Founder & CEO · SpaceX, Tesla, xAI
Founder and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, and founder of xAI, Neuralink, and The Boring Company. From Zip2 and PayPal to reusable rockets, mass-market electric cars, and frontier AI — building across the internet, payments, aerospace, automotive, and AI. Physics & economics at Penn. $307M Zip2 → $1.5B PayPal → SpaceX, Tesla, xAI.
Co-founder & CEO, Anthropic · AI safety
Co-founder & CEO of Anthropic, the AI-safety lab behind the Claude models. Formerly VP of Research at OpenAI, where he led GPT-2 and GPT-3 and co-developed the scaling laws and RLHF. Physics at Stanford, biophysics PhD at Princeton — from speech research to a frontier AI lab.
AI Engineer & Educator · Anthropic (ex-Tesla, OpenAI)
One of the most recognized AI engineers and educators. A founding member of OpenAI and former Senior Director of AI at Tesla, where he led the Autopilot vision team — now on Anthropic's pre-training team. PhD at Stanford under Fei-Fei Li, where he created CS231n. from char-rnn and nanoGPT to teaching the world to build neural nets.
Designer · Iconography & UI
The designer of the original Macintosh icons — the smiling Mac, the trash can, the command-key symbol — and the Chicago typeface. Creative director at NeXT, then 25 years running her own studio designing icons for Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, and PayPal. Now Design Architect at Niantic. the pixel-art pioneer who gave the GUI its face.
Co-founder & CEO, OpenAI · AI
Co-founder & CEO of OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. Former president of Y Combinator (2014–2019), where he scaled the world's most influential startup accelerator. Started his first company, Loopt, after dropping out of Stanford. Stanford dropout → YC president → ChatGPT.
Civic Technologist · ex-Digital Minister, Taiwan
Taiwan's first Minister of Digital Affairs and the government's first transgender, non-binary cabinet member. A self-taught programmer who left school at 14, contributed to Perl 6 and Haskell, advised Apple on Siri, and built digital-democracy tools from the g0v civic-tech movement. rough consensus and running code, applied to government.
AI Scientist · Co-founder & CEO, World Labs
The computer scientist behind ImageNet — the dataset that sparked the deep-learning revolution. Sequoia Professor at Stanford and co-director of its Human-Centered AI Institute, ex-Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud, and now co-founder & CEO of World Labs. Physics at Princeton, PhD at Caltech. the “godmother of AI”.
Founder & CEO, Girls Who Code · Moms First
Founder & CEO of Girls Who Code, which has reached hundreds of thousands of girls to close the gender gap in tech. A Yale-trained lawyer and the first Indian-American woman to run for U.S. Congress, she later founded Moms First to fight for paid leave and childcare. teaching girls bravery, not perfection.
Chef & Owner · Atelier Crenn (3 Michelin stars)
The first woman in the United States to earn three Michelin stars, at her San Francisco restaurant Atelier Crenn. French-born and self-taught — no culinary school — she rose through Jeremiah Tower's kitchen and became the first woman executive chef in Indonesia. Her tasting menus read as poetry. artistry on the plate, three stars earned.
Built Starlink, a constellation of thousands of satellites delivering broadband internet from low Earth orbit.
Brought high-speed internet to remote and underserved regions worldwide.
Founded SpaceX in 2002 and leads it as CEO and chief engineer — the first private company to send humans to orbit and to land and reuse orbital-class rockets.
Drove down the cost of access to space; SpaceX now launches the majority of the world's payload to orbit.
Leads Tesla as CEO — electric vehicles, batteries, and solar — turning EVs from niche to mainstream.
Tesla became the world's most valuable automaker and accelerated the global shift to electric vehicles.
Founded xAI in 2023 to build artificial intelligence; its assistant, Grok, is trained in part on real-time data from X.
Entered the frontier-AI race alongside OpenAI and Google.
Co-founded X.com, an online bank that merged with Confinity to become PayPal.
Sold to eBay for $1.5B — one of the first mainstream online-payment platforms.
Founded Zip2, an early web-software and city-guide company, with his brother Kimbal.
Sold to Compaq for $307M — the first exit that seeded everything after.
Authored the Responsible Scaling Policy and made interpretability and alignment first-class research priorities.
The RSP became a template other frontier labs adopted for their own safety commitments.
Founded Anthropic in 2021 to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI — and grew it into a frontier lab shipping the Claude family of models.
Claude became one of the most widely used AI assistants; Anthropic now sits among the handful of frontier AI labs.
Led the research behind GPT-2 and GPT-3 and co-developed the scaling laws that defined modern LLM training.
