Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly referred to as SpaceX, is an American space technology company headquartered at the Starbase development site near Brownsville, Texas. Since its founding in 2002, the company has made numerous advancements in rocket propulsion, reusable launch vehicle, human spaceflight and satellite constellation technology. As of 2024, SpaceX is the world's dominant space launch provider, its launch cadence eclipsing all others, including private competitors and national programs like the Chinese space program. SpaceX, NASA, and the United States Armed Forces work closely together by means of governmental contracts.
Elon Reeve Musk is a businessman known for his key roles in the space company SpaceX and the automotive company Tesla, Inc. He is also known for his ownership of X Corp., and his role in the founding of the Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink, and OpenAI. Musk is the wealthiest individual in the world; as of January 2025, Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$421 billion.
X.com was an American online bank founded by Ed Ho, Harris Fricker, Elon Musk, and Christopher Payne in 1999 in Palo Alto, California. It merged with competitor Confinity in 2000 and the merged company changed its name to PayPal in 2001. Starting in 2023, the x.com began to be used for Twitter, which was acquired by Elon Musk in 2022 and subsequently rebranded to X.
Tesla, Inc. is an American multinational automotive and clean energy company. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, it designs, manufactures and sells battery electric vehicles (BEVs), stationary battery energy storage devices from home to grid-scale, solar panels and solar shingles, and related products and services.
SpaceX Mars colonization program is a planned objective of the company SpaceX and particularly of its founder Elon Musk to colonize Mars. The main element of this ambition is the plan to establish a self-sustained large scale settlement and colony on Mars, claiming self-determination under direct democracy. The main motivation behind this is the belief that the colonization of Mars allows humanity to become multiplanetary and therefore secures the long-term survival of the human species in case of Earth being rid of human life.
The Boring Company (TBC) is an American infrastructure, tunnel construction service, and equipment company founded by Elon Musk. TBC was founded as a subsidiary of SpaceX in 2017, and was spun off as a separate corporation in 2018. TBC has completed one tunneling project that is open to the public, as well as multiple test tunnels.
Neuralink Corp. is an American neurotechnology company that has developed, as of 2024, implantable brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). It was founded by Elon Musk and a team of eight scientists and engineers. Neuralink was launched in 2016 and was first publicly reported in March 2017.
X, formerly Twitter, may suspend accounts, temporarily or permanently, from their social networking service. Suspensions of high-profile accounts often attract media attention, and X's use of suspensions has been controversial.
Elon Musk is the CEO or owner of multiple companies including Tesla, SpaceX, and X Corp., and has expressed many views on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from politics to science.
Donald Trump, who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021, announced his campaign for the 2024 U.S. presidential election on November 15, 2022. After he won a landslide victory in the 2024 Iowa Republican presidential caucuses, Trump was generally described as being the Republican Party's presumptive nominee. He was officially nominated on July 15, 2024, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, when he also announced JD Vance, a junior U.S. Senator from Ohio, as the nominee for vice president. The two initially faced off against the presumptive Democraic Party ticket of incumbent President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. However, on July 21, 2024, Biden withdrew from the race, and Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate.
Tesla, Inc. has been criticized for its cars, workplace culture, business practices, and occupational safety. Many of the criticisms are also directed toward Elon Musk, the company's CEO and Product Architect. Critics have also accused Tesla of deceptive marketing, unfulfilled promises, and fraud. The company is currently facing criminal and civil investigations into its self-driving claims. Critics have highlighted Tesla's downplaying of issues, and Tesla's alleged retaliation against several whistleblowers.
The business magnate Elon Musk initiated an acquisition of American social media company Twitter, Inc. on April 14, 2022, and concluded it on October 27, 2022. Musk had begun buying shares of the company in January 2022, becoming its largest shareholder by April with a 9.1 percent ownership stake. Twitter invited Musk to join its board of directors, an offer he initially accepted before declining. On April 14, Musk made an unsolicited offer to purchase the company, to which Twitter's board responded with a "poison pill" strategy to resist a hostile takeover before unanimously accepting Musk's buyout offer of $44 billion on April 25. Musk stated that he planned to introduce new features to the platform, make its algorithms open-source, combat spambot accounts, and promote free speech, framing the acquisition as the cornerstone of X, an "everything app".
In February 2022, two days after Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine requested that American aerospace company SpaceX activate their Starlink satellite internet service in the country, to replace internet and communication networks degraded or destroyed during the war. Starlink has since been used by Ukrainian civilians, government and military. The satellite service has served for humanitarian purposes, as well as defense and attacks on Russian positions.
ElonJet is a service that uses social media accounts to track the real-time usage of Elon Musk's private airplane. The service, created and provided by Jack Sweeney using public data, has accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Truth Social, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, and formerly on Twitter, where the Twitter account once had about 530,000 followers, before being suspended. Several of the social media accounts use the handle @elonjet.
Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022; Musk acted as CEO of Twitter until June 2023 when he was succeeded by Linda Yaccarino. In a move that, despite Yaccarino's accession, was widely attributed to Musk, Twitter was rebranded to X on July 23, 2023, and its domain name changed from twitter.com to x.com on May 17, 2024.
The America PAC is a super PAC created by Elon Musk with the backing of a number of prominent tech businessmen to support Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign. The group's primary purpose is to finance canvassing operations. Musk is the primary donor, with his contributions making up 91% of the declared contributions as of December 2024.
Kamala Harris, the 49th vice president of the United States, announced her 2024 campaign for president on July 21, 2024, after incumbent President Joe Biden withdrew his bid for reelection and endorsed her earlier the same day. Harris became the official nominee of the Democratic Party on August 5 following a virtual roll call vote; she selected Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate the following day. The two faced off against the Republican ticket of former President Donald Trump and U.S. Senator from Ohio JD Vance. Harris is the first nominee who did not participate in the primaries since Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968. It was also the shortest general election presidential campaign in history, lasting only 107 days.
From 30 August 2024 to 8 October 2024, Brazil's Supreme Federal Court judge Alexandre de Moraes imposed a block of X in Brazil. This occurred after the social network's chairman Elon Musk refused to appoint a legal representative in the country, which led Moraes to freeze Starlink's financial assets and impose fines for non-compliance. X began to be suspended at the start of the following day.
