Superhero vs Superdreamer
All of us when we where kids or even now we wished to become Superheroes and we spent hours imagining how it would be like to be Superman, Batman and Iron Man. Nowadays there is a man that some believe to be a Superhero and even more support that is the real version of the Ironman. That man’s name is Elon Musk and I don’t know if he is Superhero and has special powers but he is definitely a Superdreamer.
I was impressed to discover that Elon was born in South Africa, from a very young age he showed how smart he was and that he wasn’t going to compromise his dreams. Elon was fascinated by science fiction and computers in his adolescent and at the age of 12 he created a video game named “Blastar” which he later sold for 500$. Even Tony Stark would feel kind of jealous for that.
Elon of course couldn’t stay in Africa for long, after all he is a dreamer so he went to America to follow his dreams. First he went to Canada where he studied at Queen’s University in Kingston and during a summer he took the first and last real job at a bank. As you can imagine he probably didn’t enjoy it but neither Tony Stark would have.
After that he went to Pennsylvania and studied at the Wharton School where he earned two bachelor degrees in Physics and in Economics. After a while Elon was accepted to Stanford but he didn’t stay for longer than two days. He left Stanford and created his first company Zip2, then he sold the software of his company for $400 million. As a millionaire the first thing he did was to buy a Mclaren and a private jet but still Tony Stark had always more than that.
At that time the Internet was experiencing a period of huge growth and there were many opportunities for someone who wanted to succeed. In 1999, he started working on a project that had to do with electronic payments, it was called X.com. The same time Elon was doing this, there were two other guys, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin who were working on another project called Cofinity. They developed a software that allowed owners of Palm-Pilots and other PDAs to store encrypted information on their devices, in that way they were creating the first digital wallet. In March 2000 the two rival projects merged and in 2001 they created Paypal, an electronic wallet for online transactions which was later bought by eBay for 1.2$ billion, Elon Musk was the CEO.
“Iron Musk” had the outrageous idea that private enterprise could energize space travel and in June 2002 he founded Space X (space exploration technologies). Elon was the only founder of the company in its early years. He had the dream and he actually put most of his assets on this crazy -as many people think- “space X” dream. Elon traveled to Russia 3 times to see how the rocket technology was evolving at that time and he came to the conclusion that it was the same since the 60’s. He tried to evolve this technology and find ways to launch rockets to the space cheaply. According to some analysts Musk took 50 year old NASA’s rocket technology and streamlined it.
Furthermore when he was 32 years old, he came up with the idea of “Solar City”. Solar City was a company that leased solar panels. Those panels were put on top of house rooftops and were providing renewable energy. The best part was that Solar City was actually leasing those panels to the owners. The owners didn’t have to pay anything to set them on their houses. That’s the reason why solar city has been developing since then in a way that it became the biggest solar energy provider in the US.
In April 2004 Musk launched “Tesla”. He used 6,3 million dollars of his own money for starting this project. Tesla’s plan was to firstly hit the market with a high end high performance car to firstly attract attention. Elon wanted to create an electric Ferrari. Elon founded Tesla and Solar City to help save the environment. Solar City would produce the energy that Tesla Cars would consume. And if this is not enough to prove that he is the real life Tony Stark, then there is more proof that he is.
“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” — Elon Musk
His companies went through an economic depression during 2008 but his future wife -at that time- supported him and helped him move on. That was the exact same reason Tony kept going with his dreams. Elon after a successful Space X rocket launch he was rewarded from NASA with a huge contract. He then focused on Tesla and after a $1,5 billion US government loan and another 250 million investor raise, he saved the new car company and finally got “Model S” rolling.
Elon Musk does not have the dream to achieve world peace as Tony Stark does, but instead he is trying to progress technology as much as he can. So the rest is yet to come for human kind. In the future we shall see what will the world achieve first, private trips to Mars or World Peace.
