Elon Musk is a prominent entrepreneur, known for driving innovation across industries ranging from online payments and transportation to aerospace and neural technology. He’s taken big swings with projects that aim to push humanity forward, such as commercializing electric vehicles, restoring communication abilities to non-verbal people with paralysis and developing reusable rockets to lower space travel costs. And his long-term goals include colonizing Marks and building artificial general intelligence.
Musk is also a polarizing figure, though. He openly shares his controversial opinions on social media, and he’s been both plaintiff and defendant in countless lawsuits. In the name of pursuing his larger-than-life ambitions, he’s burned bridges, flouted regulations and fallen short of some of his more audacious goals.
Divisive as he may be, Musk remains an undeniable force in the tech industry. In this article, we’ll trace Musk’s entire entrepreneurial journey — from his early days as a scrappy startup founder to becoming the world’s richest man, with six major companies to his name.
Elon Musk's Companies
- Tesla
- SpaceX
- X
- Neuralink
- The Boring Company
- xAI
Elon Musk’s Companies
1. Tesla
Founded: 2003 (joined 2004)
Focus: Electric vehicles, energy storage, solar products
Musk’s Role: CEO and product architect
Tesla has played a key role in bringing electric vehicles into the mainstream.It helped revolutionize lithium-ion battery technology and developed EVs with longer range and more horsepower than any of its predecessors.
Contrary to popular belief, Musk was not part of the founding team of Tesla. The company was started in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk, who led an investment round for Tesla in 2004, took over as CEO in 2008. After Eberhard left the company, he sued Musk for representing himself as the founder of the company. The dispute was eventually settled, with both parties agreeing Musk could continue using the co-founder title.
Although Eberhard and Tarpenning laid the groundwork, Musk led Tesla through its most pivotal phase of growth, overseeing the development of the Model S, Model 3 and other major projects that cemented the company’s commercial success.
2. SpaceX
Founded: 2002
Focus: Space transportation and satellite internet
Musk’s Role: Founder and CEO
Founded by Musk in 2002, SpaceX has transformed the aerospace industry with its reusable rockets, greatly reducing the cost of launches and democratizing access for private companies. As of May 2025, Falcon 9 — the world’s first orbital-class reusable rocket — has transported thousands of payloads over the course of 479 missions. And in 2012, its Dragon spacecraft became the first private vessel to dock with the International Space Station. Meanwhile, the company’s Starlink project — a network of more than 8,000 satellites — is helping to bring mobile broadband to underserved and remote areas around the world.
Looking ahead, Musk hopes to eventually colonize Mars with Starship, a reusable spacecraft designed to transport both crew and cargo on long-distance space missions.
3. X
Founded: 2006 (acquired and rebranded in 2022)
Focus: Social media
Musk’s Role: Executive chairman and chief technology officer
X (formerly known as Twitter) is a social media platform originally founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. Over the years, the site gained popularity for its real-time, publicly searchable posts, which were originally limited to 140 characters and later expanded to 280 characters.
Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion to put an end to what he saw as censorship on the platform. Under Musks’s leadership, Twitter changed its name to X, loosened its content moderation policies and allowed users to become verified through paid subscriptions. Musk stepped down as CEO in June 2023 and was replaced by Linda Yaccarino, but he still serves as the company’s executive chairman and chief technology officer.
In 2024, X was acquired by Musk’s generative AI company, xAI, to help train its Grok chatbot, which is now integrated with the social media platform.
4. Neuralink
Founded: 2016
Focus: Brain-computer interfaces
Musk’s Role: Founder, Co-CEO and spokesperson
Neuralink is developing a brain-computer interface designed to enable people to control digital devices with their thoughts. The company’s first product, called the N1, has been implanted in three people as of May 2025, including a non-verbal man with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) who can now speak through a computer and edit a video about his experience.
Neuralink’s long-term goal is to restore vision, motor function and speech to people with ALS, spinal cord injuries and other neurological conditions. The company is currently recruiting additional participants with quadriplegia to participate in its clinical trial.
