Who is Elon Musk and what is his net worth?

It seems like not a day goes by without billionaire Elon Musk making headlines - and in the future, we may be calling him a trillionaire. The boss of SpaceX, Tesla, and X (formerly Twitter) is the world's richest person. He became the first person to achieve a net worth of more than half a trillion dollars (£370.9bn) in October 2025, according to Forbes, and a month later, Tesla shareholders approved a record-breaking pay deal that could be worth $1 trillion.

The planned flotation of SpaceX, which builds space exploration rockets and infrastructure but also owns xAI and Starlink, could push his net worth to about $1tn. But as well as his business ventures, Musk is also known for using his social media platform to air his views on a vast array of topics, particularly politics. In early 2024, his reach expanded further after Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election - in which the Tesla executive played a key but controversial role - before their relationship imploded in a bitter feud.

It's not just in the US where Musk has waded into political controversy - with posts and comments about current affairs in the UK, Germany, and other European states frequently stoking the ire of politicians across the pond. His foray into politics, however, appeared to come at a cost to his businesses. Analysts attributed slumps in Tesla sales in 2025 to be partly due to customers turning against Musk.

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk showed his talents for entrepreneurship early, going door-to-door with his brother selling homemade chocolate Easter eggs and developing his first computer game at the age of 12. He has described his childhood as difficult, affected by his parents' divorce, bullying at school, and his own difficulty picking up on social cues because of Asperger's Syndrome. At the earliest opportunity, he left home for college, moving to Canada and then the US, where he studied economics and physics at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League college.

In a 2010 essay for Marie Claire, his first wife, Justine Musk, a writer whom he met in college and married in 2000, wrote that even before making his millions Musk was "not a man who takes no for an answer". "The will to compete and dominate, that made him so successful in business, did not magically shut off when he came home," she recalled, adding that he told her while dancing at their wedding, "I am the alpha in this relationship." After being accepted to a physics graduate degree programme at Stanford University, Musk quickly dropped out and founded two technology start-ups during the "dotcom boom" of the 1990s. These included a web software firm and an online banking company that eventually became PayPal, which was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5bn (£1.2bn).

He ploughed his fortune into a new rocket company, SpaceX - which he aimed to make a cost-effective alternative to Nasa - and a new electric car company, Tesla, where he chaired the board until becoming chief executive in 2008. The two firms have been credited with upending their industries, even as they sometimes veered close to financial collapse. Other business ventures include his takeover of social media platform Twitter in October 2022.