Chase Elliott
$15 million
Elon Musk has a net worth of approximately $250 billion, making him the wealthiest individual on Earth by most major rankings. The South African-born entrepreneur is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, owner of X (formerly Twitter), and founder of xAI, Neuralink, and The Boring Company. His fortune is almost entirely composed of equity stakes in private and public companies, with SpaceX and xAI representing the majority of his current valuation.
Updated March 2026: According to the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List, Musk ranked as the world’s wealthiest person as of early 2026, with a reported net worth in the range of $250 billion to over $300 billion depending on market conditions. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index tracks his wealth on a daily basis, with fluctuations tied primarily to Tesla’s stock price and SpaceX’s privately assessed valuation.
Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa, to Errol Musk, a South African engineer and property developer, and Maye Musk, a Canadian-born model and registered dietitian. His parents divorced when he was approximately 10 years old. He lived primarily with his father in South Africa, a relationship he has described in interviews as difficult.
Musk taught himself computer programming as a child and at age 12 sold the source code for a video game called Blastar to a computing magazine for approximately $500. He attended Pretoria Boys High School. At 17, he relocated to Canada — his mother’s birth country — to avoid mandatory service in the South African military during apartheid. He attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, for two years before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned bachelor’s degrees in both physics and economics in 1997. He was accepted to Stanford University’s doctoral program in energy physics but withdrew after two days to pursue the commercial internet opportunity.
In 1995, Musk co-founded Zip2, a web software company providing business directories and maps to newspapers. Compaq acquired Zip2 in 1999 for $307 million; Musk’s share was approximately $22 million. He immediately reinvested that capital into X.com, an online financial services and payment company. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. eBay acquired PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion; Musk, as the largest shareholder, received approximately $180 million.
In 2002, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) with the stated long-term goal of enabling human life on Mars. The company developed the Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy rockets, pioneering the reusable rocket technology that has substantially reduced the cost of access to orbit. SpaceX holds a majority of NASA’s commercial crew and cargo contracts and operates the Starlink satellite internet constellation, which as of 2025 served more than 4 million subscribers across more than 100 countries.
In 2004, Musk led the Series A investment round for Tesla Motors, investing $6.5 million and becoming chairman of the board. He became CEO in 2008, during a period when the company was near bankruptcy, and personally contributed funds to keep it solvent. Under his leadership, Tesla became the world’s most valuable automaker by market capitalization, though its share price has been subject to significant volatility. Tesla’s Model 3 became the best-selling electric vehicle globally in multiple years.
In 2022, Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion, renaming it X and dismissing approximately 80% of its workforce. In 2023, he founded xAI, an artificial intelligence company, which launched the Grok chatbot. In early 2026, SpaceX and xAI completed a merger that was reported as the largest corporate merger in history by combined valuation, according to CNBC. Reuters reported that SpaceX was evaluating a potential IPO at a valuation of approximately $1.5 trillion in mid-2026.
In 2025, Musk served as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) advisory body within the Trump administration, advising on federal spending reductions. He stepped back from that role before the end of the year to focus on his private companies.
Musk has been married twice and has had several long-term partnerships. He married Canadian author Justine Wilson in 2000; they divorced in 2008 and have six surviving children together. Their first son, Nevada Alexander, died of sudden infant death syndrome at 10 weeks in 2002. The couple’s surviving children include twins Vivian Jenna and Griffin (born 2004) and triplets Kai, Saxon, and Damian (born 2006). Vivian Jenna Wilson has publicly distanced herself from Musk.
Musk married British actress Talulah Riley twice — first in 2010 (divorced 2012) and again in 2013 (divorced 2016). He and Canadian musician Grimes (Claire Boucher) had three children between 2020 and 2022: X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl, and Techno Mechanicus. With Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive, he has four children: twins Strider and Azure (born 2021), Arcadia (2024), and Seldon Lycurgus (born approximately 2025). He also has a son named Romulus with Ashley St. Clair, reported in 2025. Musk appeared publicly with Zilis at an event in February 2026, their first public appearance together. He has 14 children in total.
Musk’s younger brother Kimbal Musk co-founded Zip2 with him and serves on the Tesla board. Their mother, Maye Musk, is a model and dietitian who has been a prominent public presence throughout Musk’s rise. Musk has spoken publicly about his support for higher birth rates and large families, citing concerns about population decline.
Elon Musk’s net worth is estimated at $250 billion or more as of early 2026, according to the Forbes Billionaires List and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His wealth fluctuates daily based primarily on Tesla’s stock price and SpaceX’s privately assessed valuation. The SpaceX-xAI merger in early 2026 significantly increased his total estimated net worth.
Musk’s wealth is almost entirely composed of equity stakes — principally in Tesla (approximately 13%) and SpaceX/xAI (approximately 42% of the merged entity). He seeded these companies using capital from two early exits: approximately $22 million from the 1999 sale of Zip2 to Compaq, and approximately $180 million from eBay’s 2002 acquisition of PayPal. Both Tesla and SpaceX were near-collapse at various points; Musk’s personal financial commitments during those crises preserved his ownership stakes that later grew to enormous value.
Elon Musk has 14 children as of 2026: six with his first wife Justine Wilson (one deceased in infancy), three with Grimes, four with Shivon Zilis, and one with Ashley St. Clair. He has spoken publicly about his belief that having large families is important for societal and demographic reasons.