Elon Musk
“Take risks now and do something bold, you won’t regret it.”
Elon Musk is an American entrepreneur and businessman born in South Africa who founded X.com in 1999 (which later became PayPal), SpaceX in 2002 and Tesla Motors in 2003. In his late 20s, when he sold his start-up business, Zip2, to a division of Compaq Computers, Musk became a multimillionaire.
Even among billionaires, he is an outlier. We can find something that is essentially borrowable in the way he began. We have power over our patterns of thought as much as he has over his patterns of thinking. This portion of Musk can be borrowed. For starters, the way he deals with confusion, the books he reads, the way he makes promises, and corrects his own errors can all be borrowed.
Learning Faster Than You Are “Supposed To”
In Musk ‘s life, a key time came when he got his machine. It came along with the workbook of a Common programming language. It was expected to take 6 months for the workbook, but he wanted to stay up for 3 nights in a row and finished the whole thing. He was literally a programmer within 3 days by the standards of 1984. His new talent brought his first success-he wrote and sold a video game called Blastar for $500.
Starting Really Small
Compared to what Musk is doing today, his first projects were ridiculously straightforward-selling machine parts from his dorm room, operating a glorified speakeasy from his college house-electric motors, rockets, and solar panels. If he had a straight path to make electric cars back in college, would he do this? I don’t think. It seems like he took small strides toward a target that at the outset he had no idea how to achieve.
Don’t Look Back
Musk is famous for not hanging on to people or issues. He looks ahead. Ironically, he may have a lot more to look back on and be embarrassed for than all of them. His first child died at 10 months, he left his first partner, they blew up the first three times he fired his rockets, one of them breaking an expensive payload from NASA. He had blown commitments, missed deadlines, miscalculated prices, even after they had already paid, he had to charge customers extra. I think this list alone is enough to make most people look back and conclude that maybe it’s time for ambition to dominate, for relationships to be fixed, etc. But that’s not the point: Musk is capable of perfection with all his failings. His outputs justify his errors.
Just Enough Money to Start
Many people will say that it’s the lack of cash that keeps them from starting a company. The biographer of Musk helpfully tells you how much he had when he began. They had $28,000 between him and his brother Kimbal from their aunt, plus $6,000 from their friend Greg Kouri, who had joined Zip2 as a co-founder[9]. Today, the inflation-adjusted $34,000 is $53,000. This amount was enough to set up a Palo Alto office. Musk and his brother were sleeping in the office, showering at the YMCA, and eating a fast food diet.
Optimism, Promising, Delivering and Make it Over
There is a trend for both SpaceX and Tesla: make a wildly optimistic pledge, postpone the disclosure several times, eventually unveil the product, pledge to produce it quickly, postpone the delivery date, deliver a product that exceeds expectations. We’ve learned in design that you can only get 2 out of three things: great, easy, or cheap. Musk doesn’t appear to compromise on being great. He certainly looks for cheap rockets (100 times cheaper than now, Model 3 after tax incentives at $25,000).
There is No Friend As Loyal As a Book
Elon Musk obviously knew that he wanted to learn about space himself, when Musk decided to do something with space. The money alone, which he didn’t have enough to start a rocket company, he correctly estimated, doesn’t solve the space issue.Wealthy people have done this before, tossing some cash at a space project and watching it fizzle out without the knowledge of engineering.
Musk is the only one to create a future instead of just building goods so far.
