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Elon Reeve Musk (born June 28, 1971) is a South African-born American business magnate, engineer, and investor whose ventures have shaped the trajectory of modern artificial intelligence. He is co-founder of OpenAI, founder and CEO of xAI, CEO of Tesla, founder of the brain-computer interface company Neuralink, CEO of SpaceX, and owner of the social platform X (formerly Twitter). As of early 2026 he is the wealthiest person in the world by a wide margin, with a net worth estimated between $636 billion (Bloomberg) and roughly $811 billion (Forbes), driven primarily by his stakes in SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI.[1][2]
Musk's relevance to AI spans more than a decade. He provided early funding to DeepMind before its acquisition by Google, co-founded and served on the board of OpenAI from 2015 until 2018, has guided Tesla's vision-only autonomous driving program through Full Self-Driving (FSD), launched the humanoid robot program Tesla Optimus, founded the brain-computer interface company Neuralink, built one of the largest GPU superclusters in the world (Colossus, in Memphis), and after a public falling-out with Sam Altman sued OpenAI in 2024 over its for-profit conversion. His public statements have oscillated between warnings that AI poses an existential risk and aggressive efforts to outpace rival labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. He is one of the few people to have a meaningful operational stake in nearly every major branch of applied AI: foundation models, chips, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and neural interfaces.
Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on June 28, 1971, to engineer Errol Musk and model and dietitian Maye Musk. His parents divorced when he was about 10. He emigrated to Canada in 1989, attended Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received bachelor's degrees in physics and economics in 1997. He was admitted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University in 1995 but dropped out within days to pursue startups.[3]
His early companies were not AI-focused. In 1995 he co-founded the web software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal, sold to Compaq in 1999 for $307 million. He co-founded the online payments company X.com in 1999, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to become PayPal. eBay acquired PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion in stock, and Musk used the proceeds to start SpaceX in 2002 and to invest in Tesla in 2004, where he became chairman and later CEO.[3]
Musk first crossed paths with the modern AI research community through Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of DeepMind. The two met at a conference around 2012, and Musk became one of DeepMind's early outside investors during the company's Series A in 2013, alongside Peter Thiel and Founders Fund. Musk introduced DeepMind to Larry Page of Google. According to multiple accounts, including Walter Isaacson's 2023 biography of Musk, Page's casual remark that he was relaxed about machine superintelligence (and at one point allegedly accused Musk of being a "specieist" for favoring humans over digital intelligences) shocked Musk and helped crystallize his concern about AI safety.[4][5]
When Google acquired DeepMind in January 2014 for around $650 million, Musk and Luke Nosek tried to organize a counter-bid to keep the company independent. They failed, and the deal closed under Google's umbrella. Musk would later cite the Google acquisition as the moment he became convinced that the leading edge of AI was about to be concentrated inside a single advertising company. That conviction set the stage for the founding of OpenAI.[4]
In December 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI as a non-profit research laboratory along with Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman, Andrej Karpathy, and others. Musk and Altman served as co-chairs. The founding pledge was up to $1 billion in commitments from Musk, Altman, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Jessica Livingston, Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and others, with the explicit mission of building AGI "in a way that is safe and beneficial to humanity." In its early years, OpenAI was structured as a 501(c)(3) and shared most of its research openly.[6][7]
Musk's actual cash contributions, by OpenAI's own account, totaled less than $45 million during his tenure on the board, well below the headline pledge. The figure became a contested point in the later litigation between Musk and the company.[7]
Musk resigned from OpenAI's board on February 20, 2018. The publicly stated reason was a potential conflict of interest with Tesla's growing AI work, especially Autopilot and FSD, which were beginning to recruit from a similar talent pool. Internal accounts and OpenAI's own published timeline tell a more complicated story. According to OpenAI, Musk had argued that the lab needed dramatically more capital and was unlikely to keep up with Google DeepMind without either merging into Tesla or becoming a for-profit under his control. When the other founders rejected the merger, Musk left and reduced his funding commitments. He told the team he believed their probability of success was roughly zero, and that he intended to build a competing AGI effort inside Tesla.[7][8]
The departure mattered. OpenAI restructured as a "capped-profit" entity in 2019, took a $1 billion investment from Microsoft, and went on to release GPT-3 (2020), GPT-3.5/ChatGPT (2022), and GPT-4 (2023). Musk would spend the next several years arguing publicly that the lab he helped create had been hijacked from its founding mission. That narrative became the legal core of his 2024 lawsuit against OpenAI, Altman, and Brockman.
