, and by 2024, more than half of the world's orbital launches were conducted by SpaceX.

 SpaceX has been developing and testing its successor to the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy: the Super Heavy-Starship system. The Super Heavy first stage can lift 100,000 kg (220,000 pounds) to low Earth orbit. Its payload will be the Starship, a spacecraft designed for fast transportation between cities on Earth and for building bases on the Moon and Mars.

 SpaceX also developed the Dragon spacecraft, which transports supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). Dragon can carry up to seven astronauts and had a crewed flight with astronauts Doug Hurley and Robert Behnken to the ISS in 2020. The first test flights of the Super Heavy-Starship system launched in 2020. In addition to being the CEO of SpaceX, Musk was the chief designer for the Falcon rockets, Dragon, and Starship. SpaceX has a contract to build the lander for astronauts returning to the Moon by 2026 as part of NASA's Artemis program.

SpaceX has developed the Starlink satellite network, which provides broadband internet services around the world. Musk launched the project in 2015 to help finance his goal of creating a human colony on Mars. In March 2018, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved SpaceX's plan to launch 4,425 satellites into low Earth orbit. A Falcon 9 rocket carried the first batch of satellites into low Earth orbit in May 2019. Beta testing started in 2020, and commercial services began in 2021. As of 2025, there are about 7,000 operational Starlink satellites, which make up more than half of all active satellites. Starlink is a megaconstellation, or satellite Internet constellation, with over five million subscribers as of 2025. Besides its civilian services, the company runs Starshield, a military-grade version of Starlink, and is building a secure satellite system for the U.S. military.

X Twitter (Musk Platform)

Musk joined the social media platform Twitter in 2009, and, under his handle @elonmusk, became one of the site's most followed accounts, with over 85 million followers as of 2022. Musk had reservations about Tesla being publicly traded, and in August 2018 tweeted a series of messages regarding taking the company private at $420 per share, stating that he had "secured funding." (The price of $420 was interpreted as a humorous allusion to April 20, a day observed by adherents of cannabis.) The following year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Musk for securities fraud on grounds that the tweets were "false and misleading." The SEC's proposed settlement was shortly thereafter turned down by Tesla's board, allegedly because Musk threatened to resign. The news caused Tesla stock to plummet, and a tougher deal was eventually accepted. Their terms were Musk resigning as chairman for three years, although he could remain as CEO; his tweets were to be approved in advance by Tesla lawyers; and Tesla and Musk each paid a $20 million fine.

Musk was assailing Twitter's commitment to free-speech principles, given the company's content-moderation policies. In early April 2022, Twitter reports filed with the SEC revealed that Musk had acquired over 9% of the company. Later, Twitter said Musk would be appointed to its board of directors, but Musk did not do that and instead bid for the company outright, for $54.20 per share, for $44 billion. Twitter's board approved the offer, making him the sole owner of the company. Musk explained his intentions for the company were "to make the product better with new features, open the algorithms to make everyone more trusting, beat the spam bots, and verify all humans." Musk in July 2022 pulled out of the bid, stating Twitter had not yielded enough data on bot accounts and asserting the firm was in "material breach of several provisions" of the sale agreement. Bret Taylor, Twitter's board chair, replied that the company was "committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with him." Twitter sued Musk to compel him to enrolled the company. Twitter shareholders approved the offer of Musk in September 2022. Under threat of court action, Musk ultimately went forward with the deal, and it was finalized in October.
Among Musk's first moves as owner of Twitter were to fire around half the company and to make available for sale for $8 per month the blue check-mark verification, previously granted by Twitter to famous people. He also dissolved Twitter's content-moderation committee and unlocked many accounts suspended by Twitter, most significantly that of then-ex-president Donald Trump, suspended after the U.S. January 6, 2021, capitol attack. Ad revenue dropped precipitously as numerous firms pulled their advertisements off the platform. Musk renamed the company to X in July 2023. (Tweets became posts upon the switch.)

OpenAI and artificial intelligence

Musk has repeatedly warned of fears that unregulated progress in artificial intelligence (AI) may present the "biggest existential threat" to human existence. Research laboratory OpenAI, established as a nonprofit venture by Musk, Sam Altman, and other investors in 2015, was characterized as a socially responsible endeavor dedicated to open source code and safety. It also aimed to serve as a contrast to Google's initial head start in AI research. But Musk left OpenAI three years later because of an claimed conflict of interest between software being worked on at Tesla. OpenAI officials later stated that Musk had attempted to lead a new for-profit subsidiary of the firm or merge it with Tesla. Musk sued OpenAI and lead investor Microsoft in 2024 for diverting from the venture's nonprofit roots. Musk and a group of investors approached OpenAI with an offer to buy it out in February 2025 for $97.4 billion; the firm rejected the offer.

Nine months after acquiring Twitter in October 2022, Musk founded a new AI company called xAI, which trains its machine-learning models on user data from Twitter (now known as X) and publicly available sources. Its primary offering is an AI-powered assistant named Grok, a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

The Boring Company

Frustrated with delay-ridden Los Angeles traffic, Musk in late 2016 suggested creating a new infrastructure and tunneling firm to construct a low-cost, underground transit system across the city. Musk's initial concept was to send cars down from the street into underground tunnels, where they would ride on autonomous electric sleds, termed skates, at 125 to 150 mph (200 to 240 km/h). The new venture, which is named The Boring Company, was originally a subsidiary of SpaceX and was spun off into its own company in 2018. In that same year the company excavated a 1.14-mile (1.8 km) test tunnel just outside of SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The company stated that the tunnel cost less than $10 million—a mere fraction of the per-mile expense of other U.S. tunnel projects, which can be reach into the billions.

