Who is Elon Musk?

People love him, and people hate him, but Elon Musk is undoubtedly a genius with money. He has a net worth of $186.9 Billion. He is ranked #1 on both Forbes 400 and Forbes Billionaire List. He has co-founded six companies including Tesla, SpaceX, and Boring Company. Today, he owns 74% of Twitter along with many other investments. 

Musk was born in Pretoria South Africa on June 28, 1971. His parents divorced when he was 9 years old, leaving him and his brother to move in with his father. Musk’s school days were not the brightest. He has told the story of hospitalization after bullies threw him down a staircase and beat him till he blacked out. Despite the trauma, he still had the mindset of a billionaire. At only 12 years old, he sold his game “Blastar” to a computer magazine for $500. 

Post high school graduation, he moved to Canada with his mother to attend university at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. He would go on to finish his studies at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a degree in Physics and Economics. Post his degrees, his business ventures began. 

Today, he has a total of ten children with three women. He currently resides in Boca Chica, Texas in a small $45,000 home near his Space X facility. He is constantly in the news and media, he has definitely made his name known to the world. 

How did he become a billionaire?

Besides his “Blastar” video game mentioned above, Elon’s entrepreneurship began in college at UPenn. While studying at the university, he and a classmate rented out a 10-bedroom frat house and turned it into a nightclub. After graduation, he went for his Ph.D. at Stanford University but dropped out only two days after classes had begun. He decided to rather test his luck with the internet. With his brother, Elon launched Zip2, which provided city travel guides to newspapers. This company was sold to Compaq in a deal for $341 million in cash and stocks, crediting Musk $22 million. 

With $10 million of what he had just acquired, he created another online company, X.com. This would be combined a year later with Peter Thiel’s company to create Paypal. Almost as soon as he was named CEO of Paypal, the title was taken away from him after fights between the owners of what software to house the service on. Despite this, Elon made his money back when the company was sold to eBay, he gained a net profit of $165 million.

In early 2002, he founded the company which would later be known as SpaceX. The goal of this company was to make spaceflight cheaper by a factor of 10. The company hopes to send people to Mars one day. In addition to space travel, Musk focused on earthly travel with a $70 million investment in Tesla. 

Tesla almost became Musk’s baby. He took an active product role at Tesla to help develop its first car, he is still CEO today. His ideas did not stop there, however, he came up with the idea for SolarCity in 2006. The solar energy company would be run by his cousins with Elon as the source of working capital. 

With so much on his plate, he nearly went broke in 2008. The tables would turn however when SpaceX gained a $1.5 billion contract with NASA. In 2010, Tesla raised a $226 million IPO, getting its finances back on track. With his life flipped around, he created a new company in 2016, Boring. This company’s mission is to dig a network of tunnels under and around cities to create high-speed, no-traffic driving. In 2017, he founded one more company, Neuralink. The company is working towards building devices that can be implanted into someone’s brain. His most recent business venture had him buying Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022. 

What can we learn from Musk?

I think the biggest lesson one can learn from Musk is simply: don’t stop working. In 2008, when everything fell apart, he could have easily broken down. However, he kept grinding and now he is the richest man on the planet. In addition, I believe he shows, if you have an idea, run with it. Most people have a multitude of complaints in their daily life, for example, travel. When this problem came up to Elon, he faced it head-on and created a company to solve the issue. Your ideas are valid, create a solution, and don’t wait for someone else to solve the problem. 

My favorite Elon Musk quotes:

“The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.”

“Entrepreneurship is like eating glass and walking on hot coals at the same time.”

“Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.”

“I think that’s the single best piece of advice: Constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”

“Engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the world.”