The most common myths about Elon Musk, set against the record.
Elon Musk founded Tesla from scratch and built its first car.
Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning incorporated Tesla Motors on July 1, 2003, and Elon Musk joined in February 2004 by leading its first funding round with $6.5 million. A September 2009 legal settlement allows him and four others to be called co-founders.
Elon Musk was handed his fortune and grew up rich off an emerald mine.
His first real money came from companies he helped build: Compaq bought Zip2 in 1999 for $307 million, and his share of about $22 million went into X.com, which became PayPal.
Elon Musk is only a marketer and salesman who does no real engineering.
Walter Isaacson's 2023 biography shows him running detailed design reviews and making technical calls on rockets, batteries, and factories. At SpaceX he is chief executive and leads the engineering reviews of Starship and its Raptor engines.
Neuralink forces brain implants on unwilling people.
Neuralink places its implants only in consenting adult volunteers, in clinical trials such as the PRIME Study that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved in 2023. The trials recruit people with limited or no use of their hands, for example from a spinal cord injury or ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease that destroys the nerves that control muscles).
Starlink is free internet that works everywhere on Earth.
Starlink is a paid service: customers buy the dish and pay a monthly subscription, with prices that vary by country and plan, and it is sold only in countries that have approved it. SpaceX has cut fees or offered free service in specific situations, such as Venezuela through early 2026, and those offers were temporary.
Elon Musk bought Twitter impulsively, on a whim, with no real plan.
He had stated a thesis before the deal closed: in March 2022 he argued that Twitter served as the de facto public town square, and his April 2022 offer called free speech a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.
Elon Musk thinks the world is overpopulated and wants fewer people.
He argues the opposite: he has called population collapse from low birth rates a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.
Elon Musk founded SpaceX mainly to chase quick profits or build weapons.
He incorporated SpaceX in 2002 with the stated goal of making life multiplanetary by cutting the cost of reaching space, and he put roughly $100 million of his own money into the early Falcon rockets.
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