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Elon Reeve Musk (born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO , and chief engineer of SpaceX ; angel investor, CEO, and product architect of Tesla, Inc. ; founder of the Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI ; president of the Musk Foundation ; and owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc. As of November 11, 2022, Musk had a net worth of about $174 billion. He is the wealthiest person in the world according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes 's real-time billionaires list.

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Philanthropy, existential threats, media appearances, awards and honors, elon musk quotes, interesting facts about elon musk.

Musk was born and grew up in Pretoria , South Africa . Musk has British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. His mother is Maye Musk ( née  Haldeman), a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan , Canada , and raised in South Africa. His father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot , sailor , consultant , and property developer, who was a half-owner of a Zambian emerald mine near Lake Tanganyika . Musk has a younger brother, Kimbal , and a younger sister, Tosca . After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk chose to live primarily with his father. Musk later regretted his decision and became estranged from his father.

Musk had been described as an awkward and introverted child. He was an enthusiastic reader of books, later attributing his success in part to having read Benjamin Franklin: An American Life , The Lord of the Rings , the Foundation series , and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy .When he was ten, he became interested in computers and video games. He taught himself how to program Commodore VIC-20 user manual and created a game. When he was twelve, he sold his BASIC -based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500.

Musk graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. When he was 17, he became a Canadian citizen and moved to Canada. Two years later, in 1990, he attended Queen's University, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania , where he received bachelor's degrees in economics and physics .

Business career

In 1995, Musk moved to California to attend Stanford University but decided to instead pursue a business career. He partnered with his brother Kimbal and Greg Kouri to begin Zip2. Errol Musk provided them with $28,000 to start the company, which developed an Internet city guide with maps, directions, and yellow pages . Compaq purchased Zip2 for $307 million in cash in February 1999, and Musk received $22 million for his 7 % share.

In 1999, Musk co-founded the online bank X.com, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal . eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

In early 2001, Musk became involved with the nonprofit Mars Society. He wanted to help pay for placing a growth-chamber for plants on Mars . Because of his inexperience, companies did not want to pattern with him, so he began his own company, SpaceX , in 2002. Musk wants to make rockets that are reusable so they can make many trips to space. The first rocket, Falcon 1, failed to reach earth's orbit three times, but it succeeded in 2006. Another rocket, the Falcon 9 , has been launched over 100 times. In 2008, SpaceX signed a contract with NASA to fly 12 flights of its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station to resupply it. Since 2019, SpaceX has been developing Starship , a fully-reusable, super-heavy-lift launch vehicle. In 2020, SpaceX launched its first crewed flight, the Demo-2 . It became the first private company to place astronauts into orbit and dock a spacecraft with its crew at the International Space System. SpaceX has also developed a group of satellites called Starlink . They provide satellite Internet access to customers on earth. SpaceX also designs and launches custom military satellites for the Space Development Agency as part of a new missile defense system in low Earth orbit.

In 2004, Musk invested in the electric vehicle company Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc. ). He became its chairman and was active in creating several vehicles for the company. In 2008, he became Tesla's CEO. In 2022, Musk unveiled a robot developed by Tesla, Optimus.

In 2006, he helped create SolarCity, a solar energy company that was later purchased by Tesla and became Tesla Energy. By 2013, SolarCity was the second largest provider of solar power systems in the United States.

In 2013, Musk announced plans for a version of a vactrain—a vacuum tube train. The purpose of the train was to travel quickly between major cities. He called it the hyperloop . In 2015, he began a design competition for students and others to build Hyperloop pods that would run on a mile-long track owned by SpaceX.

In 2016, Musk co-founded Neuralink , a neurotechnology startup company. Neuralink believes it is able to merge the human brain with artificial intelligence (AI) by creating devices that are implanted in the brain to help it merge with the machines. This kind of technology could improve memory or allow the devices to communicate with software. The company also hopes to create devices with which to treat neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's disease , dementia , and spinal cord injuries.

In 2017, Musk founded the Boring Company to construct tunnels. He revealed plans for specialized, underground, high-occupancy vehicles that could travel up to 150 miles per hour. His goal is to reduce above-ground traffic in large cities. Two tunnel projects announced in 2018, in Chicago and West Los Angeles , have been canceled. However, a tunnel under the Las Vegas Convention Center was completed in early 2021. Local officials have approved further expansions of the tunnel system. In 2021, tunnel construction was approved for Fort Lauderdale , Florida.

Elon Musk Twitter @elonmusk I made an offer April 14, 2022

Since joining Twitter in 2009, Musk has been an active user and has over 100 million followers as of June 2022 [update] . Musk expressed interest in buying Twitter as early as 2017. In January 2022, Musk started purchasing Twitter shares. He quickly became the company's largest shareholder. On April 13, Musk made a $43 billion offer to buy Twitter. On October 27, 2022, the deal was final, and Musk became the owner of Twitter. He immediately fired many of the company's top executives .

Musk is often described as a micromanager and has called himself a "nano-manager." He expects his employees to work hard. Musk's leadership has been praised by some, who credit it with the success of Tesla and his other businesses. It has been criticized by others who see him as insensitive and too harsh.

Musk is the president of the Musk Foundation. The foundation has many goals.

• It helps provide solar-power energy systems in areas that have been hit by disasters.
• It supports research and development for human space exploration, pediatrics , renewable energy , and safe artificial intelligence .
• It supports education in science and engineering.

In 2015, Musk founded OpenAI , a not-for-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research company, whose goal is to make artificial general intelligence that is meant to be safe and helpful to humanity. He left OpenAI in 2018 so that someone else could run it and still use Tesla products and ideas.

In July 2018, Musk arranged for his employees to build a mini-submarine to help rescue the children trapped in a flooded cavern in Thailand. Engineers worked hard on this project. However, by the time it was ready to use, eight of the 12 children had already been rescued using full face masks, oxygen, and anesthesia . Rescuers helped the other children in this way, too, so the submarine was never used.

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. In January 2021, Musk became the richest person in the world. He says he is gathering resources for humanity's outward expansion to space .

Personal views

Musk has stated that AI could be a great existential threat to humanity. In order to prevent AI taking over humanity, as is seen in several movies, he believes the government should be careful to limit how AI is used.

After AI, Musk sees climate change as the greatest threat to humanity. He believes there should be a carbon tax so people are more careful about preventing global warming.

Musk said fewer people being born each year is one of the biggest risks to human civilization. He believes that humans have the ability to live on Mars , and we will need many from earth to move there.

Musk has called himself "politically moderate" and was a registered independent voter when he lived in California. Musk voted for the Democratic party candidate for President in the 2016 and 2020 elections. However, he has since stated that he could "no longer support" the Democrats because they are the "party of division & hate." He encouraged "independent-minded voters" to vote Republican in the 2022 U.S. elections.

Musk criticized COVID-19 lockdowns, but closed the Tesla Fremont Factory because of the shelter-in-place order. In May 2020, he reopened the Tesla factory, even though the shelter-in-place order was still in effect.

Musk bought and donated BiPAP and CPAP machines, which are non-invasive ventilators. These machines helped many people who had to be treated for COVID-19.

In September 2020, Musk stated that he would not get the COVID-19 vaccine ; however, he did receive the vaccine because he had to travel to visit Tesla Giga Berlin and felt that he was given no choice. He said on Twitter, "I had major side effects from my second booster shot. And my cousin, who is young & in peak health, had a serious case of myocarditis ."

Musk has stated that he does not believe the U.S. government should provide subsidies to companies; instead they should impose a carbon tax to discourage poor behavior. He says that the free market would achieve the best solution.

Musk has promoted cryptocurrencies and supports them over traditional government-issued fiat currencies . However, when Musk was shown that cryptocurrency mining took more energy than it was worth from the environment, he announced on Twitter that Tesla would not use Bitcoin until the energy consumption issues are solved.

Musk has been known to criticize public transportation and encourage the use of private vehicles. Urban planners have pointed out that public transportation in dense urban areas is more economical, more energy efficient, and requires much less space than private cars.

Personal life

From the early 2000s until late 2020, Musk resided in California, where both Tesla and SpaceX were founded. In 2020, he moved to Texas, stating that California had become "complacent" about its economic success. While hosting Saturday Night Live in May 2021, Musk stated that he has Asperger syndrome .

Musk has 10 surviving children. He met his first wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson, while attending Queen's University in Ontario, Canada; they married in 2000. In 2002, their first child died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of 10 weeks. After his death, the couple had twins in 2004 followed by triplets in 2006. The couple divorced in 2008 and shared custody. In 2022, the eldest twin officially changed her name to reflect her gender identity as a trans woman and to use Wilson as her last name because she no longer wished to be associated with Musk. Musk blamed the estrangement of his daughter on what the Financial Times characterized as "the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists."

In 2008, Musk began dating English actress Talulah Riley . They married two years later at Dornoch Cathedral in Scotland. In 2012, the couple divorced, before remarrying the following year. After briefly filing for divorce in 2014, Musk finalized a second divorce from Riley in 2016. Musk then dated Amber Heard for several months in 2017; he had reportedly been pursuing her since 2012.

In 2018, Musk and Canadian musician Grimes said that they were dating. Grimes gave birth to their son in May 2020. According to Musk and Grimes, his name was "X Æ A-12" ; however, the name would have violated California regulations as it contained characters that are not in the modern English alphabet, and was then changed to "X Æ A-Xii" . This drew more confusion, as Æ is not a letter in the modern English alphabet. The child was eventually named X AE A-XII Musk, with "X" as a first name, "AE A-XII" as a middle name , and "Musk" as surname.

In December 2021, Grimes and Musk had a second child, a daughter named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk (nicknamed "Y"), born via surrogacy . Despite the pregnancy, Musk confirmed reports that the couple were "semi-separated" in September 2021; in an interview with Time in December 2021, he said he was single. In March 2022, Grimes said of her relationship with Musk: "I would probably refer to him as my boyfriend, but we're very fluid." Later that month, Grimes tweeted that she and Musk had broken up again. In September 2023 it was reported that the pair had a third child, a son named Techno Mechanicus "Tau" Musk. In October 2023, Grimes sued Musk over parental rights and custody of their eldest son.

In July 2022, Insider published court documents revealing that Musk had had twins with Shivon Zilis, director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, in November 2021. They were born weeks before Musk and Grimes had their second child via surrogate in December. The news "raise[d] questions about workplace ethics", given that Zilis directly reported to Musk.

Musk was one of the three men who were an inspiration for the character of Tony Stark in the Marvel film Iron Man . The other two men were Steve Jobs and Donald Trump . He has made guest and cameo appearances in several movies, TV shows, and documentaries.

• Received an honorary doctorate in engineering and technology from Yale University (2015)
• Awarded an IEEE Honorary Membership (2015)
• Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) (2018)
• Won the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics George Low Transportation Award (2008)
• Won the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale Gold Space Medal (2010)
• Won the Royal Aeronautical Society Gold Medal (2012)
• Listed among Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People (2010, 2013, 2018, and 2021)
• Selected as Time ' s " Person of the Year " (2021)
• Elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2022)
• "I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary."
• "I'm nauseatingly pro-American. I would have come here from any country. The U.S. is where great things are possible."
• "If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic."
• "Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."
• When Musk was 12 years old, he created the video game Blastar. He ended up selling it to a computer magazine in 1984 for $500.
• Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla in 2003. Musk and his money joined a year later.
• He almost sold Tesla to Google for $6 billion in 2013.
• His first cameo was in the 2010 movie Iron Man 2 and he played himself on TV’s The Big Bang Theory .
• Musk was able to start SpaceX with the $100 million he earned when eBay bought PayPal .
• He has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome , a milder form of autism .
• Musk’s wealth is based on stocks and his ownership of companies. He takes no salary .
• Musk’s son Xavier has a special inspiration for his name: Comic book character Professor Xavier of Marvel ’s X-Men .
• Musk purchased James Bond ’s classic submarine car at a London auction in 2013 for close to $1 million.
• Maye Musk , Elon's mother, is currently a model .
• This page was last modified on 28 February 2024, at 12:12. Suggest an edit .

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Elon Musk – Space Visionary

Do you know who Elon Musk is, what he does and how he is involved in Space Exploration

This page is dedicated to the great man who is Elon Musk

Elon Musk is truly a great space visionary, and one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time. Elon is a billionaire, however money is far from his motivation. Elon uses money from his business ventures for good, and more importantly for space exploration. Elon Musk is on a mission of great space exploration by creating spacecraft and technology that is funding and will fund space travel for today and for the future.