Tesla's earliest production driver-assistance system, the first generation of Autopilot launched in October 2015, was built around computer-vision technology from the Israeli company Mobileye. After a fatal Model S Autopilot crash in May 2016 in Florida, Mobileye and Tesla publicly broke off their partnership in July 2016, with Mobileye citing concerns that Tesla was "pushing the envelope in terms of safety." Tesla countered that Mobileye objected to Tesla's plan to build its own vision stack.[9]
From that point forward, Musk pushed Tesla onto a deliberately camera-only path. Hardware 2 launched in October 2016 used Nvidia's Drive PX2 and Tesla's own software. By 2021 Tesla had removed radar from new Model 3 and Model Y vehicles in North America, and by 2022 it had also removed ultrasonic sensors, betting entirely on "Tesla Vision": eight cameras feeding a unified neural network. This vision-only thesis put Tesla in direct philosophical opposition to Waymo, Cruise, and most of the rest of the autonomous-driving industry, which use lidar, radar, and HD maps as redundant sensing layers. Musk has publicly called lidar a "crutch" and "a fool's errand," arguing that humans drive with two eyes and that any general solution to driving must therefore be solvable from cameras alone.[9]
Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) software has rolled out in iterative beta releases since October 2020. Despite the marketing name, FSD remains a Level 2 driver-assistance system that requires constant human supervision. The company has missed every public timeline Musk has set for true autonomy, including pledges in 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2024 that robotaxis were roughly a year away.
FSD v12, released to customers starting in early 2024, marked a real architectural shift. Tesla replaced more than 300,000 lines of hand-written C++ control code with an end-to-end neural network trained on video clips of human driving. FSD v13 (late 2024) and v14 (2025) extended the same approach with more parameters and longer context windows. The end-to-end thesis, that the car should learn to drive directly from video data rather than from explicit rules, mirrors the trajectory of large language models away from symbolic systems.[10]
On October 10, 2024, at the "We, Robot" event at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California, Tesla unveiled the Cybercab, a two-seat purpose-built robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals. About 20 prototype Cybercabs gave attendees autonomous rides around the studio lot. Tesla launched a limited Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas in mid-2025 using modified Model Y vehicles with safety monitors in the front passenger seat. Cybercab production was repeatedly pushed; Musk pledged April 2026 production starts at Gigafactory Texas, with first units produced in February 2026.[11]
To train its FSD neural networks, Tesla announced a custom AI training supercomputer called Dojo at its first AI Day in August 2021, built around in-house D1 chips. Dojo was Musk's bet that Tesla could not depend solely on Nvidia GPUs at the scale of compute required for autonomous driving. Tesla brought the first Dojo cabinets online in 2023.
In parallel, Tesla deployed a much larger conventional Nvidia cluster called Cortex (around 50,000 H100 GPUs by 2024) and continued to buy Nvidia hardware for FSD training. In August 2025, Bloomberg reported that Tesla had disbanded the Dojo team and shut down the project. Musk later confirmed the decision on X, writing that "once it became clear that all paths converged to AI6, I had to shut down Dojo and make some tough personnel choices, as Dojo 2 was now an evolutionary dead end." Tesla's chip strategy refocused on the AI5 and AI6 inference and training chips, with a $16.5 billion supply agreement signed with Samsung in July 2025 to manufacture AI6 on a 2nm process at Samsung's Taylor, Texas fab. Tesla taped out AI5 in April 2026.[12][13]
Musk announced the Tesla Bot, later named Optimus, at AI Day on August 19, 2021, with a person in a robot suit on stage as a placeholder. A semi-functional prototype walked on stage at AI Day 2 in September 2022. In December 2023, Tesla released a video of Optimus Generation 2 with smoother gait, improved hands, and the ability to perform tasks like a slow yoga balance and an egg-poaching demonstration.
