Frequently asked questions.

Above about 450 miles of range, a bigger battery makes a worse car. Range comes from adding cells, and cells add mass, cost, and charging time.

Elon Musk said in March 2022 that Tesla could have made a 600-mile Model S a year earlier and chose not to, because 99.9% of the time drivers would carry battery mass they do not need. That extra weight makes acceleration, handling, and efficiency worse and raises the price.

Tesla sizes the battery for the range people use and spends the saved mass and money on the rest of the car.

Elon Musk leads four companies: SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and The Boring Company. SpaceX includes Starlink and SpaceXSI, the artificial intelligence unit that builds Grok, owns X, and runs projects such as MACROHARD.

He also funds the Musk Foundation, a charity he started in 2001, and in 2025 he worked as a special government employee on the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). See every venture and project on the Ventures Map.

SpaceXSI is the artificial intelligence unit of SpaceX. SpaceX acquired xAI, the AI company Elon Musk founded in 2023, on February 2, 2026, folded it into SpaceX as SpaceXAI on May 6, 2026, and renamed it SpaceXSI on October 4, 2026.

SpaceXSI builds the Grok chatbot, whose current model is Grok 4.7, released on September 21, 2026. It also runs the Colossus supercomputers near Memphis, Tennessee, and owns X.

Elon Musk is worth about $1 trillion (Forbes, October 2026), which makes him a trillionaire again: he first passed $1 trillion around the June 2026 SpaceX initial public offering. Nearly all of it is the market value of his stakes in SpaceX and Tesla, not cash. The Net Worth Tracker carries the live, dated figure and the math behind each stake.

His fortune grew from early startup exits, Zip2 and PayPal, that he reinvested in each next company instead of keeping the money in the bank.

Yes. SpaceX shares began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX on June 12, 2026, after the initial public offering priced at $135 a share. The offering raised about $86 billion, the largest on record, and valued SpaceX at about $1.78 trillion.

Elon Musk kept about 82 percent of the voting power, because the Class B shares he holds carry 10 votes each and the public Class A shares carry one.

Elon Musk is one of Tesla's five official co-founders. Engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning incorporated Tesla Motors on July 1, 2003, and Elon Musk joined in February 2004 by leading the first funding round with $6.5 million of his own money, which made him chairman and the largest shareholder.

He became chief executive in October 2008. A September 2009 legal settlement allows five people to be called co-founders: Eberhard, Tarpenning, Elon Musk, JB Straubel, and Ian Wright.

Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. He is the eldest of three siblings, ahead of his younger brother Kimbal and his younger sister Tosca.

At 17 he left South Africa for Canada, using citizenship through his Canadian-born mother, Maye, and later moved to the United States for university. He became a U.S. citizen in 2002.

As of 2026, Elon Musk is the father of 14 children (13 living) with four women: Justine Wilson, Grimes, Shivon Zilis, and Ashley St. Clair.

He is openly pro-natalist and has said he is doing his best to help what he calls the underpopulation crisis. He has also been candid about being estranged from one child, his transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson.

No. His first real money came from companies he helped build. Compaq bought Zip2 in 1999 for about $307 million, and Elon Musk's roughly 7 percent stake paid him about $22 million at age 27, which he put into X.com, later PayPal.

His father, Errol, held a partial stake in a Zambian emerald business in the 1980s. Fact-checkers have not found support for the claim that a mine paid for Elon Musk's start, and he has denied it.

He gave two reasons. In March 2022 he argued that Twitter had become the de facto public town square and that failing to uphold free speech principles undermined democracy.

Weeks before the deal closed in October 2022, he posted that buying Twitter was an accelerant to creating X, the everything app, with payments, messaging, and more in one product. Twitter was renamed X in July 2023, and X is now part of SpaceXSI, the artificial intelligence unit of SpaceX.

He says he does. On May 8, 2021, while hosting Saturday Night Live (SNL), he told the audience he has Asperger's, joking that he was the first person with Asperger's to host the show, or at least the first to admit it.

Asperger's is an older name for a profile now usually described as part of autism spectrum disorder. Elon Musk has described the same wiring that makes small talk harder as an advantage for deep focus on engineering problems.

Elon Musk gives two reasons. A city on Mars would be a backup for humanity if a catastrophe ended life on Earth, and becoming a spacefaring civilization gives people a future to be excited about.

He founded SpaceX in 2002 to cut the cost of reaching space with reusable rockets, and Starship is the vehicle built for the trip. In February 2026 he said SpaceX would build a self-growing city on the Moon first, because ships can reach the Moon every 10 days while Mars lines up only every 26 months, and that work on a Mars city would begin in about 5 to 7 years.

Tesla's Robotaxi service launched in Austin, Texas on June 22, 2025. Since July 2026 it has carried riders with no one in the car in six U.S. metro areas: Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa.

In the San Francisco Bay Area the service runs with a safety driver. Tesla counted about 2.4 million paid Robotaxi miles by June 30, 2026.

27+ people had a Neuralink implant as of October 2026, by the count of Neura Pod: about 16 in the United States, 7 in the United Kingdom, and 4 in Canada. Neuralink's own last public count was 21, on January 28, 2026.

The implants are part of Neuralink's clinical trials, which run at 7 hospital sites in 4 countries. Implant surgeries have taken place at 5 of those sites, in 3 countries.