Before we get into Elon’s already quite remarkable achievements, let’s take a look at Elon’s early life and previous achievements that has gotten him to where he is now.

Elon was born Pretoria, South Africa on June 28th, 1971. He is the son of Errol and Maye Musk. Elon has one brother and one sister, and a half brother and half sister.

At a very early age, Elon was very interested in computers and computer programming, and at this early age even wrote code for gamming. Unfortunately for Elon, not everyone liked his talents, which led him to be bullied at school. This made Elon even more determined in being a good person and to do good for humanity.

Naturally Elon excelled in school and university, and before long moved from his birth home in South Africa to Canada where his mother was living.

From Canada, Elon moved to the United Sates and attend one of the most prestigious university in the world, Stanford in California. Elon always wanted to moved to the US, to live and work, and create opportunities.

Career & Achievements before SpaceX

Elon has been involved and has started up a number of organizations to build up his fortune before his endeavors into space travel with his company  SpaceX   

Elon was involved and ran companies like Zip2, x.com and PayPal. But one of Elon’s true callings was to start a company called SpaceX.

SpaceX mission is to ‘boldly go where one has gone’ ….. Em no, that is Star Trek , just joking. Elon’s and SpaceX mission ultimately is to get to Mars    

SpaceX is a fantastic company and is doing great work in making this amazing dream of regular Mars missions a reality one day. SpaceX also works with NASA and other space organizations, providing them with rockets and technology to use for missions. SpaceX also conducts certain space missions to the International Space Station

SpaceX is an amazing organization and is right now leading the new space race to Mars, and could well be the organization to get there. With Elon Musk leading the way, I would not be surprised is SpaceX make it there first.

Other ventures Elon Musk is involved in outside of SpaceX

Outside of SpaceX, Elon is the founder and CEO (chief executive officer) of a number of companies. These companies are also doing great work, not on Mars, but on Earth.   Below is a list of companies Elon is involved in:

Tesla – An electric automobile company.

SolarCity – A solar power company.

Gigafactory – A solar panel company.

Hyperloop – A high speed transportation company.

OpenAI – An Artificial Intelligence company.

Neuralink – A Neurotechnology company.

The Boring Company – A tunnel boring company.

Elon always states that he is an engineer at heart, and that is definitely true judging by all of these companies that is involved in, however he is also a business man, a visionary and a great man. Elon will be remembered as a pioneer of space exploration. 

Kids Fun Facts Corner

# 1. Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002.

# 2. Elon Musk has no formal training in rocketry.

# 3. Elon Musk is in direct space exploration competition with Jeff Bezos.

# 4. Elon Musk is a multi billionaire.

# 5. Elon Musk’s SpaceX estimate that seats on future missions to Mars will cost in the region of $500,000.

# 6. Elon Musk has a foundation dedicated to space exploration called the Musk Foundation.

# 7. Elon Musk is a South African, Canadian & US citizen.  

# 8. Elon Musk is a visionary in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

# 9. Elon Musk built model rockets as a kid.

# 10. Elon Musk has pledged to give away most of his fortune to good causes.

Q&A Corner

Q. In what year was Elon Musk born?

Q. In what year was SpaceX founded by Elon Musk?

Q. What types of citizenships does Elon Musk hold? 

Q. How much will a seat cost on future SpaceX missions to Mars?

Q. Who is in direct competition in the space race with Elon Musk? 

Q. Outside of SpaceX, name two other companies that Elon Musk is involved in?

Q. What is the name of Elon Musk’s foundation?

Q. How would Elon Musk describe his job? (hint what is at heart)

Q. What did Elon Musk build as a kid?

Q. What has Elon Musk pledged to do with this fortune?

Q. What will Elon Musk be remembered as?

Download questions about Elon Musk here: Elon Musk   (answer are on this page)

For further reading and more information on Elon Musk  visit https://wiki.kidzsearch.com/wiki/Elon_Musk

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South African entrepreneur Elon Musk is known for founding Tesla Motors and SpaceX, which launched a landmark commercial spacecraft in 2012.

Who Is Elon Musk?

Elon Musk is a South African-born American entrepreneur and businessman who founded X.com in 1999 (which later became PayPal), SpaceX in 2002 and Tesla Motors in 2003. Musk became a multimillionaire in his late 20s when he sold his start-up company, Zip2, to a division of Compaq Computers.

In January 2021, Musk reportedly surpassed Jeff Bezos as the wealthiest man in the world.

Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. As a child, Musk was so lost in his daydreams about inventions that his parents and doctors ordered a test to check his hearing.

At about the time of his parents’ divorce, when he was 10, Musk developed an interest in computers. He taught himself how to program, and when he was 12 he sold his first software: a game he created called Blastar.

In grade school, Musk was short, introverted and bookish. He was bullied until he was 15 and went through a growth spurt and learned how to defend himself with karate and wrestling.

Musk’s mother, Maye Musk , is a Canadian model and the oldest woman to star in a Covergirl campaign. When Musk was growing up, she worked five jobs at one point to support her family.

Musk’s father, Errol Musk, is a wealthy South African engineer.

Musk spent his early childhood with his brother Kimbal and sister Tosca in South Africa. His parents divorced when he was 10.

At age 17, in 1989, Musk moved to Canada to attend Queen’s University and avoid mandatory service in the South African military. Musk obtained his Canadian citizenship that year, in part because he felt it would be easier to obtain American citizenship via that path.

In 1992, Musk left Canada to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated with an undergraduate degree in economics and stayed for a second bachelor’s degree in physics.

After leaving Penn, Musk headed to Stanford University in California to pursue a PhD in energy physics. However, his move was timed perfectly with the Internet boom, and he dropped out of Stanford after just two days to become a part of it, launching his first company, Zip2 Corporation in 1995. Musk became a U.S. citizen in 2002.

Zip2 Corporation

Musk launched his first company, Zip2 Corporation, in 1995 with his brother, Kimbal Musk. An online city guide, Zip2 was soon providing content for the new websites of both The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune . In 1999, a division of Compaq Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options.

In 1999, Elon and Kimbal Musk used the money from their sale of Zip2 to found X.com, an online financial services/payments company. An X.com acquisition the following year led to the creation of PayPal as it is known today.

In October 2002, Musk earned his first billion when PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock. Before the sale, Musk owned 11 percent of PayPal stock.

Musk founded his third company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, in 2002 with the intention of building spacecraft for commercial space travel. By 2008, SpaceX was well established, and NASA awarded the company the contract to handle cargo transport for the International Space Station—with plans for astronaut transport in the future—in a move to replace NASA’s own space shuttle missions.

Falcon 9 Rockets

On May 22, 2012, Musk and SpaceX made history when the company launched its Falcon 9 rocket into space with an unmanned capsule. The vehicle was sent to the International Space Station with 1,000 pounds of supplies for the astronauts stationed there, marking the first time a private company had sent a spacecraft to the International Space Station. Of the launch, Musk was quoted as saying, "I feel very lucky. ... For us, it's like winning the Super Bowl."

In December 2013, a Falcon 9 successfully carried a satellite to geosynchronous transfer orbit, a distance at which the satellite would lock into an orbital path that matched the Earth's rotation. In February 2015, SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 fitted with the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite, aiming to observe the extreme emissions from the sun that affect power grids and communications systems on Earth.

In March 2017, SpaceX saw the successful test flight and landing of a Falcon 9 rocket made from reusable parts, a development that opened the door for more affordable space travel.

A setback came in November 2017, when an explosion occurred during a test of the company's new Block 5 Merlin engine. SpaceX reported that no one was hurt, and that the issue would not hamper its planned rollout of a future generation of Falcon 9 rockets.

The company enjoyed another milestone moment in February 2018 with the successful test launch of the powerful Falcon Heavy rocket. Armed with additional Falcon 9 boosters, the Falcon Heavy was designed to carry immense payloads into orbit and potentially serve as a vessel for deep space missions. For the test launch, the Falcon Heavy was given a payload of Musk's cherry-red Tesla Roadster, equipped with cameras to "provide some epic views" for the vehicle's planned orbit around the sun.

In July 2018, Space X enjoyed the successful landing of a new Block 5 Falcon rocket, which touched down on a drone ship less than 9 minutes after liftoff.

BFR Mission to Mars

In September 2017, Musk presented an updated design plan for his BFR (an acronym for either "Big F---ing Rocket" or "Big Falcon Rocket"), a 31-engine behemoth topped by a spaceship capable of carrying at least 100 people. He revealed that SpaceX was aiming to launch the first cargo missions to Mars with the vehicle in 2022, as part of his overarching goal of colonizing the Red Planet.

In March 2018, the entrepreneur told an audience at the annual South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, that he hoped to have the BFR ready for short flights early the following year, while delivering a knowing nod at his previous problems with meeting deadlines.

The following month, it was announced that SpaceX would construct a facility at the Port of Los Angeles to build and house the BFR. The port property presented an ideal location for SpaceX, as its mammoth rocket will only be movable by barge or ship when completed.

Starlink Internet Satellites

In late March 2018, SpaceX received permission from the U.S. government to launch a fleet of satellites into low orbit for the purpose of providing Internet service. The satellite network, named Starlink, would ideally make broadband service more accessible in rural areas, while also boosting competition in heavily populated markets that are typically dominated by one or two providers.

SpaceX launched the first batch of 60 satellites in May 2019, and followed with another payload of 60 satellites that November. While this represented significant progress for the Starlink venture, the appearance of these bright orbiters in the night sky, with the potential of thousands more to come, worried astronomers who felt that a proliferation of satellites would increase the difficulty of studying distant objects in space.

Tesla Motors

Musk is the co-founder, CEO and product architect at Tesla Motors, a company formed in 2003 that is dedicated to producing affordable, mass-market electric cars as well as battery products and solar roofs. Musk oversees all product development, engineering and design of the company's products.

Five years after its formation, in March 2008, Tesla unveiled the Roadster, a sports car capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds, as well as traveling nearly 250 miles between charges of its lithium ion battery.

With a stake in the company taken by Daimler and a strategic partnership with Toyota, Tesla Motors launched its initial public offering in June 2010, raising $226 million.

In August 2008, Tesla announced plans for its Model S, the company's first electric sedan that was reportedly meant to take on the BMW 5 series. In 2012, the Model S finally entered production at a starting price of $58,570. Capable of covering 265 miles between charges, it was honored as the 2013 Car of the Year by Motor Trend magazine .

In April 2017, Tesla announced that it surpassed General Motors to become the most valuable U.S. car maker. The news was an obvious boon to Tesla, which was looking to ramp up production and release its Model 3 sedan later that year.

In September 2019, using what Musk described as a "Plaid powertrain," a Model S set a speed record for four-door sedan at Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey County, California.

The Model 3 was officially launched in early 2019 following extensive production delays. The car was initially priced at $35,000, a much more accessible price point than the $69,500 and up for its Model S and X electric sedans.

After initially aiming to produce 5,000 new Model 3 cars per week by December 2017, Musk pushed that goal back to March 2018, and then to June with the start of the new year. The announced delay didn't surprise industry experts, who were well aware of the company's production problems, though some questioned how long investors would remain patient with the process. It also didn't prevent Musk from garnering a radical new compensation package as CEO, in which he would be paid after reaching milestones of growing valuation based on $50 billion increments.

By April 2018, with Tesla expected to fall short of first-quarter production forecasts, news surfaced that Musk had pushed aside the head of engineering to personally oversee efforts in that division. In a Twitter exchange with a reporter, Musk said it was important to "divide and conquer" to meet production goals and was "back to sleeping at factory."

After signaling that the company would reorganize its management structure, Musk in June announced that Tesla was laying off 9 percent of its workforce, though its production department would remain intact. In an email to employees, Musk explained his decision to eliminate some "duplication of roles" to cut costs, admitting it was time to take serious steps toward turning a profit.

The restructuring appeared to pay dividends, as it was announced that Tesla had met its goal of producing 5,000 Model 3 cars per week by the end of June 2018, while churning out another 2,000 Model S sedans and Model X SUVs. "We did it!" Musk wrote in a celebratory email to the company. "What an incredible job by an amazing team."

