Formerly a Thessalian prince, Salmoneus was son of King Aeolus of Aeolia. His mother is variously Enarete daughter of Deimachus, Iphis daughter of Peneus, or Laodice daughter of Aloeus. He was brother of Athamas, Sisyphus, Cretheus, Perieres, Deion, Magnes, and several Aeolid sisters.

By his first wife Alcidice he fathered Tyro; after her death he married Sidero, who mistreated the girl. Salmoneus and Sisyphus hated each other: an oracle told Sisyphus that children by Tyro would kill Salmoneus, but when Tyro learned the plot she slew the boy she had borne, and later by Poseidon became mother of Pelias and Neleus.

Emigrating from Aeolis with fellow Aeolians, he founded a city on the Alpheius in Elis and named it Salmonia after himself. Overbearing and impious, he ordered his people to worship him under the name of Zeus, diverting the god's sacrifices to himself.

He built a bridge of brass and drove his chariot over it at full speed to imitate thunder, heightening the din with dried skins and cauldrons trailing behind, while he cast torches into the air for lightning. For this hubris Zeus blasted him with a true thunderbolt and destroyed the town. Virgil's Aeneid consigns him to Tartarus for eternal torment.

Frazer linked the myth to early Greek rain-kings who imitated Zeus's thunder for the crops — as at Crannon in Thessaly, where a bronze chariot was shaken in drought. Reinach suggested the lightning-struck Salmoneus arose from misreading a picture of a Thessalian magician calling down rain and lightning, later taken for a scene of divine punishment.