Journey of Elon Musk

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South-Africa on 28 June 1971. He is an engineer, industrial designer, technology entrepreneur and philanthropist.

Early Life

He’s the son of a Canadian model (Maye Musk) and a South-African electro-mechanical engineer (Errol Musk).His parents divorced in 1980, after which Musk lived with his father.
When he was 10 years old, he discovered the Commodore VIC-20. He taught himself to programme and sold a video game coded in BASIC two years later. BASIC is an imperative programming language that was originally intended to help people learn programming very quickly. The game was called Blastar, and he sold it to PC and Office Technology magazine for 500 dollars soon after.
As a child, Musk attended the independent Waterkloof House Preparatory School. He did his final exams at Pretoria Boys High School and moved to Canada in June of 1989. He then became a Canadian citizen through his Canadian mother.

PayPal

In March of 1999, Musk founded X.com, an online payment platform. He invested 10 million in it. A year later the company merged with Confinity which had its own payment platform named PayPal. The merged company focused on the services PayPal already had and continued under that name in 2001. PayPal’s early growth was driven by a promotion that offered money to new customers if they signed up. PayPal was acquired by eBay in October of 2002, for one-and-a-half billion dollars. 165 million of that sum went to Musk. Before the takeover, Musk had been the largest shareholder with 11.7% of PayPal’s shares.

Space X 

Musk was long convinced that for life to survive, humanity has to become a multiplanet species. However, he was dissatisfied with the great expense of rocket launchers. In 2002 he founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) to make more affordable rockets. Its first two rockets were the Falcon 1 (first launched in 2006) and the larger Falcon 9 (first launched in 2010), which were designed to cost much less than competing rockets. A third rocket, the Falcon Heavy (first launched in 2018), was designed to carry 117,000 pounds (53,000 kg) to orbit, nearly twice as much as its largest competitor, the Boeing Company’s Delta IV Heavy, for one-third the cost. SpaceX also developed the Dragon spacecraft, which carries supplies to the International Space Station and is designed to carry as many as seven astronauts. Musk sought to reduce the expense of spaceflight by developing a fully reusable rocket that could lift off and return to the pad it launched from. Beginning in 2012, SpaceX’s Grasshopper rocket made several short flights to test such technology. In addition to being CEO of SpaceX, Musk was also chief designer in building the Falcon rockets, Dragon, and Grasshopper.

Tesla

Musk had long been interested in the possibilities of electric cars, and in 2004 he became one of the major funders of Tesla Motors (later renamed Tesla), an electric car company founded by entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. In 2006 Tesla introduced its first car, the Roadster, which could travel 245 miles (394 km) on a single charge. Unlike most previous electric vehicles, which Musk thought were stodgy and uninteresting, it was a sports car that could go from 0 to 60 miles (97 km) per hour in less than four seconds. In 2010 the company’s initial public offering raised about $226 million. Two years later Tesla introduced the Model S sedan, which was acclaimed by automotive critics for its performance and design. The company won further praise for its Model X luxury SUV, which went on the market in 2015. The Model 3, a less-expensive vehicle, went into production in 2017.

Elon Musk quotes

• “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”
• “If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not.”
• “There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.”
• “When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars, people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.”
• “Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.”
• “It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.”
• “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
• “Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.”
• “Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive and determination of the people who do it as it is about the product they sell.”
• “We’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.”
• “The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.”
• “People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.”
• “I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.”