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Elon Musk, from computer geek to successful entrepreneur

He opened the world of online payments by setting up Paypal, builds space shuttles with SpaceX to transport astronauts and engineers to the International Space Station, and aims to get 80,000 people to Mars eventually. An ambitious goal you might say, but is Elon Musk a dreamer or the new Steve Jobs?  How did this South-African born become such a modern day icon of innovation?

It all started back in the capital of South-Africa, Pretoria in 1971. The Musks, where dad was an engineer – described by a family member as a "serial entrepreneur" – and mom a nutritionist, were a race nearly as much as they were a family with a specialized awareness of themselves as wanderers and adventurers. "Without sounding patronizing, it does seem that our family is different from other people," says Elon's sister, Tosca Musk. "We risk more". Accomplishments and success can be found throughout the Musk family; a grandfather who won a race from Cape Town to Algiers, grandparents which were the first to fly from South-Africa to the main land of Australia in a single-engine plane and a great-grandmother who was the first female chiropractor in Canada. Innovation and out-of-the-box thinking is in their genes.

Elon was characterized as a studious kid, reading continuously, not simply to amuse himself but to gain more knowledge. Acknowledging this his parents sent him to school early in Pretoria. His quest for more knowledge and self-improvement had two reasons. First of all his thinking as a Musk and therefore being a kind of transcendent citizen rather than an average South-African. Secondly his access to the personal computer. "He was on computers as soon as they were available to us," Tosca says. The fundamental difference between him and the hundreds of other brainiacs and wizkids was his ability to put his digital brilliance at the service of his familial one. He made the connection between the digital world and real-life. Furthermore, he had also seen his father start businesses which he wanted to combine with more digital aspects, which in turn was also a main stimulus for his entrepreneurial nature; thinking in opportunities.

A young Elon made his move after he graduated from high school. Though he already felt like an American due to the weird habit of his father, being South-African but raising your kids doing chores the American way, he'd done research and concluded that it would be easier to become a real American as a Canadian immigrant instead of a South-African one. His mother, a nutritionist, was from Canada. Most of her family still lived there. Elon attended the University of Pennsylvania  as soon as he received American citizenship and earned bachelor degrees in Economics and Physics. He was admitted to Stanford University in California, with the intention of obtaining a PhD in Energy Physics, however, Musk's life was about to change dramatically...

"When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor."

Only after just two days of college he dropped out of Stanford to start with his first company called Zip2 Corp. It was an online city guide platform for the new online versions of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune newspapers. After four years of struggling to keep Zip2 afloat, he eventually sold his majority shares in 1999 worth $22 million, and as such he had become a millionaire just at the age of twenty-eight!

X.com was the next step, using $10 million from the sale of Zip2. Elon is credited with inventing a method of securely transferring money using a recipient's e-mail address and set the stage for the service currently known as PayPal. The original focus of the company was dropped to align with Elon's vision, becoming a global payment transfer provider. As the millennium arrived, Musk was discussing his fortune with a friend back from Pennsylvania, Adeo Ressi. When the night started to fall, it was dark and there were people asleep in the backseat, prompting them to start a conversation about outer space.  They'd mentioned Mars in the car and as soon as Musk got to his computer, he went to the NASA Web site and searched for information on their Mars progamme. He found nothing. "I expected to find that they were well on their way and that we'd have to figure out something else to do. But there was nothing at all". A new idea sprouted and was pitched less than a month later. "I want to change mankind's outlook on being a multiplanetary species," were his exact words. They were not starting a rocket company, as the initial idea was, in Ressi's words, "to influence public opinion by launching a high-profile mission to Mars". Bluntly spoken, the whole idea was to buy a rocket and send it to Mars with something in it, living matter that had a chance of staying alive. "We created a company called Life to Mars, because that was the objective," Ressi says. "We were going to show the world that two guys with money and vision could reach Mars, and that it wasn't that bad a place."

Many of Musk's family and friends believe that Elon will colonize Mars and that he will do so simply because he is determined to do so. He is a man who argues from first principles, and will not accept the notion that something is impossible unless it violates the laws of chemistry or physics. When confronted with the improbability of one of his goals, he will respond with "But I've done the calculations!".

This year he succeeded in ramping up production of Tesla's Model S, an electric car that can accelerate like a Ferrari, exceed a speed of 200 km/h with an engine no bigger than a watermelon, and was the unanimous choice as Motor Trend's Car of the Year. But the gap between the soaring nature of his vision and the opportunistic nature of his genius means that there is also a gap between his salesmanship and his ability to deliver. He has built an amazing car in the Model S but the question remains whether he will be able to build enough of them to keep Tesla out of bankruptcy and off government dependency.

"Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

According to some fanatics, he is the real-life version of "Iron Man"; strong-willed, persistent and believes in a cause. Elon Musk is an American of the Year because he has done something nobody thought he could do, and docked his own space ship with the International Space Station. He has made one of the greatest wagers in all of history — if he succeeds, humanity succeeds — and has so far made good on it, at least partially.

 

If you would like to read more, interesting articles about Elon Musk I would like to refer you to the blog website waitbutwhy.com


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