Elon Musk: The History of Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal and the Companies Behind Them

From Zip2 to PayPal: first fortune, first ouster

Zip2 was Musk’s first company, an online city guide he co-founded in the mid-1990s. Compaq bought it for $307 million in cash in February 1999.

Musk put part of that money into X.com, launched in March 1999 as an online payments service with ambitions of becoming an internet bank. In March 2000, X.com merged with Confinity, the startup behind the PayPal payment system; the combined company took the PayPal name officially in June 2001. That merger hides one of the least-told parts of the story: in 2000, the board of directors, with Peter Thiel among the key figures, removed Musk as CEO. Sources disagree slightly on the exact timing within the year, but agree on the causes: Musk’s push to move the company’s systems onto Microsoft platforms, against the wishes of part of the engineering team, and his plan to drop the PayPal name in favor of X. eBay bought PayPal on October 3, 2002 for $1.5 billion in stock; Musk, still the largest single shareholder, walked away with a sizable share of that payout.

Steve Jobs went through a similar boardroom ouster at the company he founded: the history of Apple and Steve Jobs tells that part of the story.

Tesla, the company Musk didn’t start

Tesla Motors was incorporated in San Carlos, California, on July 1, 2003, by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk entered the picture in February 2004, leading the company’s first funding round with $6.35 million of his own money and becoming chairman of the board. The Tesla Roadster prototype was unveiled in 2006; Musk didn’t take the CEO title until 2008, by which point the company was already five years old.

Real-world example: Tesla’s two big production milestones show how much the company has scaled. It reached its one-millionth vehicle in the spring of 2020 and its ten-millionth at the end of July 2026, six years later, a pace TechCrunch notes still trails China’s BYD, which has built around 17 million electric and hybrid vehicles.

Company	Year founded	Musk’s role
Zip2	1995	Co-founder
X.com / PayPal	1999	Co-founder, then replaced as CEO in 2000
SpaceX	2002	Founder and CEO
Tesla	2003	Investor from 2004, CEO from 2008
Neuralink	2016	Co-founder
The Boring Company	2016-2017	Founder

SpaceX, from a workshop to the most-watched IPO of the year

Musk founded SpaceX in May 2002, taking the roles of CEO and chief engineer. For two decades the company stayed private, funded by government contracts and venture capital while it developed the Falcon rockets and crewed missions. That changed on June 11, 2026, when SpaceX priced its initial public offering at $135 a share, placing 555,555,555 Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market and Nasdaq Texas under the ticker SPCX; the deal was set to close on June 15, 2026.

Financial press called it the largest IPO on record, with a reported valuation around $1.77 trillion and a first day of trading that closed near $161 a share, up 19%. About 30% of the shares on offer were set aside for individual investors, an unusually high share for an offering of this size.

Twitter, Neuralink and The Boring Company: the other fronts

On April 4, 2022, Musk disclosed a 9.2% stake in Twitter worth $2.64 billion. Days later he offered to buy the entire company for $43 billion, at $54.20 a share; the board unanimously accepted a deal rounded up to $44 billion in its public statements. The transaction closed on the afternoon of October 27, 2022, with Musk tweeting “the bird is freed.” In July 2023 the app was renamed X, a switch Wikipedia notes caused considerable confusion among users.

Alongside that, Musk kept two other projects moving. In 2016 he co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology company, with an initial $100 million investment; the first human patient received one of its brain implants in January 2024. The Boring Company traces back to the same period: the origin story is a December 2016 tweet in which Musk, stuck in traffic, said he’d build a tunnel boring machine and start digging; the company was formally incorporated in 2017. Its best-known project, the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, opened in June 2021 with a 2.7-kilometer route served by Tesla shuttles; an expansion to 29 miles and 51 stations, including the Strip’s hotels and the football stadium, has been approved but not yet built.

Musk had also co-founded OpenAI in December 2015, before leaving its board in 2018: a separate chapter from the artificial intelligence built into his other companies, including Tesla’s Autopilot.

The fortune, and the many faces behind it

According to Forbes, Musk’s net worth stood at roughly $886.4 billion as of September 15, 2026, with a daily swing of $24.8 billion: a figure that, by its nature, moves with every trading session. The largest share of it traces back to SpaceX, where Musk holds about 38% between shares and options after the IPO, followed by Tesla, where his stake sits near 11%, plus another 8% in restricted stock still to vest.

Jeff Bezos built his company across an equally wide range of industries: the history of Amazon and Jeff Bezos follows that path, from online books to global logistics.