Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX. Photo: Debbie Rowe / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Elon Musk is the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX and the owner of the social platform X, which makes him one of the most visible business figures in the country. His companies also reach the Chicago area in ordinary ways: a car showroom off a suburban commuter highway, a service bay in the city, and a satellite dish on a rural roof.
From Pretoria to Silicon Valley
Musk was born June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and another in economics from the Wharton School. In 1995 he co-founded the software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal and Greg Kouri; Compaq bought it in February 1999.
That same year he co-founded X.com, an online financial services business. It merged with Confinity in March 2000 and became PayPal, which eBay acquired in 2002. SpaceX followed in May 2002, with Musk as chief executive and chief engineer.
Tesla, SpaceX and the rest
Musk led the 2004 Series A investment round in Tesla and became its chief executive and product architect in 2008. He co-founded Neuralink, a brain-interface company, in 2016, and started The Boring Company in 2017 to build tunnels. In July 2023 he launched the artificial intelligence company xAI. In October 2022 he bought Twitter for roughly $44 billion; it was later renamed X.
SpaceX began developing Starlink, a satellite internet network, in 2015. It launched its first batch of 60 operational satellites on May 24, 2019. Subscriber counts have climbed quickly since: roughly 4.4 million in December 2024 and about 8 million by November 2025, with service offered in around 160 countries and territories, according to figures compiled on Wikipedia.
What it looks like in Illinois
Tesla sells directly to customers rather than through independent dealers, so its stores and service centers are company sites. The Chicago area has had them for more than a decade. On Dec. 20, 2013, Tesla opened a sales, service and charging center at 1200 Old Skokie Road in Highland Park, according to InsideEVs. The site is visible from Highway 41, a major commuter route, and had a showroom with a design studio, a delivery area and five service bays. Owners came to the informal opening from both the Chicago and Milwaukee areas, and orders placed that day were quoted for March delivery.
Tesla’s website has listed several other locations in the region. They include a store with delivery and service at 717 S. Desplaines St. in Chicago, a site at 50 W. Ogden Ave. in Westmont, a Schaumburg location on West Golf Road with service and demo drives, and a service center on North Elston Avenue in Chicago. Addresses, hours and what each site offers can change, so anyone planning a visit should check Tesla’s location pages first.
Starlink’s Illinois footprint is harder to pin down. Wikipedia’s Starlink entry describes the service as aimed at rural and remote areas, while competing with terrestrial providers in urban and suburban markets, but it does not break out coverage by state. For households beyond the metro area, where wired broadband can be thin, the practical question is whether a dish is available at a given address, which depends on the provider’s own availability tools.
Federal rural broadband money has also been part of the Starlink story. The Federal Communications Commission awarded SpaceX $885.5 million through the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund to serve customers in 35 states, then revoked the subsidies in August 2022 and denied SpaceX’s appeal in December 2023.
For North Shore readers, the nearest Tesla tie is the Highland Park site, with Schaumburg and Westmont farther out. This reporting did not verify any SpaceX or xAI operations in Illinois.
Sources: Wikipedia entries on Elon Musk and Starlink; InsideEVs; Tesla’s location pages.
Daniel Okafor covers business, startups and the Innovators section for The Evanston Edge.
