Elon Musk

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa. His parents divorced in his childhood, and at school he was often bullied — even beaten badly enough to be hospitalized. The lonely boy buried himself in books and code, teaching himself programming at ten on an old computer, and at twelve selling a game he had written himself to a magazine. This posture — pushed away by the world, so he builds a world of his own — runs through nearly his entire life thereafter.

Using his mother's citizenship he emigrated to North America, studying between Canada and the United States. After earning dual degrees in physics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania, he attended a Stanford doctorate for only two days before dropping out and plunging headlong into the newly emerging internet. From Zip2 to X.com, then merging into PayPal and being acquired by eBay, he completed his primitive accumulation of capital. But he did not stop in his comfort zone; instead he bet nearly his entire fortune on two things that seemed almost insane at the time — driving down the cost of rockets and turning electric cars mainstream.

2008 was the narrow gate of his fate. That year Tesla and SpaceX were both on the brink of bankruptcy, Falcon 1 failed three launches in a row, and he was nearly out of options; yet at year's end came the rocket's first orbital success and a life-saving NASA contract, a rescue from the very edge. Over the following decade and more, Tesla went public and drove global electrification, reusable rockets and Starlink came true one after another, and in 2021 he became the world's richest person, seen by many as a real-life Iron Man.

His empire spread ever wider: the brain-computer interface Neuralink, the tunneling firm Boring, then acquiring Twitter and renaming it X, and founding xAI to launch Grok. At the same time, he became a center of controversy — a privatization tweet drew regulatory penalties, his radical overhaul of the social platform caused an uproar, and he loudly intervened in American politics, at times allied with power and at times breaking with it.

It is hard to box Musk into a single label. He is both an engineering dreamer who sends humans into space and drives the energy transition, and a controversial figure whose words and deeds repeatedly stir turmoil; he has an almost obsessive intensity of work and appetite for risk, and often pays a heavy price. However divided the assessments may be, one thing is clear: again and again he has pushed the nearly impossible to reality's door, and in doing so has profoundly reshaped the landscape of aerospace, automobiles and technology.