Elon Musk, one of the world's most famous and intelligent scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs.
You must have heard of him before, he is the owner of the most crazy ideas such as sending people to Mars and integrating people's brains with small chips that add new capabilities to humans, and he is the founder and president of several companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, Neuralink, OpenAI and The Boring Company.
Also, at the beginning of 2021, he became the richest man in the world, surpassing Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who is also a person who has caused controversy a lot because of some of his views and positions.
However, for such a person to be able to enter many different fields at the same time, and also to become the richest man in the world, is never a simple matter.
It is known that Elon Musk works more than 80 hours a week, and has also read thousands of books in many sciences and fields.
- How did he manage to succeed in this way?
- And what is his story?
- What are the stages of rise and fall in his life?
This is what we will talk about in this article.
1. The Beginnings of Elon Musk
Elon Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa to a South African father, an electromechanical engineer, and a Canadian mother, Maye Musk, who is also a famous model and nutritionist.
The family's fame did not stop there, but there is also his younger brother Kimbal Musk, owner of a major restaurant group in America, founder of Big Green and Square Roots agricultural technology company, and there is also their younger sister Tosca Musk, a famous film and television maker.
When he was ten years old, he began to have a passion for computers and video games, as in 1983, when he was 12, he sold the game Blastar, which he programmed himself using BASIC language for $ 500, and you can try the game via this link!
Elon Musk is known to be one of the most loving people to read as well. Even when he was young, he read all the books available around him to the point that he couldn't find new books to read, so he read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica at the age of about nine, according to his mother!
Of course, his childhood days were not so happy, as he is an introverted and cranky child, he was one day attacked by his school students and was given first aid for a whole week in the hospital, and he also talked a lot about family problems in his childhood.
After his parents separated, the children decided to live with their mother, as they all moved to Canada, and from there Elon began his university studies at Queen's University.
Two years later, Elon decided to move to America, and completed his studies at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating from there in 1997 with two degrees in physics and economics.
And on the subject, Elon was also suffering from student debts, and he was not able to pay them all at the time, according to him.
In 1995, Elon was accepted to Stanford University to study for a Ph.D. in Materials Science.
At the same time, Elon had a great passion for the web.
The web was new at the time, and although not everyone was convinced of its usefulness at the time, Elon had high ambitions and decided to delve into the world of the web and try his luck.
Indeed, he left the university after only two days and created his new company, Zip2, and from here Elon's new inventions and genius began to appear.
Of course, this decision came after he tried to work for Netscape, the developer of the famous Netscape Navigator browser, but he did not receive any response from the company.
2. Elon and the world of the web and the beginning of success
Many of the technological innovations of our time started from Silicon Valley, where there are many opportunities to work in large technology companies or create start-ups and get financial support from investors.
Indeed, Elon and his brother Kimball moved to Silicon Valley to create their Zip2 company.
They didn't have enough money to rent a home and office at the same time, so Elon eventually decided to rent a small office and live in it, and he showered at a local gym, as he mentioned in one of his speeches at USC.
Zip2 aimed to help newspaper publishing companies enter the world of the web, by providing them with an Internet City Guide with maps, directions and yellow pages.
Zip2 was the first to provide these services to newspaper publishing companies, and Elon was able to contract with The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, and according to Elon, he was programming the site all the time non-stop, seven days a week, day and night.
Four years later, specifically in 1999, Elon was finally able to sell Zip2 to the famous Compaq for $307 million, and Elon got $22 million for his 7% stake in the company!
Suddenly, Elon, who did not have enough money to rent a house and office together, turned into a millionaire with a huge fortune, and then bought a very luxurious McLaren F1 for 1 million dollars, and also married Canadian writer Justin Wilson the following year!
3. Elon Musk at PayPal and X.com
Elon Musk did not stop there, but decided to continue his career in the world of the web, and this time his idea was to devise a new way to pay online.
And that's exactly what he did in 1999, creating a service called X.com, starting as an email payment service, and starting to create new online payment services.
A few months after the company was founded, more than 200,000 people signed up for the service, and it started to be very popular.
At the same time, another competitor to the company was a company called Confinity, created by entrepreneurs Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, which had similar online payment services to X.com, the most important of which was PayPal, which had more fame than X.com although the features were not as powerful as those of X.com.