The following February, Musk announced that the company was finally rolling out its standard Model 3. Musk also said that Tesla was shifting to all-online sales, and offering customers the chance to return their cars within seven days or 1,000 miles for a full refund.

In November 2017, Musk made another splash with the unveiling of the new Tesla Semi and Roadster at the company's design studio. The semi-truck, which was expected to enter into production in 2019 before being delayed, boasts 500 miles of range as well as a battery and motors built to last 1 million miles.

Model Y and Roadster

In March 2019, Musk unveiled Tesla’s long-awaited Model Y. The compact crossover, which began arriving for customers in March 2020, has a driving range of 300 miles and a 0 to 60 mph time of 3.5 seconds.

The Roadster, also set to be released in 2020, will become the fastest production car ever made, with a 0 to 60 time of 1.9 seconds.

In August 2016, in Musk’s continuing effort to promote and advance sustainable energy and products for a wider consumer base, a $2.6 billion dollar deal was solidified to combine his electric car and solar energy companies. His Tesla Motors Inc. announced an all-stock deal purchase of SolarCity Corp., a company Musk had helped his cousins start in 2006. He is a majority shareholder in each entity.

“Solar and storage are at their best when they're combined. As one company, Tesla (storage) and SolarCity (solar) can create fully integrated residential, commercial and grid-scale products that improve the way that energy is generated, stored and consumed,” read a statement on Tesla’s website about the deal.

The Boring Company

In January 2017, Musk launched The Boring Company, a company devoted to boring and building tunnels in order to reduce street traffic. He began with a test dig on the SpaceX property in Los Angeles.

In late October of that year, Musk posted the first photo of his company's progress to his Instagram page. He said the 500-foot tunnel, which would generally run parallel to Interstate 405, would reach a length of two miles in approximately four months.

In May 2019 the company, now known as TBC, landed a $48.7 million contract from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to build an underground Loop system to shuttle people around the Las Vegas Convention Center.

In October 2022, Musk officially bought Twitter and became the social media company's CEO after months of back and forth.

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Musk’s Tweet and SEC Investigation

On August 7, 2018, Musk dropped a bombshell via a tweet: "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." The announcement opened the door for legal action against the company and its founder, as the SEC began inquiring about whether Musk had indeed secured the funding as claimed. Several investors filed lawsuits on the grounds that Musk was looking to manipulate stock prices and ambush short sellers with his tweet.

Musk’s tweet initially sent Tesla stock spiking, before it closed the day up 11 percent. The CEO followed up with a letter on the company blog, calling the move to go private "the best path forward." He promised to retain his stake in the company, and added that he would create a special fund to help all current investors remain on board.

Six days later, Musk sought to clarify his position with a statement in which he pointed to discussions with the managing director of the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund as the source of his "funding secured" declaration. He later tweeted that he was working on a proposal to take Tesla private with Goldman Sachs and Silver Lake as financial advisers.

The saga took a bizarre turn that day when rapper Azealia Banks wrote on Instagram that, as a guest at Musk's home at the time, she learned that he was under the influence of LSD when he fired off his headline-grabbing tweet. Banks said she overheard Musk making phone calls to drum up the funding he promised was already in place.

The news quickly turned serious again when it was reported that Tesla's outside directors had retained two law firms to deal with the SEC inquiry and the CEO's plans to take the company private.

On August 24, one day after meeting with the board, Musk announced that he had reversed course and would not be taking the company private. Among his reasons, he cited the preference of most directors to keep Tesla public, as well as the difficulty of retaining some of the large shareholders who were prohibited from investing in a private company. Others suggested that Musk was also influenced by the poor optics of an electric car company being funded by Saudi Arabia, a country heavily involved in the oil industry.

On September 29, 2018, it was announced that Musk would pay a $20 million fine and step down as chairman of Tesla's board for three years as part of an agreement with the SEC.

Inventions and Innovations

In August 2013, Musk released a concept for a new form of transportation called the "Hyperloop," an invention that would foster commuting between major cities while severely cutting travel time. Ideally resistant to weather and powered by renewable energy, the Hyperloop would propel riders in pods through a network of low-pressure tubes at speeds reaching more than 700 mph. Musk noted that the Hyperloop could take from seven to 10 years to be built and ready for use.

Although he introduced the Hyperloop with claims that it would be safer than a plane or train, with an estimated cost of $6 billion — approximately one-tenth of the cost for the rail system planned by the state of California — Musk's concept has drawn skepticism. Nevertheless, the entrepreneur has sought to encourage the development of this idea.

After he announced a competition for teams to submit their designs for a Hyperloop pod prototype, the first Hyperloop Pod Competition was held at the SpaceX facility in January 2017. A speed record of 284 mph was set by a German student engineering team at competition No. 3 in 2018, with the same team pushing the record to 287 mph the next year.

AI and Neuralink

Musk has pursued an interest in artificial intelligence, becoming co-chair of the nonprofit OpenAI. The research company launched in late 2015 with the stated mission of advancing digital intelligence to benefit humanity.

In 2017, it was also reported that Musk was backing a venture called Neuralink, which intends to create devices to be implanted in the human brain and help people merge with software. He expanded on the company's progress during a July 2019 discussion, revealing that its devices will consist of a microscopic chip that connects via Bluetooth to a smartphone.

High-Speed Train

In late November 2017, after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked for proposals to build and operate a high-speed rail line that would transport passengers from O'Hare Airport to downtown Chicago in 20 minutes or less, Musk tweeted that he was all-in on the competition with The Boring Company. He said that the concept of the Chicago loop would be different from his Hyperloop, its relatively short route not requiring the need for drawing a vacuum to eliminate air friction.

In summer 2018 Musk announced he would cover the estimated $1 billion needed to dig the 17-mile tunnel from the airport to downtown Chicago. However, in late 2019 he tweeted that TBC would focus on completing the commercial tunnel in Las Vegas before turning to other projects, suggesting that plans for Chicago would remain in limbo for the immediate future.

Flamethrower

Musk also reportedly found a market for The Boring Company's flamethrowers. After announcing they were going on sale for $500 apiece in late January 2018, he claimed to have sold 10,000 of them within a day.

Relationship with Donald Trump

In December 2016, Musk was named to President Trump’s Strategy and Policy Forum; the following January, he joined Trump's Manufacturing Jobs Initiative. Following Trump’s election, Musk found himself on common ground with the new president and his advisers as the president announced plans to pursue massive infrastructure developments.

While sometimes at odds with the president's controversial measures, such as a proposed ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, Musk defended his involvement with the new administration. "My goals," he tweeted in early 2017, "are to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy and to help make humanity a multi-planet civilization, a consequence of which will be the creating of hundreds of thousands of jobs and a more inspiring future for all."

On June 1, following Trump's announcement that he was withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, Musk stepped down from his advisory roles.

Personal Life

Wives and children.

Musk has been married twice. He wed Justine Wilson in 2000, and the couple had six children together. In 2002, their first son died at 10 weeks old from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Musk and Wilson had five additional sons together: twins Griffin and Xavier (born in 2004) and triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian (born in 2006).

After a contentious divorce from Wilson, Musk met actress Talulah Riley. The couple married in 2010. They split in 2012 but married each other again in 2013. Their relationship ultimately ended in divorce in 2016.

Girlfriends

Musk reportedly began dating actress Amber Heard in 2016 after finalizing his divorce with Riley and Heard finalized her divorce from Johnny Depp . Their busy schedules caused the couple to break up in August 2017; they got back together in January 2018 and split again one month later.

In May 2018, Musk began dating musician Grimes (born Claire Boucher). That month, Grimes announced that she had changed her name to “ c ,” the symbol for the speed of light, reportedly on the encouragement of Musk. Fans criticized the feminist performer for dating a billionaire whose company has been described as a “predator zone” among accusations of sexual harassment.

The couple discussed their love for one another in a March 2019 feature in the Wall Street Journal Magazine , with Grimes saying “Look, I love him, he’s great...I mean, he’s a super-interesting goddamn person.” Musk, for his part, told the Journal, “I love c’s wild fae artistic creativity and hyper-intense work ethic.”

Grimes gave birth to their son on May 4, 2020, with Musk announcing that they had named the boy "X Æ A-12." Later in the month, after it was reported that the State of California wouldn't accept a name with a number, the couple said they were changing their son's name to "X Æ A-Xii."

Musk and Grimes welcomed their second child, a daughter named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, in December 2021. The child was delivered via a surrogate.

Nonprofit Work

The boundless potential of space exploration and the preservation of the future of the human race have become the cornerstones of Musk's abiding interests, and toward these, he has founded the Musk Foundation, which is dedicated to space exploration and the discovery of renewable and clean energy sources.

In October 2019 Musk pledged to donate $1 million to the #TeamTrees campaign, which aims to plant 20 million trees around the world by 2020. He even changed his Twitter name to Treelon for the occasion.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Elon Musk
• Birth Year: 1971
• Birth date: June 28, 1971
• Birth City: Pretoria
• Birth Country: South Africa
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: South African entrepreneur Elon Musk is known for founding Tesla Motors and SpaceX, which launched a landmark commercial spacecraft in 2012.
• Space Exploration
• Internet/Computing
• Astrological Sign: Cancer
• University of Pennsylania
• Queen's University, Ontario
• Stanford University
• Nacionalities
• South African
• Interesting Facts
• Elon Musk left Stanford after two days to take advantage of the Internet boom.
• In April 2017, Musk's Tesla Motors surpassed General Motors to become the most valuable U.S. car maker.

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Elon Musk Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/business-leaders/elon-musk
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: October 31, 2022
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• I'm very pro-environment, but let's figure out how to do it better and not jump through a dozen hoops to achieve what is obvious in the first place.
• Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

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Elon Musk: The Complete Biography of an Extraordinary Innovator

• by history tools
• March 26, 2024

Elon Musk is one of the most famous entrepreneurs and business leaders of the 21st century. As the co-founder of PayPal, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, and driving force behind many other companies, Musk has had an outsized influence on technology, space exploration, and solving some of humanity‘s biggest challenges.

Let‘s take a closer look at Musk’s remarkable life story, complex persona, monumental successes and occasional setbacks, and what makes him such a polarizing character.

Childhood and Early Life in South Africa

Musk was born on June 28, 1971 in Pretoria, one of South Africa’s wealthiest and most segregated cities during apartheid. His mother Maye was a famous dietitian and model who grew up in Canada, while his father Errol was a wealthy white South African electromechanical engineer.

As a child, Musk was an avid reader and self-taught computer programmer. At age 12 he created and sold a video game called Blastar to a computer magazine for $500. But his relationship with his father was difficult – his parents divorced when he was 9 years old. Musk chose to live mostly with his father, which he would later regret considering they became estranged.

Discovering His Calling

After spending two years in the South African military, Musk moved to Canada at age 19. He studied at Queen‘s University in Ontario for two years, avoiding mandatory service in the South African military, before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania.

At Penn, Musk pursued a Bachelor’s degree in Physics as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Economics. Most notably, he rekindled an early passion by taking extra classes at the Stanford School of Engineering. It was a harbinger of innovations to come.

Founding Zip2 and PayPal

In 1995 Musk dropped out of Stanford’s PhD program to found his first startup Zip2 Corporation with his brother Kimbal. Zip2 provided online city guides to newspapers like the New York Times and Chicago Tribune.

Compaq bought Zip2 in 1999 for $307 million, earning Musk $22 million. He soon co-founded X.com, one of the first online banks providing services like checking accounts and money transfers.

X.com merged with its rival Confinity in 2000 to become PayPal, with Musk serving as the new CEO. Despite internal struggles at the new company, PayPal went on to revolutionize online payments. In 2002 eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk received $175 million.

“If something‘s important enough you should try, even if the probable outcome is failure.”

Making History with SpaceX

Flush with cash from the PayPal sale, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in 2002 with an audacious long-term goal: make humanity multi-planetary by establishing a human colony on Mars.

SpaceX develops rockets, spacecraft and satellites aimed at revolutionizing space transportation to eventually make it affordable for private citizens to travel into orbit and to other planets. It almost went bankrupt in 2008, but Musk kept it afloat with personal funds.

In 2012 SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial spaceship to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. And in 2020 SpaceX sent astronauts to the ISS for the first time, effectively resurrecting American manned spaceflight.

