For the builders, the believers, and everyone who still thinks America’s best days are ahead.

The first build

In January 1999, Musk launched X.com, an online financial services company. In March 2000 it merged with Confinity, the company behind a payments product called PayPal. The combined company took the PayPal name, and in October 2002 eBay acquired it for $1.5 billion in stock.¹ Long before “fintech” was a word, the idea that you could send money as easily as an email was a bet against the entire banking establishment. The bet paid off, and the lesson stuck: incumbents are not invincible.

Electrify

In February 2004, Musk led Tesla’s first funding round and became its chairman; in 2008 he became CEO.² At the time, electric cars were punchlines. Tesla made them fast, beautiful and wanted. In June 2014, Musk announced that Tesla would not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wanted to use its technology, writing that the company existed “to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport.”³ In the first quarter of 2023, the Model Y became the world’s best-selling car, the first electric vehicle ever to hold that title.²

Whatever you think of climate policy, that is a remarkable thing: an American company, building in American factories, beat the world’s largest automakers at their own game.

Reuse the rocket

For sixty years, orbital rockets were thrown away after a single flight. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 on the belief that this was the problem. On December 21, 2015, a Falcon 9 delivered 11 satellites to orbit and its first stage flew back and landed at Landing Zone 1 — the first time an orbital-class rocket had ever landed.⁴ Reusing boosters is now routine. It changed the economics of reaching space, for America and for everyone who launches with it.

Return to orbit

When the Space Shuttle retired in 2011, the United States lost the ability to launch its own astronauts. In 2012, SpaceX’s Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to deliver cargo to the International Space Station.⁴ Then, on May 30, 2020, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley launched aboard Crew Dragon on a Falcon 9 from Kennedy Space Center — the first time astronauts had launched from American soil since 2011, and the first time a commercial company had taken astronauts to orbit and back.⁵ A country that had been buying seats abroad was flying its own crews again.

Connect everyone

Starlink set out to bring broadband to anywhere under the sky. Its value became clear when the ground infrastructure failed. Two days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, Ukraine’s digital minister Mykhailo Fedorov publicly asked Musk for help; Musk replied that Starlink service was active in Ukraine, and a shipment of terminals arrived less than 48 hours later.⁶ After Hurricane Helene in 2024, Starlink systems were deployed in western North Carolina to help responders and cut-off communities communicate.⁷ When the cables are cut and the towers are down, a connection from orbit is a lifeline.

Restore what was lost

Neuralink, which Musk co-founded in 2016, is building a brain-computer interface. In May 2023 it received FDA clearance for its first-in-human clinical trial. On January 28, 2024, Noland Arbaugh — paralyzed below the shoulders after a diving accident — received the first implant, and was later shown moving a computer cursor and playing online chess using only his thoughts.⁸ It is early, and it is a trial, not a cure. But it points toward a future where paralysis doesn’t have to mean disconnection.

Dig, don’t wait

Frustrated by traffic, Musk started The Boring Company to make tunnels cheaper and faster to build. Its Las Vegas Convention Center Loop opened in 2021, carrying visitors underground between convention halls.⁹ It’s a modest system. The point is the attitude: when the infrastructure doesn’t exist, build it.

Think about AI early

Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI, announced in December 2015 as a nonprofit research lab, and served as its co-chair until February 2018.¹⁰ He was warning about the risks of advanced artificial intelligence long before it was a dinner-table topic. Whatever you think of the later disputes, he was early to a question every president from now on will have to answer.

Open the square

On October 27, 2022, Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, later renaming it X, on a promise to make it a platform for free expression.¹¹ People disagree, loudly, about how that has gone. That they can disagree so loudly, on the platform itself, is part of the point.

Take on the waste — and the duopoly

In 2025, Musk spent roughly 130 days leading the Department of Government Efficiency as a special government employee, leaving at the end of May.¹² He took on the unglamorous work of questioning federal spending in public. DOGE’s savings claims were disputed by independent reviewers, and we won’t pretend otherwise — but very few people of his means have ever chosen to spend their time and reputation on the federal budget.

Then, on July 5, 2025, he announced the America Party, writing that “when it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy.”¹³ Reports since then indicate no formal FEC registration followed, and in 2026 his political spending has gone to Republican candidates through America PAC.¹⁴ We think the idea he named still deserves a movement.