Elon Musk and the limits of being able to do anything

Elon Musk

Photo: Ministério Das Comunicações / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 28, 1971 Pretoria
Occupation	Programmer
Awards	Gold Medal of the Royal Aeronautical Society u00b7 John Fritz Medal u00b7 NSS Wernher Von Braun Memorial Award

At some point in the middle of last year, Elon Musk was simultaneously running five companies, leading a government advisory body with the power to fire federal employees, and engaged in a public feud with the president of the United States — a president whose campaign he had bankrolled to the tune of $250 million. The moment passed, as his moments always do. But the image stays: the man who built reusable rockets and mass-market electric cars and a satellite internet system that now covers the planet, reduced to trading insults with a head of state on a social media platform he owns. That contradiction — between the long-game strategist who bet his Zip2 fortune on spacecraft in 2002 and the daily provocateur of X — is not incidental to Elon Musk. It is the story.

Pretoria in the 1970s was a city built around a particular kind of certainty, and Musk was not designed for it. He grew up reading encyclopaedias front to back and programming computers before most of his peers understood what a computer was for. Born June 28, 1971, to Errol Musk — a property developer and engineer — and Maye Musk, a model and dietitian whose career would outlast her son’s first three companies, he was a bookish and difficult child in a country he had already decided to leave. His parents divorced when he was nine. He was seventeen when he crossed into Canada alone, ostensibly to attend Queen’s University in Ontario, functionally to escape mandatory military service in a state he did not believe in. By twenty-one he was at the University of Pennsylvania, collecting degrees in economics and physics simultaneously — the combination that would define everything that came after.

The first fortune came from nothing dramatic. Zip2, a company his brother Kimbal helped him build in a Palo Alto office that also served as their bedroom, provided digital city maps to newspaper groups and sold to Compaq for $307 million in 1999. Musk walked away with $22 million and immediately put $12 million into X.com, an online payment service that merged with a rival called Confinity, rebranded as PayPal, and was acquired by eBay in 2002. His stake returned approximately $165 million. He spent the next few months dividing that windfall between three things that were each expected to fail: a rocket company, an electric car company, and a solar energy firm.

SpaceX very nearly did fail. The first three launches of the Falcon 1 rocket ended in explosions, burning through most of the capital he had committed. A fourth launch in September 2008 succeeded, days before the company would have been forced to shut down. That proximity to catastrophe became the template for how Musk operates: Tesla nearly went bankrupt in 2019, the Boring Company has yet to prove its tunnels faster than traffic, and Neuralink’s clinical path remains uncertain. But his record is that the companies he stakes on either disappear or change their industry permanently.

SpaceX changed its industry permanently. The Falcon 9 landing its orbital-class booster on a drone ship in 2015 was not merely an engineering milestone — it restructured the economics of getting things into orbit. Starlink, the megaconstellation of satellites Musk began deploying in 2019, has over 9,600 active in orbit as of early 2026 and more than five million subscribers worldwide, many in regions no ground-based internet provider has reached. In 2020, SpaceX became the first private company to carry crew to the International Space Station. Tesla followed the same arc: years of near-collapse, then dominance. The Model S legitimised electric vehicles for a sceptical market; the Model 3 turned Tesla briefly into the world’s most valuable automaker. The Cybertruck arrived late and divisive. Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot, is targeted for consumer sale by the end of 2026.

The version of Elon Musk that his supporters describe — the systems-thinking engineer too rational for conventional politics — collides repeatedly with the version that shows up on X. His 2022 acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion was followed by mass layoffs cutting roughly 80 percent of the workforce, a reversal of content moderation policies that drove away advertisers, and a steady transformation of the platform into his primary broadcast channel. The Department of Government Efficiency he led from January 2025 claimed $215 billion in savings through methods that ran, at times, faster than their legal authority; multiple federal courts issued injunctions against specific actions. His daughter Vivian Wilson, who changed her name after coming out as transgender, has publicly stated she wants no relationship with her father. His feud with Donald Trump in the summer of 2025 — which included accusations about Epstein-related documents and a threat from Trump to deport him — was eventually resolved at a Mar-a-Lago dinner, but the episode permanently complicates the image of Musk as a purely strategic actor. There are at least two Elon Musks: the one who builds for the long game and the one who cannot resist the short one.

The SpaceX IPO in June 2026 — $75 billion raised, the company listed on the Nasdaq as SPCX, a valuation above $2 trillion within days of opening — was the financial expression of the long game. In February 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI, the artificial intelligence company Musk had founded in 2023, home to the Grok AI assistant and the Colossus supercomputer; the merged entity now competes with OpenAI in AI, with Comcast in satellite broadband, and with Boeing in commercial spaceflight, simultaneously. Forbes and Bloomberg both estimate Musk’s net worth in the range of $735 to $852 billion as of June 2026, with some projections placing him as the first person in history to hold a net worth above one trillion dollars — a designation he disputes the methodology behind but does not publicly discourage.

He has twelve confirmed children with four women, and a contested fourteenth whose paternity was being determined by a New York court as of early 2026. He was married twice to the British actress Talulah Riley. He has been public about his belief that population decline is a civilisational threat, a position he practices as well as preaches.

Neuralink, the brain-computer interface company he co-founded in 2016, had successfully implanted its N1 chip in twelve patients by September 2025, all of whom had severe paralysis and used the device to control computers through thought. Mass production of the device is targeted for 2026. The next confirmed dates on Musk’s calendar are all product launches: the Optimus robot, the Cybercab autonomous taxi, a full-reusability test of the Starship launch system. The peculiar thing about Elon Musk is not that he aims at too many targets. It is that he keeps hitting enough of them to make the next round of bets look reasonable.

Tags: business, ceos, SpaceX, Elon Musk, entrepreneurs, xAI, Starlink

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