Time names Elon Musk its 2021 Person of the Year
Time magazine picked Musk for the 2021 honor, citing his influence on electric cars, spaceflight and public conversation.
Profile
Elon Musk
Elon Musk, born June 28, 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, is an entrepreneur who co-founded Zip2 and X.com (which became part of PayPal), founded SpaceX, and leads Tesla as CEO. He also co-founded Neuralink and The Boring Company, founded xAI, and owns X (formerly Twitter).
- Born June 28, 1971
- Roles CEO of Tesla and SpaceX
Career in brief
Musk's career runs in three acts. In the 1990s he built and sold two internet companies: Zip2, an online city-guide business, and X.com, which merged with Confinity and became PayPal. The sale of PayPal to eBay in 2002 made him wealthy.
He then put most of that money into two capital-hungry bets: SpaceX, to make rockets cheaper through reuse, and Tesla, to prove electric cars could be desirable. Both nearly ran out of money in 2008, and both survived to become industry leaders.
Since the mid-2010s he has added more ventures: The Boring Company for tunneling, Neuralink for brain-computer interfaces, xAI for artificial intelligence, and, since 2022, the social platform X. He also stirs public debate through his posts and appearances.
Stories 10
Elon Musk hosts Saturday Night Live
The CEO took the stage at NBC's sketch show on Mother's Day weekend, an appearance that drew a lot of attention.
Musk overtakes Jeff Bezos as the world's richest person
A surge in Tesla's share price made Musk the top name on the main billionaire rankings in January 2021.
Musk co-chairs the launch of OpenAI
OpenAI was announced as a non-profit AI research lab with Elon Musk and Sam Altman as co-chairs.
Musk publishes the Hyperloop concept
A white paper proposed passenger pods in low-pressure tubes, and Musk invited others to build it.
December 2008: the week SpaceX and Tesla both survived
With both companies close to running out of money, a NASA contract and a Tesla financing round arrived within days of each other.
eBay agrees to buy PayPal for $1.5 billion
The sale of PayPal, which grew out of Musk's X.com, gave him the funds to start SpaceX and invest in Tesla.
Musk founds X.com, the online bank that became PayPal
Elon Musk's second company aimed to reinvent banking online, and after a merger it grew into PayPal.
Compaq buys Zip2, Elon Musk's first company, for $307 million
Elon Musk's first startup was sold in a deal worth more than $300 million, funding his next ventures.
Elon Musk is born in Pretoria, South Africa
The early life of the entrepreneur, from a boyhood programmer in South Africa to university in North America.