Elon Musk – South African, Canadian, and the U.S.

Elon Musk is an engineer, industrial designer, tech innovator, and self-made billionaire. He is the founder, CEO, CTO, and chief designer of SpaceX; Tesla, Inc.’s early-stage investor, CEO, and product architect; The Boring Company’s founder; Neuralink’s co-founder; and OpenAI’s co-founder and initial co-chairman. With this much title to his name, it’s not surprising to see him on top of the world’s wealthiest people list.

Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, to a Canadian mother and a South African father. He attended the University of Pretoria for a short time before moving to Canada at the age of 17 to study at Queen’s University. Two years later, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and physics. In 1995, he moved to California to attend Stanford University but instead chose to pursue a business career, co-founding Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. In 1999, Compaq bought the company for $307 million. Musk co-founded online bank X.com in the same year, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal, which eBay purchased for $1.5 billion in 2002.