Chief Executive, Space Exploration Technologies Corp.,
Boring Co., Tesla Motors Inc.

The South Africa-born entrepreneur announced early last year that he was moving to Austin, Texas. However, SpaceX is still headquartered in Hawthorne and Musk’s influence remains strong in the area. Musk moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford, but famously dropped out after two days and founded web software company Zip2, which he sold to Compaq in 1999. He also founded X.com, which later became PayPal and was purchased by eBay Inc. in 2002. That same year he founded SpaceX and then launched Tesla Inc. in 2003. He has been considered the world’s wealthiest person with $250 billion in net worth. In April he raised $43 billion to acquire Twitter Inc.

YEARS ON THE LA500: 7