Elon MuskElon Musk

Born 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa. Attended Queen's University in Ontario, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania (BS Economics, BS Physics). Briefly enrolled in a Stanford PhD program but dropped out after two days to co-found Zip2 (sold for $307M), then X.com which merged into PayPal (sold to eBay for $1.5B). Founded SpaceX (2002), co-founded Tesla (2004). Was an early co-founder and funder of OpenAI (2015) but departed the board in 2018 citing conflicts with Tesla's AI work. Grew increasingly critical of OpenAI's shift to a for-profit model. Founded xAI in July 2023 with a team recruited from DeepMind, OpenAI, and Google. xAI built Grok, integrated into X (Twitter). Despite raising billions and building massive compute infrastructure (Colossus cluster), xAI faced a co-founder exodus -- by early 2026 only 2 of 12 original founders remained.