Elon Musk is rarely out of the spotlight. But, even by his standards, 2025 has been a full-on year.

Over the past 12 months, the entrepreneur-turned-government adviser has reached massive business milestones and suffered serious setbacks. He was also knocked off the top spot as the world’s richest man – and is now further out in front than ever before.

All that amid a backdrop of an increasingly challenging economic environment, both across the US and globally – and without factoring in private life developments, which included the announcement of a reported 13th child being born months earlier.

But business wise, Musk has been all-action, all year – just not all of it as smooth as he might have wished. Here, The Independent takes a look at a year in the life of Elon Musk.

Doge – and Donald Trump

It feels a long time ago but the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) only came into being in January 2025, with Musk appointed as a special government employee, effectively giving him a 130-day stint overseeing cuts to the US federal budget, slashing public sector jobs and planning cuts to the US foreign aid programme to the tune of almost $10bn. Naturally, plenty of this drew plenty of ire, with Bill Gates one of those to accuse “the world’s richest man [of] killing the world’s poorest children”.

While it might have been expected that he at least had the backing of the person who appointed him to the role during that spell – President Trump – the relationship proved to be fractious and volatile, descending into all-out personal attacks strewn over social media at one point.

In June, Musk called Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” an “abomination” and soon after suggested on X that “the really big bomb [was] Trump is in the Epstein files”. For his part, the president lambasted Musk as a disappointment. The petty squabbles continued as Trump said the administration would be looking at the subsidies paid to Musk’s companies, around potentially ending them – though noting it had “to be fair” to the nation and to the entrepreneur alike. Suggesting he’d “take a look” at deporting Musk was hardly “first buddy” material, either.

Musk officially ended his Doge tenure in May, weeks after telling Tesla shareholders that he would be spending “far more time” back to focusing on the EV firm, amid a falling share price and questions over product launches.

Business ups and downs

It would of course be remiss to not detail the successes and milestones that Musk has seen across the year around his many businesses.

Though – as is often the case in industry and especially where pushing new boundaries is concerned – many ups can be followed by a down, Musk’s companies do continue to produce.

Tesla, for example, launched their long-range Cybertruck variant partway through the year to much acclaim from fans – but a massive recall to tens of thousands of earlier models over parts concerns was a misstep.

Neuralink, Musk’s firm which is developing brain implants to be placed within human skulls to aid people with limited movement to be able control devices using their thoughts, has held multiple clinical trials. He says there’s a backlog of 10,000 people who are signed up for it, with the potential for positive reach here undeniable, yet there has also been criticism over possible animal treatment and for filing as a “small disadvantaged business” in the US despite a valuation of $9bn.

Elsewhere Grok 4 was launched in July as a new AI model, SpaceX performed a successful controlled splashdown landing with one of its Starship rockets and The Boring Company showed progress with its ZPIT (Zero People In Tunnel) approach: digging tunnels, moving earth and installing concrete wall segments with no humans inside, improving safety and efficiency along the way.

Tesla

But it’s impossible to separate Musk from one company in particular, and that one has had more downs than ups across 2025: Tesla.

The share price, as ever, tells its own story: from a high of around $480 near Trump’s vote victory last winter, it sunk to about $220 by April, decimated by public perception of its CEO, falling sales, widespread economic uncertainty over tariffs and questions over the company’s valuation.

If investing in Tesla – and investing in individual companies in general – has always been a bit of a rollercoaster, 2025 has perhaps marked the part of the ride with loops, turnbacks and rapid accelerations, heading quickly towards the highest peak as we race toward the end of the calendar year. Beyond it? As with any funfair ride, you never know until you get there – that’s the thrill and the fear of it.

Tesla showrooms faced vandalism, while Musk himself faced protests aplenty – collections of people, bus stop posters, even a car smashed to pieces.

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Some came in the face of his Doge work, while others were furious at a perceived insulting salute gesture at Trump’s inauguration. Yet more came as comments emerged from the car maker’s chief executive seemingly trying to entangle himself in other nations’ politics or policies.

The upshot was simple enough: falling sales.

In Europe in particular, the drop-off has been spectacular – summer data showed Tesla sales fell by 40 per cent as competition from Chinese manufacturers, reputational damage and a lack of new models all played a part in BYD overtaking it as the dominant emerging EV brand on the continent. Tesla’s market share had fallen to below 1 per cent by that time, and sales are down year-on-year despite EV sales as a whole being up by more than a quarter.

Weak sales in India, China and the US add further worries, despite a pickup in September domestically, driven by buyers beating the expiration of tax credits.

In Norway, a similar effect gave a recent boost in Europe: Tesla broke records for sales by a single manufacturer in a month in November, but rather than this being a sustainable trend, it appears to have been spurred on by planned increases to taxes on buying EVs which come into effect next year.

But Musk has long felt that car sales are not the only, or the biggest, ace up Tesla’s long-term sleeves.

Self-driving cars, robotics, AI and data – all these factors are what many investors point to as future revenue prospects for the firm. And those inside and outside the company seem to feel the same way, given the recent events.

World’s richest person

Musk is already the world’s richest person and has been for some time – aside from a few hours when he very briefly lost top spot to Oracle’s Larry Ellison.

Since then, however, Musk has opened up a huge gap again and, at the start of December, had a net worth of $450bn (£340bn) per Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.

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That places him a full $180bn (£136bn) ahead of now-second-placed Larry Page, of Alphabet. Musk’s net worth has grown by almost $17.5bn (£13.2bn) across the course of 2025 and he did become the first person to hit the $500bn mark for a short period. Yet it’s a figure way beyond even those riches where Musk’s year finishes in the spotlight.

Close to a full trillion dollars is at stake in his new Tesla pay package, voted for and approved by more than three-quarters of shareholders just last month. He’ll earn $878bn (£665bn) across a decade if he continues to lead the growth of the company to significant production and valuation milestones, the last of which would leave Tesla worth $8.5tn (£6.4tn) – the precise combined market capitalisation value of the world’s two biggest public companies right now as it happens, Nvidia and Apple.

The path to those riches is not just a “new chapter […] but a whole new book,” Musk declared after that pay packet was approved.

Whatever pages 2026 writes for Musk and his many projects, he’s unlikely to ever be far from dramatic progress, fervent criticism or eye-catching headlines – and the money milestones keep piling up too.