An entrepreneur is someone who has a business idea, from which a business is created by taking risks and bearing all the rewards or losses. Entrepreneurs are known to be the backbone of any economy and whenever people talk about “Entrepreneurs”, there is only one name that pops up in mind and that is “Elon Musk”.
Only
a few entrepreneurs have made a mark on the whole world with their start-ups
and among them, there is only one who has done it with not just one but with
all his start-ups from PayPal to Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, etc. All
these start-ups are worth a fortune in the current times and the best in their
respectable fields.
Elon
Musk is “the Entrepreneur”, engineer, industrial designer, philanthropist,
technology expert, visionary, entertainer and what not. Whatever he has touched
so far has turned to gold; every company he started or worked with became
successful.
According
to Forbes, he is currently (in July 2020) the eighth richest person in the
world. He was born on June 28, 1971. He has citizenship from 3 major countries
South Africa, Canada and U.S.A with china having offered him their green card
when he set-up an out-sized manufacturing plant in China which he’s presumably
to ignore as he has already decided to manoeuvre his manufacturing unit from
china to some other country due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
He
is the founder, CEO, the lead designer of “SpaceX”, CEO, product architect of
Tesla Inc., founder of The Boring Company and PayPal (formerly X.com), Teslaquila,
Co-founder of Neuralink, OpenAI and Zip2, and the chairman of SolarCity.
He
was ranked joint-first Most Innovative Leaders of 2019 and 21st on the
World’s most powerful people of 2016 by Forbes.
He is also the longest term CEO of any automotive manufacturer company
around the world.
Elon has appeared in a number of shows like Young Sheldon, The Big
Bang Theory and etc. and movie “Iron Man 2”.
Elon
has two bachelor’s degrees; one in Economics from the Wharton School and
another in physics from the College of Arts and Science. He also wanted to do
PhD in applied physics and material science from Stanford University but
later decided against it and pursued a business career.
Musk
was severely bullied throughout his childhood and he has an interest in reading.
He even learned computer programming using a manual and sold a code he made to
a magazine for $500. At such a young age, he was being both a techie and a
business-man or at least learning about both of them.
Musk
is the father of 7 children from his 3 wives over the years. He named his last
son as ‘X Æ A-12’ which left everyone scratching
their heads. But later Elon explained Son’s
name as an idea of his wife Grimes and Musk said, “It’s just X, the letter
X, the ‘Æ’ is pronounced, ‘Ash,’ and then, A-12 is my contribution which is
Archangel 12, the precursor to the SR-71, coolest aircraft ever.” Well anyway,
that’s a weird name to name your son but whatever.
He has been married three times, the first being in 2000 with Jennifer
Justine Wilson, a Canadian author who met Elon during college times and was
married to him for around 8 years. They divorced in 2008 and before that
Justine gave birth to 6 children of Elon out of which one died during his
infant age. Among the five, one is a twin pair and the others are triplets.
After the divorce, the billionaire entrepreneur started dating
“Taulah Riley”, an English actress. They got married in 2010 but decided to get
separated in 2012. However, both remarried in 2013 and stayed together with the
5 children of Elon until 2016 when they finally ended their marriage.
In 2018, Elon met his current wife on twitter goes by the name
of “Grimes”, she is a Canadian musician, singer, composer, and visual artist.
Elon Musk’s mother Maye Musk is a dietitian and has been a model for over 50 years. His father Errol Musk who Elon refers to as “a terrible human being” was an engineer and was very tough on his kids. Many people think he is the reason Elon is what he is today but Elon gives all the credit to his mom as she was a single mother raising the three children.
As of July 2020, Elon Musk net worth is estimated around 70.6 billion US dollars and he is the eighth wealthiest man in the world according to
Forbes.
Three
out of the top ten start-ups of the millennium belongs to Elon Musk but to
understand why he is the entrepreneur of the millennium, let’s just talk about
his journey from the very beginning, his first start-up.
His
first startup was way back in 1995, he along with his brother started Zip2, a web
software company, the company provided an internet city guide and Musk was able
to persuade contracts from The New York Times and Chicago Tribune. The company
became popular and noticed by majors within a time span of 4 years, Musk wanted
to become the CEO of Zip2 but the board rejected his idea and in February 1999
Zip2 was acquired by Compaq for $307 Million.
Elon
received around $22 million for his 7% share in the company. It is known that
Elon was so broke and in-debt after college that he didn’t even have money to
buy a second computer for programming of the Zip2. He used to work at nights so
that the company stays active during day time.
$22
million was a lot at that time; a normal man would have enjoyed and invested
that money but Elon Musk being Elon Musk co-founded another start-up by March
1999 called X.com. X.com was first started as an online financial services and
e-mail payment company from the money he received from Zip2.
X.com
was one of a kind thing at that time and it received the acknowledgement in just
one year. X.com was merged with Confinity in the year 2000 but the merged
company focused on only one service ‘PayPal’- a money-transfer service of
Confinity and later the company was named PayPal. Elon became the CEO of PayPal
but he was ousted due to disagreements with the board members. Later in October
2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion out of which $165 million
went to Elon Musk.
By this time, the world didn’t know who Elon is, he was just another Entrepreneur for the world who had luck in his first 2 start-ups but in 2002, Musk founded SpaceX, the first private company intended to make rockets to explore the space.
The idea came when Musk was looking for cheap rockets to land a miniature
experimental greenhouse on Mars to gain the interest of people in space
exploration but failed to find any rockets in the budget even after exploring
2/3 major rocket making countries. On the way back home, Elon realized he can
start his own company that can make the rocket that he needs.
He
invested around $100 million and founded Space Exploration Technologies
Corporation Known as SpaceX. He is the CEO and CTO of SpaceX and around 54%
shareholder of the company. In the very first 7 years, SpaceX has already
designed a family of launch vehicles and Dragon multipurpose spacecraft.
