Born in 1971, serial entrepreneur Elon Musk is the world's richest person, with a net worth of more than $800B as of April 2026. Originally from South Africa, Musk has spent most of his life founding and leading tech companies—aside from a short stint in the Trump administration in 2025 leading the advisory body known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Hours of research by our editors, distilled into minutes of clarity.
This data visualization shows the 20 wealthiest people in the world as of January 2026. Topping the list with a net worth of more than $713B is Elon Musk, trailed by Larry Page ($258B), Jeff Bezos ($251B), and Larry Ellison ($243B).
From the software company Zip2 in the 1990s to Musk's Twitter acquisition (which he later renamed X), Elon Musk has run, founded, and invested in many different businesses over the past three decades.
The disruptive innovator and founder of SpaceX and Tesla is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, an unimaginable sum. This simple interactive visual uses pixels (representing $1K each) on a scrolling screen to demonstrate the billionaire's wealth compared to other known financial values, like the cost of building a Boeing 777 or the net worth of Tiger Woods.
Musk started the online alternative to Yellow Pages in 1995 with his younger brother. Musk sold the company for $305M in 1999.
Musk was bullied as a child in South Africa, and even recalled being punched in the face, per a recent Walter Isaacson biography on the entrepreneur.
Elon Musk cofounded "X.com," an online banking service, in 1999 with the idea that the web would become a financial repository as internet access expanded and became ingrained in daily life. Peter Thiel cofounded "Confinity" as a digital security service that morphed into a payments system. In 2000, the two merged to form PayPal, and in 2002, they sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5B.
Learning quickly from early Falcon rocket failures and clashes with vendors and safety regulators, the company has focused on reusability as a first step to reaching Mars and is backed by NASA funding to do so.
From recovering and reusing rocket components to launching a mannequin and Tesla into orbit to the tune of David Bowie's "Starman," Elon Musk drove public interest and government contracts to his company as he transformed space launches into spectacles.
The attempts with Falcon 1 endangered the company's future but provided valuable information from which to iterate and follow up with the successful first privately funded orbital launch in history and multiple ISS resupply missions.
The company went public in 2010, raising $226 million in its IPO just two years after beginning production on its first car. Tesla's first Supercharger stations were launched in 2012 with six locations in California.
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