Elon Musk is a South African-born entrepreneur, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, and a co-founder of OpenAI who later became one of its most vocal critics after founding a competing AI company.
Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa, and made his early fortune co-founding PayPal before starting SpaceX and taking over Tesla. In 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman and others as a nonprofit research lab intended to counterbalance concerns that advanced AI would be developed only inside closed, profit-driven companies. He left OpenAI's board in 2018, citing a potential conflict of interest with Tesla's own AI work, though he continued to criticize the direction the organization took after adopting a capped-profit structure.
Founding xAI
In 2023, Musk founded xAI, a new AI company explicitly positioned as an alternative to what he described as overly cautious or ideologically biased labs. xAI released a chatbot called Grok, integrated into the X social media platform Musk also owns, and pursued rapid buildout of large GPU training clusters. Musk has also sued OpenAI and Altman, alleging the organization abandoned its founding nonprofit mission in pursuit of profit, a dispute that became one of the highest-profile legal fights in the AI industry.
Autonomy and robotics
At Tesla, Musk has repeatedly promised full self-driving capability through the company's Full Self-Driving software, using a camera-based approach that differs from competitors' reliance on lidar. Tesla has also developed Optimus, a humanoid robot Musk has described as a future volume product, though as of the mid-2020s it remained an early-stage prototype rather than a shipping product. Musk has framed both efforts as extensions of the same underlying AI and robotics capability he wants xAI and Tesla to share.
Public commentary on AI risk
Musk has long warned publicly about existential risk from advanced AI, describing it at various points as more dangerous than nuclear weapons, and was among the signatories of the 2023 Pause Giant AI Experiments letter calling for a temporary halt to training the largest models. Critics have noted a tension between these warnings and his own company's aggressive pace of AI development, a contradiction Musk has addressed by arguing that safety-focused actors need to remain competitive to have influence over how the technology develops.