Elon Musk: A journey
The man who courts controversy, a billionaire tech mogul, the man who inspired the making of Iron Man, a high-risks high-rewards maverick, a man who wanted to change the world, and did.
A man with chic quotes like,
“Don’t confuse schooling with education. I didn’t go to Harvard, but the people who work for me did.”
Today marks the 49th birthday of Elon Musk; the founder and CEO of SpaceX, CEO and Product Architect of Tesla, Inc., and founder of X.com popularly known as PayPal to name a few. (Yes, you’re right. A few)
“I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary”, says Elon; a standing testimony to his own words and ideas.
Elon was born as the eldest son to a family in South Africa on June 28th,1971. Constantly shifting schools and with separated parents, Musk was bullied as a kid and even sustained injuries; but the experience fueled him to be resilient and more ambitious than ever before.
By the age of ten, his interest in programming piqued and by the time he was twelve, he sold his first video game for $500. A budding entrepreneur indeed.
Filled with boundless energy and curiosity, Musk wanted to achieve great things. And he believed the place to do it was America. Using his Canadian-born mother to his advantage, Musk shifted to Canada and eventually the USA. To him, it has truly been the land where dreams come true.
With an undergraduate degree in Economics and Physics, the logical path ahead of Elon was to pursue his education further. But this was America in the 90s, with Pop Culture and the Internet flourishing like never before, the world was gearing up for more, and Musk was ready to ride the tide.
He dismissed an offer from Stanford for a PhD and co-founded Zip2, with his brother Kimbal, supported by funding from a few angel investors. Marketing an internet guide for newspapers, Zip2 soon had formidable clients including the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. Zip2 was sold for $307M in 1999. Quite the rags to riches story!
But to Musk himself, Zip2 was just a preamble to the journey. Merely a month after its sale, Musk had co-founded X.com, an online banking platform, which merged with Confinity to become PayPal.
With controversial ideas and unmatched ambition, not everyone saw eye to eye with Musk’s leadership. The board rejected his position as CEO at Zip2 and ousted him as the CEO of PayPal. But nothing seemed to deter Musk and his goals.
Inspired by his childhood reading of the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, Musk dreamt of the colonization of space. His attempts to acquire rockets and fuel his dreams, ended in bitter terms, with exorbitant prices and ridicule against his seemingly impossible ideas.
Angered by the response, Musk decided to take things into his own hands and create cheap rockets on his own. And he did. With the money he acquired from PayPal’s sale, Musk founded SpaceX in 2002.
The list of accolades and laurels that SpaceX brought home are many. The first private company to berth a vehicle at the ISS. The first company to create a rocket with a reusable first stage. And most recently, Elon Musk and SpaceX made history by being the first private company to launch a manned aircraft, in May this year.
Over the course of his growth, scientists at NASA went from looking down on and mocking Musk to collaborating with him and working with him. The people who regarded him as an ambitious fool paused and looked twice.
While shooting off to the stars with his SpaceX goals, Musk simultaneously became the CEO of Tesla, Inc., a position he maintains to date. He is the torchbearer for a sustainable future in the transport industry with ongoing research for electric self-driving cars and hyperloop.
In recent pandemic struck times, Musk’s approach has been controversial and different, to say the least. His company Tesla, Inc. has defied the lockdown rules of the US and continued production in their factory in California.
The company seems to be doing better in the stock market in comparison to its competitors. But both Musk and Tesla, Inc. have been mired with controversies over the safety and health conditions of workers. As always, Elon Musk remains unfazed and heads straight on and only time will tell how Tesla, Inc. emerges after the pandemic subsides.
Musk’s life story seems like a dystopian fairy tale. Innumerable men dream of changing the world. Yet how many men strive hard enough to become the change they wanna see? Elon did.
He has built himself a tech empire right from scratch. The greatest inspiration to wannabe entrepreneurs and start-up founders out there looking for success. Make no mistake. Elon’s success might have been helped by his incredible talent, but what drove it home are his grit, determination and hard work.
120 hours a week. A crazy 17 hours a day of work. This man is an inspiration. A visionary. He has changed the way people see the world and will go down in history as one of the most influential entrepreneurs ( with the most controversial tweets) of the 21st century.
