Elon Musk

Elon Musk is a serial entrepreneur and CEO who has founded or leads several of the most closely watched technology companies of the past two decades. He co-founded OpenAI, though he later grew dissatisfied with its direction and publicly criticized its ties to Microsoft ; founded Tesla, where he serves as leader and has driven its distinctive hiring culture and autonomous-driving strategy ; and leads SpaceX, the rocket company he established in 2002 after a failed attempt to buy repurposed Soviet missiles . More recently he founded xAI, which in 2024 set a record by building a 100,000-GPU supercomputing cluster in 122 days , and Neuralink, his 2016 brain-computer interface venture . Across these companies, Musk has been described by partners as applying "first-principles" reasoning to both engineering and talent recruitment—personally interviewing early SpaceX hires down to the janitorial staff, and insisting on hiring only the best even when that meant poaching graduate students from their university dorm rooms .