Elon Musk is a towering figure in the electric automobile industry through his role in Tesla, in America’s privatized space exploration industry through SpaceX and Starlink, as well as the global technology and social media world through his ownership of X and his increasing overtures to reactionary politics around the world.
There are few men of such high stature in any single industry, let alone the many industries he’s managed to dominate through shrewd business and engineering competence, as well as an endless capacity for self-mythologizing—and making others buy both that mythology and the stock behind it.
But just how tall is Elon Musk? Like in terms of feet and inches.
For some celebrities that can be a hard question to answer right on the nose, because so few self-reported heights are reliable. Often the only ones we really do know the height of are those who have been arrested and stood up against a police height chart. For somebody like California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), you can compare how he looks in pictures with people like that, including former President Donald Trump, who’s been listed as 6’3” on booking documents.
Elon Musk Height
Elon Musk has been pictured with Donald Trump too, and they look about the same height, though Musk looks maybe ever so slightly shorter.
Online, speculation about Musk is varied. On the r/MandelaEffect subreddit, u/johns1993 speculated last year that Musk was another example of the storied phenomenon.
The Mandela Effect is basically the idea that our timeline bifurcated sometime in the past, but many of us still remember remnants of the alternate timeline, like a universe where Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s, or that Darth Vader said “Luke, I am your father” in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.
“I remember him being short (around 5’6) and being used as an example on the internet of a short guy who can get more girls than tall guys because of how much money he has,” u/johns1993 recalled. “I even remember him looking significantly shorter than everyone he’s been pictured with, but apparently he’s been 6’1 this whole time.”
But false memories aside, the question in Elon Musk’s case is pretty easy to answer, thanks to the engineering efforts of the Badgerloop program from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Students involved in that program competed in, and won third place at, a Hyperloop competition sponsored by SpaceX in 2017.
Hyperloop, which was proposed by Elon Musk in a white paper in 2013, was described as “a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment.” Essentially pitched as an alternative to high-speed rail (but oft-criticized as a fancy tunnel) Musk proposed the transportation method as a hyper-modern, extremely fast method of public transportation. In the ten years since the idea was first proposed, there’s been little progress on the technology.
But in the 2017 competition, students participating in the Badgerloop program designed a pod to compete against 30 other teams for a spot on SpaceX’s one-mile test track.
Design schematics for the winning Badgerloop pod showed the dimensions of the competition pod, and an update from the UW-Madison website explained the team’s thinking.
“The team purposefully built its pod to fit Musk, who is 6 feet 2 inches tall. Badgerloop got its wish when, after delivering remarks at the competition, Musk toured the various teams’ booths and took the opportunity to sit in the Badgerloop pod.”
“We were all ecstatic to see Elon sit in our pod,” Claire Holesovsky, the program’s operations director, said. “He checked out our pod’s technology. It was a great highlight in an incredible week for the team.”
And while the competition pod was a little bit smaller than the proposed model from the team, it’s a pretty good bet that budding engineers would get Musk’s size right if they wanted to win the competition.
And because that size tracks with how tall he looks in photos with other people, it’s safe to say that Elon Musk is 6 feet, 2 inches tall.
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