Tesla Accelerates Ahead with Musk at the Helm

Also in 2004 Musk made the series A investment round in Tesla Motors and joined Tesla’s board of directors as chairman. Founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003, Tesla aimed to prove electric cars could be better than gasoline-powered cars.

The original Roadster sports car impressed critics, but by 2007 Tesla was also on the verge of bankruptcy. Musk invested heavily in Tesla and took over leadership of the company, serving as CEO and product architect.

Under his guidance, Tesla went public in 2010 to raise funds and the Model S sedan was named Motor Trend‘s 2013 Car of the Year. By 2023 Tesla had become the world‘s most valuable automaker, dominating the rapidly growing EV market.

Expanding His Entrepreneurial Portfolio

In addition to SpaceX and Tesla, Musk has founded or co-founded a number of new companies over the last two decades. These include:

• The Boring Company (2016) – Develops tunnels aimed at eliminating street traffic to reduce transportation time
• Neuralink (2016) – Develops implantable brain-machine interfaces to connect human brains with computers
• OpenAI (2015) – Non-profit AI research company working to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits humanity
• Starlink (2019) – SpaceX project to provide global satellite Internet access coverage

Not all of these companies have proven successful so far. But Musk continues to think big while attracting top talent to bring innovative new technologies to reality.

Taking Over Twitter for $44 Billion

In January 2022, Musk started acquiring shares of social media company Twitter. By March he had accumulated a 9.2% stake to become Twitter‘s largest shareholder. This set in motion a tumultuous year that eventually led to his purchase of Twitter for $44 billion on October 27, 2022.

Shortly after acquiring Twitter, Musk laid off roughly half the company‘s 7,500 employees and radically changed the platform‘s operations. Many users have quit the platform over concerns about misinformation as Musk grants "amnesty" to suspended accounts. The long-term implications of his takeover remain uncertain.

“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

Marriages, Relationships and Family

In 2000, Musk married Canadian author Justine Wilson. Their first son died unexpectedly from SIDS at 10 weeks old. They share custody of 5 sons – a set of twins and a set of triplets – born through IVF. Musk and Wilson separated in 2008.

From 2010 to 2012, Musk was married to English actress Talulah Riley. After divorcing, they remarried in 2013 before finalizing their divorce again in 2016. Musk also had an on-and-off relationship with musician Grimes which began in 2018. They had 2 children – a son born in 2020 and daughter born in 2021 via surrogate.

In 2022 it was revealed that Musk secretly had twins in 2021 with Shivon Zilis, a top executive at his company Neuralink. He now has 10 children from 3 relationships. But his 18-year-old transgender daughter has disowned him, changing her name in opposition to Musk‘s "public transphobia."

Losing and Regaining Title of World‘s Richest Person

Thanks mostly to his shares in Tesla Motors, Musk experienced an astronomical rise in his personal net worth. He became the richest person in the world for the first time in January 2021 when he surpassed Jeff Bezos.

But his net worth dropped in 2022 and early 2023 as Tesla‘s share price declined. On January 6, 2023 Musk lost the title of world‘s richest person to Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH.

What‘s more, with an estimated $183 billion loss between November 2021 and January 2023, Musk holds the record for the largest loss of personal fortune in history according to Guinness World Records. Despite these setbacks, Musk’s supporters are betting he’ll reclaim the top spot someday.

What Makes Musk Such a Polarizing Figure

Musk has earned both ardent fans and vocal critics. So what makes him such a polarizing public figure?

Reasons supporters are drawn to Musk include:

• Daring vision for future innovations
• Willingness to take risks
• Commitment to tackling climate change with sustainable energy
• Power to make things happen that others consider impossible
• Relatable sense of humor on social media

However some people are strongly critical of Musk for:

• Poor treatment of employees by demanding unrealistic hours and goals
• Controversial public stances on issues like pandemic lockdowns
• Spreading misinformation and making questionable promises on Twitter
• Brash communication style and vindictiveness towards naysayers
• Concerns about concentration of power held by billionaires

But there‘s no questioning the outsized impact Musk already made on multiple industries. Even his detractors admit they‘re curious to see what he’ll achieve next.

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Eight things we learned from the Elon Musk biography

Widespread access to world’s richest man allowed biographer Walter Isaacson to detail a number of illuminating anecdotes

A new biography of Elon Musk was published on Tuesday and contains colourful details of the life of the world’s richest man.

Musk afforded widespread access to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, the author of the bestselling biography of the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and the book contains a series of illuminating anecdotes about Musk. Here are eight things we learned from the book.

1. Musk’s difficult relationship with his father

Musk, 52, was born and raised in South Africa and endured a fraught relationship with his father, Errol, an engineer. Isaacson writes that Errol “bedevils Elon”.

Musk’s brother, Kimbal, says the worst memory of his life was watching Errol berate Musk after he was hospitalised after a fight at school (the book says Musk was still getting corrective surgery for the injuries decades later). “My father just lost it,” says Kimbal.

Musk and Kimbal, who are estranged from their father, describe Errol as a “volatile fabulist”. Interviewed by Isaacson, Errol admits he encouraged a “physical and emotional toughness” in his sons.

Grimes, the artist who is mother to three of his 10 children, says PTSD from Musk’s childhood shaped an aversion to contentment: “I just don’t think he knows how to savor success and smell the flowers.” Musk tells Isaacson he agrees: “Adversity shaped me. My pain threshold became very high.”

2. Elon Musk has an issue with the ‘woke mind virus’

Shortly before taking over Twitter, or X as it is now called, Musk told Isaacson that the “woke mind virus” – a derogatory term for progressive politics and culture – would prevent extraplanetary settlement (one of Musk’s fixations).

“Unless the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary,” said Musk.

3. Musk gave Twitter executives short shrift

Musk fired Twitter’s executive team as soon as he completed the takeover of Twitter in October last year and it had been coming. When Musk bought a significant stake in Twitter months before, he agreed to meet the CEO, Parag Agrawal. After the meeting, Musk said: “What Twitter needs is a fire-breathing dragon and Parag is not that.”

They soon fell out. Agrawal texted Musk to say his tweet asking if Twitter was “dying” was not helpful. Musk, on a break in Hawaii, replied: “What did you get done this week?” He added: “I’m not joining the board. This is a waste of time. Will make an offer to take Twitter private.”

This was during discussions about Musk joining the board. Agrawal’s reply underlined the power imbalance, and Twitter’s fear of Musk. He texted: “Can we talk?” Musk soon lodged an official bid for Twitter, which he tried unsuccessfully to wriggle out of, but the die was cast for Agrawal and his colleagues.

4. Sam Bankman-Fried tried to get in on the Twitter takeover

The founder and CEO of the fallen cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, offered via his banker to put $5bn (£4.1bn) into the Twitter takeover, the book claims. Bankman-Fried also wanted to discuss putting Twitter on a blockchain – the technological underpinning for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.

A subsequent call between Musk and Bankman-Fried in May 2022 went badly, Isaacson wrote. “My bullshit detector went off like red alert on a Geiger counter,” Musk is quoted as saying.

Bankman-Fried’s offer to invest or to roll over $100m of Twitter stock that he claimed he had invested, came to nothing.

5. Musk tried to recruit Rudy Giuliani as an adviser

In his early tycoon career, Musk pondered recruiting the then mayor of New York as a political fixer to help him turn his PayPal business into a bank in 2001. Musk sought a meeting with Giuliani, then coming to the end of his tenure in office, because he wanted to turn PayPal – an online payments company – into a “social network that would disrupt the whole banking industry”.

In 2001, Musk and an investor, Michael Moritz, went to New York to see if they could hire Giuliani to guide them through the process of turning PayPal into a bank. It didn’t go well.

“It was like walking into a mob scene,” Moritz says in the book. Giuliani “was surrounded by goonish confidantes. He didn’t have any idea whatsoever about Silicon Valley, but he and his henchmen were eager to line their pockets”.

“‘This guy occupies a different planet,’ Musk told Moritz.”

6. Musk is concerned about a dwindling human population

One of Musk’s reasons for founding a new artificial intelligence company , xAI, is addressing the threat of population collapse. In one face-to-face conversation with Isaacson, the multi-billionaire said human intelligence was in danger of being surmounted by digital intelligence.

“The amount of human intelligence, he noted, was levelling off because people were not having enough children. Meanwhile, the amount of computer intelligence was going up exponentially, like Moore’s law on steroids. At some point, biological brainpower would be dwarfed by digital brainpower.”

This conversation was conducted at the Austin, Texas house of Shivon Zilis, an executive at Musk’s Neuralink business who is the mother of two of his children. Zilis told Isaacson she agreed to have children with Musk via IVF after listening to his arguments about having children as a “kind of social duty”. She said: “He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to.”

7. Musk is very concerned about AI

Musk tells Isaacson that human consciousness is under threat from the prospect of super-intelligent, and uncontrollable, AI systems.

He says: “What can be done to make AI safe? I keep wrestling with that. What actions can we take to minimize AI danger and assure that human consciousness survives?”

8. Musk’s complicated role in the Ukraine conflict

Musk’s satellite communications unit, Starlink, has a key role in Ukraine’s defence against the Russian invasion. When a Russian cyber-attack crippled Ukraine’s satellite comms network an hour before the invasion, Musk stepped in following an appeal for help from Ukrainian officials and the country’s deputy prime minister.

However, the book alleges that Musk told his engineers to “turn off” Starlink coverage that would have facilitated an attack by drone submarines on Russia’s navy at the Sevastopol base in Crimea.

However, Isaacson has subsequently clarified this excerpt after Musk used his X platform to state that there was no Starlink coverage in that area and he refused a Ukrainian request to activate it. Musk posted: “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson is published by Simon & Schuster. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

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Elon Musk Hardcover – September 12, 2023

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• Print length 688 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Simon & Schuster
• Publication date September 12, 2023
• Dimensions 6.13 x 1.9 x 9.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1982181281
• ISBN-13 978-1982181284
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (September 12, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1982181281
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982181284
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.25 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 1.9 x 9.25 inches
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About the author

Walter isaacson.

Walter Isaacson is writing a biography of Elon Musk. He is the author of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race; Leonardo da Vinci; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution; and Kissinger: A Biography. He is also the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He is a Professor of History at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, and editor of Time magazine.

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Elon Musk By Walter Isaacson

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Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People.

Walter Isaacson’s biography of the billionaire entrepreneur depicts a mercurial “man-child” with grandiose ambitions and an ego to match.

Credit... Illustration by Jan Robert Dünnweller; Photo reference by Steven Ferdman/Getty Images

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By Jennifer Szalai

• Published Sept. 9, 2023 Updated Sept. 11, 2023
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ELON MUSK , by Walter Isaacson

At various moments in “Elon Musk,” Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the world’s richest person , the author tries to make sense of the billionaire entrepreneur he has shadowed for two years — sitting in on meetings, getting a peek at emails and texts, engaging in “scores of interviews and late-night conversations.” Musk is a mercurial “man-child,” Isaacson writes, who was bullied relentlessly as a kid in South Africa until he grew big enough to beat up his bullies. Musk talks about having Asperger’s, which makes him “bad at picking up social cues.” As the people closest to him will attest, he lacks empathy — something that Isaacson describes as a “gene” that’s “hard-wired.”

Yet even as Musk struggles to relate to the actual humans around him, his plans for humanity are grand. “A fully reusable rocket is the difference between being a single-planet civilization and being a multiplanet one”: Musk would “maniacally” repeat this message to his staff at SpaceX, his spacecraft and satellite company, where every decision is motivated by his determination to get earthlings to Mars. He pushes employees at his companies — he now runs six, including X, the platform formerly known as Twitter — to slash costs and meet brutal deadlines because he needs to pour resources into the moonshot of colonizing space “before civilization crumbles.” Disaster could come from climate change, from declining birthrates, from artificial intelligence. Isaacson describes Musk stalking the factory floor of Tesla, his electric car company, issuing orders on the fly. “If I don’t make decisions,” Musk explained, “we die.”

By “we,” Musk presumably meant Tesla in that instance. But Musk likes to speak of his business interests in superhero terms, so it’s sometimes hard to be sure. Isaacson, whose previous biographical subjects include Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs, is a patient chronicler of obsession; in the case of Musk, he can occasionally seem too patient — a hazard for any biographer who is given extraordinary access. At one point, Isaacson asks why Musk is so offended by anything he deems politically correct, and Musk, as usual, has to dial it up to 11. “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit and anti-human in general, is stopped,” he declares, “civilization will never become multiplanetary.” There are a number of curious assertions in that sentence, but it would have been nice if Isaacson had pushed him to answer a basic question: What on earth does any of it even mean?

