Elon Musk, the businessman everyone has an opinion about

Photo: (U.S. Air Force photo by Trevor cokley) / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

Few business figures get talked about at a Main Street coffee counter the way Elon Musk does.

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971, Musk moved to Canada at 17 and later to the U.S. He made his first money with Zip2 and then X.com, which merged into PayPal. He used his share of the PayPal sale to start SpaceX in 2002 and put early money into Tesla, becoming its CEO in 2008.

SpaceX now launches most of the world’s satellites and runs Starlink, the satellite internet service that has reached farms in rural Iowa where cable never went. Tesla made electric cars mainstream. He bought Twitter in 2022, renamed it X and later folded it into his AI company, xAI.

In 2025 he led the Department of Government Efficiency for several months before stepping back to focus on his companies. His politics have cost Tesla some buyers and won it others. Either way, the rockets keep going up, and in parts of Wright County Starlink dishes on the roof are now a common sight.

Kim Sanders writes for Clarion News Online.