<Tr> <Th> Awards </Th> <Td> Fellow of the Royal Society </Td> </Tr> <Tr> <Th_colspan="2"> Signature </Th> </Tr> <P> Elon Reeve Musk FRS (/ ˈiːlɒn /; born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate, investor and engineer . He is the founder, CEO, and lead designer of SpaceX; co-founder, CEO, and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; co-founder and CEO of Neuralink; and co-founder of PayPal . In December 2016, he was ranked 21st on the Forbes list of The World's Most Powerful People . As of August 2018, he has a net worth of $20.2 billion and is listed by Forbes as the 46th - richest person in the world . </P> <P> Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk taught himself computer programming at the age of 12 . He moved to Canada when he was 17 to attend Queen's University . He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania two years later, where he received an economics degree from the Wharton School and a degree in physics from the College of Arts and Sciences . He began a Ph. D. in applied physics and material sciences at Stanford University in 1995 but dropped out after two days to pursue an entrepreneurial career . He subsequently co-founded Zip2, a web software company, which was acquired by Compaq for $340 million in 1999 . Musk then founded X.com, an online bank . It merged with Confinity in 2000 and became PayPal, which was bought by eBay for $1.5 billion in October 2002 . </P>

Telsa was cofounded by what south african born inventor