SpaceX

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1971 and emigrated to Canada in 1989 before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned bachelor's degrees in physics and economics. He briefly enrolled in a Stanford physics PhD program but left after two days to pursue internet ventures, co-founding the web-software company Zip2 (sold to Compaq for $307M in 1999) and the online-payments company X.com, which merged with Confinity to become PayPal (sold to eBay in 2002). With roughly $100M from the PayPal sale, Musk founded SpaceX in May 2002 to lower the cost of access to space and ultimately make life multiplanetary, serving as CEO and Chief Engineer. He also leads Tesla and has founded or co-founded Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI.