Elon Musk

Elon Reeve Musk is a South African-born entrepreneur and engineer who holds the title of chief engineer at SpaceX, the rocket and spacecraft company he founded in 2002, and has served as chief executive and product architect at the electric vehicle maker Tesla since joining its board in 2004. His engineering identity rests primarily on these self-described leadership titles and direct involvement in vehicle and rocket design decisions rather than on a formal engineering credential, since his university degrees were in physics and economics; SpaceX has nonetheless developed the reusable Falcon 9 booster and the Starship vehicle under his direction, and Tesla has built mass-market electric vehicles and battery technology. He also co-founded the online payments venture that became PayPal, and later founded the tunneling company the Boring Company in 2017, the neurotechnology company Neuralink in 2016, and the artificial intelligence company xAI in 2023. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.