Optimus appeared at Tesla's We, Robot event in October 2024, where the units bartended and danced. Some were teleoperated by humans behind the scenes, a fact Tesla disclosed only after journalists pressed. By mid-2025 Tesla had built only "hundreds" of Optimus units, well behind Musk's stated 2024 target of thousands. Musk has repeatedly called Optimus the largest long-term value creation opportunity in Tesla's history, projecting eventual annual production of 10 million units. Optimus v2.3 was demonstrated publicly outside the United States for the first time in London and Berlin in December 2025. Optimus version 3 was deferred to a later unveiling closer to the start of mass production.[14]
Musk filed papers to incorporate X.AI Corp. in Nevada on March 9, 2023, and announced the company publicly on July 12, 2023. He recruited the founding technical team primarily from DeepMind, Google Brain, OpenAI, Microsoft, and the University of Toronto, including Igor Babuschkin (DeepMind, OpenAI), Christian Szegedy, Yuhuai "Tony" Wu, Greg Yang, Toby Pohlen, and Jimmy Ba. Dan Hendrycks of the Center for AI Safety joined as an advisor. The company's stated mission is to "understand the true nature of the universe."[15]
xAI's framing leaned heavily on a critique of competitors. Musk argued that ChatGPT and similar models had been tuned toward what he called "woke" responses and that xAI would build a more "truth-seeking" alternative. The first product, Grok, debuted on X (Premium+) in November 2023 with a deliberately irreverent personality and a real-time connection to X data, then a unique feature among major chatbots.[15]
| Model | Release date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Grok-1 | Nov 4, 2023 (announce) / Mar 17, 2024 (open weights) | 314B-parameter MoE; weights released under Apache 2.0 |
| Grok-1.5 | Mar 28, 2024 | 128k context, improved reasoning |
| Grok-1.5V | Apr 12, 2024 | First multimodal Grok with vision |
| Grok-2 / Grok-2 mini | Aug 13, 2024 | Improved reasoning, tool use; image gen via Flux |
| Aurora (image model) | Dec 9, 2024 | xAI's in-house autoregressive MoE image generator |
| Grok 3 / Grok 3 mini | Feb 17, 2025 | Trained on first Memphis Colossus build; "Think" reasoning mode |
| Grok 4 / Grok 4 Heavy | Jul 9-10, 2025 | Multi-agent "Heavy" config; topped Humanity's Last Exam |
| Grok Imagine | Aug 4, 2025 | Aurora-based image-to-video generator for SuperGrok |
| grok-code-fast-1 | Aug 2025 | Coding-specialized model |
| Grok 4.20 (beta) | Late 2025 / early 2026 | Iterative quality and safety fixes |
Grok 4 Heavy, the multi-agent variant of Grok 4, was the first publicly announced model to clear 50 percent on Humanity's Last Exam, a 2,500-question PhD-level benchmark, scoring 50.7 percent on the text-only subset (44.4 percent on the full benchmark with tools). xAI claimed top scores on ARC-AGI-2 and several mathematics benchmarks at launch.[16][17]
In December 2024, xAI shipped Aurora, an autoregressive mixture-of-experts image generator built in-house, replacing the third-party Flux model that Grok had been using. Aurora was notable for its photorealism and its willingness to render copyrighted characters and public figures with far fewer guardrails than competing systems, which created its own controversies. Aurora was added to the xAI API in March 2025. Grok Imagine, a text-to-image and image-to-video product built on Aurora, launched on iOS for SuperGrok and Premium+ subscribers on August 4, 2025.[18]
xAI built its first supercluster, Colossus, in a former Electrolux factory in Memphis, Tennessee, in 122 days during 2024, with Dell and Supermicro as primary integrators. The initial build used roughly 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs and came online in mid-2024. Throughout 2025 Colossus expanded with Nvidia H200s and Blackwell GB200/GB300 systems. By June 2025 the cluster reportedly held 150,000 H100s, 50,000 H200s, and 30,000 GB200s.
In March 2025 xAI bought a one-million-square-foot warehouse in Memphis as the site for Colossus 2, billed as the world's first gigawatt-scale AI supercluster. Reports through late 2025 and early 2026 indicated Colossus 2 would integrate hundreds of thousands of GB200 and GB300 systems. Musk has publicly targeted one million GPUs by the end of 2026 and three million by the end of 2027.[19][20]
Colossus drew criticism from Memphis residents and environmental groups for its on-site natural gas turbines, which the Southern Environmental Law Center alleged were operating without Clean Air Act permits. xAI eventually applied for permits and committed to grid power, but the dispute remained politically charged through 2025.
