Elon Musk is one of the few naturally gifted entrepreneurs in the world of technology. He is a future-oriented person and seems to have his hands in every major technology project today. Though widely known as the Tesla CEO, he owns and manages other multibillion businesses. He is the CEO of SpaceX, founder of the Boring company, and he is among the OpenAI and Neuralink Co-founders. Musk is a business Guru, and he makes it to the list of the top three wealthiest persons on earth. His contribution to the business and technology world is unmatched, and he is still committed to introducing more new projects as he seems not to run out of ideas.
Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa and grew up just like any other child. What made him unique from the rest of the children was his love and passion for exploring the technology world. At 10, he had already purchased his first company to start programming. He would later develop ‘Blaster,’ his first video game that he sold at $500 to a computer magazine at just 12 years old. However, He dropped out of Stanford University two days after being admitted into the PhD program because he saw a massive business opportunity. His decision was influenced by the technological advancements at that time, especially the growth of the Internet.
In 1995, Musk and his brother founded Zip2 and later sold it to Compaq for $341 million. X.com, an online banking company, was his next project that later merged with Confinity to form PayPal. eBay later bought PayPal, earning him another $165 million. It’s from here that Musk shifted focus to the space world, establishing SpaceX. At the same time, he kept a close eye on the car industry with Tesla Motors.
2008 was one of Musk’s worst years of his life as he nearly went bankrupt. Managing SpaceX, SolarCity, and Tesla at the same time was financially straining and challenging. He kept on losing money from Tesla while SpaceX was struggling to launch the Falcon Rocket. The SpaceX contract with Nasa for about $1.5 billion came to his rescue, and soon Tesla started attracting investors as well. Everything progressed nicely from there, including an IPO for Tesla in 2010.
In 2013, Musk almost sold Tesla to google for $11 billion. At that time, Tesla was not the company it is today; it was deep in the red. At this time, he reached out to Alphabet CEO Larry Page for a takeover. He had also reached out to Apple CEO Tim Cook to sell the company, but Tim refused to meet Musk. This was during what Musk describes as dark days when Tesla was designing their model 3 program. Amusingly, Musk was willing to sell Tesla for about 10% of what it’s worth now.
Today, SpaceX has its sights set on Mars while Telsa is helping people across the globe reduce their carbon footprint. His ability to understand technology and motivate his staff to do the impossible is literally out of this world!