Elon Musk is an engineer, entrepreneur, inventor, and visionary who has founded and co-founded a number of companies that have had large impact and success.
Elon Musk is known as a prodigious workaholic. He has for some time been CEO of multiple companies at the same time, most prominently SpaceX, which is leading efforts for a new generation of commercially developed reusable spacecraft with the stated goal of helping humanity become a multi-planetary species, and Tesla, which produces electric vehicles, solar energy capture systems, and battery energy storage systems, with the stated goal of accelerating humanity's transition to renewable energy.
He is a very hands-on CEO, often getting involved in engineering and design, while also planning how products can be developed in a way that makes it possible to bootstrap by having early generations of product finance the development of successive generations. He says he is driven by a desire to be happy about the future. He is a naturalized American citizen, but he grew up in South Africa, where he received an education that taught him one of his often described problem solving techniques, working from first principles. He has applied this technique to solve problems and create new solutions and companies in a way that has few comparisons.
His first big success was a relatively unknown company called Zip2, created at the dawn of the commercial world wide web. After that he helped create PayPal, followed by Solar City, Tesla (where he is counted as a founder although he was not there at the very beginning), SpaceX, and The Boring Company, which is focused on creating underground transportation alternatives using tunnels. He also envisioned and promoted a "Hyperloop" concept which would be a tube enabling long distance conveyance of passengers in capsules with high speeds enabled by a near vacuum atmosphere inside the tube.
Additionally he created OpenAI and NeuralLink, two companies aiming to enable and guide progress toward positive outcomes in artificial intelligence. Another company he has in preparation is Starlink, currently being developed under the SpaceX umbrella, which is a plan for a constellation of near-earth satellites that will support a low-latency network providing internet access covering most of the earth.
With all these accomplishments and activities, Elon Musk manages to find time to be active on social media. Although he's been compared to Thomas Edison as an inventor and captain of industry, he is quite a colorful figure, with public antics often drawing attention not characteristic of most CEOs. And as the CEO of several publicly traded companies, he sometimes gets criticized when his irreverence doesn't match people's expectations. Amongst his critics are some stock-shorting investors who would stand to profit if he is brought down, and they manage to sustain an ongoing onslaught of public criticism, some made up, and some based on Musk's actual statements or actions. In the meantime, he continues to have quite an impact, shipping real products, changing several industries, and generally helping to make the world a place where we can, as he puts it, "think about the future and not feel sad."