All About Elon Musk's Educational Background And His Journey To Top

NDTV

5 hours ago

Elon Musk Journey 2025: Elon Reeve Musk, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of leading tech companies such as Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter), recently led the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)-an initiative under the second Trump administration aimed at reducing excessive spending and regulations.
As of July 12, 2025, Musk is the richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US dollar 404.2 billion, according to Forbes.
Widely regarded as resilient and exceptionally hardworking, Musk has demonstrated immense dedication to his companies. He once revealed about how he stayed in the company's office for three-four days continuously and did not even go outside.
Elon Musk's Educational Background
Elon Musk completed his high school from Pretoria Boys High School, a public, tuition-charging English medium high school in South Africa.
Musk applied for a Canadian passport to avoid South Africa's mandatory military service and ease his immigration to the United States and while waiting for his application to be processed, he studied at the University of Pretoria, South Africa for five months.
He moved to Canada in June 1989 and took on various odd jobs, including working on a farm and in a lumber mill.
He completed his Bachelors of Arts in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Science in economics from the university's Wharton School in 1995. He did not receive his degrees from the university until 1997.
During his college years, he did two internships in Silicon Valley-one at energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which investigated electrolytic supercapacitors for energy storage, and another at Palo Alto-based startup Rocket Science Games.
In 1995, Musk was accepted into Stanford University's graduate program in Materials Science, but he chose not to enroll. He also applied for a job at Netscape Communications Corporation but did not receive a response.
Elon Musk's Entrepreneurial Journey
After his studies, he and his brother, Kimbal founded Zip2, an Internet city guide for the newspaper publishing industry, with maps, directions, and yellow pages, sold for 307 million dollars.
He then founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company, which was later merged with Paypal and sold for 1.5 billion dollars. Musk acquired the domain X.com from Paypal which is now the domain of Twitter.
In 2002, using $100 million from his earlier ventures, Musk founded SpaceX with the goal of building affordable rockets. He serves as its CEO and Chief Engineer.
In 2015, Elon started the development of Starlink constellation of low Earth orbit satellites to provide satellite Internet access and deployed his first large constellation in 2019. Over 7,600 Starlink satellites are operational as of 2025.
Musk invested 6.35 million dollars in the Tesla in 2004, becoming the chairman of its board of directors. He became the CEO of the company in 2008.
Tesla began the delivery of Roadster, an electric sports car, in 2008 and sold over 2,500 vehicles. Under Elon, Tesla has launched several high-selling vehicles like four-door sedan Model S (2012), the crossover Model X (2015), the mass-market sedan Model 3 (2017), the crossover Model Y (2020), and the pickup truck Cybertruck (2023).
He also co-founded Neuralink, founded the Boring Company and acquired twitter, now known as X.com and launched Grok, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot.