Elon Musk

A glimpse into Elon Musk’s World

18th months before writing this book Ashlee Vance was distraught with Elon musk refusal to cooperate. this rejection pushed Vance to work without his help, and he interviewed about two hundred people. Musk eventually asked the author to dinner later for a sort of negotiation — he wanted to add footnotes to serve as control over his life’s story. Musk had always stuck Vance as a guy who became wealthy by preying on people’s self hatred and fear. So he insisted Musk shouldn’t interfere with the book and so it was.

Vance began his study at SpaceX headquarters in California, Where Musk willingly tackled impossible things, Making people respect and see him as deity.

Overtime, the surge int the get-rich-quick internet fantasy has made Silicon valley and San Francisco become a city of deep depression where only good times are well chronicled. We are now in an era where people prefer to make simple apps and ads to entertain consumers instead of creating physical products that make more job opportunities available.

Musk could have become a part of the malady if he hadn’t relocated from silicon valley to Los Angeles after making a fortune off his dot-com ventures. He doubled down on investing in the manufacture of physical products in both Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. But he faced many fierce enemies who were not happy especially with his progress in space technology and direct sales of tesla instead of franchised dealerships.

Musk has left behind a trial of people who either despised or loved him while he was busy building his companies over the last two decades. this summary will give you an overview of Elon’s Musk’s life. We’ll go back to his childhood, then talk about his humble beginnings and the giant strides he’s making in the tech industry. Let’s get started.

Musk’s childhood was troubled and hard

Young Elon Musk first became known when PC and Office Technology magazine published the source code of his video game. The remarkable thing about him was that he took fantasies about space more seriously than others.

Musk was born in 1971 and raised in Pretoria, South Africa. During childhood, apartheid was rampant in the country — violence and tension caused by clashes between white and Black people. Luckily for him, he had the opportunity to travel overseas during his childhood. At the age of 20, this gawky boy sought refuge in the US, where his personality and dreams would be able to flourish.

As suggested by family trees, his maternal ancestors with the Swiss-German surname “Haldeman’ left Europe for New York during the Revolutionary War. From New York, they spread out to the prairies of the Midwest — Illinois, and Minnesota, in particular.

His great-grandfather, John Elon Haldeman, was born in 1872 and grew up in Illinois before moving to Minnesota. He met his wife there, and they gave birth to Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Norman Haldeman, who became a great role model for Musk — at seven years old, he was a wrestler, a boxer, and a bronco rider. The family moved to Saskatchewan in 1907, where Haldeman’s father died. Haldeman left home as a teen to get a degree from the Palmer School of Chiropractic in Iowa, and then he went back to Saskatchewan to become a farmer.

Musk’s parents, Errol and Maye, met at school and got married seven years later. They had Elon on June 28, 1971. Two other children, Kimbal and Tosca, came after him.

As a child, Maye knew her son was exceptionally gifted and intelligent. By age five or six, he would zone out of the world and put all his focus on a single task. This was because his mind worked in a visual way. According to Musk, this allowed him to replicate things in his mind and visualize what happens when they interact with other things.

While growing up, Musk spent several hours in the libraries and bookshops. He was full of facts that he became the classic know-it-all; other kids avoided him. His parents got divorced when Musk was ten, making childhood difficult for him.

Elon’s unplanned trip to Canada from South Africa had some glitches but helped define his future

Musk did not have a solid plan when he left for Canada as a young adult, so he had to do odd jobs to get by. His mother, sister, and brother also moved to join him in Canada. In 1989, Musk enrolled at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Besides their studies, he and his brother would cold-call interesting people and ask them out to lunch — this was how Musk landed a summer internship with Peter Nicholson at the Bank of Nova Scotia.

College suited Musk because people respected his intellectual abilities instead of laughing it off like the kids in high school. He met Navaid Farooq, and they became friends with a shared interest in board games. They worked together to release a video game called Civilization.

After spending two years at Queen’s, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) to complete dual degrees in Physics and Economics. He wrote exceptional papers — one predicted that material improvements would lead to a rise in solar power technology. He also talked about the construction of solar plants on a large scale.

After college, Musk thought seriously about going into the gaming industry — he had been obsessed with video games since childhood. But he felt that he wouldn’t make much difference to the world in that field. Instead, he told people about his big ambition to pursue three fields — space, renewable energy, and the Internet. He felt they were useful and essential for the future.

