Who is Elon Musk and how he achieved his success
How did a "nerdy" kid from South Africa become a world-famous businessman? The Elon Musk story teaches that some simple principles, relentlessly applied, can produce surprising results.
Elon Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa. His mother is model and dietitian Maye Musk, and his father is Errol Musk, an electromechanical engineer, whom Elon has described as "a terrible human being." Elon Reeve Musk is the oldest of the three children in the family, and he is a citizen of three countries: South Africa, Canada and the United States.
Musk spent his childhood with his nose stuck in books and computers. He was an introverted little boy, ostracized by his schoolmates and regularly beaten up by the big guys in the class. But in his teens, he himself grew up fast enough, so he was able to defend himself.
First companies
Musk moved to Silicon Valley in the summer of 1995. He enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Applied Physics at Stanford University, but dropped out after just two days. His brother Kimball Musk, 15 months younger than Elon, had just graduated from Queen's University with a degree in finance, and joined him in California. The early internet was taking off, and the brothers decided to launch a startup company which they called Zip2. It was a kind of online business directory, equipped with maps.
Over time, the brothers found investors for Zip2 and made it a successful company. In 1999, the brothers sold Zip2 to computer maker Compaq for $ 307 million.
Later, Elon founded an online financial services company, X.com, on his account. His main rival was a company called Confinity, founded by Peter Thiel and two partners, just a few months after X.com. Both had their offices in the same building. The two companies merged in March 2000 and took the name of their main product, PayPal, an online, person-to-person money transfer service.
Ebay, the online auction service, bought PayPal in October 2002 in exchange for $ 1.5 billion worth of Ebay shares. At the age of 31, Elon Musk, who had been PayPal's largest shareholder with 11.7 percent of the shares, owned $ 165 million worth of Ebay shares.
Three missions
The companies Elon Musk founded, co-founded and / or led since leaving PayPal - two of which are SpaceX and Tesla Motors, on which he risked his entire fortune - are focused on addressing three distinct long-term dilemmas for the Long-term humanity: the climate risk, the risk of dependence on a single planet and the risk of obsolescence of the human species.
Climate risk
Tesla Motors, SolarCity and The Boring Company aim to address climate risk by accelerating the transition to clean electricity and electric transportation.
Risk of dependence on a single planet
According to Musk, the survival of Humanity is at risk in the long term if it is limited only to this planet. Sooner or later, some disaster, perhaps an asteroid, a supervolcano, or a nuclear war, will end our existence on Earth. Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, in May 2002 with the goal of getting humans off the planet.
Musk taught himself the engineering skills necessary to design rockets, and is the CTO and CEO of SpaceX. A key hire at the beginning was the 11th employee to join: Gwynne Shotwell, head of business development. She soon established herself as Musk's right-hand man at SpaceX. She has become a legend in the world of space technology, and the company might as well have failed without her.
Risk of obsolescence of the human species
Musk and other thinkers say that artificial general intelligences (AGSI) - that is, the general intelligences of machines more intelligent than humans - will present a huge existential risk to the future of humanity.
That's why, in December 2015, he co-founded the non-profit company OpenAI to develop "friendly AI." OpenAI provides free access to your advanced AI research results; the idea is to spread techniques to make AGSI safe and prevent powerful groups from monopolizing AGSI.
Wrong Steps, Hard Times, and Controversy
Elon Musk is not a perfect and infallible hero. He is a brilliant creator of extraordinary vision and ability, but he is also, according to some former employees, a very difficult man to work with. He works 80 hours a week, and expects his engineers to keep that schedule, too.
He is often impatient with his co-workers, and when he is stressed, he sometimes fires people on the spot for what he considers to be displays of alleged incompetence that others would regard as very minor mistakes.
In his statements, Musk has made several errors of judgment, sometimes sending inflammatory tweets for which he later had to apologize (he tweets a lot).
In May 2020, Musk weathered intense controversy over his decision to reopen Tesla Motors' manufacturing plant in Fremont, California, after a two-month shutdown. Musk was reacting with the shutdown to statements by an Alameda County official who ruled that Tesla was not an "essential business" and should remain closed due to the SARS-CoV-2 lockdown in the region.
Despite these and other controversies and poorly formulated public comments, there have been few major mistakes by Elon Musk in executing his core business. Given that Tesla and SpaceX have weathered their fragile years of early growth, and are now on their way to becoming fully consolidated consortia, there are no visible obstacles that could hold Elon Musk back as the entrepreneur strives to literally take his companies out of the box. to the stars.
