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This Elon Musk trivia quiz has 49 free questions with answers and follows the whole arc: the Pretoria kid who sold a video game at twelve, the Zip2 and PayPal windfalls, the three Falcon 1 failures that nearly sank SpaceX, the Tesla takeover, the Roadster looping David Bowie on its way past Mars, the $44 billion Twitter deal and the more recent turns through Neuralink, the Boring Company and Washington. It is built for tech-minded quiz nights, business students and anyone who follows the space and EV worlds. The easy questions cover the companies everyone knows; the hard ones dig into deal sizes, dates and the people who were actually in the room. Questions stick to documented facts rather than opinion. Every answer has been checked against encyclopaedic and primary sources, so you can trust the numbers even when the story keeps changing.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Elon Musk born?
Pretoria
Musk was born in Pretoria on June 28, 1971; the city serves as South Africa's administrative capital.
Q 02Musk holds Canadian citizenship from birth because of which relative?
His mother, born in Saskatchewan
His mother, born in Saskatchewan, is Maye Musk, born in Regina in 1948; that Canadian birth passed citizenship to him. Her father moved the family to South Africa in 1950.
Q 03What BASIC video game did 12-year-old Musk sell to a magazine for about $500?
Blastar
Blastar, a space shooter written in BASIC, was sold to PC and Office Technology magazine for about $500; Musk had taught himself to program from a Commodore VIC-20 manual.
Q 04Which Canadian university did Musk attend for two years before transferring to Penn?
Queen's
Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, enrolled him in 1990; he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, earning degrees in physics and economics.
Q 05Musk was accepted to a graduate programme at which university in 1995 but never enrolled?
Stanford
Stanford admitted him to a materials-science graduate programme in 1995, but he deferred and instead founded Zip2 during the dot-com boom.
Q 06Musk's first company, Zip2, provided what kind of software?
City guides for newspapers
City guides for newspapers were Zip2's product: online maps and business directories licensed to clients such as The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.
Q 07Which computer company bought Zip2 for $307 million in 1999?
Compaq
Compaq paid $307 million in cash for Zip2 in February 1999; Musk's roughly 7 percent stake brought him $22 million.
Q 08Which company merged with Musk's online payments start-up in 2000 to form what became PayPal?
Confinity
Confinity, founded by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel, already ran the more popular PayPal service.
Q 09Which company bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002?
eBay
eBay's $1.5 billion all-stock purchase of PayPal closed that October; Musk, the largest shareholder with 11.72 percent, received about $175.8 million.
Q 10In 2017 Musk bought back which internet domain from PayPal, saying it had sentimental value?
X.com
X.com was the name of Musk's 1999 online bank that became PayPal; he bought the domain back in July 2017 and reused it when Twitter was rebranded as X.
Q 11In what year did Musk found SpaceX?
2002
SpaceX was founded in 2002 with about $100 million of Musk's PayPal fortune; he took the titles of CEO and chief engineer.
Q 12How many times did SpaceX's first rocket fail before it finally reached orbit in 2008?
Three
Three Falcon 1 launches failed (2006, 2007 and August 2008) and nearly bankrupted SpaceX; the fourth, that September, was the first privately developed liquid-fuelled rocket to reach orbit.
Q 13In 2012 SpaceX's Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to do what?
Dock with the ISS
NASA had awarded the company a $1.6 billion resupply contract in 2008.
Q 21How much did Musk invest in Tesla's 2004 Series A to become its largest shareholder?
$6.35M
$6.35M of the $7.5 million Series A came from Musk in February 2004, making him chairman and largest shareholder; he became CEO and product architect in October 2008.
Q 22Tesla's first car, delivered from 2008, was the first mass-produced all-electric car to use what?
Lithium-ion battery cells
Lithium-ion battery cells, 6,831 of them, powered the original Tesla Roadster; about 2,500 of the two-seat sports cars were sold before production ended in 2012.
Q 23Musk's car company is named in tribute to which inventor?
Nikola Tesla
Q 14SpaceX first landed a Falcon 9 first stage back on land in which year?
2015
On December 21, 2015, a Falcon 9 booster returned to Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral after launching Orbcomm satellites; reusing boosters was the key to cutting launch costs.
Q 15What dummy payload rode on the first Falcon Heavy launch in 2018?
Musk's own Tesla Roadster
Musk's own Tesla Roadster, painted midnight cherry, flew as the test payload; a spacesuited mannequin named Starman sat at the wheel as the car headed into an orbit around the Sun stretching beyond Mars.
Q 16Which novel did Musk place in the glovebox of the space-bound Roadster?
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy rides in the glovebox beside a towel, and the dashboard reads 'Don't Panic'; Musk has cited Douglas Adams's novel as a formative influence.
Q 17The mannequin in the space-bound Roadster was named after a song by which artist?
David Bowie
David Bowie wrote 'Starman' (1972), the song that gave the mannequin its name; the Roadster's stereo was set to loop his 'Space Oddity'.
Q 18SpaceX's 2020 Demo-2 mission made it the first private company to do what?
Put astronauts into orbit
Put astronauts into orbit: on May 30, 2020, Crew Dragon carried NASA's Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the ISS, the first crewed orbital launch from US soil since the Shuttle retired in 2011.
Q 19What is the name of SpaceX's satellite internet constellation?
Starlink
Development began in 2015; SpaceX estimated the decade-long project would cost $10 billion.
Q 20Which two men incorporated Tesla Motors in 2003, before Musk joined?
Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning
Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning incorporated Tesla Motors in July 2003; Musk led its 2004 funding round, and a 2009 lawsuit settlement let five men call themselves co-founders.
Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor of the AC induction motor, is the company's namesake; the original Roadster was driven by exactly that kind of motor.
Q 24Musk's 2018 "funding secured" tweet about taking Tesla private led the SEC to fine him and Tesla how much apiece?
$20M
$20M each was the penalty for Musk and Tesla in the September 2018 SEC settlement; Musk also had to surrender the chairmanship, which Robyn Denholm took that November.
Q 25Which solar company, founded by Musk's cousins, did Tesla buy for about $2 billion in 2016?
SolarCity
SolarCity was founded in July 2006 by Musk's cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive on his concept and seed money; Tesla absorbed it that November in an all-stock deal.
Q 26What did Musk unveil in 2013 as a cheaper way to travel long distances?
The Hyperloop
The Hyperloop, outlined in Musk's August 2013 'Hyperloop Alpha' paper, proposed pods racing through low-pressure tubes; he had engineers from Tesla and SpaceX sketch the concept.
Q 27Musk co-founded which artificial intelligence lab in December 2015, later leaving it?
OpenAI
OpenAI began as a non-profit co-founded by Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever; Musk left its board in February 2018 and later founded the rival lab xAI.
Q 28Musk co-founded Neuralink in which year?
2016
Neuralink was incorporated in 2016 and first reported publicly in March 2017; Musk put in about $100 million, and the company later showed a macaque playing Pong through its implant.
Q 29What did Neuralink call the brain implant given to its first human patient in 2024?
Telepathy
Telepathy is the name Musk gave the first implant, placed in patient Noland Arbaugh in January 2024; by February he could move a computer cursor by thought.
Q 30Musk said frustration with traffic in which city inspired the Boring Company?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles traffic prompted the December tweet in which Musk vowed to 'build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging'; the Boring Company was incorporated soon after.