Elon Musk Trivia
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This Elon Musk trivia quiz has 46 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 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Elon Musk born?
Pretoria
Pretoria, South Africa's administrative capital, is where Musk was born; at 17 he left for Canada, partly to avoid South African military service.
Q 02What BASIC video game did 12-year-old Musk sell to a magazine for about $500?
Blastar
Blastar has since been rebuilt from its printed code as a browser game that anyone can play online.
Q 03After two years at Queen's University in Ontario, Musk transferred to which Ivy League school?
Penn
Penn is where Musk hosted big ticketed house parties to help pay his way through college.
Q 04Musk gave up a place in which university's graduate programme to found Zip2?
Stanford
Stanford admitted Musk, but he left to join the internet boom, quitting after two days by one account or never enrolling by another.
Q 05Musk's first company, Zip2, provided what kind of software?
City guides for newspapers
City guides for newspapers: in 1998 Zip2 agreed to merge with its rival CitySearch, then called the deal off weeks later, citing clashing cultures and technology.
Q 06Which PC maker bought Zip2 for $307 million in 1999?
Compaq
Compaq's purchase let Musk fund his next venture right away, an online financial services company.
Q 07Musk's online bank merged with Confinity in 2000; which Confinity co-founder later replaced him as CEO?
Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel took over after the board ousted Musk in 2000, and he renamed the company after Confinity's more popular PayPal service.
Q 08Which company bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002?
eBay
eBay's purchase made Musk rich, and he put $100 million of his PayPal fortune into starting SpaceX.
Q 09In 2017 Musk bought back which internet domain from PayPal?
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 10Which SpaceX rocket failed on its first three launches before reaching orbit in 2008?
Falcon 1
Falcon 1's fourth launch was make-or-break: Musk has said that had it failed, that would have been it for SpaceX.
Q 11In 2012 SpaceX's Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to do what?
Dock with the ISS
Dock with the ISS is the popular phrasing: in May 2012 astronaut Don Pettit caught Dragon with the station's robotic arm so it could be berthed.
Q 12Whose rocket company landed a booster after a trip to space a month before SpaceX's first landing in 2015?
Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin landed New Shepard in November 2015, but Musk pointed out that it had flown only a suborbital hop.
Q 13Which SpaceX rocket's first flight, in February 2018, carried Musk's Tesla Roadster into space?
Falcon Heavy
Falcon Heavy's two recycled side boosters landed back at Cape Canaveral, but its centre core missed the drone ship and was lost.
Q 21Which Tesla vehicle's 'Armor Glass' windows shattered when a metal ball hit them at its 2019 unveiling?
Cybertruck
Cybertruck designer Franz von Holzhausen threw the ball, and Musk later blamed an earlier sledgehammer blow that had cracked the base of the glass.
Q 22Musk's 2018 'funding secured' tweet led the SEC to make him give up which post?
Tesla chairman
Tesla chairman was the post Musk surrendered under the settlement, though he stayed CEO, and Musk and Tesla paid $40 million in penalties.
Q 23Which solar company, founded by Musk's cousins, did Tesla buy for about $2.6 billion in 2016?
SolarCity
SolarCity's takeover drew a shareholder lawsuit calling it a bailout, but a Delaware judge ruled in Musk's favour in 2022.
Q 14Which novel's famous motto appeared on the dashboard screen of Musk's space-bound Roadster?
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a boyhood favourite that Musk credits with shaping him, so its 'Don't Panic!' rode along as a nod.
Q 15The mannequin in the space-bound Roadster was named after a song by which artist?
David Bowie
David Bowie wrote 'Starman', the song that gave the mannequin its name, and the Roadster's stereo was set to loop his 'Space Oddity'.
Q 16SpaceX's 2020 Demo-2 mission made it the first private company to do what?
Put astronauts into orbit
Put astronauts into orbit: the flight ended nine years in which NASA astronauts could reach orbit only aboard Russia's Soyuz.
Q 17What is the name of SpaceX's satellite internet constellation?
Starlink
Starlink terminals were donated to Ukraine after the full-scale invasion of 2022, and in 2023 the Pentagon agreed to buy Starlink service for Ukraine.
Q 18Which 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.
Q 19Tesla's 2018 struggle to mass-produce which car became known as 'production hell'?
Model 3
Model 3 production kept missing its targets while about half a million people who had paid $1,000 deposits waited for their cars.
Q 20Tesla'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 powered the Roadster, but Tesla couldn't build enough of the cars and came close to bankruptcy in 2008.
Q 24What did Musk unveil in 2013 as a cheaper way to travel long distances?
The Hyperloop
The Hyperloop was released by Musk as an open design, similar to Linux, so others could improve it and bring it to reality.
Q 25Musk 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 26Neuralink's 2021 demo showed a monkey with a brain implant playing which classic video game?
Pong
Pong was the game: the macaque, Pager, had learned to steer the paddle for a banana smoothie delivered through a straw.
Q 27What did Neuralink call the brain implant given to its first human patient in 2024?
Telepathy
Telepathy went to Noland Arbaugh, a man with tetraplegia, who used it to move a cursor and play online chess by thought.
Q 28Musk said frustration with traffic in which city inspired the Boring Company?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles traffic set off Musk's December 2016 tweets: 'Traffic is driving me nuts… Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging.'
Q 29The Boring Company sold 20,000 of which novelty item in a few days in 2018?
Flamethrowers
Flamethrowers at $500 each sold out despite warnings from US politicians, one of whom moved to ban their sale in California.
Q 30The Boring Company's first working transport system opened in 2021 beneath what venue?
The Las Vegas Convention Center
The Las Vegas Convention Center Loop runs through 1.7 miles of tunnel between the halls and has since grown into the wider Vegas Loop.