Elon Musk, the famous founder of SpaceX and Tesla, is one of the richest people in the world. However, his life has not always been smooth, and his journey with faith has been filled with ups and downs. It wasn’t until recently that an extraordinary event completely changed Elon’s perspective on faith and religion, leading to a profound shift in his life.

Elon Musk grew up in a wealthy family in South Africa. His father, Errol Musk, was a mechanical engineer, pilot, and sailor, while his mother, May Musk, was a well-known model and dietitian. From an early age, Elon was baptized and raised in an Anglican family, but religion was not something he particularly focused on. His childhood was often marked by dull Sunday school sessions, and over time, he became familiar with the basic teachings of Christianity.

What’s noteworthy is that Elon also attended a Jewish preschool, exposing him to different religious views and diversity. This experience led him to see religion as a subjective concept without a significant impact on life. As he grew older, Elon drifted further away from religion. He couldn’t make sense of the existence of a powerful deity who could change his life but did nothing when he faced struggles, especially during his tumultuous childhood filled with challenges.

Elon’s relationship with his father, Errol, was also far from easy. Though his father was successful in his career, he lacked emotional support for his children, making Elon feel isolated. After his parents divorced, Elon lived with his mother, but he later decided to return to his father’s house, hoping to be closer to him and earn his recognition. However, this didn’t turn out as he had hoped. Errol continued to display emotionally abusive and even physically violent behaviors, leaving Elon disillusioned. In these years, Elon began to detach from faith and grow increasingly disillusioned with the world around him.

Despite these hardships, Elon didn’t give up. With determination, he used his personal drive to overcome the challenges he faced. From being a lonely and bullied child, Elon became someone with big ambitions. He started to turn his bold ideas into reality, founding Zip2, a city guide platform for newspapers. Later, he founded PayPal, which became a huge success and was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion.

However, as Elon reached major successes, personal struggles began to emerge. Tesla, SpaceX, and other companies he founded no longer seemed to bring him happiness as financial problems and work pressures mounted. Elon realized that even though he was capable of achieving remarkable feats in business, his soul still felt empty. His life was marked by financial turbulence, poor decisions, and public controversies. Notably, after buying Twitter for $44 billion—a decision that stirred much debate—Elon began to realize that money and fame couldn’t solve deeper issues in his life.

In discussions with religious leaders and people who had strong faith in God, Elon expressed deep respect for Christian values. He acknowledged that he had learned an important lesson from life, especially the idea of “turning the other cheek” as Jesus taught. However, at this point, Elon still hadn’t fully recognized that God could be the key to addressing the deeper issues in his life.

Finally, in January 2024, Elon Musk traveled to Las Vegas for a tech conference. He decided to arrive a few days before the main event to relax and find a moment of peace. One of Elon’s bold decisions was to visit a local church. Not wanting to be recognized, he dressed casually to conceal his identity. When he entered, he sat in a pew at the back, hoping to experience a normal, quiet moment away from the pressures of fame.

Everything began to change when a young man was invited onto the stage to share his testimony. The young man spoke about the losses and hardships in his life, but how his life had transformed when he decided to live for Christ. His story deeply resonated with Elon. In that moment, Elon felt as if God was speaking to him through that young man, as though God had always been there for him, even though Elon had not realized it. Elon felt deeply moved, and as the service concluded, he quietly returned to his hotel with a newfound sense of peace that he could not fully express. Despite his many problems, he felt a calm assurance that everything would be okay. It was a peace that transcended all understanding.

Although Elon’s life continued to be filled with difficulties, from that moment on, he found a new faith in God. He began to describe himself as a “cultural Christian,” meaning that while he couldn’t fully defend the spiritual claims of Christianity, he chose to live by its values and teachings in his daily life. He now encourages everyone to seek the truth, believing that it will lead them to a deeper understanding.

Elon Musk’s story is a testament to the fact that, no matter how successful someone may be, faith and life’s values are crucial in helping them overcome life’s deeper struggles.

Elon Musk says all human data for AI training ‘exhausted’

Tech boss suggests move to self-learning synthetic data though some warn this could cause ‘model collapse’

Artificial intelligence companies have run out of data for training their models and have “exhausted” the sum of human knowledge, Elon Musk has said.

The world’s richest person suggested technology firms would have to turn to “synthetic” data – or material created by AI models – to build and fine-tune new systems, a process already taking place with the fast-developing technology.

“The cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted in AI training. That happened basically last year,” said Musk, who launched his own AI business, xAI, in 2023.

AI models such as the GPT-4o model powering the ChatGPT chatbot are “trained” on a vast array of data taken from the internet, where they in effect learn to spot patterns in that information – allowing them to predict, for instance, the next word in a sentence.

Speaking in an interview livestreamed on his social media platform, X, Musk said the “only way” to counter the lack of source material for training new models was to move to synthetic data created by AI.

Referring to the exhaustion of data troves, he said: “The only way to then supplement that is with synthetic data where … it will sort of write an essay or come up with a thesis and then will grade itself and … go through this process of self-learning.”

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has used synthetic data to fine-tune its biggest Llama AI model, while Microsoft has also used AI-made content for its Phi-4 model. Google and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, have also used synthetic data in their AI work.

However, Musk also warned that AI models’ habit of generating “hallucinations” – a term for inaccurate or nonsensical output – was a danger for the synthetic data process.

He said in the livestreamed interview with Mark Penn, the chair of the advertising group Stagwell, that hallucinations had made the process of using artificial material “challenging” because “how do you know if it … hallucinated the answer or it’s a real answer”.

Andrew Duncan, the director of foundational AI at the UK’s Alan Turing Institute, said Musk’s comment tallied with a recent academic paper estimating that publicly available data for AI models could run out as soon as 2026. He added that over-reliance on synthetic data risked “model collapse”, a term referring to the outputs of models deteriorating in quality.

“When you start to feed a model synthetic stuff you start to get diminishing returns,” he said, with the risk that output is biased and lacking in creativity.

Duncan added that the growth in AI-generated content online could also result in that material being absorbed into AI data training sets.

High-quality data, and control over it, is one of the legal battlegrounds in the AI boom. OpenAI admitted last year it would be impossible to create tools such as ChatGPT without access to copyrighted material, while the creative industries and publishers are demanding compensation for use of their output in the model training process.