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The Most Famous

INVENTORS from South Africa

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This page contains a list of the greatest South African Inventors. The pantheon dataset contains 354 Inventors, 2 of which were born in South Africa. This makes South Africa the birth place of the 23rd most number of Inventors behind Switzerland and Egypt.

Top 2

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary South African Inventors of all time. This list of famous South African Inventors is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

Photo of Elon Musk

1. Elon Musk (1971 - )

With an HPI of 80.35, Elon Musk is the most famous South African Inventor.  His biography has been translated into 122 different languages on wikipedia.

Elon Reeve Musk (; EE-lon; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman and investor. He is the founder, chairman, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO, product architect, and former chairman of Tesla, Inc.; owner, executive chairman, and CTO of X Corp.; founder of the Boring Company and xAI; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and president of the Musk Foundation. He is one of the wealthiest people in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$190 billion as of March 2024, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and $195 billion according to Forbes, primarily from his ownership stakes in Tesla and SpaceX.A member of the wealthy South African Musk family, Elon was born in Pretoria and briefly attended the University of Pretoria before immigrating to Canada at age 18, acquiring citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. Two years later, he matriculated at Queen's University at Kingston in Canada. Musk later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, and received bachelor's degrees in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University, but dropped out after two days and, with his brother Kimbal, co-founded online city guide software company Zip2. The startup was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999, and that same year Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. In October 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion, and that same year, with $100 million of the money he made, Musk founded SpaceX, a spaceflight services company. In 2004, he became an early investor in electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.). He became its chairman and product architect, assuming the position of CEO in 2008. In 2006, Musk helped create SolarCity, a solar-energy company that was acquired by Tesla in 2016 and became Tesla Energy. In 2013, he proposed a hyperloop high-speed vactrain transportation system. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company. The following year, Musk co-founded Neuralink—a neurotechnology company developing brain–computer interfaces—and the Boring Company, a tunnel construction company. In 2022, he acquired Twitter for $44 billion. He subsequently merged the company into newly created X Corp. and rebranded the service as X the following year. In March 2023, he founded xAI, an artificial intelligence company. Musk has expressed views that have made him a polarizing figure. He has been criticized for making unscientific and misleading statements, including COVID-19 misinformation and antisemitic conspiracy theories. His ownership of Twitter has been similarly controversial, being marked by the laying off of a large number of employees, an increase in hate speech and misinformation and disinformation on the website, as well as changes to Twitter Blue verification. In 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued him, alleging that he had falsely announced that he had secured funding for a private takeover of Tesla. To settle the case, Musk stepped down as the chairman of Tesla and paid a $20 million fine.

Photo of Phil Ramone

2. Phil Ramone (1934 - 2013)

With an HPI of 46.35, Phil Ramone is the 2nd most famous South African Inventor.  His biography has been translated into 24 different languages.

Philip Rabinowitz (January 5, 1934 – March 30, 2013), better known as Phil Ramone, was a South African-born American recording engineer, record producer, violinist and composer, who in 1958 co-founded A & R Recording, Inc., a recording studio with business partner Jack Arnold at 112 West 48th Street, New York, upstairs from the famous musicians' watering hole, Jim & Andy's, and several doors east of Manny's Music. The success of the original A & R Recording allowed it to expand into several studios and a record production company. He was described by Billboard as "legendary", and the BBC as a "CD pioneer".

Pantheon has 2 people classified as inventors born between 1934 and 1971. Of these 2, 1 (50.00%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living inventors include Elon Musk. The most famous deceased inventors include Phil Ramone.

Living Inventors

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Deceased Inventors

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