| Date | Round | Amount | Valuation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 2023 | Series A | ~$135M | ~$673M |
| May 2024 | Series B | $6B | $24B |
| Dec 2024 | Series C | $6B | $50B |
| Jul 2025 | Debt + equity | $10B ($5B debt) | ~$150B |
| Sep 2025 | Equity raise | ~$10B | ~$200B |
| Jan 2026 | Series E | $20B | $230B |
xAI's Series E in January 2026 included Nvidia, Cisco, Fidelity, Valor Equity Partners, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, Baron Capital, and a roughly $2 billion commitment from Tesla itself. The Tesla investment was unusual in that it was an automaker buying preferred stock in a sister AI company controlled by the same CEO, raising governance questions among Tesla shareholders.[21]
In February 2026, SpaceX announced it would acquire xAI in an all-stock transaction valuing xAI at roughly $250 billion and SpaceX at $1 trillion, creating a combined entity worth about $1.25 trillion. Reported as the largest merger in history, the deal converted Tesla's recent $2 billion xAI investment into a minority equity stake in SpaceX.[22]
Musk co-founded the brain-computer interface company Neuralink in 2016. Its goal is a high-bandwidth implantable interface between the human brain and computers, initially for patients with paralysis and eventually, Musk argues, as a way for humans to keep up with advanced AI through "high-bandwidth" symbiosis.
The N1 implant uses 64 flexible polymer threads carrying 1,024 electrodes that record from neurons in the motor cortex. The threads are placed by a custom surgical robot, R1. After years of animal trials and a 2023 FDA approval for first-in-human use, Neuralink performed its first human implant in late January 2024 at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. The recipient, Noland Arbaugh (publicly identified as Participant 1, or "P1"), is a 29-year-old quadriplegic who was paralyzed below the shoulders in a 2016 diving accident.[23]
In a March 20, 2024 livestream, Arbaugh used the implant to control a computer cursor and play online chess and the video game Civilization VI. Within roughly a month of surgery, however, a number of the threads retracted from his cortex. Neuralink told him only about 15 percent of threads remained reliably reading neural signals. The company adjusted its decoding algorithms to recover much of the lost performance and changed its surgical technique for subsequent implants. By July 2024 Arbaugh's implant had stabilized.
Neuralink expanded enrollment through 2024 and 2025. By September 2025, Reuters confirmed twelve human recipients across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates. By January 2026 Neuralink had reached its target of approximately 20 implants enrolled in clinical trials for the "Telepathy" implant. Future programs Neuralink has publicly described include "Blindsight," an experimental visual cortex implant, and a deep-brain stimulator program.[23][24]
Musk began accumulating Twitter shares in early 2022, disclosed a 9.2 percent stake on April 4, 2022, and made an unsolicited offer to take the company private at $54.20 per share on April 14, 2022. Twitter's board accepted the offer on April 25 at a total enterprise value of about $44 billion. Musk attempted to back out of the deal in July 2022 over disagreements about spam-bot accounts; Twitter sued, and Musk closed the acquisition on October 27, 2022, on the original terms. He immediately fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, and general counsel Sean Edgett.[25]
The Twitter acquisition is directly material to AI history for two reasons. First, Musk renamed the platform "X" and began using its real-time post stream as an exclusive training and inference data source for Grok, a structural advantage no other major AI lab had. Second, in March 2025, xAI formally acquired X in an all-stock transaction that valued X at $33 billion ($45 billion including roughly $12 billion of debt) and xAI at $80 billion, with the combined entity valued at $113 billion. The merger gave xAI direct ownership of the X data pipeline and let Musk consolidate ownership of his AI and social-media holdings under a single company.[26]
Musk filed his first lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman in San Francisco Superior Court on February 29, 2024. The complaint alleged breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and unfair business practices, claiming that OpenAI had abandoned its founding non-profit mission by partnering closely with Microsoft and pursuing for-profit conversion. Musk withdrew the suit in June 2024 without prejudice.
In August 2024 he refiled a substantially expanded complaint in federal court in the Northern District of California, this time also naming Microsoft and adding LinkedIn co-founder and former OpenAI board member Reid Hoffman among the defendants. The refiled case alleged racketeering and antitrust violations as well as breach of contract, with Musk's lawyers seeking up to $134 billion in damages and a forced unwinding of the OpenAI for-profit conversion. The case proceeded through discovery and motions practice through 2025. Jury selection in Musk v. Altman began in late April 2026 in federal court in Oakland, California, before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.[27][28]
Musk has been one of the most prominent public voices warning about AI for more than a decade.
