ELON MUSK: An Untold Story

Have you ever imagined of doing stuffs surprised by others? Not just imagining, have you ever tried to bring down your imagination into reality? The reason to ask you this is nothing but this blog reads about such a kind of person whose mind is full of innovations & wonders, “Elon Musk”.

Elon musk, as many of you might know is an entrepreneur, one of the most successful & influential person in the world, is always a creative thinker, which led him to the success of his designations. Many, even myself had surprised to know about such kind of man; his innovations, career process had made the entire world into astonishment. We all recognize him as a midas-touch person, mostly, here this blog emphasize also the struggle he had came through to be the 21st of Most Powerful People in the world & the Richest person in the world, as per Forbes report.

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25 points on ELON MUSK:

• Elon Musk was brought up in South Africa until he turned 17. His father was emotionally abusive to him and the family & his mother used to work five jobs to support the family. His parents divorced when he was 10 & lived with his father later on, till seventeen; which he admitted that it was miserable & he called his father as a ‘terrible human being’. He was determined of moving to US often, saying that great things are possible only in US. But was overruled by his father. However, at 17, he moved to Canada gaining passport through her Canadian-born mother.

• First Business: At his childhood, at 10, he was interested in coding with the Commodore VIC-20. He taught himself Computer Programming and developed a Basic Video game ‘Blaster’ and sold it for $500, when he was 12. A web version of the game is still available online. While studying in school, he was often bullied by his fellow-mates.

“They got my best[expletive] friend to lure me out of hiding so they could beat me up. And that [expletive] hurt. For some reason they decided that I was it, and they were going to go after me nonstop. That’s what made growing up difficult. For a number of years there was no respite. You get chased around by gangs at school who tried to beat the [expletive] out of me, and then I’d come home, and it would just be awful there as well.”

• Education: Moving to Canada, he joined Queen’s University, avoiding mandatory service in the South African Military. Then he completed his Bachelor of Arts in Economics & Physics from University of Pennsylvania in 1994. In 1995, he commenced Ph.D in energy physics/material science in Stansford University wherein he quit the course in just two days, seeking to involve himself in the Internet boom, which was prevailing during the time. There comes his notable first invention Zip2, a web software company.

• During his college years, he turned his rented house as a party club during nights with the help of his friends, where he charged $5, per person. He said that sometimes around 500 would show up, that earned him for the college stuff.

• While in college, he firmly believed that three sectors, namely electric cars, energy production & internet were to be the most influential & dynamic development in the future world.

• First Innovation: Elon with his brother Kimbal Musk founded Global Link Information Network in 1995, (later termed to be as Zip2 in 1999) which initially connects local businesses with internet presence and later developed to assist the newspapers in designing online city guides; the money for the development was from the angel investors. In 1998, the investors forced the company to merge with City Search, a main competitor to Global Link. Elon though welcomed the merge at the beginning, denied strongly later. The merge turned out to be a failure, according to The New York Times. Then the company was sold to Compaq Computer in Feb 1999, for US $305 million.

• First Online Bank: In Nov 1999, investing the money profited from Zip2, Musk went with his business mentor Greg Kouri and came out with X.com, one of the world’s first online banks. In Mar 2000, the company merged with Confinity. Musk became its largest shareholder and CEO. Confinity’s product Paypal enabled Palmpilots for the online transactions. Later in Sept 2000, Musk was replaced by co-founder of Confinity, due to disagreements with other company leadership. In 2001, X.com was renamed as Paypal. In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for US$1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk received US$165 million.

• Musk married his college mate Justin Wilson in 2000. Their first son was died at age of 10 weeks due to sudden infant death syndrome. The couple later had twins in 2004 & triplets in 2006 through invitro fertilisation. They got divorced in 2008.

• Birth of SpaceX: In 2001, Musk conceived Mars oasis, a project to migrate the mankind to Mars, cultivating mars to be a greenhouse resource, to colonize mars to avoid human extinction; thereby manifests his space explorating innovations. In October 2001, he moved to Moscow with Jim Cantrell (An Aerospace Supplies Fixer) and Adeo Ressi(College-friend) to meet with companies to buy Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles(ICBMs) that could send envisioned payloads into space. The meeting doomed. Then he visited Russia with Michael D. Griffin(Aerospace Engineer) for the same moto. Here, the price was at odds; Elon refused. Then, the incite of starting his own company making the rockets & engines sparked his mind, which led to SPACE-X.

• In October 2002, Elon founded Space Exploration Technologies/ SpaceX with $100 million of his early fortune. It took almost 7 years to come out with the company’s first launch vehicles : Falcon 1 & Falcon 9 rockets & its first spacecraft : Dragon. The company was awarded two contracts from NASA, one in 2006 & another for $1.6 Billion in 2008.