GPT-3 set the template for today's large language models.
Co-authored “Concrete Problems in AI Safety,” framing a research agenda for safe machine-learning systems.
Became one of the most-cited AI-safety papers of the era.
Worked under Andrew Ng on Deep Speech, applying end-to-end deep learning to large-scale speech recognition.
Deep Speech showed deep learning could beat traditional, hand-built speech pipelines.
Joined Anthropic's pre-training team in 2026 — using Claude to accelerate the research that builds the next generation of Claude.
Brought a decade of model-training expertise to a frontier lab.
Founded Eureka Labs to build an AI-native school — courses paired with an AI teaching assistant — and created the open “Neural Networks: Zero to Hero” curriculum.
Taught hundreds of thousands to build neural networks and LLMs from scratch.
Rejoined OpenAI to work on GPT-class large language models.
A second tour at the lab he helped found.
Hired by Elon Musk to lead Tesla's computer-vision team — built the neural networks and data engine behind Autopilot / Full Self-Driving, and popularized the idea of “Software 2.0.”
Shipped vision-based autonomy to over a million cars.
A founding member of OpenAI — alongside Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and Sam Altman — working on deep reinforcement learning and generative models.
Helped launch one of the most influential AI labs in the world.
Designs graphical elements — icons and visuals — for Niantic's augmented-reality games including Pokémon GO.
Brought her iconographic clarity to one of the most-played mobile games in the world.
Joined Pinterest's creative team, shaping visual and product design.
Applied decades of interface craft to a modern visual-discovery product.
Ran her own design studio for over two decades — created icons for Microsoft (the Windows 3.0 set and the Solitaire card deck), IBM, Facebook, PayPal, and Oracle.
Her work shipped to hundreds of millions of desktops; many Windows icons lasted unchanged until XP.
Creative director at NeXT, the company Steve Jobs founded after Apple.
Carried the visual language of personal computing into a new platform.
Designed the original Macintosh interface icons — the happy Mac, the trash can, the save disk — and the Chicago typeface, drawing on her training in counted-thread embroidery for the grid.
Defined the visual language of the graphical user interface; her icons shipped on every Mac.
Co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and became CEO in 2019; led the launches of ChatGPT and the GPT-4 model line.
ChatGPT reached 100M+ users faster than any prior consumer app and reset the AI industry.
Ran Y Combinator as president, expanding the accelerator and launching YC Continuity for later-stage funding.
Helped fund and scale hundreds of startups now worth hundreds of billions.
Co-founded Loopt, a location-sharing app, in Y Combinator's first batch; raised $30M+ and sold it to Green Dot.
Acquired by Green Dot for $43.4M in 2012.
Ran a seed fund backing early-stage startups, including a large early position in Stripe.
Built the investing track record that led to running YC.
Represents Taiwan internationally on digital democracy, open government, and information resilience.
Carries Taiwan's participatory-governance model to a global audience.
Taiwan's first Digital Minister — built participation tools (vTaiwan, Join), led the open-data COVID mask-map response, and defended the 2024 elections from cyber-interference.
Pioneered transparent, participatory digital governance copied around the world; first non-binary cabinet member.
Joined the cabinet from the g0v civic-tech community; brought open-source, consensus-seeking methods into policymaking after the 2014 Sunflower Movement.
Turned civic hacking into a working model of government.
Consulted for Apple, helping develop its Siri virtual assistant and other machine-learning products.
Applied language and ML expertise at consumer scale.
Core contributor to Perl 6 (Raku) and Haskell; worked in high-level IT consultancy and built open-source software from a young age.
A respected figure in the global free-software community.
Co-founded World Labs to build “large world models” — AI that understands and generates 3D space, not just pixels and text.
Reached a multi-billion-dollar valuation within months on the bet that spatial intelligence is AI's next frontier.
Built ImageNet (2009), a 14-million-image dataset and challenge that catalyzed deep learning; co-founded Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute (HAI).
ImageNet enabled the breakthroughs — AlexNet onward — behind modern AI.
On sabbatical from Stanford, served as VP at Google and Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud.
Brought research-grade AI to enterprise cloud products.
Directed the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-founded AI4ALL to widen access to AI education.
Mentored a generation of AI researchers and pushed for inclusive AI.
Began her faculty career in computer vision, the work that led directly to ImageNet.
Laid the groundwork for large-scale visual recognition.
Founded Girls Who Code in 2012 to close the gender gap in technology — clubs, summer immersion, and college programs reaching hundreds of thousands of girls.
Helped change who learns to code in America.
Launched the Marshall Plan for Moms — now Moms First — pushing for paid leave, affordable childcare, and pay equity.
