Elon Musk's rise: How billionaire rocketed from startup founder to US politics

Last month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang labelled tech titan Elon Musk "superhuman" after his company, xAI, built one of the fastest AI-training supercomputers. The tag, however, is not completely unfounded. At the age of 53, Musk is not only the CEO of a host of groundbreaking ventures like Tesla and SpaceX, but has emerged as a significant political force in the incoming Donald Trump administration.

On Wednesday, as anticipated, Trump announced that Musk would work with another tech entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy in a "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) tasked with cutting down wasteful expenditures. However, the department will not be a part of the government.

The development marks the meteoric rise of Musk -- from growing up in violence-ridden, apartheid-torn South Africa to becoming the world's richest man and now as an influential figure in the US government. He is also close to setting a new wealth record, boosting his net worth to $335 billion.

However, the mercurial entrepreneur had humble origins before bursting on to the Silicon Valley scene more than 20 years ago. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk came from a broken family, with his parents divorcing when he was barely eight.

Since a very early age, Musk showed entrepreneurship skills, selling homemade chocolate Easter eggs and developing his first computer game at the age of 12. However, Musk's childhood was difficult, and he has recounted how he was bullied at school and his struggles picking up on social cues because of Asperger's Syndrome.

"From the very start, he knew pain, but also knew how to survive it," writes Walter Isaacson in his biography of Elon Musk.

However, life took a turn for Musk after he moved to Canada and then to the United States for higher studies. Musk studied economics and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. Musk then travelled to California to attend Stanford University but dropped out and decided to test the entrepreneurship waters during the "dotcom boom" of the 1990s.

He founded two start-ups, including a web software firm (Zip2) and an online banking company that eventually became PayPal. It was later sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. Even before selling PayPal, Musk had already thought of his next move and his goal -- to make spaceflight cheaper.

In early 2002, Musk founded a company known as Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, with $100 million from the PayPal sale. Six years later, he ploughed his fortune into a new electric car company, Tesla. He became the chief executive in 2008.

The same year, Musk nearly went broke. A turnaround came in 2009 when SpaceX landed a $1.5 billion contract with NASA and Tesla found more investors. After that, there was no looking back, as Musk founded and bought several ventures, such as OpenAI, SolarCity and The Boring Company.

In 2017, Musk founded Neuralink, which is building devices that can be implanted inside the human brain. It was the same year that his association with Trump started, albeit briefly. Musk joined President Trump's business advisory council but quit after severe backlash.

However, the most significant of his takeovers came in October 2022, when, after months of back and forth, he bought social media platform Twitter for $44 billion.

The year 2024 has been unforgettable for the 53-year-old, who has fathered 11 children from three partners.

In a crucial step towards making rockets fully reusable, SpaceX successfully caught a rocket booster in chopstick-like arms. The mechanical arms are designed to catch descending rockets using pincer-like grips at the launch pad.

SpaceX has also been tasked with bringing back NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been stuck on the Space Station (ISS) for over 100 days longer than initially planned.

While Musk has cemented his role as a tech visionary, it remains to be seen what impact he creates in the Trump administration.