• In 2008, Musk saved the company just before 2 days of the bankruptcy issue. He admitted that those where the times, that were really hard to overcome through. Later the company pronounced with numerous ideas, innovations & designs that still is making effort to achieve.

• Making Possible the Impossible: Elon Musk believed that the key to make space travel affordable is to launch reusable rockets; which many of the industrial experts claimed impossible or infeasible. More than belief, he experimented successfully the idea in 22 December 2015; SpaceX successfully landed the first stage of its Falcon Rocket in its launch pad.

• Role in Tesla: In Febraury 2004, Elon Musk joined the board of directors of Tesla Inc., with its founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, as Chairman, after investing in Series A round. The company was inspired at AC Propulsion Tzero electric roadster prototype, at that time. Tesla attracted the whole world with its Model 3 vehicle & recently the, Cyber Truck.

• Musk drew him closely to the electric roadster design. At the time, the company was forced to financial crisis in 2008, Eberhard ousted. Then, Elon Musk became the CEO of Tesla, Inc.,. Tesla’s master plan, as iterated by Musk in 2006 was: “Build sports car. Use that money to build an affordable car. Use that money to build an even more affordable car. While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options”. In Jan 2021, Tesla overtakes all other car-makers, & became world’s first most valuable carmaker with a market value of $776 Billion.

• He announced that buyers of Tesla would be provided with free energy throughout the life through his super charging stations, for recharging the electric vehicle.

• He shifted his innovations then in energy production, Solar city in 2006. He provided the initial concept and financial capital to the innovation; it was later co-founded by his cousins Lyndon & Peter Rive. Within 7 years, the company became the second largest producer of solar power in US.

• In 2014, Elon Musk committed himself to the building of second largest building in the world and one of the single largest solar panel production in the world, Gigafactory. The company aims in the production of photovoltaic batteries & claims that it is improving further to provide the entire world with the product.

• Musk didn’t rest his innovative thinking with the above listed companies. He pursued further and came out with Hyperloop Transportation(to provide a lightning transport of passengers & goods), OpenAI(not for profit, artificial intelligence research company), Neuralink(to link & integrate human brain with artificial intelligence).

Get to know about Neuralink, here!

• Elon Musk in launched “Starlink“, a satellite based internet connection that fetches uninterrupted, low-latency, high speed network connection. The mission comprises of launching nearly 12,000 satellites at 550km orbit(may lead up to 42,000 if possible), for rendering a smooth network.

Read more about Elon Musk’s Starlink here!

• On December 17, 2016, while stuck in traffic, Musk tweeted “[I] am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging …” The company was named ‘The Boring Company’.

• Married the same person twice : In an interview, he said that he was a person always wanting for a companion rather than being alone. After getting divorced in 2008, from his first wife Justine, Musk dated English actress Talulah Riley. The couple married twice, once in 2010, & again remarried in 2013, encountering a divorce in 2012. However the couple was divorced in 2016. He then dated Amber Heard for a year; And started dating Grimes, Canadian Singer in 2018. Grimes posted in Jan 10,2020 that she was pregnant. The father of the baby is assumed to be Elon musk, though not officially.

• Elon Musk bought a McLaren F1 in 1999 for $1 million. Having difficulty in buying the insurance for the car, he unbothered it. Then he crashed it in an accident, which he had comically explained it in an interview.

• Musk bought James Bond’s Lotus Espirit Submarine car in 2013 for $997000, being a fan of James Bond. The car had no wheels and it could not drive on land. It only had articulated fins.

• Elon Musk presume that Artificial Intelligence is “the most serious threat to the survival of the human race”.

• Elon Musk owns three nationalities; one in his born country South Africa, one in Canada while pursuing studies in the country in 1989 and another in US in 2002.

• It’s almost like you can go off grid with the inventions of Elon Musk, independent of the government. He had unveiled a redesign of Solar panel as “Solar Glass Roof”. The new roof design would cost around $42,500 for a 2000 sq.foot roof with 10KW of solar capacity. It would add 25 years warranty. He challenges himself to unveil new design of the roof for every six to nine months.

• After becoming the Richest Person in the World, Musk tweeted “How Strange; Back to Work”.

Epilogue

That’s almost a WoW kind of history, even as myself confused at times, not knowing which to highlight as there were numerous holdings of him to enrich and show you. Being an avid reader, dreamer & innovative thinker, Musk had never rested to come out with new ideas. He said that his plan of SpaceX is that to migrate about 1 million people to colonize in Mars. And he stated once that he wants to die in Mars. Being so influential & innovative, he once admitted in an interview that he used to take sedatives at nights to subdue the stress and tensions while designing and involving himself to his companies.

Obviously Elon Musk, as we all see, is a person with innovation & developer of the mankind to the next level & I hope he would be a great inspirer to the young entrepreneurs, as he is, to myself.

Moreover,

His Innovations Continue!