Put the unpaid labor of mothers onto the national policy agenda.
Served as Deputy Public Advocate for New York City; in 2010 became the first Indian-American woman to run for U.S. Congress.
The school visits during that campaign sparked the idea for Girls Who Code.
Practiced law in finance and investments after Yale Law School.
The legal and policy foundation behind her later advocacy.
Opened Atelier Crenn in 2011 — poetic, artistic tasting menus — and in 2018 became the first woman in the US to earn three Michelin stars.
Redefined American fine dining and what a woman-led kitchen could achieve.
Owns Petit Crenn (homestyle French) and Bar Crenn, a Parisian-style wine bar that also earned a Michelin star.
Built a family of restaurants around her vision.
As executive chef of Luce, earned the restaurant a Michelin star.
Established her name in the San Francisco fine-dining scene.
Became the first woman executive chef in Indonesia, also cooking in Osaka — honing technique and management abroad.
Broke ground for women in professional kitchens internationally.
Got her first kitchen job under Jeremiah Tower, a father of California cuisine, and worked her way up — with no formal culinary schooling.
Self-taught foundations that became a three-star career.
Leads development of Starship, a fully reusable super-heavy launch vehicle designed to carry people to the Moon and Mars.
Built Starlink, a low-Earth-orbit satellite constellation delivering broadband internet worldwide.
Co-founded Neuralink to build implantable brain-computer interfaces.
Founded The Boring Company to dig tunnels for fast urban transit.
Co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit AI research lab; departed its board in 2018.
Led the lab building Claude — a family of frontier AI assistants designed to be helpful, honest, and safe.
Co-developed Constitutional AI — training models to follow a written set of principles instead of relying only on human feedback.
Authored the Responsible Scaling Policy — capability thresholds that gate model deployment on safety evidence.
A minimal, readable codebase for training and fine-tuning medium-sized GPTs — the reference many learn LLMs from.
A free video course building neural nets and LLMs from scratch — micrograd → makemore → GPT.
Co-designed with Fei-Fei Li and taught Stanford's first deep-learning course — Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition.
A tiny scalar-valued autograd engine and neural-net library — built to teach how backpropagation really works.
Designed the original Mac icon set — the happy Mac, the trash can, the watch cursor — that taught the world the desktop metaphor.
Designed Chicago, the bold bitmap typeface used across the early Mac interface (and later the first iPods).
Designed the card deck and icons for Microsoft's Windows 3.0 — including the Solitaire cards seen by hundreds of millions.
Shipped ChatGPT, the assistant that brought generative AI to hundreds of millions of people.
Co-founded Worldcoin, a proof-of-personhood and digital-identity project.
Built open platforms (vTaiwan, Join) where citizens and government deliberate on policy and reach rough consensus.
Coordinated the open-data mask-availability map that helped Taiwan manage PPE without lockdowns.
Core contributor to the design and implementation of Perl 6 (Raku).
Created ImageNet and its annual challenge — the dataset and benchmark that proved deep learning at scale.
Co-founded the nonprofit AI4ALL to bring AI education to underrepresented students.
Co-founded and co-directs Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute, advancing AI that benefits humanity.
Built a nationwide network of clubs and summer programs teaching girls to code and to belong in tech.
Founded Moms First (formerly the Marshall Plan for Moms) to win paid leave, childcare, and pay equity.
Wrote the bestseller expanding her TED talk on raising girls to be brave rather than perfect.
Her flagship — a poetic, vegetable-forward, artistry-driven tasting menu that earned three Michelin stars.
A Parisian-style wine bar adjacent to Atelier Crenn that earned its own Michelin star.
Wrote the memoir “Rebel Chef: In Search of What Matters,” on identity, immigration, and cooking.
Founder & CEO · SpaceX, Tesla, xAI
Austin, TX · elon@example.com · x.com/elonmusk
Founder and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, and founder of xAI, Neuralink, and The Boring Company. From Zip2 and PayPal to reusable rockets, mass-market electric vehicles, and frontier AI — building across the internet, payments, aerospace, automotive, and AI. Physics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania.
SpaceX
Tesla
xAI
X.com / PayPal
Zip2
University of Pennsylvania
Queen's University, Kingston
aerospace engineering, rocket propulsion, electric vehicles, manufacturing, artificial intelligence, satellites, autonomy / self-driving, energy storage, robotics, tunneling, payments, systems engineering, software architecture, first-principles design, simulation, rapid iteration, vertical integration, design-for-manufacture, cost engineering, recruiting, team leadership, public communication, vision-setting, physics, first-principles reasoning, risk analysis