5. The Boring Company
Founded: 2017 (spun off in 2018)
Focus: Urban transportation
Musk’s Role: Founder and chairman
Musk founded The Boring Company in 2017 as a subsidiary of SpaceX, and it became an independent entity the following year. The company aims to solve traffic congestion in urban areas by creating an underground tunnel system for high-speed transportation. To achieve this, it developed a machine that can dig more than 30 feet under the earth, boring an underground tunnel and then re-emerging to the surface when it’s done.
As of May 2025, the company has built a 1.7-mile underground loop under the Las Vegas Convention Center, and it plans to extend the tunnel system to nearby resorts. Just outside of Los Angeles in the city of Hawthorne, the company built a 1.15-mile tunnel as a research and development site for a hyperloop system designed to transport people in autonomous electric pods at more than 600 miles per hour. This tunnel has since been removed, and the primary hyperloop company, Hyperlooop One, has shut down.
6. xAI
Founded: 2023
Focus: Artificial intelligence
Musk’s Role: Founder and CEO
xAI is an artificial intelligence company that Musk founded in 2023 to compete against OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which Musk has accused of being too “woke.” The company has since developed its own language models and an AI chatbot called Grok, which is integrated into social media platform X (a subsidiary of xAI).
Grok has been programmed to answer “spicy questions” that are typically rejected by most other AI systems, with a tone that aims to be witty, unfiltered and, at times, provocative. xAI has also built a massive supercomputer called Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee to train Grok and support Musk’s other companies.
7. OpenAI
Founded: 2015
Focus: Artificial intelligence
Musk’s Role: Co-founder (no longer involved)
OpenAI is an AI research company best known for developing AI chatbot ChatGPT, image generator Dall-E and large language models like GPT-4 and GPT-4o. It was launched in 2015 by Musk, current CEO Sam Altman and nine other people.
Citing a conflict of interest due to Tesla, Musk left Open AI in 2018 — shortly after he unsuccessfully proposed taking control of the company. In 2023, he started his own AI research company, xAI, to compete against OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which he claimed was trained to be “politically correct” and “untruthful.” In 2024, Musk sued OpenAI, criticizing its transition from a nonprofit organization to a capped-profit structure and its close partnership with Microsoft. In 2025, he and other investors bid $97.4 billion to buy the company, but the offer was rejected.
8. SolarCity
Founded: 2006 (acquired by Tesla in 2016)
Focus: Solar energy
Musk’s Role: Chairman (no longer involved)
SolarCity was a solar energy company founded in 2006 by Musk’s cousins, Peter and Lyndon Rive. Musk was an early investor in the company, which went on to become the top residential solar panel installer in the United States.
In 2016, Tesla acquired SolarCity for $2.6 billion and folded it into its Tesla Energy division. Musk recused himself from the Tesla board of director’s vote, as he was also chairman of the SolarCity board and owned 22 percent of the company. A group of shareholders sued Musk and Tesla’s board of directors, alleging they did not disclose SolarCity’s financial troubles. Musk ultimately won the lawsuit.
9. PayPal
Founded: 1999 (as X.com) and 2001 (as PayPal)
Focus: Online payments
Musk’s Role: Co-founder and CEO (no longer involved)
In 1999, Musk used about $10 million from the sale of his first startup, Zip2, to launch an online banking company called X.com with three other co-founders. A year later, X.com merged with competitor Confinity, which had developed an early mobile payment software for Palm Pilots called PayPal. In 2001, the company rebranded as PayPal and quickly became a leader in the online payments space.
In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion, and Musk earned $165 million from the deal. PayPal sold the X.com domain name back to Musk in 2017, which he eventually used to rebrand Twitter into a new social media platform called X.
10. Zip2
Founded: 1995
Focus: City guides and business directories
Musk’s Role: Co-founder and chief technology officer (no longer involved)
Musk’s first company was Zip2, an online city guide that helped users find and navigate to local businesses. Originally known as Global Link Information Network, the company was founded in 1995 by Musk, his brother Kimbal Musk and Greg Kouri. Zip2 went on to partner with 160 newspapers to provide online business directories on their websites.