The Musk’s brothers launched a start-up to help businesses get online

Musk did many internships in Silicon Valley. During the day, he worked at Pinnacle Research Institute, where scientists were exploring the ways hybrid and electric vehicles could be powered by a revolutionary fuel source known as ultracapacitors. He enjoyed working there and used the lessons he learned as the basis for his industrialist fantasies and business plan experiments at Penn.

In the evenings, he worked at the video game start-up Rocket Science Games in Palo Alto. Musk was hired to write the drivers that would enable mice and joysticks to communicate with various games and computers.

He found numerous opportunities and a suitable place for his ambitions in Silicon Valley. After he graduated from Penn, he talked his brother Kimbal into moving to Silicon Valley so they could build an online business together.

In 1995, they founded a start-up known as Global Link Information Network, later renamed Zip2. The idea was to help businesses get online. But most companies didn’t realize the importance of this back then. The Musk brothers acquired an office,

bought some equipment, and hired people to complement the team. Elon managed to get a license for a business database, obtained free digital-map technology from Navteq, and did the coding for the system while Kimbal handled the sales operation.

Things were very rough for them in the beginning. Their father gave them $28,000 to keep afloat, and they slept in the office for the first three months. They eventually moved to a two-bedroom flat but couldn’t afford furniture. The only thing that kept their team going was that Musk continued improving the Zip2 software until they could use and demo it.

In 1996, Zip2 went through a major change when Mohr Davidow Ventures invested $3 million into the company. The newly hired computer scientists refined the system codes and divided them into chunks that could be changed and refined.

Everything was fine until Zip2 started to lose money when they refused to form a merger with CitySearch. In 1999, the board of Zip2 happily sold the company for $307 million to PC maker Compaq. Mohr Davidow made 20 times his investment back. Musk and his brother got $22 million and $15 million, respectively.

A dot-com millionaire with a lot of confidence

The sale of Zip2 pushed Musk to search for a lucrative industry that he could exploit. He invested most of his money into another tech start-up named X.com, where he employed an all-star crew with a finance and tech background. Two Canadians with finance knowledge, Christopher Payne and Harris Fricker joined their company.

Within five months of X.com’s operation, Frisker started a coup due to his personality clashes with Musk and left with most of the key engineers. Luckily for Musk, Mike Moritz, a famed investor from Sequoia Capital, backed the company, and they were up and running in no time.

Not long after, another crisis popped up — notable businessmen and investors Peter Thiel and Max Levchin started the payment company Confinity, which became a major competitor. The two companies battled fiercely to gain more market share. In March 2000, both companies merged, and Musk became the largest shareholder of X.com.

As their customer base grew, their system continued having technical issues, causing the website to crash weekly and exposing the company to fraud as the key engineers battled to create a new system. As a result, some X.com employees planned a coup Thiel became the CEO while Musk was on honeymoon with his first wife, Justine Wilson.

In June 2001,X.com became Paypal, and Elon Musk was relegated to the role of an advisor to the company. He embraced the role and kept investing in paypal until ebay acquired it for $1.5 billion in July 2002.

Musk moved to Los Angeles to be around aeronautics thinkers that he could learn from

When Musk turned 30, he began to think of a way out of the rat race in Palo Alto. After he was pushed out of PayPal, he went back to his childhood fantasies that revolved around space travel and rocket ships. He moved to Los Angeles with his wife and began connecting with industry experts.

Though he didn’t know much about space, he was surrounded by aeronautics thinkers that could refine his ideas. His first interaction was with Mars Society — a nonprofit group of space enthusiasts — who noticed him when he sent them $5,000. The head of the group, Robert Zubrin, invited him for coffee and told him all about the group’s research center that was built in the Arctic to imitate the harsh conditions of Mars.

As he thought about space, its exploration seemed more important to him. He gathered some experts at a conference where they brainstormed on the best way to explore Mars. Some of these experts became his consultants who worked on a design for a plant machine that would be launched to Mars.

Musk wanted to purchase a revamped intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) from the Russians and use that as his launch vehicle. So, he sought assistance from Jim Cantrell, an unusual fellow who had done a mix of secret and random work for the United States and other governments. They went together to Russia to look for potential sellers.

In 2002, after a negotiation deal failed, Musk decided to make his own rockets. He was sure he would succeed because American engineer Tom Mueller, who spent his whole life tinkering with and producing rockets, joined his team of space experts. In June 2002, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in an old warehouse in El Segundo, Los Angeles. It was to serve as a new clean slate by America in the rocket business.

On March 21, 2007, SpaceX successfully launched Falcon 1, but it blew up in Space after a few minutes. However, this did not dampen Musk’s optimism.

