ELON MUSK: The real-life Iron man
Elon Musk’s story is certainly one of the most inspirational to any businessman. We would have a look at his life journey and startups in this blog.
His Childhood
Elon Musk was born in 1971 in the city of Pretoria, one of South Africa’s capital cities. Which is called by the people "Capetown" nowadays. He was born to a South African father and a Canadian mother and his parents split from him when he was only 9 years old and he lived with his father while his mother moved back to Canada. After his parents split, he developed an estranged relationship with his father and spent most of his time learning computer programming, and even managed to sell a space-related game he had coded at the age of 12 for 500$!
The Beginning Of His Career
Elon was a genius at a very young age, and with the limited opportunities in South Africa, he decided to move to his mother’s home country of Canada in 1989, with hopes of eventually moving to and starting his career in the land of opportunity, the United States.
He started attending college in Canada, and later was transferred to Penn State in the United States, during this time, Elon worked as an intern for two Silicon Valley companies in 1994, not knowing that one day he would come to dominate this valley himself. Elon was fascinated with the rise of the internet at this time and applied for a job at Netscape to which he never received a response. Undeterred, Elon Musk applied for a Ph.D. in energy physics/materials science at the University of Stanford and was accepted, but just two days after starting there, he quit because the upcoming rise of the internet was too much for Elon not to focus his full efforts on.
His Early Businesses
In 1995, Elon Musk, his brother, and one of their friends rented out a small office in Palo Alto, where they founded their company Zip2 after raising about $200,000 from a group of angel investors. The company developed and sold the city guides to newspapers across the United States. While this may not seem like an Elon Musk business, it was very successful before it caught the interest of IT giant Compaq Computers, which bought the company for over $305 million. After Elon Musk had his first big success with Zip2, Elon could work on his next big venture which would, once again, change his life. In the early days of the internet, online banking was unheard of, but Musk predicted that the internet would slowly take over all aspects of human life, and internet banking would become inevitable, so he founded X.com as one of the first major online banks in the United States.
X.com aimed at making online payments simple and secure for the potential hundreds of millions of e-commerce websites at the time. One of X.com’s biggest competitor was another online banking company named Cofinity, the premise for that company was quite similar and instead of directly competing with each other, the two companies decided to not be a hindrance to each other and merged to form a massive internet banking company called PayPal, you might’ve heard of it. The success of PayPal eventually led to it being sold to eBay for over $1.5 billion, of which Musk’s share was about $100 million.
SpaceX
After selling PayPal, Musk was left with a blank canvas of money to spend, and he decided to follow one of his biggest passion, space. Musk always had a fascination for space exploration and especially Mars colonization. From 2001 to 2002, Musk made multiple visits to Russia, contacting different companies to buy ICBMs that could be shot into space, but he was usually laughed at by the executives in the room who considered Musk an amateur when it came to space. After being thrown one too many hardballs, Musk decided he would form his own space company that would make affordable rockets and wouldn’t undermine all his ideas, thus, with $100 million to spend, he finally founded SpaceX in 2002.
Tesla
While still trying to make SpaceX a conceivable project, Musk would begin work on an automobile company. Elon Musk was a car enthusiast, but after he’d started a family and needed to drive his children to school every day, he realized that the perfect family car simply didn’t exist. In 2004, he heavily invested in a new automobile company called Tesla motors which led to him becoming a board member, and later CEO of the company. Before becoming CEO in 2008, Musk was heavily involved in the design of the Tesla Roadster, a car that would incorporate both the high-performance of a sports car as well as the latest technology available. Something that would be both a tech product and a sports car. The car was finally released as the company’s first car in 2008, around the same time, Elon Musk himself became the CEO of the company. The Roadster was the most impressive electric vehicle ever produced, it was able to go about 250 miles on a single charge, something unheard of at the time, and the car was an astounding success, selling about 2,500 units.
Other big projects of Elon Musk
Around the same time, from 2005 to 2008, when he was developing the Roadster, he was busy trying to launch a rocket into orbit with SpaceX. After multiple failures at launch, SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon 1 rocket into space, becoming the first private company to reach such a feat. This was a game-changer for space exploration as NASA and other government-owned space agencies no longer had a monopoly on space exploration. Success And Other Companies Tesla and SpaceX had both become quite successful companies at this point, but Elon Musk wanted to take both of these companies to the next level.
He wanted them to become the companies in their respective fields. Probably the biggest breakthrough with Tesla was the creation of the $42 million Tesla Factory in 2010. It was clear, at this point, that Tesla was aiming to get in direct competition with the largest automobile makers in the world such as Toyota and Ford. With the infrastructure in place, Tesla went public at the NASDAQ (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations), ushering in a new age of American automobiles. It was at this time when Musk was working on his prize project, the Tesla Model S.
The Tesla Model S was intended at being the car that would be seen on roads across the United States, a common car. When the car was finally released in 2012, everyone was left amazed at its performance. It went 0 to 60 faster than any street-legal vehicle out there, and the removal of all limitations placed by gas-powered engines made the car so much more versatile. On top of all that, the car was feature-packed, completely making all other competitor’s entertainment systems seem venerable. The car was got massive success and sold over 250,000 units to date. It was the success of the Model S that led to a bunch of other Tesla models being released, including the Model X, the Model 3, and more. In the meantime, SpaceX also kept reaching new heights.
The company started to enter partnerships with NASA which helped it out massively. They signed contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars with the space agency and eventually designed the Falcon 9 and Dragon, both of which were extremely successful rockets. SpaceX eventually launched a private customer into space in 2012, becoming the first company to do so. At this time, SpaceX was also working on a global internet project known as Starlink, which would provide billions of people with internet access that would be free of government regulations or censorship.
As of May 2021, Tesla is a company with a market capitalization of over $650 billion, making it the most valuable automaker in the world. While SpaceX has a market capitalization of over $74 billion, making it the largest private space company in the world as well as larger than almost every space agency in the world, except for the exception of the few largest. Apart from these two giants, Musk is also working on various other projects, such as his ambitious Hyperloop project which aims to create underground public transportation networks, using Teslas. Only time will tell what comes out of that project. Some other projects include OpenAI, which is a non-profit that aims at developing AI software that’s even used in his own Tesla Autopilot, and SolarCity, which builds and sells solar panels.
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