In 1999, Compaq acquired the company for $307 million, and Musk earned $22 million from the deal — money he then took to start online banking startup X.com, which would later become PayPal.
Elon Musk’s Criticisms and Controversies
His Role in the Trump Administration
Musk has never shied away from controversial opinions, but he took on a new level of criticism when he joined President Donald Trump’s administration as a “special government employee” in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in 2024. Democrats say Musk and DOGE overstepped their authority by cutting agency funding and humanitarian aid, firing (and sometimes rehiring) employees and threatening to terminate employees who didn’t email Musk with their weekly accomplishments. Watchdog groups also raised alarms about Musk’s influence over agencies tasked with enforcing regulations and awarding contracts in Musk’s companies. Meanwhile, Tesla’s stock plummeted amid the ensuing boycotts and protests.
After reaching the end of his 130-day term limit, Musk stepped down from his post in May 2025. In his final days, he criticized Trump’s multi-trillion dollar spending proposals and protectionist tariff policies.
His Controlling, Unpredictable Leadership Style
Musk’s heavy-handed approach to management has been evidenced at several of his companies. After taking over Twitter, for example, he immediately slashed half the team, fired those who spoke out against him and threatened to fire employees who wouldn’t commit to being “extremely hardcore” and working long hours. At Tesla, meanwhile, workers reportedly slept on the floor after working 12-hour shifts. The automaker was also sued on allegations of racial harassment.
While Musk is known for being an ambitious visionary, he has a history of making promises that his companies cannot live up to. For example, in 2016 Musk promised that Tesla cars would be fully self-driving, despite safety concerns from the Autopilot engineering team — a promise that is yet to be fulfilled. Likewise, he has been promising to manufacture Optimus, a humanoid robot, since 2021. Musk now says production will start in 2025.
Musk’s bold claims sometimes carry legal ramifications. In 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk for securities fraud after he tweeted that he had secured funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share. As part of a settlement agreement, Musk agreed to step down as chairman of the company, pay a total of $40 million in fines and have a lawyer review any future tweets that could affect the company’s stock price.
His Companies’ Environmental Impact
Musk has faced a litany of environmental complaints across numerous companies. In 2024, Tesla was sued by the state of California for improperly disposing of hazardous waste. Another lawsuit filed by an environmental advocacy group alleged the company violated the Clean Air Act hundreds of times at its Fremont facility.
That same year, SpaceX was cited by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for polluting nearby bodies of water at its Starbase facility along the Gulf Coast. Local environmentalists have also said the explosions, fires and debris from rocket launches have impacted wildlife, particularly rare bird species.
In Memphis, meanwhile, local residents have criticized xAI’s Colossus supercomputer for the additional strain it has put on the city’s power grid. The company has augmented its power needs with the help of 35 methane gas turbines, which emit nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde and other pollutants. The company operated the turbines for a year before seeking a permit.
Frequently Asked Questions
What companies does Elon Musk own?
Elon Musk owns six companies: Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), Neuralink, The Boring Company and xAI.
Does Elon Musk still own PayPal?
No, Elon Musk does not own PayPal. He was a co-founder of PayPal in the late 1990s, but the company was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. Musk used his share of the proceeds to invest in other ventures, including SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity.
What was Elon Musk’s first company?
Elon Musk’s first company was Zip2, a searchable business directory with a map service that gave directions. Musk and two co-founders launched the company in 1995, and they sold it in 1999 for $307 million.
Why did Elon Musk buy Twitter?
Elon Musk bought Twitter because he believed its content moderation policies were too strict, and he wanted to restore “free speech” to the platform. Several analyses have found an uptick in hate speech since the platform rebranded to X. Musk has also integrated the platform into his AI research company, and he has talked about turning the site into an “everything app” similar to WeChat in China.
Is Elon Musk still involved with OpenAI?
No, he’s not. While Elon Musk was part of the founding team of OpenAI in 2015, he left three years later after internal disagreements and a conflict of interest with Tesla. Musk has been one of OpenAI’s fiercest critics in recent years. He sued the company for abandoning its non-profit mission and creating a for-profit business unit, and has engaged in various public squabbles with CEO Sam Altman.
