Rarely a day (or night) goes by in the current news cycle without Elon Musk dominating the headlines. The world’s richest man — with a net worth of $425 billion and counting — is addicted to posting outspoken tweets, mainly on the social media platform he owns, X — formerly known as Twitter. His companies dominate everything from electric vehicle production and space exploration, he has a bromance with the next US President, and has his sights seemingly set on disrupting other country’s political systems.
In the opening weeks of 2025 alone, Musk has attacked the UK government online, calling for Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his safeguarding minister Jess Philips to be jailed. The billionaire has been looking into how to oust Starmer before the next election, according to a report in the Financial Times. He has taken potshots at Canada’s outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
He has mooted financial support for political party Reform UK, although he appears to have switched allegiance from current leader Nigel Farage to imprisoned far-right activist Tommy Robinson. On the other side of the Channel, he has also been busy supporting the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, hosting a live interview with her on X.
World leaders are not happy. French President Emmanuel Macron has accused Musk of “directly intervening” in European elections. Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre has also voiced concern. “I find it worrying that a man with enormous access to social media and huge economic resources involves himself so directly in the internal affairs of other countries,” said Støre.
Musk is certainly not the first industrial billionaire to try his hand at putting his thumb on the political scales, but his extreme wealth and anti-regulatory ambitions make the robber barons of the 19th century look like amateurs. Why limit your ambition to building a railway monopoly and lobbying the government when you can plan to colonise another planet and influence politicians around the world?
The billionaire’s segue into political trolling and attempted kingmaking activities are a more recent development. Until recently he has appeared more concerned with building his vast business empire of space rockets, satellites and brain implants.
Musk’s biographer described him as a “man-child” who lacks empathy but possesses a maniacal drive for success at all costs, sleeping at work and demanding employees similarly sacrifice any semblance of a work-life balance. Seemingly impervious to scandal and with vast appetite for risk, Musk has become one of the most powerful people on the planet. But who is he really?
Early years
Born into a wealthy family in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971, Musk was raised by his father from the age of nine after his parents divorced. Despite persistent rumours that Elon’s father Errol owned an emerald mine, Musk Sr was in fact an emerald dealer who acquired the rights to the output of three mines in Zambia – but never owned them.
By Musk’s own account to his biographer Walter Isaacson, his childhood was unpleasant, marked by intense physical bullying at school and stints at wilderness survival camps he described as being like a "paramilitary Lord of the Flies". Errol, 79, is an avowed pro-natalist (like his son) and has at least seven known biological children, including two with Elon’s step-sister who is 40 years younger than him. Musk is estranged from his father. Errol has disputed his son’s account of his upbringing, telling the Daily Mail: “Everything he is, he owes to me.”
After school, Musk applied for a Canadian passport (his mother Maye, a model and dietitian with over 1.5 million followers of her own on Instagram, was born there) and moved there in 1989, allowing him to escape apartheid-era South Africa’s compulsory military conscription. He took odd jobs on a farm and at lumbermill, before enrolling at university in Ontario. Two years later he was able to transfer to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution in the US, where he got degrees in physics and economics.
Entrepreneurial success
Musk was accepted onto a graduate program at Stanford University but, in the grand tradition of most tech entrepreneurs, dropped out in 1995 to found his first company Zip2, which licensed digital city guides to newspapers. Zip2 sold in 1999 for $307 million (£250 million), with Musk receiving a 7 per cent share of $22 million (£17.8 million). Despite Musk’s current anti-immigration stance, during this period he may have been working in the US without the appropriate visa, per a 2024 Washington Post investigation.
Musk channeled some of the funds from the sale of Zip2 into his next start-up, X.com (Musk loves the letter, which he gave one of his children as a name, and re-christened Twitter once he bought it), an online banking and e-mail payment service. In 2000, Musk merged X.com with Confinity, the company co-founded by fellow tech entrepreneur and political activist Peter Thiel (current net worth $15.4 billion), which had its own online money transfer service PayPal.
Originally, Musk was made CEO of Confinity and Thiel resigned following a disagreement over which software to use, but the board fired Musk and instated Theil as CEO. Musk retained his shares in the company, re-named PayPal, and received $176 million from its $1.5 billion acquisition from eBay in 2002. While their early business relationship may have been contentious, Theil has recently praised Musk for paving the way for other tech investors to come out in support of Donald Trump and credited his former partner for an uncanny appetite for risk-taking. “You should never bet against Elon,” said Thiel.
Reaching for the stars
The entrepreneur's next project was SpaceX (again, Musk loves the letter X), a rocket company he founded in 2002 with $100 million of his own funds. Musk had become interested in space exploration, particularly the opportunity to colonise Earth’s nearest planet. He’d travelled Moscow in search of a refurbished intercontinental missile he could re-purpose to send mice to Mars (yes, really) but baulked at the prices the Russians had quoted him. Instead, he decided to build his own.
Despite failed launches and a brush with bankruptcy, today SpaceX is valued at $350 billion and has contracts with NASA. It will be SpaceX technology that takes the International Space Station (ISS) out of orbit when it’s retired in 2030. Its subsidiary company, Starlink, operates a constellation of almost 7,000 low-orbit satellites that provide internet coverage. But this second space age success has had a very human toll. An investigation by Reuters discovered 600 previously undocumented workplace injuries at SpaceX sites, including crushed and amputated limbs and, in one tragic case, death.
And it’s not the only issue likely to dent Musk’s market share. Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin was this morning set to launch his space rocket New Glenn, a potential challenger to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The launch was, however, called off, due to a ‘vehicle subsystem issue'.
