Elon Musk (28 June 1971-) was a South African-American businessman and the founding CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX. Born in Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa in 1971 to a South African engineer and his Canadian wife, he came from a wealthy family and emigrated to Canada in 1989 before attending college in the United States in 1992 and permanently settling there. In 1995, he and his brother founded Zip2, an Internet city guide which was sold to Compaq for $307 million in 1999, netting Musk $22 million for his 7% share. Musk also founded the online bank X.com, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal; in 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion. In 2002, Musk founded the aerospace manufacturer SpaceX, and he was an early investor in Tesla Motors, Inc. in 2004, becoming its CEO in 2008. In 2022, Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion, doing so because of his professed support for freedom of speech; he criticized Twitter's censorship of the far-right.
Musk expressed libertarian political views and voted for the Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020; however, in 2022, he announced that he could no longer support the Democrats, whom he labeled the "party of division and hate", and, on 7 November 2022, he encouraged independent-minded voters to vote Republican and supported a potential Ron DeSantis presidential bid for 2024. Musk also expressed controversial views on international relations, such as suggesting that Taiwan should become a special administrative region of China, suggesting that Ukraine should make territorial concessions to Russia in exchange for an end to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, and comparing Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler amid the Canadian convoy protests. During the 2024 presidential election, he endorsed Donald Trump's presidential bid and was in turn appointed to head the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE). Musk, widely seen as the "power behind the throne" in the leadup to Trump's second term, experienced an ideological shift to the far-right as he endorsed the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany and Freedom Party of Austria parties in December 2024-January 2025 and demanded that white supremacist Tommy Robinson replace Nigel Farage as leader of Reform UK. He also spread far-right conspiracy theories and disinformation on social media, especially with regard to non-white migrants.