Former · Jan 2025 – May 2025
Elon Musk
Senior Adviser, DOGE
Zip2, PayPal, rockets that land, a car company that made electric ordinary, a satellite internet that reached Ukraine, and a five-month war on federal waste.
- On the file
- 5
- Of 13
- 13
- The building
- Out
Career
Awards, firsts, the work
Zip2, then PayPal
Compaq bought Zip2 for $307 million. X.com merged into PayPal. eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion; his after-tax take was about $160 million. That check funded the rocket company. He became a U.S. citizen the same year.
SourceEncyclopaedia BritannicaFirst private orbital launch, then the ISS
SpaceX, founded 2002. After three failures, September 28, 2008: first private company to reach orbit. Then the first private spacecraft to the International Space Station, reusable Falcon 9 landings, Crew Dragon. NASA later hired the company to deorbit the ISS.
SourceBusiness InsiderTesla at a trillion
He was not the original founder. He was the investor who became CEO in 2008 and made a sports car, then a sedan, then a mass-market EV. October 2021: Tesla’s market cap crossed $1 trillion, the sixth U.S. firm to do it. The charging network is why a family in Ohio can own an electric car without a prayer.
SourceInvestopediaStarlink, including a war zone
A low-earth constellation selling broadband where fiber is a rumor. Traffic tripled in 2024. The wartime use in Ukraine is the line that made a satellite company a foreign-policy fact. A kid in a village and a medic under fire both got a signal.
SourceBusiness InsiderDOGE, the wall of receipts, $175 billion posted
Day 1: the U.S. Digital Service restyled as the Department of Government Efficiency. He stood it up, posted cancelled contracts, and left in May. The site claimed about $175 billion. Critics will litigate the arithmetic. The instruction to stop paying ghost invoices was the job.
SourceFox News