The Boring Company invested roughly $47 million to construct a twin tunnel system under the Las Vegas Convention Center. The combined 1.7 miles (2.7 km) transportation system, Loop, took to the public streets in 2021, ferrying travelers from point to point on the 200-acre campus in less than two minutes. Musk's original idea—cars zipping along autonomous, high-speed electric skates—was replaced by a battery of driverless Tesla vehicles that transport passengers in the tunnels at speeds of up to 40 mph (64 km/h), considerably lower than the originally envisioned 125 to 150 mph (200 to 240 km/h). The company subsequently detailed plans to open a network of tunnels in Las Vegas. It also indicated tunnel projects in other metropolitan areas, such as Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., which were subsequently abandoned or put on indefinite hold.

The Boring Company also governs development of the Hyperloop, a public transit system that Musk has advocated for years. In 2013, frustrated with the estimated $68 billion price tag for California's bullet train project, he put forward an alternative: a quicker one, the Hyperloop, a pneumatic tube through which a capsule containing 28 passengers would be shot the 350 miles (560 km) between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 35 minutes at a speed of 760 mph (1,220 km/h)—close to the speed of sound. Musk stated the Hyperloop might be constructed for as little as $6 billion and, with two-minute intervals between departures, could transport the six million travelers who make that journey each year. But he said he couldn't personally work on the concept while operating SpaceX and Tesla.

Neuralink

Musk got interested in creating technology to enable humans to operate computers using their brains in 2016. He started Neuralink with a group of eight neuroscientists, engineers, and biomedical researchers to create neural lace technology (partly inspired by Ian M. Banks's science fiction), a brain-computer interface that can be implanted in the human brain through surgery and provide for wireless communication with computers and mobile devices controlled solely by thought. Drawing on decades of prior research, the company's original intention was to develop a medical device for alleviating neurological ailments like epilepsy and paralysis. Musk's avowed long-term intention is to develop a brain chip that would safeguard people against potentially harmful uses of artificial intelligence.

After animal testing, Neuralink initiated human clinical trials in 2023 and by early 2024 had inserted a brain chip named Telepathy into a 29-year-old quadriplegic. The recipient was able to move a cursor on the screen of a computer, surf the internet, and play chess by thinking. Towards the end of 2024, the company successfully inserted a better version of the chip in another patient, who had a spinal injury. Musk had informed that the company's next offering, Blindsight, would restore vision in case of partial or total blindness in patients. Politics and DOG

Politics and DOGE

Trump vowed on the campaign trail that Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy would head a commission, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, a nod to the memecoin cryptocurrency Dogecoin), tasked with streamlining the government. Musk promised that in doing so, he would "balance the budget immediately" by eliminating $2 trillion of government spending, which would "entail some temporary hardship."

Musk tweeted on X, that he and Trump would close the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which treats foreign aid. Shortly after USAID's website was disabled, most of USAID's 10,000 staff were put on administrative leave, and programs around the world were dangling. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) declared that it would eliminate $4 billion of "indirect costs," which establish hospitals and universities of NIH grant recipients. In the Department of Education's research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, are had its contracts terminated in large numbers.

Musk had identified himself as a moderate Democrat, but his positions shifted considerably to the right since his acquisition of X. He openly supported Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump following an assassination attempt on Trump in July 2024. Among his America Political Action Committee (PAC), he mutated the nation's largest political donor, donating $288 million to Trump and other Republican politicians.

Musk addressed Trump campaign rallies and through America PAC organized a sweepstakes where he would donate $1 million per day up to election day to one registered voter in a major swing state. The move preceded to lawsuits that claimed it was equivalent to paying individuals to vote, which is prohibited.

Ramaswamy departed DOGE shortly after Trump's inauguration on January 20, 2025. Trump, on the same day, signed an executive order that established DOGE within the United States Digital Service, renamed the United States DOGE Service. The order further directed that every federal agency have at least four DOGE staff. Musk was made a special government employee, a status for an individual who works for the government temporarily. Most individuals associated with DOGE are present or past employees of Musk's companies.

DOGE sprang into action. On January 20 in the afternoon, a DOGE group occupied the director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), an agency responsible for administering the federal civil service, office and accessed major OPM databases. Over two million government workers received an offer of deferral resignation by e-mail.

DOGE's actions resulted in a whirlwind of suits. DOGE's critics asserted that it had spawned a constitutional crisis, in which the executive was infringing on the separation of powers by not spending the funds Congress had authorized for agencies like USAID and NIH. But Republicans, who dominated Congress at the time, said there was nothing out of the ordinary in a new administration taking a hard look at government expenditures.

Musk stepped down from DOGE on May 28, 2025, a day after he stated during an interview that he was "disappointed" with Trump's "one big beautiful bill" plan for potentially raising the budget deficit and sabotaging the cost-cutting the DOGE has achieved. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the spending bill would add $2.4 trillion to the federal budget deficit. During the next week, Musk and Trump exchanged insults on the public stage about the bill. Trump threatened to cancel government contracts with Musk, temporarily shaving over $150 billion from Tesla's market value in early June.