The contradiction between these warnings and his own accelerating efforts at xAI, Tesla AI, and Neuralink has been a regular subject of commentary. Musk's stated answer is that someone determined to build AGI would do so regardless of his own actions, and that it is therefore safer for him to be in the race than to cede the field to labs he believes are less aligned.
| Company / project | Role | Year | Status (early 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepMind | Early investor (Series A) | 2013 | Exited 2014 via Google acquisition |
| OpenAI | Co-founder, co-chair, board | 2015-2018 | Resigned board Feb 2018; suing OpenAI since 2024 |
| Tesla Autopilot / FSD | CEO | 2014-present | Vision-only, end-to-end nets, robotaxi launch |
| Tesla Dojo | CEO | 2021-2025 | Shut down Aug 2025; replaced by AI5/AI6 program |
| Tesla Optimus | CEO | 2021-present | Hundreds built; mass production targeted post-2026 |
| Neuralink | Co-founder, CEO | 2016-present | ~20 human implants by Jan 2026 |
| X (Twitter) | Owner / CTO | 2022-present | Acquired Oct 2022; sold to xAI Mar 2025 |
| xAI | Founder, CEO | 2023-present | $230B valuation; Grok 4 Heavy; Colossus 2 |
| Grok for Government | Owner via xAI | 2025-present | $200M DoD contract |
| SpaceX-xAI | Owner / CEO | 2026 | $1.25T combined entity after merger |
| Date | Event | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Feb 2018 | Resigns OpenAI board | Cites Tesla AI conflict; later disputed |
| Mar 2023 | Signs FLI "pause" letter | Founds xAI weeks later |
| Aug 2024 | Diverts Nvidia chips from Tesla to xAI | Reported by CNBC; raised governance concerns |
| May 2025 | Grok "white genocide" replies | xAI blames "unauthorized" prompt change |
| Jul 2025 | Grok "MechaHitler" incident | Antisemitic outputs after system-prompt update; xAI rolls back |
| Aug 2025 | Tesla disbands Dojo | Strategy refocused on AI5 / AI6 + Samsung partnership |
| Aug 2025 | Grok system prompt published | xAI publishes prompt after Hitler-praise outputs |
| 2024-2026 | OpenAI lawsuits | Two filings; trial begins April 2026 |
| 2025-2026 | Memphis Colossus air-permit dispute | Southern Environmental Law Center challenges gas turbines |
The most damaging single incident was Grok's behavior on July 8-9, 2025, when, following an over-the-weekend system-prompt change instructing the model not to "shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect," Grok began praising Adolf Hitler, calling itself "MechaHitler," and producing explicitly antisemitic content. xAI removed the offending instructions, made the system prompt public, and apologized. The incident drew bipartisan criticism in the U.S. Congress, including a letter from Representative Josh Gottheimer and others demanding answers about the $200 million Pentagon contract awarded to xAI weeks earlier.[31]
Musk has been the world's wealthiest person, by most measures, since 2021. The bulk of his net worth is tied to his stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. Forbes pegged him at roughly $811 billion at the start of 2026 and Bloomberg's index at roughly $636 billion as of March 2026, the difference reflecting different methodologies for valuing private SpaceX-xAI shares.[1][2] After the Delaware Supreme Court restored his $115 billion Tesla compensation package in December 2025, and after the SpaceX-xAI merger valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion in February 2026, his Forbes-measured wealth crossed $800 billion for the first time. He is more than three times wealthier than the next person on the Forbes list (Larry Page).[1]
That wealth is materially relevant to AI because it gives Musk an unusual ability to bootstrap compute. The Memphis Colossus build was financed in significant part by his personal credit, and xAI has used SpaceX as both an equity investor (in 2025) and ultimately as an acquirer (in 2026). Few other AI founders have access to a comparable balance sheet without going through public capital markets or strategic partners like Microsoft or Amazon.
Views on Musk's role in AI vary sharply. Supporters credit him with helping launch the modern AGI era by funding DeepMind, co-founding OpenAI, popularizing AI risk concerns, and demonstrating with xAI that a small team could reach competitive frontier-model performance in less than two years. Critics argue that his warnings about AI risk are inconsistent with his behavior, that xAI has shipped frontier models with weaker safety testing than its peers, that his ownership of X gives Grok unfair training-data access, and that the Grok antisemitism incidents reflect deeper governance failures.
Walter Isaacson's 2023 biography, the most widely cited primary source on Musk's internal thinking about AI, should be used with caution: it was written with Musk's cooperation and access, and several of its narrative claims (especially around the OpenAI dispute and the Twitter acquisition) have been challenged by other reporting and by court filings.[5]