Elon Musk, it's a name that everyone knows. Everyone has an opinion on but who really is Elon and what's he all about to get a better idea we have to wind back. The clock to his childhood in South Africa. Elon grew up in Pretoria a large city just outside of Johannesburg. His mother May is a model and she's appeared on the cover of magazines like New York. His father Errol was a mechanical and electrical engineer. As a child Elon seemed to understand things quicker than the other kids and he would drift off into these trances at times people would speak to Elon but nothing got through when he had a certain distant look in his eyes. This happened so often that his parents thought he might be death for Musk. These pensive moments were wonderful at the age of five and six.
Musk found a way to block out the world around him and dedicate all of his concentration on a single task. A part of this ability stunned from the very visual way in which his mind works. He can see images in his mind's eye with the clarity and detail that we might associate today. With an engineering drawing produced by computer software, Musk said he can't do this as much now because there's so many things demanding his attention but as a kid it happened all the time. The most striking part of Elon's character as a young boy was his compulsion to read The Lord of the Rings, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy as his favorites by the fourth grade.
Elon had read through his entire schools library and tried to convince a librarian to order more books later in his childhood. Elon moved in with his father who was a brilliant engineer but a mean harsh man who liked to drink. Elon had an emotionally challenging upbringing and said living with his father was like misery throughout middle school and high school. Elon bounced around schools and endured relentless bullying. Musk said that, "There's some reason the bullies decided that I was it and they were going to go after me non-stop. That's what made growing up difficult. I got chased around by gangs at school who tried to beat the out of me and then I'd come home and it would be just as awful back at the age of 17." Musk left South Africa for Canada. He had his eyes set on Silicon Valley for a while and wanted to get to to US as quickly as possible and could use Canada as a pit stop because he had family there.
Elon ended up enrolling at Queen's University in Kingston Ontario picking the school / University of Waterloo because he felt they were better looking women at Queens in 1992. He spent two years at Queen's and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania on a scholarship. He saw the Ivy League schools being able to open more doors. Having pursued a dual degree in economics and physics, Musk began to think about what he would do after college. He briefly considered getting into the video game business but he came to see this as not a grand enough pursuit. He viewed the Internet renewable energy and space as the three areas that would undergo significant changes in the years to come. He was set on making a big impact.
The first idea for a business opportunity happened in 1995 when a Yellow Pages salesperson came in to one of the startup offices that Elon was working at. He tried to sell the idea of an online listing to complement the regular listing a company. Elon thinking and his brother Kimball started to zip to a company that would help businesses get online for the first time. For the business concept of zip to think Yelp meets Google Maps Musk's did all of the original coding that will look wrap up the door-to-door sales operations for the first three months. Both musk and his brother lived at the office and would shower at the YMCA (the company developed and marketed an Internet city guide for the newspaper publishing industry and obtaining contracts with the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune).
In 1999 compact computer offered three hundred and seven million dollars in cash for zip to Musk walked away from the deal with twenty ten million dollars and enjoyed the benefits of his newfound wealth. He got a job at XCOM company. He got a million dollar car and quite a few creature comforts for his next venture. He wanted to build a full-service financial institution online. On March 1999 musk incorporated XCOM and invested 12 million dollars of his own personal cash into the company under Musk's direction. XCOM tried out some radical banking concepts. He did away with overdraft penalties and built a personal payment system in which he could send money just by plugging their email address into. The sites XCOM and paypal were initially competitors but they merged and Musk's life. As the largest shareholder of the combined company and because of financial issues and other problems the company turned on musk and urged the board to remove him from CEO and ended up appointing Peter Thiel who later rebranded XCOM as PayPal.
On July 2002 eBay offered 1.5 billion dollars for PayPal. Musk needed about 215 million dollars from the sale to eBay after his venture at PayPal. He started to revisit his childhood fantasies around rocket ships and space travel and 2001. To conceptualize a project to land a miniature greenhouse on Mars, he must need Rockets that he could send into space for the mission. So on October 2001, Musk travel to Scotland with two of his colleagues. They met with the Russians three times over a period of four months. The appointments all seem to go the same way very slowly. They would meet the Russians around 11:00 a.m. for an early lunch where they would eat sandwiches, drink vodka and small talk for a few hours. After lunch came a lengthy smoking and coffee drinking period.
The big wind-ups fathered Musk because he could tell that they didn't take him seriously during one intense meeting Musk, who was buzzed from the vodka asked point-blank, "How much would a missile cost?" They told him eight million dollars each. He countered offering eight million dollars for two missiles. They told him there's no way and hinted that he didn't have the money to pay. Musk stormed out of the meeting and left Moscow on the plane. At home must turned his colleagues and said I think we can build the rocket ourselves and that's exactly what he did on May 2002 using a hundred million dollars of his early fortune Musk founded SpaceX. Since its inception SpaceX achievements are seemingly endless. In 2008 the Falcon 1 became the first privately funded liquid propellant rocket to reach orbit. In 2010 SpaceX became the first private company to launch orbit and recover spacecraft with the dragon. As of March 2017, SpaceX has flown 10 missions to the International Space Station and all of this success hasn't been without adversity for years after starting the company.