Isaacson has ably conveyed that Musk doesn’t truly like pushback. Some of his lieutenants insist that he will eventually listen to reason, but Isaacson sees firsthand Musk’s habit of deriding as a saboteur or an idiot anyone who resists him. The musician Grimes, the mother of three of Musk’s children (the existence of the third, Techno Mechanicus, nicknamed Tau, has been kept private until now), calls his roiling anger “demon mode” — a mind-set that “causes a lot of chaos.” She also insists that it allows him to get stuff done.

It’s a convenient assessment, one that Isaacson seems mostly to accept. “As Shakespeare teaches us,” he writes, “all heroes have flaws, some tragic, some conquered, and those we cast as villains can be complex.” Well, yes — but couldn’t this describe anyone? What is there to say specifically about Musk himself?

For that we can turn to Isaacson’s reporting, of which there is plenty. (Another thoroughly reported biography, by Ashlee Vance , was published in 2015 — four years before SpaceX started launching Starlink satellites and seven years before Musk acquired Twitter.) Isaacson even managed to get Errol, Elon’s intermittently estranged father, to talk — though mostly what Errol offers are rambling bigoted comments (while insisting he isn’t racist) and self-aggrandizing tales (at least one of which turns out to be “provably false”).

Errol has two children with his stepdaughter. As for Elon, he has 10 children with three women, one of whom — Shivon Zilis, who bore his twins in 2021 — is an executive at one of his companies. (Another child, Musk’s first, born in 2002, died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome when he was 10 weeks old.)

“He really wants smart people to have kids,” Zilis said of Musk, who offered to be her sperm donor so that, Isaacson adds, “the kids would be genetically his.” At the time, Grimes and Musk were expecting their second child, a girl. Musk didn’t tell Grimes that he had just had twins with one of his employees.

But the details of such domestic intrigues are, in the book and in Musk’s life, largely beside the point. He is mostly preoccupied with his businesses, where he expects his staff to abide by “the algorithm,” his workplace creed, which commands them to “question every requirement” from a department, including “the legal department” and “the safety department”; and to “delete any part or process” they can. “Comradery is dangerous,” is one of the corollaries. So is this: “The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.”

Still, Musk has accrued enough power to dictate his own rules. In one of the book’s biggest scoops, Isaacson describes Musk secretly instructing his engineers to “turn off” Starlink satellite internet coverage to prevent Ukraine from launching a surprise drone attack on Russian forces in Crimea. ( Isaacson has since posted on X that contrary to what he writes in the book, Musk didn’t shut down coverage but denied a request to extend the network’s range.) Musk decided that he was saving humanity from a nuclear war. When Ukraine’s vice prime minister texted him to say that Starlink service was “a matter of life and death,” Musk instructed him to “seek peace while you have the upper hand.”

Counseling the Ukrainians to “seek peace” sounds especially rich coming from someone who is “energized,” Isaacson says, by “dire threats.” But then the overall sense you get from this biography is that for all of Musk’s talk about the world-changing magic of “the algorithm,” he ultimately does what he wants. He will order his companies to scrimp fanatically on some things while insisting that they spend lavishly on others. At Tesla, Musk’s obsession with the minutiae of automotive design inflated costs and drained the company of cash. At SpaceX, instead of spending $1,500 for the kind of latch used by NASA, an engineer figured out how to modify a $30 latch intended for a bathroom stall. When Musk acquired Twitter last year, he eliminated 75 percent of the staff.

Since Musk’s acquisition, hate speech on the platform has proliferated while ad sales have plunged . Reading this book, one begins to wonder if the old bird-site will be Musk’s Waterloo. “He thought of it as a technology company,” Isaacson writes, “when in fact it was an advertising medium based on human emotions and relationships.” Isaacson believes that Musk wanted to buy Twitter because he had been so bullied as a kid and “now he could own the playground.” It’s an awkward metaphor, but that’s also what makes it perfect. Owning a playground won’t stop you from getting bullied. If you think about it, owning a playground won’t get you much of anything at all.

ELON MUSK | By Walter Isaacson | Illustrated | 670 pp. | Simon & Schuster | $35

Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times. More about Jennifer Szalai

The World of Elon Musk

The billionaire’s portfolio includes the world’s most valuable automaker, an innovative rocket company and plenty of drama..

SpaceX: President Biden wants companies that use American airspace for rocket launches to start paying taxes into a federal fund  that finances the work of air traffic controllers.

Tesla: The maker of electric vehicles appeared to be losing command of the market it effectively created after reporting a stunning drop in quarterly sales , raising fresh questions about Elon Musk’s leadership of the company.

Business With China : Tesla and China built a symbiotic relationship that made Elon Musk ultrarich. Now, his reliance on the country may give Beijing leverage .  

A Testy Interview:  In the wake of a rough interview with Elon Musk that touched upon Donald Trump, his reported drug use and hate speech on X,  the former television anchor Don Lemon said that his deal for a new talk show on X was called off  just days before it was scheduled to air.

The Musk Foundation: After making billions in tax-deductible donations to his charity, Musk has failed recently to donate the minimum required to justify a tax break  — and what he did give often supported his interests.

OpenAI: Musk, who helped found the A.I. start-up in 2015, has filed a lawsuit  accusing the company and its chief executive  of breaching a contract  by putting profits and commercial interests ahead of the public good.

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Elon Musk biography portrays a brutal character driven by lofty dreams

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There’s this guy that’s pretty sure the thing you’re looking at right now is one of the greatest threats to humanity. No, he’s not talking about our growing obsession with staring at sheets of digitised glass, and the unhealthy sedentary existence associated with doing so. He’s talking about the thing living inside the machine humming quietly behind that glass: artificial intelligence.

It turns out that Elon Musk, one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, is plagued with existential worries . His new biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future , reveals the billionaire engineer is seriously concerned about the rise of technology so intelligent it could destroy the human race in an effort to protect itself. Why should we listen to him? Well, when it comes to the future, he – more than anyone – is making it happen.

With his company Tesla, he’s transforming the automotive industry by producing the most compelling range of cars of all time – and they’re electric. With SolarCity, he’s producing the cheapest form of energy in most states of the US, and it’s through solar power. And with SpaceX, he’s building state-of-the-art rockets and spacecraft far cheaper than anyone else, that are about to become an order of magnitude cheaper through partial and full reusability.

Why is Musk, who sold his founding stake in PayPal for more than US$150m (£97m), doing this? To increase our chances, to enable the expansion of humanity, to take one of our eggs out of this basket and place it on Mars as soon as possible. A decade ago, the vast majority of serious thinkers laughed these ideas off as ludicrous. Not now.

Musk had a difficult start in South Africa as the unassuming nerd from a broken family. He was a loner during childhood and suffered for years from bullying in the spartan Afrikaner culture he was brought up in. But now the man, sometimes known as General Musk, has risen. He has willed three recently thought impossible companies into existence, almost simultaneously, each now worth on the order of US$10 billion (£6 billion).

In the biography, Ashlee Vance level-headedly paints an insightful picture of the vehemence that is Musk, his growth into a leader, the personal sacrifice and torture he has chosen to endure, and the arduous development of his companies.

Any worries that the book would be a shallow money-grabbing rehash of a dozen YouTube interviews are swiftly put to bed. Vance battled to get Musk on side and eventually managed to conduct regular interview with the man himself, the people closest to him, and those that were there at pivotal points throughout his life so far.

As someone who started life in similarly difficult circumstances in post-Apartheid South Africa, with a background in aerospace and a strong affinity for the potential of Mars, I have a soft spot for big E. But Vance is not a fan-boy. His words describe a man whose unrelenting drive and genius is harrowing to those around him, who is mentally detached from what most of us pond-life think is normal – and how brutal such a combination makes this modern-day “Messiah-like” character on a personal level.

Musk is reported to have turned solid engineers into catatonic wrecks after a bad meeting, and built a culture where his employees adore him and fear him at the same time. For me, it is this aspect of Vance’s portrayal is particularly fascinating.

This guy has such lofty and inspiring ambitions for humanity. He has put everything on the line to take us forward as a species. Yet when it comes to dealing with individuals, in Vance’s book his lack of empathy appears to go beyond anything most of us have ever encountered. On the surface, Musk seems personable and easy-going. In Vance’s reality, he puts Spock to shame.

Even at 400 pages, the book could easily have spent another 100 pages delving more into the personal conversations with Musk, exploring his thoughts more deeply and speculating on the inner-workings of his mind. My wife, a psychiatrist, would have a field-day with this guy.

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11 WTF Moments From the New Biography ‘Elon Musk’

• By Miles Klee

Tuesday saw the release of Elon Musk , author Walter Isaacson’s mammoth new biography of the controversial tech mogul , and hardly a chapter of the nearly 700-page book goes by without a weird anecdote about the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s eccentric, sometimes self-destructive behavior. We are treated to insights about volatile relationships with family and partners, his caustic managerial style, and the toll that burnout takes as Musk struggles to deliver on promises of a fantastical future. Isaacson had total access to Musk himself, and, throughout the narrative, features perspectives from dozens of people in Musk’s inner circle (or formerly close with him) on exactly what makes the man tick.

The Emotional Wreckage of Musk’s First Marriage

Musk split with his first wife, Justine Musk, in 2008, after the relationship devolved into constant and bitter verbal fights, with Musk saying things like, “If you were my employee, I would fire you” or calling her an “idiot,” Justine told Isaacson. She also recalled once trying to explain the concept of empathy to Musk, but he said his lack of such a quality gave him an advantage when it came to running major companies. He also grew irritated by her suggestions that he try therapy, and blamed her own anger on Adderall, which a psychiatrist had prescribed to her for attention deficit disorder. Justine Musk said that although the drug was “an amazing help” for her, Elon “would go around the house throwing away the pills” that he believed were contributing to their marital strife.

Musk Has Suffered From Years of Neck and Back Pain Because of a Birthday Party Stunt

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Tesla’s Autopilot has been involved in hundreds of car crashes and at least 17 fatalities , with such accidents surging along with increased use of the system. Surely, Musk’s habit of exaggerating what it can do hasn’t helped. Though when it comes to Autopilot-involved deaths, he doesn’t seem to think they matter much in the grand scheme, believing the tech “should be judged not on whether it prevented accidents but instead on whether it led to fewer accidents.” After the first two reported Autopilot-involved fatalities in 2016, Musk did not immediately issue a statement, and Isaacson notes that he “could not understand why one or two deaths caused by Tesla Autopilot created an outcry when there were more than 1.3 million traffic deaths annually.” He then got angry during a press conference where reporters opened with questions about those accidents, firing back that they were the ones “killing” people if they turned public sentiment or government regulators against autonomous driving systems.

What Was Secretly on Musk’s Mind During a Rolling Stone Interview

In 2017, Musk gave an interview to Neil Strauss for a Rolling Stone cover story . He seemed distracted from the beginning and walked out on Strauss, coming back several minutes later to explain that he had recently broken up with his girlfriend, actress Amber Heard . Later in the conversation, Musk spoke unforgivingly of his estranged father, Errol Musk. “He was such a terrible human being,” Musk said. “Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.” He didn’t offer specifics at the time, but Isaacson reveals that shortly before this, Musk had learned that in 2016, Errol had impregnated Jana Bezuidenhout, a woman more than four decades younger, whom Errol had raised as his stepdaughter. Elon and his siblings were profoundly disturbed by the news, which seemed to weigh on him during his talk with Strauss, who wrote, “There is clearly something Musk wants to share, but he can’t bring himself to utter the words.”

The Personal Turmoil Behind the Infamous ‘Pedo Guy’ Tweet

An unexpected consequence of smoking weed on joe rogan’s show.

Musk’s 2018 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience was intended to be a bit of damage control at a precarious time for the CEO, who was seen as increasingly erratic. So, naturally, when Rogan offered him a toke on a tobacco-and-cannabis blunt, he confirmed that it was legal before gamely taking a puff. Even so, Tesla investors were rattled as the image of Musk wreathed in pot smoke went viral, and the company’s share price tumbled to almost its lowest point that year. There was one other, hidden ramification, too: “SpaceX was a NASA contractor, and they are big believers in the law,” Musk is quoted as saying in the biography. That meant, for the next couple of years, he was subject to random drug tests. “Fortunately,” he said, “I really don’t like doing illegal drugs.”