However, in the following year, specifically in 2000, both companies decided to merge together to avoid unnecessary competition, and a new company, PayPal, which we know today, was created, and Elon became the company's CEO and largest shareholder.
However, after that, Peter and Elon had a disagreement about the techniques that should be used in PayPal. Elon preferred to use Windows over Linux, and this was strongly opposed by Peter, so he resigned afterwards.
During that period, Elon traveled to spend the holiday in another country, and due to technical and other disagreements at work, the company's board of directors removed Elon and replaced him with Peter to be the new CEO of the company, and Elon was surprised after his return that his position had gone to someone else.
Then everything changed in 2002, when eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion, and Elon got $165 million through this deal!
What then? Did Elon Musk stop there?
of course not! There is even a dream that he wanted to achieve for a very long time, which is the colonization of Mars!
Hence, Elon's story with SpaceX began.
4. SpaceX and the Colonization of Mars (Elon Musk and Space)
Elon started planning Mars colonization in earnest even before selling PayPal, and was very inspired by the idea of sending boxes containing plants to grow on Mars. great interest, and returned to America to no avail.
In February 2002, Elon returned with his companions to discuss the matter again with Kosmotras and wanted to buy 3 missiles this time, so the company offered to sell only one missile for $8 million, but Elon refused the offer.
Elon realized then that he should start his own company and develop rockets himself, which he did in May 2002, where he founded a company called Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, in which he invested $100 million of his previous fortune.
SpaceX's primary mission is to enable people to live in space and Mars, and to reduce the costs of space travel to become acceptable to ordinary people.
One thing that sets SpaceX apart is the cost of launching the rocket. Let's quickly explain it:
In general, rockets were manufactured by assembling different parts from different manufacturers, and then assembled by engineers at rocket launch companies.
And because each part of this missile has its own manufacturer, and each of these parts contains other parts from other manufacturers, each part will be very expensive, because each manufacturer of these parts will need to cover development and manufacturing costs, and will also seek to obtain a large profit margin.
In contrast, Elon's simple cost-cutting solution was for SpaceX to make its own rocket parts, since the company now makes 85% of the rocket's components itself, and indeed, if you look at the launch cost of an organization like United Launch Alliance, which was It is responsible for many of the US government's rocket launches.
You will find that the cost of launching the rocket through it cost more than $400 million, while the cost of launching the rocket from SpaceX is $80 million, which is only one-fifth of the cost.
However, there is a much bigger problem in terms of cost, which Elon Musk talked about a lot before that, which is: Why do we launch rockets into space and then destroy them?!
Hence the idea of manufacturing missiles that return to Earth on their own, and then be used again.
Was it that easy to implement?
of course not! The Falcon 1 missile, the first rocket manufactured by SpaceX, failed 3 consecutive times to return again to Earth, until it finally succeeded in the fourth time in 2008, and after the company lost a lot of money due to previous missiles, not to mention the global financial crisis in 2008 that It also affected the company, which forced him to drain a lot of his previous wealth, to the point that he had to borrow money from his friends, and this is what we will talk about later.
The company was close to complete bankruptcy, but something brought the company back to recovery again. In late 2008, NASA completely dispensed with its rocket after seeing the success of the Falcon 1 rocket, and contracted with SpaceX to transport equipment to the International Space Station for an amount of $ 1.6 billion. (With the rocket back to Earth, too!).
And the company has returned to success again and again. In 2018, the company launched the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful and largest rocket ever launched in history, even before the company announced the Starship rocket, which is much more powerful than its predecessor, and which will be the rocket that will start transporting people to Mars.
It is interesting that Elon Musk is not only the CEO of the company, but he is the chief engineer in the company and he is technically responsible for building all the missiles in it, and all the innovations of the company he had a role in developing himself along with the rest of the engineers, and this is what distinguishes him from other entrepreneurs, He is more of a brilliant scientist and engineer than a businessman, and he is known to have spent a great deal of time reading books on rocket science and more.
During his early years at SpaceX, Elon had one more thing he wanted to work on, which was people's complete dependence on renewable energy, so his story with Tesla begins.
5. Tesla and electric cars
We all know the Tesla, it is the car loved by many people, which has proven its ability to defeat the fuel-powered cars in all respects.
- How did the company start?
- How did you get to this point of fame?