Currently,
SpaceX is the largest private producer of rocket engines in the world and holds
many records and achievements in space exploration.
In
2004, after the initial success of SpaceX, Musk joined another start-up named
Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.), an electric car manufacturer and became
its chief architect and later in 2008 became the CEO of the company and still
holds the position. Tesla’s plan as quoted by Elon Musk “Build sports car. Use
that money to build affordable cars. Use that money to build even more
affordable cars. While doing above, also provide zero-emission electric power
generation options.”
Many
publications have compared him to Henry Ford for his work in advancing vehicle power
trains. Tesla Model 3 is the world’s best-selling electric car in the world.
Musk
provided the idea and finance to his cousins for SolarCity which was founded in
2006. By 2013, SolarCity became one of the largest providers of solar power
systems in the U.S before it was acquired by Tesla, Inc. in 2016.
In
2013 Musk unveiled the concept of Hyperloop, a high-speed transportation
system. Musk has already received government approval to build a Hyperloop and
the world will notice another wonder done by the great Musketeer.
In
2015, Musk founded OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research
company. It aims to develop AI in such a way that it is both safe and
beneficial for humans. In 2016 Musk co-founded another company, Neuralink, a
neurotechnology start-up company that aims to integrate the human brain with
AI. Musk sees the OpenAI and Neuralink related as one is focused on minimizing
the dangers of AI, while Neuralink is working to implant AI with human brains.
In 2016 while stuck in traffic Musk tweeted “am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging” which led to the company “The Boring Company”, an infrastructure and tunnel construction service company.
After
reading all of this, you should have developed the understanding of why he is
the “entrepreneur of the millennium”.
Elon Musk has been involved in many good deeds to help the world. His vision of Tesla and SolarCity to help combat global warming is a prime example of it. In 2014, Musk stated that Tesla will allow its technology patents to be used by anyone in good faith to speed up the development of electric cars to save the environment. His goals include lessening the risk of human extinction by colonizing the planet Mars and that’s the idea of SpaceX.
He became famous around the lesser-known parts of the world too
when he offered to help in rescuing children’s soccer team in Tham Luang cave rescue.
He arranged engineers from his two companies, The Boring Company and SpaceX to
design small and child shaped submarine to help in the rescue. The engineers
built the submarine named “Wild Boar” in only 8 hours and Elon personally
delivered it to the Thai government. But by that time, 8 out of 12 children
were already rescued which led Thai authorities too not use the submarine.
Although the king of Thailand later awarded Elon with “member of
the order of the Direkgunabhorn” for his contributions in the rescue.
For the betterment of the human race, Elon has already invested
in many technology firms which aim at the improvement of the Artificial
Intelligence but he is afraid that AI can be humanity’s largest existential
threat and for that he has been arguing with people like Mark Zuckerberg over
the safe improvement of the AI which should only benefit humans.
He also stated that the investment in these firms are not for
any investment return but to keep an eye on the growth of AI and to make sure
the outcome is positive and not bad.
Nikola Tesla’s (the greatest scientist of all time) grandnephew
asked Elon for donations towards the construction of Tesla Science Center at
Wardenclyffe. Elon not only made a donation but also promised to build a Tesla
Supercharger in the museum car park.
In 2018, Musk donated nearly $500,000 to help solve the water
crisis in Michigan schools.
Just when the world was ready to accept Musk as the superhero
that the world needed, he found a way to show his human behaviour. It started in
2018 when U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Musk for a tweet
claiming the tweet as false, misleading, and damaging to the investors. Musk
called it unjustified but they reached a settlement in a few days. After that
Musk called the SEC as “Shortseller Enrichment Commission” and clearly saying
that he doesn’t respect SEC.
After the Tham Luang cave rescue, Vernon Unsworth, a cave
explorer who played a key role in the rescue criticized the submarine on
national TV and called it a publicity stunt. He also said that Musk had no
conception of the cave passage and can stick his submarine where it hurts. Musk
is a public figure and should avoid these types of small things but he acted
aggressively and called Unsworth a “Pedo guy” which got Musk a lot of
criticism.
In another incident, Elon musk was seen smoking Cannabis on-air
on The Joe Rogan Experience show. It became a story of Musk’s instability and
resulted in a drop in stock prices of Tesla.
Another controversial statement was released by Musk during the
COVID-19 pandemic when he compared COVID-19 to the common cold and stated that
“the panic is dumb” and claimed that the children are immune to the virus while
only oldies that have existing conditions are vulnerable. He also claimed that
medical companies are creating a hoax for COVID-19 just for their financial
interests.
These claims only brought him a lot of criticism.
All
these controversies proved Elon is just as human as others and he can also make
mistakes but we cannot take away any acknowledgement that is due to him. He has
been an inspiration to thousands of entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers and
every human being. He has achieved all his success by himself and not by any
kind of nepotism. He has made the world a better place and plans to make it
even better than today.
From
his kind gestures and advancements in various fields he has won thousands of
awards, the most significant ones are the Entrepreneur of the year, 2007 by
Inc. Magazine, 2007 Index design award for his design of Tesla Roadster, George
Low award for his contribution is space transportation, National Conservation
Achievement award, a Gold medal by Royal aeronautical society, Edison
Achievement award and many more.
He
is listed as one of the top 100 Time’s people who affected the world. He might
be considered a wrong person for his controversies but he is the best
entrepreneur that has ever been and a few bad things don’t outweigh the
thousand of goods that he has done.
We
hope you liked our blog, please let us know with your valuable suggestions and
feedback. If you don’t want to miss on any latest blogs, do subscribe to our
free newsletter.