Why Musk and Grimes Got into Couples’ Spats

Throughout their courtship and co-parenting journey, Musk and occasional girlfriend Grimes have had their share of blowups, some of them sparked by truly unusual behavior. In 2021, for example, he was obsessed with the civilization strategy game The Battle of Polytopia , which in time began to distract him from work meetings and social events. Grimes started playing as well, noting that video games are one of Musk’s only outlets for relaxation, but, she said, “he takes those so seriously that it gets very intense.” In one game they played together, having agreed to an alliance, she betrayed him with a surprise attack, triggering “one of our biggest fights ever.” When she tried to argue it was only a game and not a big deal, he said, “It’s a huge fucking deal,” and didn’t speak to her for the rest of the day. On the flip side, Grimes was angry with Musk when he sent a photo of her having a C-section during childbirth to friends and family, without her consent. “He was just clueless about why I’d be upset,” she told Isaacson.

When Musk’s Reproductive Habits Made for a Curious Coincidence

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At the end of 2022, as Musk tried to get Twitter under control in the wake of a contentious acquisition, he expressed an alarming opinion of a humanitarian crisis in China. Talking to reporter Bari Weiss, Isaacson writes, he said that “Twitter would indeed have to be careful about the words it used regarding China, because Tesla’s business could be threatened.” He also told her that the country’s repression of the Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim minority group, had two sides. The Chinese government is placing this population in concentration camps and has been widely accused of crimes against humanity with the U.S. even going so far as to call it “ genocide .”

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Elon Musk's 11 Children: All About His Kids and Their Mothers

Elon Musk is the father of 11 children, including a pair of twins and a set of triplets with his ex-wife Justine Wilson and two boys and a girl with ex-girlfriend Grimes

Elon Musk 's family keeps on growing.

Within two decades, the Tesla founder has become a father of 11 children with three women. His first child was born in 2002 and his most recent in 2023.

The first six children he shares with his ex-wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson . After first meeting as students at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, the SpaceX CEO wed Wilson in 2000 — but after seven years of marriage and five kids, the couple officially divorced in 2008.

"Custody of our five children is split evenly," Musk said in a 2010 Business Insider op-ed. "Almost all of my non-work waking hours are spent with my boys, and they are the love of my life."

Two years later, the entrepreneur married and divorced actress Talulah Riley twice — the first lasting from 2010 to 2012, and the second from 2013 to 2016. They never had children together.

In 2018, Musk and singer-songwriter Grimes (whose real name is Claire Boucher) were linked — and had their first child together in 2020.

Despite splitting up in September 2021 after three years, Grimes revealed in a March 2022 Vanity Fair interview that the couple had reconciled and welcomed another child via surrogate in December 2021. At the time, she also revealed that the couple wants more babies — telling the outlet, "we've always wanted at least three or four" — but the day the article was released, she tweeted that they had broken up again.

A few weeks prior to the arrival of their second child together, the CEO secretly fathered twins with Shivon Zilis in November 2021, according to court documents published by Insider. The twins were born in Austin, Texas.

In September 2023, a biography about Musk revealed that he and Grimes had secretly welcomed a third child. They named their second son Techno Mechanicus , who also goes by “Tau."

During an interview with The Wall Street Journal ’s CEO Council, Musk spoke about his children's futures. He shared that he has no plans to "automatically" give his children shares of his companies "if they have no interest or inclination or ability to manage" his empire.

Learn more about Musk's family, below.

Nevada Alexander

Musk had his first son, Nevada Alexander, with his first wife, Justine Wilson in 2002. Sadly, at 10 weeks old, he passed away from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

"Nevada went down for a nap, placed on his back as always, and stopped breathing," Wilson wrote in a 2010 essay for Marie Claire . "By the time the paramedics resuscitated him, he had been deprived of oxygen for so long that he was brain-dead."

She continued, "He spent three days on life support in a hospital in Orange County before we made the decision to take him off it. I held him in my arms when he died."

Vivian Jenna Wilson and Griffin

In her Marie Claire essay, Wilson details their journey to expanding their family further.

"I buried my feelings ... coping with Nevada's death by making my first visit to an IVF clinic less than two months later. Elon and I planned to get pregnant again as swiftly as possible. Within the next five years, I gave birth to twins, then triplets," she wrote .

One of Musk's now 18-year-old twins has filed to legally change her name and gender and said she no longer wishes to be related to her father, according to court documents obtained by PEOPLE.

The April 18 petition seeks the legal change of her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson (the maiden name of her mother, Justine Wilson); recognition of her gender as female; and the issuance of a new birth certificate to reflect the changes.

"Gender Identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form," Vivian wrote in the petition explaining her request for the changes.

In an October 2022 interview with Financial Times , Musk said he believes Vivian doesn't want to be associated with him because of the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists. "It's full-on communism . . . and a general sentiment that if you're rich, you're evil," said the Tesla CEO. "It [the relationship] may change, but I have very good relationships with all the others [children]. Can't win them all."

Kai, Saxon and Damian

Wilson gave birth to triplets named Kai, Saxon, and Damian in 2006, two years after having twins. She revealed in a 2017 TedTalk that they were also conceived via IVF, but she and Musk have not discussed the children themselves publicly.

Musk does not often discuss his own family, but he does have strong opinions on increasing the birth rate — stating that there are "not enough people" in the world at Wall Street Journal 's annual CEO Council in December 2021.

"I think one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low birth rate and the rapidly declining birthrate," he said. "Please look at the numbers – if people don't have more children, civilization is going to crumble, mark my words."

In a 2023 biography on the tech mogul, titled  Elon Musk ,  author Walter Isaacson wrote about Damian , who became a vegetarian at age 8 to "decrease my carbon footprint."

Isaacson also mentioned that Damian became a classical music prodigy who excelled in math and physics. Musk's mom, Maye, even once told her son, "I think Damian is brighter than you."

For more on Elon Musk, listen below to our daily podcast on PEOPLE Every Day.

Grimes and Musk welcomed their first child on May 4, 2020 after the singer announced her pregnancy with a picture of her baby bump back in January 2020. Their son X Æ A-12, whose name was later changed to X Æ A-Xii , was in part named after the CIA's Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance plane.

Though nicknamed "X," Grimes broke down his pronunciation in her Instagram comment section. "It's just X, like the letter X," she wrote. "Then A.I.," she added. "Like how you said the letter A then I."

But Musk explained the pronunciation differently, saying on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast that "X" is spoken "like the letter" while "the 'Æ' is pronounced like 'ash.'"

While proudly stating that "A-12 was [his] contribution," he said it was Grimes who " mostly came up with the name ." She even gave a thorough description of the meaning behind it on her Twitter .

The boy later made headlines when he joined his dad for a tense meeting at Twitter at the age of 2.

According to The Washington Post , Musk brought X Æ A-Xii to Twitter's offices while meeting with Trust and Safety Office Yoel Roth in October 2022. The child was reportedly running around the building as Musk discussed Twitter's future. X Æ A-Xii also made himself comfortable in the conference room, which the newspaper reported "was strewn with toys."

In April 2023, X Æ A-Xii tagged along with his dad to the MMA Global Possible Conference in Miami. The little boy was seen playing with Musk on stage, which the audience found heartwarming.

Four months later, Grimes opened up about her son's love of spacecraft . "X knows a lot about rockets. It's crazy," she explained. "He knows more about rockets than me."

She even admitted that she was worried about his "obsession with space" after SpaceX's Starship rocket exploded after takeoff in April.

"When X saw Starship blow up, he had, like, a three-day PTSD meltdown," the mom of two said. "Every hour, he was waking up and going, 'Starship ...' and I had to rub his back."

Strider and Azure

Walter Isaacson/Twitter

Musk secretly welcomed twins, son Strider and daughter Azure, with Shivon Zilis in November 2021, according to court documents published by Insider on July 6 . The twins were born in Austin, Texas — just weeks before he and Grimes welcomed a baby girl via a surrogate.

The papers reveal that in April, Musk and Zilis — who is the project director at his Neuralink company — asked a Texan county court to change their babies' names so they would "have their father's last name and contain their mother's last name as part of their middle name."

The parents revealed the babies' names and sexes in September 2023, when they were 16 months old.

Exa Dark Sideræl

Grimes revealed a year later in a Vanity Fair interview that she welcomed a baby girl via surrogate in December 2021, three months after the couple's public breakup. Named Exa Dark Sideræl, the singer-songwriter explained that her name has double meaning.

Exa refers to a supercomputing term, exaFLOPS, while Dark represents "the unknown." She explained to the outlet, "People fear it but truly it's the absence of photons. Dark matter is the beautiful mystery of our universe."

The third part of Y's full name, Sideræl, is pronounced "sigh-deer-ee-el," according to Vanity Fair. Grimes described the word as "a more elven" spelling of sidereal, which she defined as "the true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, not our relative earth time."

The second meaning of Sideræl is a nod to Grimes' favorite Lord of the Rings character, Galadriel, who "chooses to abdicate the ring."

In March 2023, Grimes shared a rare photo of her daughter on Twitter — and revealed that the little girl is going by a new name.

"Normally we [don't] post her for her privacy, but she's fairly unrecognizable here since shes channeling Goku," the mom-of-two wrote in the comments, referring to a Dragon Ball character. The photo showed Musk's youngest in a red onesie with super blonde spiked hair.

In a separate comment, Grimes said: "She's Y now, or "Why?" or just "?" (But the government won't recognize that). curiosity, the eternal question, .. and such."

In August, Grimes described her younger child as "a little engineer," and said, "she likes industrial shipping. She's very strange."

Techno Mechanicus

Journalist Walter Isaacson's biography about Musk revealed the birth of the Tesla founder's third child with Grimes. The couple secretly welcomed a second son, Techno Mechanicus , who also goes by “Tau."

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Prologue-Chapter 11

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Chapters 24-35

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Chapters 48-59

Chapters 60-71

Chapters 72-83

Chapters 84-95

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Summary and Study Guide

The biography Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, published in 2023, explores the life and achievements of one of the most enigmatic figures in the tech and business worlds. Isaacson, a biographer with a track record of profiles on iconic individuals such as Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci, brings his expertise to unravel the complex layers of Elon Musk’s persona. Isaacson’s deep dive into Musk’s life aims to give readers a deeper understanding of the man behind Tesla, SpaceX, and numerous other ventures. This work navigates the intersections of Musk’s personal and professional spheres, shedding light on his ambitious pursuits, visionary goals, and the controversies that surround him.

This guide references the Simon & Schuster 2023 Kindle Edition.

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The biography is structured chronologically, providing readers with a detailed account of Elon Musk’s life from his childhood in South Africa to his ventures in the United States, where he would become a key player in revolutionizing the automotive and space industries.

The narrative begins by unraveling Musk’s formative years in Pretoria, South Africa. Isaacson focuses on how Elon’s childhood, which was shaped by violence and verbal abuse, laid the foundation for his behavior as an adult. These chapters also outline Musk’s childhood interests in computers, technology, and science fiction, which inspired his future endeavors. Musk’s relentless pursuit of knowledge and his ambition to make a mark on the world set the stage for his eventual move to the United States.

The book then chronicles Musk’s early entrepreneurial ventures, starting with Zip2, a city guide software for newspapers. The challenges and successes of Zip2 provided Musk with invaluable experiences and lessons. Subsequently, the narrative transitions to the creation of X.com, an online payment company, which eventually merged with Confinity to become PayPal. Isaacson details Musk’s struggles, innovations, and eventual sale of PayPal, emphasizing his extreme work ethic and his desire for control and autonomy.

A significant portion of the biography is dedicated to Musk’s founding and development of SpaceX. It particularly focuses on the challenges faced during the company’s early years. Isaacson elucidates Musk’s vision for interplanetary colonization and his unwavering commitment to reducing space travel costs. Isaacson argues that Musk’s willingness to challenge the conventionally accepted notions of the cost of rockets enabled SpaceX to move more nimbly than NASA and jumpstart the United States’ flagging participation in the space industry.