Did you know? Some parts of Iron Man 2 were filmed inside and outside of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Tesla almost went bankrupt at the production stage

J.B. Straubel, an expert building electric and hybrid cars on a budget and now CEO of a battery recycling facility known as Redwood Materials hit the jackpot in the fall of 2003 when he met Elon Musk. Straubel got in touch with AC Propulsion and told them to bring tZERO for Musk to drive. He loved the car, but the company rejected his offer to fund the transformation of tZERO into a commercial vehicle.

Unknown to Straubel, two business partners were also interested in making a car powered by lithium batteries. The work of Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard at NuvoMedia made them gain insights into the capacity of lithium-ion batteries, but AC Propulsion rejected Eberhard’s offer. So, he founded his own company and incorporated it with Tarpenning to form Tesla Motor, and brought in Ian Wright, an engineer from New Zealand.

Straubel was hired to work at Tesla and Musk invested $6.5 million, becoming Tesla’s chairman and largest shareholder. In the early days, several batteries exploded as the engineers worked with cutting-edge battery technology. In May 2006, a Roadster called EP1 was released by Tesla, enabling them to get more investors. EP2 was used to wow the public at an event in Santa Clara.

As Tesla went through some pains in the manufacturing phase, Eberhard was replaced as the CEO, and Michael Marks took over. Tesla’s finances were so strained Musk had to sell off some of his belongings to get more funds for manufacturing.

On December 23, 2008, NASA gave $1.6 billion to SpaceX to become a supplier for the International Space Station (ISS). Musk’s ability to stay focused in the middle of a crisis made him successful.

Musk’s achievements transformed him into one of the most respected doers in Silicon Valley

Elon Musk’s cousins, the Rive brothers, were like a technology gang. They built software that would enable them to control their client’s computer from afar and automate basic tasks. In search of a bigger challenge, they traveled in an RV with Musk to the madness of the Burning Man and Black Rock desert. When Musk suggested they go into the solar market, they followed his advice and established a company known as SolarCity in 2016.

Unlike other solar companies that were into manufacturing solar panels, they focused on buying, installing, and managing the solar panels for their customers. It was a huge success, and by 2014, SolarCity was valued at about $7 billion. While SolarCity was growing, Silicon Valley was busy pumping money into green technology companies that ultimately failed. It was too expensive for the government to keep funding, and the viable market was small. In early 2014, SolarCity started selling energy storage systems which they built in partnership with Tesla Motors. By June 2014, SolarCity bought the solar cell maker, Silevo, for $200 million. To close observers, the company had grown into a utility company.

SolarCity is a vital part of the unified field theory of Musk. SolarCity sells battery packs made by Tesla to end customers, and Tesla provides free charging to its drivers using SolarCity’s solar panels in the charging stations. Most Model S owners began to live the Musk lifestyle and bought solar panels for their homes. SpaceX and Tesla are also related; they swap knowledge about materials, the intricacies of operating factories, and manufacturing techniques. The future is still unpredictable — all three of Musk’s companies could still face major technological issues.

By the time their dinner was over, the author had decided that the risk-taking ability of Musk had nothing to do with insanity, as he had thought aloud some months back. Musk just has an intense and extraordinary level of conviction that puts most people off.

Conclusion

Vance highlighted a life full of victory and tragedy as Elon Musk made a major mark in the space, solar, and transport industry. Even though many people waited for years for Musk’s companies to fail, perseverance and the ability to survive crises made him a global success today. You may not be a Musk or a tech billionaire, but the key takeaways from this summary will help you in your endeavors.

Perhaps the first lesson is that you shouldn’t sacrifice your dreams for anything. Your hopes and aspirations are valid. So, honor them by giving your all to turning them into a reality. Elon Musk has always been fascinated by technology and space. That affinity dropped a bit when he was at PayPal, but he picked it up again after he left the company and went on to create the world he has always wanted.

Musk encountered challenges along the way, but his resilience is keeping him steady to this day. It’s not different for any of us. You will encounter challenges on your path to success and significance but keeping your head high and focusing on your life’s vision will enable you to scale through.

In addition, make partnerships a core value — you can’t do everything alone. Everyone who wants to get ahead in life must learn to discern and keep important partnerships.

“As his ex-wife, Justine, put it, “He does what he wants, and he is relentless about it. It’s Elon’s world, and the rest of us live in it.

— Ashlee Vance

Try this:

Follow your dreams no matter how grand they might seem in the beginning. Learn to connect with other people, especially those people with skills and knowledge that match your goals.