All of Elon Musk’s Companies Explained

Musk founded the Boring Company, an infrastructure and tunnel construction company, in 2016 with a mission: “To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D.” TBC has completed several tunnels with others in various stages of construction, discussion, and planning. The company’s recently completed third funding round of $675 million valued TBC at $5.675 billion.

Musk co-founded this health tech venture with “a dream team” of eight scientists, per Fortune. Neuralink is developing implantable brain machine interfaces for a wide range of applications, including helping people with brain-related injuries and paralysis, according to the company. Neuralink has completed several rounds of financing, the most recent one of $205 million.

Artificial Intelligence company OpenAI was co-founded by Musk in 2015 as a nonprofit with the aim of creating artificial intelligence safely and in a way that benefits all of humanity. The company transitioned to for-profit, specifically capped-profit, in 2019, a year after co-founder Musk resigned the board due to potential future conflict of interest with Tesla’s development of the self-driving AI. He remained a donor and advisor, however. Microsoft invested $1 billion in 2019.

Musk co-founded his second startup, X.com, in 1999. The online financial services company merged with competitor Confinity Inc. a year later. The merged company changed its name to PayPal and went public in 2002. That year, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion. At the time, Musk owned over 11% of the shares.

PayPal was spun off to become an independent company in 2014, but long before that, Musk sold his stake and used the proceeds to start SpaceX and Tesla among others. Perhaps anticipating a need (see X Holdings) Musk bought the defunct domain name X.com from PayPal for an undisclosed amount in 2017.

Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (doing business as SpaceX) in 2002, using $100 million from his PayPal payout, with the goal of revolutionizing space transportation technologies and colonizing other planets. Since its founding, SpaceX has launched 153 rockets carrying satellites or spacecraft into orbit, including a recent one with an all-civilian crew. It is a leading provider of launch services, including for NASA. SpaceX is privately owned, but through rounds of fundings – amounting to $1.5 billion in total in 2021 – it is valued at $100.3 billion, according to CNBC.

SolarCity was founded in 2006 by Musk’s cousins, Peter and Lyndon Rive, with the backing of Musk. It was a publicly traded company until Tesla acquired it in 2016 in a deal worth about $2.6 billion and reorganized it into Tesla’s energy generation and storage provider. The business has not taken off in the same way as Tesla’s automotive segment, though 2021 could have been a turning point. Several large projects and growing popularity of other products have contributed to significant revenue growth in 2021. Still, the segment reported a loss that year.

Once there were the Big Three auto companies – and then came Tesla and did what no one thought could be done in a traditional industrial sector: fully disrupted it. Tesla was founded in 2003 by two engineers and entrepreneurs, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. In February 2004, Musk invested $6.3 million, according to Wired, and became the largest shareholder. He has served as CEO since 2008, taking it public in 2010. Tesla reported another record year in 2021, with revenue, profit, and vehicle deliveries soaring. Tesla delivered 936,222 cars in 2021.

In his bid to acquire Twitter, Musk registered three companies under the name “X Holdings.” He has been a vocal critic of the social media giant, questioning its commitment to free speech. With a 9.2% stake in the company, Musk wants to take Twitter private.

According to SEC filings, X Holdings I would become the parent company if Musk completes the deal, while X Holdings II would merge with Twitter. X Holdings III would be used to help fund the transaction. Musk says he has lined up $46.5 billion in commitments to finance the deal. Investors now wonder if he will combine his other companies under X Holdings. As of Monday, Twitter has accepted Musk’s buyout bid and the deal is expected to close this year – though according to Investopedia, “it is dependent upon Twitter shareholder approval, regulatory approval, and other closing conditions.”

Though long gone, Zip2 is notable for having been the first company Musk started. Musk and his brother, Kimbal, founded the company, which provided and licensed online city guide software to newspapers, in 1995. It was purchased by Compaq Computer in 1999 for about $300 million. According to Wikipedia, Musk netted $22 million from the sale and used the proceeds to start X.com, which morphed into PayPal.