Another pivotal aspect of Musk’s career is explored in the chapters dedicated to Tesla Motors. The biography describes Musk’s involvement with Tesla, from investing in the company to taking over as CEO and becoming a driving force behind its electric vehicle revolution. Isaacson touches upon Tesla’s challenges, including financial difficulties, and highlights Musk’s leadership style and determination to cut costs and create an efficient means of production, even at the expense of alienating employees and driving them to the point of burnout.

The narrative extends beyond Musk’s automotive and space endeavors to cover his involvement in SolarCity, a solar energy services company, and his ventures into neuroscience with Neuralink. Isaacson also discusses The Boring Company, a venture focused on infrastructure and tunnel construction. These chapters illuminate Musk’s wide-ranging interests and his desire to address global challenges.

Throughout the book, Isaacson provides glimpses into Musk’s personal life, exploring his relationships, marriages, and the toll his professional commitments take on his personal well-being. The narrative doesn’t shy away from portraying Musk’s complex personality, including his struggles with social interactions and the toll his intense work ethic has on his health.

Isaacson draws connections between Musk’s abusive childhood and his behavior in relationships, repeatedly intoning that Musk possesses a predilection for drama, conflict, and crisis, something that he brings to his relationships in both his personal life and his business life. Isaacson observes that when Musk experiences phases of relative stability or success, Musk feels a need to artificially create crises to feel energized. Isaacson contends that this enables Musk to drive his teams to high levels of success, pushing them to reach achievements that they previously thought were impossible, though Isaacson also acknowledges the interpersonal fallout from Musk’s driven and sometimes callous behavior.

The biography concludes with Musk’s foray into social media, particularly his acquisition and transformation of Twitter. The book explores Musk’s unorthodox management style and the consequences of his decisions on the platform. Additionally, the narrative touches upon Musk’s concerns about artificial intelligence and his efforts to ensure ethical development in the field.

Isaacson concludes the biography by reflecting on Musk's lasting impact on various industries and the tensions between his controversial behavior and innovative contributions. The book presents Musk as a complex figure, acknowledging both his successes and the controversies surrounding his leadership style. Isaacson implies that Musk’s behavior, while sometimes callous, cruel, and reckless, may be justified by the grandiosity of his accomplishments.

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Elon Musk on micromanaging: ‘If you’re trying to make a perfect product, then attention to detail is essential’

Elon Musk is pushing back on his reputation as a micromanager. The best employees, he says, actually need little management.

“I wouldn’t call it micro management, it’s just insisting on attention to detail,” he said in an interview Monday with Nicolai Tangen, the chief executive of Norway’s wealth fund, which was streamed on Musk’s social media site, X. “If you’re trying to make a perfect product, then attention to detail is essential.”

Walter Isaacson’s biography on Musk depicted the billionaire obsessing over the most minute of decisions, from the design of the Cybertruck to where Twitter put its servers. Musk said on Monday that he hasn’t read Isaacson’s book about him, despite giving the author a front-row seat to how he simultaneously ran six companies over two years.

While most micro-managing bosses don’t consider their actions to be encroaching on employee autonomy, the majority of workers say they have had an overly involved boss during their careers,  surveys  have found. And Musk is in good company with other demanding bosses like former Apple CEO Steve Jobs and former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates.

When asked about how to manage his best employees, Musk said: “Smart people, they manage themselves.” Intelligent and talented people can go and work anywhere,  he said, so the way to keep them them happy is to set out goals and let people figure out how to achieve them.

“So I say, ‘Look, this is the goal we’re after and this is what we’re trying to achieve. If you agree with that goal, then let’s try to get it done,’” Musk said, noting that he reserves the right to weigh in and take control when warranted. “Once in a while, you have to say, ‘Guys, you have to trust me on this one.”

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Elon Musk Didn’t Want His Latest Deposition Released. Here It Is.

Senior Reporter, HuffPost

Elon Musk was deposed last month over his role in allegedly promoting a false conspiracy theory that a 22-year-old Jewish man participated in a neo-Nazi brawl.

Musk tried to keep the deposition from going public, and perhaps for good reason: It did not go well for him.

“There’s some risk that what I say is incorrect, but one has to balance that against having a chilling effect on free speech in general, which would undermine the entire foundation of our democracy,” Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), said during the deposition.

The lawsuit against the billionaire, filed in October , alleges that Musk used his colossal social media platform to amplify a false far-right conspiracy theory linking 22-year-old Ben Brody to a brawl in Oregon between the neo-Nazi group Rose City Nationalists and the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist fight club . The brawl occurred during Oregon City’s first Pride Night Fest, when both groups came to disrupt the event and spew anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric.

Brody wasn’t even in the same state when the June 24 brawl occurred. But his world was turned upside down when far-right X accounts, magnified by Musk, falsely identified him as a member of Rose City Nationalists (and an undercover federal agent) and posted his personal information online.

Musk amplified the conspiracy theory repeatedly to his more than 180 million followers, suggesting Brody was a fresh-faced federal agent pretending to be a neo-Nazi in a “false flag situation,” a phrase used to suggest a harmful event was deliberately set up to misrepresent a group or person.

“Looks like one is a college student (who wants to join the govt) and another is maybe an Antifa member, but nonetheless a probable false flag situation,” Musk posted to X after Brody had been falsely identified as a Rose City Nationalists member. The post remains on X.

Brody said he and his family were forced to flee their home amid the fallout from Musk’s posts. He’s seeking more than $1 million in damages. The next court hearing is scheduled for April 22.

On March 27, Musk sat for a two-hour deposition with attorneys from both parties over Zoom. Following the testimony, Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, filed multiple emergency motions in an attempt to keep the deposition sealed.

“I’m asking that this transcript be marked as confidential,” Spiro said at the end of Musk’s deposition, according to the transcript. “That’s what I’m asking for, OK?”

Spiro’s efforts failed after a judge struck down his motions. Though video of the deposition has not been made public, HuffPost obtained a copy of the full transcript, which was made public Monday.

You can read Musk’s full testimony here.

During his deposition, Musk admitted he has a “limited understanding” of the lawsuit against him, said he thought Brody’s attorney was the one suing him, and revealed he did no research in determining whether Brody was involved in the brawl after seeing the accusations on X.

Musk also made broader admissions about his failures with X — which has plummeted in value since his takeover in 2022 — saying he “may have done more to financially impair” the social media site than help it. Musk also confirmed that he once used a burner account on X seemingly to role-play as his toddler son.

“I’m guilty of many self-inflicted wounds,” Musk testified.

‘Actually, Mr. Musk, I’m An Attorney. Did You Know That?’

From the outset of the deposition, Spiro traded barbs with Brody’s attorney, Mark Bankston, as Musk attempted to answer basic questions about the case.

“Do you think you did anything wrong to Ben Brody?” asked Bankston, who’s based in Houston.

Spiro interjected, saying this “isn’t a question you’re allowed to ask by the court.”

It was the start of what would be a contentious back-and-forth between two high-profile attorneys. Spiro, who has represented celebrities such as Jay-Z and Megan Thee Stallion, previously won a defamation case for Musk after the billionaire called a man who helped rescue children trapped in a cave in Thailand a “pedo guy” in 2018.

“You keep filing these silly, frivolous shake-down cases, I’ll keep trying to think of Texas lawyers to bring to your depositions,” Spiro told Bankston.

Bankston, of the Texas law firm Farrar & Ball, previously represented two Sandy Hook parents who won $45 million in damages against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones after Jones spent years falsely claiming the 2012 school shooting never happened.

Spiro did not respond to a request for comment on this story. Bankston declined to comment.

Throughout his testimony, Musk showed little understanding about the lawsuit he was testifying for, and even said he believed it was Bankston — not Brody — who was suing him.

“I think you’re the one suing,” Musk told Bankston, according to the transcript.

“Actually, Mr. Musk, I’m an attorney,” Bankston explained. “Did you know that? I’m an attorney representing Mr. Brody.”

Asked if Musk understood what the lawsuit was about, Musk admitted he had “a limited understanding of that — of what the lawsuit is about” but suggested again that this was simply a money grab by Brody’s attorney.

“My — what I want to think it’s really about is about you getting a lot of money,” said Musk, who paid $44 billion for Twitter in 2022 .

From An Anti-Semitic Account To Elon Musk

Musk learned of the conspiracy theory about Brody from what the lawsuit describes as a fringe X account with more than 30,000 followers that “features extreme rightwing memes, neo-Nazi apologia/nostalgia, juvenile and cringe-worthy attempts at bigoted humor, low effort bait tweets, delusional panics over lazy hoaxes, and a cavalcade of absurdly false information.”

“The account is the social media equivalent of gutter sludge,” the lawsuit says.

The anonymous account, named Dr Frensor, posted a photo of Brody with his personal information found on his college fraternity’s social media page. The caption on the photo of Brody read, “After graduation he plans to work for the government,” which Dr Frensor used to suggest Brody was at the brawl and a federal plant.

“Very odd,” Musk responded. As it goes whenever Musk interacts with a post on X, this one quickly went viral.

In his deposition, Musk was asked whether he’d seen other posts from the Dr Frensor account.

“I wasn’t trying to assess their credibility,” Musk responded.

Bankston showed Musk a meme Dr Frensor had posted the same day the account posted about Brody. More from the transcript:

Bankston : And here it says at the top, ‘Is this meme insensitive to Jewish persons?’ And then there’s a meme of the United Nations’ logo that says, “Founded in 1945 to end all wars, the United Nations. The world has been at war ever since.’ Do you know if you saw this? Musk : I have not seen this. B : Okay. Would this have triggered a red flag as to this person’s credibility? Spiro : Objection to form. M : I mean, I think it’s a dubious post, but it suggests anti-Semitism. B : Correct. … I think we all know it reflects anti-Semitism. I’m asking, does this trigger red flags to this person’s reliability? M : I would say, yes, it probably does.

Still, Musk defended his response to the anti-Semitic account.

“But if you’re suggesting that in order to reply to anyone, you have to scroll through all their posts, that would make it impossible to use the system,” he said of his website.

A Billionaire’s Fact-Checking Process

Contrary to his earlier statements, Musk suggested later on in the deposition that he researches discourse before he joins it.

“If you care about the truth, you have to go look about it,” Musk said.

Musk’s own testimony reveals he did little to seek out the truth.

“Would it be fair for me to say that, other than the tweets that you interacted with, you did not secure other information about this unmasked brawler?” Bankston asked at one point.

“I don’t recall securing other information,” Musk responded.

During his testimony, Musk criticized what he called the “traditional legacy news industry” while lauding X’s Community Notes, a website tool that allows users to add corrections or additional context to misleading or untrue posts.

Musk called Community Notes “the best system on the internet” for fact-checking, and said he tagged Community Notes in his post referencing Brody as a show of “good faith,” the transcript shows.

“And I think — I think I really did this in good faith, because I would not ask for a fact-check which is what I do by adding Community Notes,” Musk said, according to the transcript.

Musk did tag Community Notes in his post about Brody, but a note was never added to the false claim. The post remains on X today without a correction.

Musk was also asked about his interactions with posts on X, which can make an otherwise invisible post go instantly viral. Bankston pointed out that his post on X referring to a “college student who wants to join the govt” was seen more than a million times, according to X’s metrics.

Musk downplayed the number and argued that his post was merely a reply to someone else, which attracted less viewership than his own post would.

From the transcript:

Bankston : You do understand that the amount of people who saw this, who have viewed this, is equivalent to all 30 major league baseball stadiums filled to capacity? You wouldn’t dispute that? I mean, we’re talking over a million people. Spiro : Objection to form. Musk : Yeah, that’s actually – that may seem like a large number, but it is not compared to the fact – I believe there are something on the order of five to eight trillion views per year so a million is really – B : Not a big deal? M : – hit or miss, yeah. B : Not a big deal that this went out to that many people? M : Correct .

Musk’s ‘Self-Inflicted Wounds’

Over the course of his testimony, Musk acknowledged his lack of restraint in posting on X and the negative impact it’s had on his company.

He called them “self-inflicted wounds,” a reference to his own quote in Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography about him, though he says he hasn’t read it.

“I certainly — I would say that I — you know, I’m guilty of many self-inflicted wounds,” Musk testified.

Last year, Motherboard and other internet sleuths traced a bizarre account on X to Musk himself. The account, @ermnmusk, appeared to be role-playing as Musk’s toddler son.

