Complete list of Elon Musk companies: also an insight into firms no longer under his control

Elon Musk has held the title of the richest person globally on and off for the past several years. He holds the position as of June 29, according to Forbes real time billionaires list. He has made his billions by founding or investing in a number of successful companies.

Some of the most prominent Elon Musk companies are electric car maker Tesla, space transportation and satellite company SpaceX and Neuralink – a developer of implantable brain-computer interfaces. He has founded a multitude of tech companies since the 1990s.

So far, Elon Musk has six different companies under his control. These firms span a range of industries, from electric vehicles to a social media giant and an underground tunnel company. The oldest company he has retained is SpaceX, founded in 2002 for $100 million.

List of companies no longer under Elon Musk’s helm

There are several companies the billionaire no longer has under his helm. His first company Zip2 used to be an online business directory that he started through funding from his father and sold in 1999 for $307 million to Compaq Computer Corporation.

He then started an online financial service company called X.com. It and Continuity merged a year later to form PayPal. A couple of years later, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion, letting Musk found and invest in several of the companies he still has in today’s date.

Back in 2006, the billionaire decided to invest in his cousins’ solar energy company, SolarCity. Tesla acquired the firm ten years later for $2.6 billion in stock. Musk also used to be one of the co-founders of ChatGPT maker OpenAI until his resignation from the board in 2018.

Complete list of Elon Musk companies

1. SpaceX

Purpose: space transportation and satellite-based internet service

Year of founding: 2002

Company’s value: $150 billion as of July 2023

2. Tesla

Purpose: maker of EVs, solar energy generation systems and battery energy storage products

Year of investing: 2004

Company’s value: $770.2 billion as of August 2023

3. Neuralink

Purpose: manufacturing implantable brain-computer interfaces

Year of founding: 2016

Company’s value: $5 billion as of June 2023

4. X (previously called Twitter)

Purpose: Social media platform

Year of purchasing: 2022

Company’s value: $15 billion as of June 2023

5. The Boring Company

Purpose: infrastructure and underground tunnel construction services

Year of founding: 2016

Company’s value: $5.7 billion as of April 2022

6. xAI

Purpose: artificial intelligence company and rival to OpenAI

Year of founding: 2023

Company’s value: Unknown