Space rockets aren’t Musk’s only large-scale transport venture. At a meeting of the Mars Society, a nonprofit dedicated to colonising Mars, Musk met Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who had founded a company dedicated to making electric cars a luxury item. Musk became an early investor in Tesla in 2004 as a majority stakeholder and member of its board of directors. But by 2007, Musk had ousted Eberhard, and Tarpenning quit soon afterwards. After this boardroom coup, Musk assumed the role of founder and forged ahead with a ruthless work ethic. He boasted about sleeping on the factory floor at points during the Model 3 production.
Bright ideas, no bright colours
Tesla has withstood multiple scandals to become an electric car behemoth. A 2017 investigation from the Guardian looked into allegations from female engineers that they were being harassed at Tesla factories, with one woman describing an area of a factory as the “predator zone”. Allegations of workplace injuries being downplayed surfaced in a Bay Area nonprofit RevealNews.org, which also claimed that Musk dislikes the colour yellow so much that safety markings on the factory floor had been painted in grey.
Tesla rebuffed the claims, but a more recent report on SpaceX saw previous supervisors claim that brightly coloured safety clothing had been banned and machinery repainted from industrial safety yellow to grey or blue. Tesla is currently valued at a market cap of over $1 trillion, putting it in the top 10 most valuable companies in the world.
A one-man baby boom
A father of 12, recently Musk is rarely seen without his son, X, perched on his shoulders. Like his estranged father, the billionaire is a pro-natalist – someone who believes (white, wealthy) people have a duty to have as many children as possible. “One of the biggest risks to civilisation is the low birth rate and the rapidly declining birthrate,” Musk once told the CEO Council of the Wall Street Journal.
Musk had six children with his first wife, Justine Musk, who he met when they were students at Queen's University in Ontario. “I was not the only woman he pursued, but even after he transferred to Wharton he kept sending roses,” Justine wrote in her tell-all story for Marie Claire. The couple married in 2000. Tragically their first child, Nevada Alexander, died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDs) when he was just 10 weeks old. They went on to have five more children – twins Griffan and Vivian followed by triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian – via IVF before they divorced in 2008. Vivian, who is trans, is now estranged from her father over his anti-trans views.
That same year, Musk got engaged to the actress Talulah Riley. They wed in the Scottish highlands in 2010, divorced in 2012, but married again the next year. Their second divorce was finalised in 2013, and Riley went on to marry actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster last year.
Musk went on to have an on-off relationship with actress Amber Heard. “Elon and I had a beautiful relationship, and we have a beautiful friendship now, one that was based on our core values,” Heard told People magazine in 2018, after they finally split. But last year it was alleged in an investigation by Tortoise Media that Musk had used a private investigator to spy on Amber with drones while she was filming on location in Australia.
After meeting over Twitter, Musk began dating the musician Claire Boucher, aka Grimes, in 2018. They welcomed their first child X Æ A-12, or X for short, in 2020. Although the couple appeared to have split afterwards, in a bombshell interview with Vanity Fair in 2021 Grimes revealed they had another child, Exa "Y" Dark Sideræl, via a surrogate. The couple had their third child, Techno Mechanicus, via a surrogate in 2022. They are currently engaged in a custody battle over their three children.
A few weeks before their daughter was born, Musk became a father to twins called Strider and Azure. The children were conceived via IVF with Shivon Zilis, an employee at his company Neuralink. “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis," Musk posted on twitter about the birth of the twins. "A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” Musk and Zilis had another baby via IVF in June 2024, but did not announce the name or gender.
Last year there were rumours that Musk bought a $35 million compound in Austin, Texas, for all his children that are still under 18 to live in, although Musk has denied the reports. The billionaire has also allegedly offered “his own sperm to friends and acquaintances”, according to a report in the New York Times.
Brain implants and pipe dreams
Electric cars and space exploration may be his core businesses, but Musk has several other pioneering business interests. In 2016, he founded Neuralink with $100 million of his own money. The startup that aims to integrate AI in the human brain via implanted devices. MIT called the project “neuroscience theater” and trials on monkeys were dogged with claims of animal cruelty and staff complaining that Musk’s tight deadlines had lead to botched experiments.
In 2022 a federal investigation into animal welfare was launched after 1,500 monkeys, pigs and sheep were killed during experiments. The next year the Food and Drug Association approved a six-year-long human trial for Neuralink, and in early 2024 Musk claimed the first human patient to have the chip implanted in his brain could use it to play chess.
Musk founded The Boring Company in 2017, with plans to build looping transport tunnels under major cities to ameliorate traffic jams. So far the company has completed a 1.7 mile tunnel under the Las Vegas convention centre, and a 1.14 mile tunnel in Las Vegas. The Boring Company is currently valued at $7 billion.
The posts heard around the world
The billionaire's most recent business venture was the acquisition of Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion. Musk immediately cut staff by 80 per cent, restructured the company, and re-christened it X. His profile has 211.6 million followers, as of publication, and the BBC calculated that he posts on the platform once every 15 minutes when he’s awake. Before he purchased the site he posted 50 times a week on average, according to the Economist.
Now he makes upwards of 220 weekly posts, with an increasingly political – and antagonistic – bent. The long-term effects of the world’s richest man publicly targeting politicians remains to be seen, but Musk’s obsession with engagement and increasingly right wing politics have been heralded from many quarters as a threat to democracy itself. So far only Brazil has had the temerity to (temporarily) block X in retaliation against Musk.