SpaceX launched the Falcon 1 and the first three Rockets failed to reach orbit. With his personal fortune and an entire company on the line, Musk's mission never wavered. Eight weeks later, Musk bet the company on another flight. This time around, everything worked perfect at that fourth launch. The work that wouldn't have been if we would have not had the resources to the amount of faith when people hear the name Elon Musk most of us think of Tesla. A common misconception is that Elon founded the company. Actually, Martin Eberhard and Mark tarpon founded Tesla in 2003. Elon Musk joined the company in 2004 as the largest investor in the company and was named chairman of the board in August 2007. Everhard who is CEO at the time got a call from Elon Musk telling him you'd be dismissed as chief executive. Everhard was stripped of almost all responsibilities and left the company completely in 2008. That's how musk operates once Elon is convinced that you can't do the job. There's no way he can be convinced back again in 2008. Amidst the financial crisis, Tesla was under huge financial strains.
Elonn saved the company from bankruptcy by arranging a 40 million dollar loan and must took the reins as CEO. Musk put so much of his personal wealth into Tesla that in 2009. He was living off personal loans from friends. Tesla Motors has transformed the transportation industry and upended the decades of criticism towards electric vehicles. Tesla's first vehicle the Roadster (an electric sports car) was released in 2008 with sales of about 2,500 vehicles to 31 countries in June 2012. Tesla began delivery of its four-door model. A sedan this all-electric vehicle could go more than 300 miles on a single charge and can reach 60 miles per hour in 4.2 seconds. In November 2012 the Model S was in a Motor Trends Car of the Year. In the first unanimous has ever had Consumer Reports give models. Its highest car rating in history while proclaiming it is likely the best car ever built.
Tesla rolled out its third product, the Model X aimed at the SUV minivan market. In September 2015, Elon Musk is a man that seems to have his hands and just about everything these days SpaceX has unveiled its plans to colonize Mars. Both Mars synchronization happens roughly every two years. So every two years there's an opportunity to fly to Mars. So then in 2024 they want to try to fly four ships, two of which would be crude and two which to cover and two to curb the goal of these initial missions. To find the best source of water that's for the first mission and then the second mission the goal is to build the propellant plant. Most recently the West Coast briefly freaked out over UFO sightings but it was actually a SpaceX launch of a falcon 9 rocket. In July 2017 Tesla officially unveiled he model 3 which the company has touted as the first mass-market electric car. With its $35,000 price tag it expects to start full-scale production on the car in June of 2018.
In November 2017 Elon unveiled Tesla's new semi truck and a second-generation roadster. The truck is fast with a 0 to 60 time of just 5 seconds and the key statistic. The range is 500 miles at maximum load. At highway speed, Elon Musk came back to the stage at the very end to reveal a new roadster. A low sleek sports car with a removable top, a 200 kilowatt hour battery which is twice as large as any car Tesla currently sells and a 600 mile range to Gasoline Park Yulin also started a new venture called the boring
company. That's anything but boring. Its goal is to solve the problem of soul destroying traffic by creating a large network of underground tunnels that transport cars these fast dated and low-cost tunnels would also make Hyperloop adoption viable and enable rapid transit across densely populated regions like enabling traveling from New York City to Washington DC in less than 30 minutes. Clearly Elon has been enormously successful with his net worth right now. It is valued at 85.8 Billion dollars but Elon has his share of character flaws and struggles like the rest of us.
Elon has gone through three divorces and his first wife Justine has openly spoken about the messy marriage with Elon where he would constantly remark on the way she found her Lackey and he treat her more like an employee than a wife. Elon is a notoriously ruthless boss and work balance is essentially non-existent for most people that worked for Musk. Many people think that Elon has trouble in recognizing the strong emotions of those around him but Elon's brand of empathy is unique. He seems to feel for the human species as a whole without wanting to consider the wants and needs of specific individuals. Everyone has an opinion on him but I'm convinced the world needed Elon Musk in a society often consumed by vanity, meaningless content and ignorant influencers.
Elon is someone that is doing work that actually matters. Elon's submission goes far beyond the pursuit of money. It's about fundamentally changing the course of humanity with his ultimate mission, big making mankind a multi-planet species. Elon Musk is someone that inspires men. He's someone that makes me excited and optimistic about tomorrow and about mankind's future there are naysayers, that claim that he's crazy and he'll never be able to achieve his goals but Elon's legacy will go far beyond the accomplishments he makes in his life. Elon's life and work is inspiring a generation of children that will someday pick up right where he left off. For all of the Elon Musk fans I highly recommend the book by Ashley Vance. It's a book that I used to get most of the information for this article and it has a lot of information about him and how to be successful in life. You can buy the book from Amazon by clicking here.
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