COMPANY RISK RATINGS
By InsidEntity Editorial Desk · Jul 19, 2026 · 4 min read
People search his age, his companies, and his fortune. We look at the seats. According to his InsidEntity profile, Elon Reeve Musk, born 28 June 1971 and now 55, has held a seat on the Tesla board since April 2004, longer than most directors hold any seat anywhere, and has been its CEO since 2008.
The seats he holds
At Tesla, Musk is an executive director who also carries the title of Technoking. He served as chairman of the board until November 2018, when he stepped down from the chair under a settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, resolved without admitting or denying the allegations; Robyn Denholm has chaired the board since. He serves on no board committees; independent oversight is led by the chair and the standing committees, audit, compensation, nominating and corporate governance, and disclosure controls, none of which he sits on.
At SpaceX, listed in June 2026 as the merged SpaceX and xAI entity, he is founder, chairman, CEO and chief engineer, on the board since 2002. He founded xAI in 2023, acquired by SpaceX in February 2026 on the record. He acquired Twitter in 2022, renaming it X Corp, since folded into xAI. He founded The Boring Company in 2016 and co-founded Neuralink the same year.
| Company | Role | On the record since |
|---|---|---|
| Tesla | Executive director, CEO, Technoking; chairman until Nov 2018 | April 2004 |
| SpaceX (incl. xAI) | Founder, chairman, CEO, chief engineer | 2002 |
| xAI | Founder; acquired by SpaceX February 2026 | 2023 |
| X Corp | Acquirer and chairman; folded into xAI | 2022 |
| The Boring Company | Founder | 2016 |
| Neuralink | Co-founder | 2016 |
The record before
The earlier chapters are on the profile too: co-founder of Zip2 in 1995, acquired by Compaq in 1999; co-founder of X.com the same year, the startup that became PayPal, where he served as CEO until 2000 and remained a board member and the largest shareholder through eBay’s 2002 acquisition; chairman of SolarCity from 2006 until Tesla acquired it in 2016; and a board member of OpenAI from 2015 to 2018. He holds degrees in physics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania, was born in South Africa, and holds South African, Canadian and United States citizenship.
The governance lens
Two numbers on the record do most of the talking. The first is tenure: twenty-two years on the Tesla board, more than double the ten-year mark at which the Company Risk Rating methodology stops counting any director as independent. The second is control: Musk held 85.1% of SpaceX’s combined voting power through super-voting Class B shares at the time of its listing filings, settling at 82.4% after the June 2026 IPO, on a nine-member board where one director is marked independent and the auditor relationship with PwC has already run past the ten-year clock that capped HSBC’s rating. The listing filings also disclose that Musk can be removed as chairman, CEO or CTO only by a vote of the Class B shareholders, a class he dominates, which in practice makes his removal a decision only he can take.
Independence, read the InsidEntity way
The Director Independence pillar leans on direct disclosures from directors themselves through the platform’s director risk framework, and where declarations have not been populated the platform presents the default and says so on the profile. Musk’s profile is marked Director Verified: No, and the invitation to verify stands, as it does for every director on the platform. But an executive founder with super-voting control does not need a questionnaire to be read correctly. He is the company. That is the opposite of independent, and on the SpaceX record, that is exactly what it shows.
If you sit on a board, this record exists for you too
InsidEntity maintains director profiles across 145 stock exchanges, built from filings and public disclosures, whether or not the director has ever seen them. Verification is the part only you can add: completing the independence disclosure through the platform’s director risk framework moves your profile from the platform’s defaults to your own account of your independence, visible to every investor who looks you up before they form a view without you. The invitation stands for every director on the platform, from the Technoking down.
His full profile, directorships, committee history and working record are free to view: Elon Musk on InsidEntity.
Know your entity. This is independent research, not financial advice.