“I will finally turn 3 on May 4th!” one post read.

“I wish I was old enough to go to nightclubs. They sound so fun,” read another.

Though the account’s name is not mentioned in the transcript, Monday’s court filing contained an exhibit of the @ermnmusk account that was shown to Musk during his testimony. In the filing, Bankston alleges that Musk deleted the account in February on the same day of the court’s discovery order.

Asked about the account by Bankston during the deposition, Musk confirmed it was his, but dismissed it as a “test account.”

“No, I would not use this account,” Musk testified. “It was just used for — for testing.”

Later in the deposition, Musk again reflected on those “self-inflicted wounds.”

“The — and going back to the sort of self-inflicted wounds, the Kevlar shoes, I think there’s — I’ve probably done — I may have done more to financially impair the company than to help it, but certainly I — I do not guide my posts by what is financially beneficial but what I believe is interesting or important or entertaining to the public,” he said.

A day after Brody had been falsely linked to neo-Nazis, the recent college graduate uploaded a video to Instagram begging for the harassment to stop.

“My family and I are just being harassed completely, and I would be more than happy to clear up any confusion if necessary,” Brody says in the video. “This is just so ridiculous and I just really can’t believe this is happening to me right now.”

Near the end of the deposition, Bankston asked Musk if he believed he owed it to Brody to be accurate. Musk said: “I aspire to be accurate no matter who the person is.”

“Do you think you lived up to that duty to Ben Brody or do you think you failed him?” Bankston asked.

“I don’t think — I don’t think — I don’t think he has been meaningfully harmed by this,” Musk replied.

Bankston pushed Musk on the question, leading to another argument between the two lawyers. Finally, Musk answered, reiterating his belief that he didn’t harm Brody.

“People are attacked all the time in the media, online media, social media, but it is rare that that actually has a meaningful negative impact on their life,” Musk testified.

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From our partner, more in u.s. news.

Elon Musk admits he 'may have done more to financially impair' X than to help it

• Elon Musk said his social-media posts may have harmed X's financial standing.
• Musk made the comments during a deposition for a lawsuit involving one of his posts on X.
• Since his takeover, X has faced backlash over his posts and moderation policies, leading to an ad exodus.

Elon Musk said his posts on social media might have had a negative impact on X's bottom line .

In a deposition for a lawsuit against the billionaire, Musk addressed concerns about his posting habits on X.

"I may have done more to financially impair the company than to help it, but I certainly I — I do not guide my posts by what is financially beneficial but what I believe is interesting or important or entertaining to the public," Musk said in a deposition that was released Monday.

Musk's comments were in response to a question from an attorney regarding his use of X and a quote from Walter Isaacson's biography of the Tesla CEO. The author quoted Musk as saying: "I've shot myself in the foot so often, I ought to buy some Kevlar boots."

In response, Musk said he's "guilty of many self-inflicted wounds."

Related stories

Since Musk bought Twitter in 2022, the company has reportedly lost many of its biggest advertisers , and Musk has faced criticism for some of his posts on the site, including one where he boosted a post promoting the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, which is commonly spread by white supremacists. The platform also reportedly saw a surge in hate speech and antisemitism after Musk's takeover and has reinstated multiple accounts previously banned for violating the company's policies.

There are also signs that investors may view X as having decreased in value since Musk's purchase. Fidelity once again lowered the value of its stake in Musk's social-media company in February — suggesting its valuation of X had dropped 73% since Musk bought the platform for $44 billion.

It's not the first time Musk has reflected on his posting habits. Last year, Musk said he should probably stop posting on social media into the early-morning hours.

"Have I shot myself in the foot multiple times? Yes," Musk said during an interview with the BBC. "I think I should not tweet after 3 a.m. If you're going to tweet something that maybe is controversial, save it as a draft, then look at it the next day, and see if you still want to tweet it," he added.

Musk sat for the deposition on March 27. The billionaire was deposed over a lawsuit that alleges he boosted a conspiracy theory that falsely affiliated the 22-year-old Ben Brody with a neo-Nazi group.

Brody filed the lawsuit last fall after Musk promoted posts on X that falsely identified Brody as a man who had engaged in a brawl at a Pride event that had broken out between two far-right groups: the Rose City Nationalists and the Proud Boys. The groups had intended to interrupt the LGBTQ+ event.

Brody is suing for $1 million in damages, accusing Musk of damaging his reputation. The 22-year-old said he was doxxed, harassed, and even forced to flee his home at one point because of the fallout from the posts on social media.

Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Watch: OPINION: Media activist shares how Musk could change Twitter

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Elon Musk Reveals Which Star Should Play Him in Darren Aronofsky's Biopic (Exclusive)

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At the 10th Breakthrough Prize ceremony on Saturday, billionaire Elon Musk took a moment to share his thoughts on the upcoming biopic about his life, directed by acclaimed filmmaker Darren Aronofsky. 

When ET’s Deidre Behar asked who should portray him on the big screen, Musk deflected the question with his characteristic wit, replying, "Who do you think should play me?"

However, when the suggestion of Bradley Cooper was raised, Musk couldn't help but laugh, responding with his own suggestion, "Uh, how about Benedict Cumberbatch?"

Amidst chuckles, Musk then directly addressed Cumberbatch through the camera, saying, "All right, Benedict, what do you think?"

Shifting gears, Musk shared a look into his space exploration endeavors, revealing discussions with Tom Cruise about possibly filming a Mission: Impossible movie in space . 

Musk disclosed, "Tom Cruise has said he wants to do Mission: Impossible in space. We've had some discussions, but I'm not sure where his mind is at."

The controversial tech billionaire's story will be adapted into a film based on Walter Isaacson's book, Elon Musk , and directed and produced by Aronofsky.

Isaacson's Steve Jobs was previously adapted into a 2015 movie of the same name starring Michael Fassbender. As for Aronofsky, the Oscar nominee previously directed Black Swan , The Whale and Requiem for a Dream . 

A24 landed the bidding war for the project.

Musk has approved the film and its director, posting to X, "I'm Glad Darren is doing it. He is one of the best."

Puck was the first to report the movie news.

Musk, a dad of 11, is the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla. In 2022, he bought Twitter and became its CEO. He's since changed the social media site's name to X and stepped down as CEO, maintaining the role of executive chairman and chief technology officer.

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James Naismith

• Occupation: Teacher, Coach, and Inventor
• Born: November 6, 1861 in Almonte, Ontario, Canada
• Died: November 28, 1939 in Lawrence, Kansas, United States
• Best known for: Inventing the sport of basketball.
• Some people wanted to name the sport "Naismith Ball", but Naismith was determined that it be called basketball.
• He served as a chaplain for the First Kansas Infantry during World War I.
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Elon Musk's ‘self-inflicted wounds’ and other highlights from a newly released deposition

The tesla ceo has been sued by a california man targeted by a conspiracy theory the x owner boosted.

Elon Musk has never been one for restraint, whether it be announcing his latest potential Tesla and Neuralink plans or posting on X, formerly known as Twitter.

But Musk may have taken things a bit too far when he amplified claims that Ben Brody, a 22-year-old Jewish man from California, was an undercover agent in a neo-Nazi group. People online had found that Brody looked similar to an individual involved in a violent clash between rival far-right groups and neo-Nazis protesting a gay pride event near Portland, Oregon, on June 24.

“Looks like one is a college student (who wants to join the govt) and another is maybe an Antifa member, but nonetheless a probable false flag situation,” Musk tweeted a few days later , after engaging with related conspiracy theories.

In October, Brody sued the tech billionaire for defamation; the lawsuit seeks damages in excess of $1 billion and an apology and retraction from Musk. Brody’s lawyer is Mark Bankston, the attorney who successfully sued conspiracy theorist Alex Jones over his false claims related to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012.

On March 27, Musk sat down for a two-hour deposition with his attorney — Alex Spiro — and Bankston. Multiple emergency motions filed by Spiro to seal the deposition were struck down by a judge and made public Monday. It was first reported by The Huffington Post .

Here are X takeways from the newly-released deposition.

‘Self-inflicted wounds’

Throughout the deposition, Musk acknowledged the impact his X habits have on his company, testifying that he is “guilty of many self-inflicted wounds.”

Since Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion the company’s value has plunged at least 71% , according to mutual fund giant Fidelity. Musk has been criticized for platforming and promoting conspiracy theories on his social media platform.

Dozens of advertisers — including Comcast, Apple, and The Walt Disney Company — pulled their spending on X last November after reports that their companies’ ads were appearing next to pro-Nazi content and hate speech . Last year, the company lost $1.5 billion in ad revenue because of the onslaught of departures. Musk later told advertisers to “ go f[*]ck [themselves] ” during an interview with the New York Times.

“I may have done more to financially impair the company than to help it, but I certainly I — I do not guide my posts by what is financially beneficial but what I believe is interesting or important or entertaining to the public,” Musk later said after Bankston asked if he used his posts on X to benefit the company.

Musk roleplayed as his toddler

Musk, like many people on social media, has a burner account used for testing and scrolling anonymously. But, the billionaire did things a little differently than most other users.

Although the account is not named in the deposition, Musk seemingly confirmed that he used a burner account. The account @ErmnMusk was first discovered last summer using a photo of X Æ A-12, Musk and Grimes’ two-year-old son often referred to as “X,” and posting in his likeness.

“I will finally turn 3 on May 4th!” read one post, matching the real-life X’s actual birthday, Gizmodo reported. The account also asked MicroStrategy CEO and bitcoin enthusiast Michael Saylor if he liked Japanese girls and replied “I [purple heart emoji] librarians” in response to a tweet sexualizing former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison .

“No, I would not use this account,” Musk said in the deposition. “It was just used for — for testing.” He later repeated the statement, testifying that “I briefly used this account as a test account.”

Fact-checking via crowdsourcing

Musk said he doesn’t use any of his company’s internal tools for fact-checking before he interacts with it, preferring to use X’s Community Notes feature to allow users to correct any inaccurate or baseless claims.

“I think I really did this in good faith, because I would not ask for a fact-check which is what I do by adding Community Notes,” Musk said. In his initial post about Brody he had tagged Community Notes in his post, although such a note was never added.

He has repeatedly touted the success of Community Notes, saying that it requires agreement from people who historically refuse to work with each other. But he has also run afoul of the program himself and argued with Community Notes put on his posts.

Branson also brought up a number of Musk’s past controversies that came about when he promoted conspiracy theories. For example, the attorney asked Musk if he had received advice from friends or family when he replied to a false article related to an attack against Paul Pelosi.

The attorney pointed to Musk’s tweets suggesting the injuries sustained by then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband during a home invasion had been caused by a male prostitute he had met at a gay bar . He had cited an article published in the Santa Monica Observer .

“I don’t think I have a growing tendency to read fake news sites,” Musk said during the deposition when asked about a related passage in Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Tesla CEO. “I aspire to read the most accurate information possible.”

Social media rarely has a ‘meaningful negative impact’ on someone’s life

“People are attacked all the time in the media, online media, social media, but it is rare that that actually has a meaningful negative impact on their life,” Musk replied when asked whether he thought his posts had affected Brody.

The Tesla CEO has frequently gotten in trouble for criticizing people online, such as when he called a British diver who helped rescue boys trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand a “ pedo .” A jury in Los Angeles later found that Musk did not defame the diver , Vernon Unsworth.

Who’s the plaintiff again?

To give Musk some credit, it must be tough to keep track of the many lawsuits filed against him and his companies over the years; the University of California, Los Angeles even has a class dedicated to this litigation .

At the start of the deposition, Musk was asked if he “did anything wrong to Ben Brody,” to which he replied “I don’t know Ben Brody.” When Bankston asked if he was aware that Brody was suing him, Musk countered that “I think you’re the one suing.”

“I view many cases, and probably this one too, that the real plaintiff is the lawyer seeking money, like you,” Musk said. He later added that, despite having a “limited understanding” of what the lawsuit is about, he thinks “it’s really about” Bankston “getting a lot of money.”

Since the deposition was taken last month, Tesla has r eached a settlement with the family of an apple engineer who died in a 2018 crash involving the use of Tesla’s driver assistance program . Two ex-Tesla employees sued the electric vehicle company last week and accused it of committing a series of wage law violations against workers at its flagship factory in Fremont, California.

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