Tesla's task was very difficult at the time, as electric cars in the past had a very bad reputation because of their ugly shape and specifications that did not live up to the level of fuel-powered cars, and also because of the pressure exerted by the media and oil companies, but the company aspired from the beginning to improve the reputation of these cars and innovate Beautiful electric cars that can compete with the rest of the cars in all possible standards.
The company knew from the start that in order to make enough money and keep the company alive in the long term, it had to go through 3 stages:
- Making a high speed sports car at an exorbitant price.
- Creating a luxury car to suit a larger audience and to compete with companies such as Mercedes-Benz and BMW.
- Use the profit generated from selling those cars to make a cheap car for the common people.
But problems began to appear from the beginning. With the company starting to design its first sports car, the Tesla Roadster, it was believed that the car would cost $ 25 million to develop, but the company discovered that it would need $140 million!
Although the car first appeared in 2006, but it had many flaws in design and function, and because the company was losing a lot of money, and due to some disagreements in the company, the Board of Directors decided to remove Martin from his position as CEO and replace him with another person.
After hiring more than one person for the position, Elon Musk ended up being installed as CEO and chief engineer for the company.
In 2008, the company was finally able to sell hundreds of Roadster cars and received great support from the company's fans, and the company was close to starting designing its next Model S car, until a major problem occurred in addition to the previous problems.
It is the global economic crisis, as the company was really close to death, and it is reported that it had only $ 500,000 in the bank at the end of 2008.
With the company approaching death, Elon Musk had to find a solution to revive the company again, so he invested all his remaining personal wealth, which was approximately 20 million dollars, and was able to collect another 20 million dollars from other investors, although the amount was not enough, but it helped The company is on the rise.
Musk has invested everything he owns so much that he borrowed some money from his friends in 2009 to make ends meet!
At the time, Elon was preparing a plan to make the company profit again, and indeed in 2009 he succeeded in contracting with Daimler, the owner of Mercedes-Benz cars, to supply it with 1,000 battery packs for smart electric cars for more than 40 million dollars, and Daimler agreed to buy 10% of the Shares of the company for 50 million dollars.
Tesla now has enough money to develop its next Model S, and already in March 2009 was able to announce the concept car design.
In June 2009, the company received $465 million from the US Department of Energy to secure the entire Model S production process.
In June 2010, Tesla went public, raising $226 million through an initial public offering on the stock exchange.
Thus, the company was completely ready to start producing the Model S, which officially entered the market in 2012 and became one of the most successful cars in the world.
Elon managed to turn the company upside down, from a company on the verge of bankruptcy, to one of the largest and most famous car companies in the world.
Indeed, its market value in December 2020 reached 615 billion dollars, which is more than Ford, Honda, BMW, General Motors, Daimler, Volkswagen and Toyota combined!
The reason is simple, which is that Tesla was able to create environmentally friendly electric cars, and at the same time better than fuel cars in terms of performance and design, the first of which is the Model S and Roadster.
The company then manufactured many other cars and trucks such as Model X, Model 3 and the new Roadster that has not yet entered the market, but it is the first car in the world that managed to reach 100 km/h acceleration in just 1.9 seconds!
6. The Boring Company, OpenAI and Neuralink
We will first talk about The Boring Company, a company founded in 2016 with the goal of creating new and easy means of transportation.
The company is now digging a tunnel under the city of Los Angeles whose job is to transport people and vehicles to remote places underground at great speed, by installing conveyor vehicles on the edges of the streets that people or cars can ride in.
Then those vehicles go underground and walk in their designated path.
The company is also working on the Hyperloop project, which is a train that runs at a speed of more than 1,000 km/h in a huge vacuum tube connected between several cities.
Now let's talk about Neuralink, which you may have heard about recently.
The company was also founded in 2016 by Elon Musk and 8 other partners.
And in 2020, it announced a new chip that connects the human brain with external electronic devices, as it is implanted inside the human head by a robot.
This chip performs many tasks such as controlling devices through the brain, treating neurological problems, and others.
It now remains OpenAI.
Founded by Elon Musk and 5 other people, the company is a research laboratory tasked with developing and promoting human-friendly artificial intelligence technologies.
This is after concerns spread about the ability of machines to develop themselves one day, as many people believe that this could lead to the extinction of humans.
So, this is the story of Elon Musk, one of the most famous and smartest inventors of our time.
Tell us what you think of him, and is there anything you liked or inspired by his story? Share your opinion!
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