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Elon Musk: The Real World Iron Man

July 4, 2019

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Considers himself as a futurist, he is an inventor, engineer, investor, philanthropist and a business magnate. It is not humanly possible to describe everything that a certain South African-born Canadian-American gentleman called Elon Musk has and will accomplish in one article.

He is the founder, CEO, and lead designer of SpaceX; co-founder, CEO, and product architect of Tesla Inc.; co-chairman of Open AI; founder and CEO of Neuralink, and founder of The Boring Company. He is also a co-founder and former chairman of Solar City, co-founder of Zip2, and founder of X.com, which merged with Confinity and took the name PayPal.

He is also the man behind the high-speed transportation system Hyperloop and the VTOL(Vertical Take- Off and Landing) supersonic jet aircraft with electric fan propulsion also known as Musk electric jet.

Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa, and is a man who well and truly changing the world in a really big way. He became a multimillionaire in his late 20s due to his positive outlook towards life and innovative ideas.

Elon Musk has been described as the most imaginative business magnate of the 21st Century. His net worth is $19.2 billion (As of 6/28/2019).

Elon Musk is the one for the future. According to him, his goals are to change the world and humanity. It includes reducing global warming by the use of more sustainable energy production & consumption and reducing the risk of “Human Extinction” by establishing a human colony on Mars.

Education

When he was 12 he sold his first software: a game he created called Blastar.

In grade school Musk was short, introverted and bookish. He was bullied until he was 15 and went through a growth spurt and learned how to defend himself with karate and wrestling.

At age 17, in 1989, Elon Musk moved to Canada to attend Queen’s University and avoid mandatory service in the South African military. Musk obtained his Canadian citizenship that year, in part because he felt it would be easier to obtain American citizenship via that path.

In 1992, Musk left Canada to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated with an undergraduate degree in economics and stayed for a second bachelor’s degree in physics.

After leaving Penn, Elon Musk headed to Stanford University in California to pursue a PhD in energy physics. However, his move was timed perfectly with the Internet boom, and he dropped out of Stanford after just two days to become a part of it, launching his first company, Zip2 Corporation in 1995. Musk became a U.S. citizen in 2002.

Musk’s Ventures:

Zip2 Corporation

Elon Musk launched his first company, Zip2 Corporation, in 1995 with his brother, Kimbal Musk. An online city guide, Zip2 was soon providing content for the new websites of both The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. In 1999, a division of Compaq Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options.

PayPal

In 1999, Elon and Kimbal Musk used the money from their sale of Zip2 to found X.com, an online financial services/payments company. An X.com acquisition the following year led to the creation of PayPal as it is known today.

In October 2002, Elon Musk earned his first billion when PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock. Before the sale, Musk owned 11 percent of PayPal stock.

SpaceX

Musk founded his third company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, in 2002 with the intention of building spacecraft for commercial space travel. By 2008, SpaceX was well established, and NASA awarded the company the contract to handle cargo transport for the International Space Station—with plans for astronaut transport in the future—in a move to replace NASA’s own space shuttle missions.

Falcon 9 Rockets

On May 22, 2012, Musk and SpaceX made history when the company launched its Falcon 9 rocket into space with an unmanned capsule.

BFR Mission to Mars

In September 2017, Musk presented an updated design plan for his BFR (an acronym for either “Big F—ing Rocket” or “Big Falcon Rocket”), a 31-engine behemoth topped by a spaceship capable of carrying at least 100 people. He revealed that SpaceX was aiming to launch the first cargo missions to Mars with the vehicle in 2022, as part of his overarching goal of colonizing the Red Planet.

Internet Satellites

In late March 2018, SpaceX received permission from the U.S. government to launch a fleet of satellites into low orbit for the purpose of providing Internet service.

Tesla Motors

Elon Musk is the co-founder, CEO and product architect at Tesla Motors, a company formed in 2003 that is dedicated to producing affordable, mass-market electric cars as well as battery products and solar roofs. Musk oversees all product development, engineering and design of the company’s products.

Roadster, Model S, Model 3, Semi Truck, Model Y

Five years after its formation, in March 2008, Tesla unveiled the Roadster, a sports car capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds, as well as traveling nearly 250 miles between charges of its lithium ion battery.

The Boring Company

In January 2017, Elon Musk launched “The Boring Company,” a company devoted to boring and building tunnels in order to reduce street traffic. He began with a test dig on the SpaceX property in Los Angeles. Being able to construct smaller, cheaper transit tunnels is still an important innovation, and the massive tunnels needed to accommodate multi-passenger subways

Hyperloop

In August 2013, Elon Musk released a concept for a new form of transportation called the “Hyperloop,” an invention that would foster commuting between major cities while severely cutting travel time. The world’s first full-sized Hyperloop passenger capsule has been unveiled in Spain giving those in attendance a glimpse of the future. This capsule can reach speeds of 1,220 kilometres per hour.

AI and Neuralink

Elon Musk has pursued an interest in artificial intelligence, becoming co-chair of the nonprofit OpenAI. The research company launched in late 2015 with the stated mission of advancing digital intelligence to benefit humanity.

Elon Musk’s accomplishments over the last two decades make him a role model for young entrepreneurs. Here are five powerful lessons that you can learn from his life and career.

Dare to challenge reality

Quoting Einstein, “You can’t solve problems with the same thinking that caused them.” Before Tesla Energy came into existence, people were convinced that battery packs would continue to be expensive, no matter what. However, Musk realised that if someone could break down batteries into its fundamental components – aluminum, cobalt, carbon, nickel, polymers, steel etc. – and build them from scratch by optimising the resources, the overall cost could be reduced by a huge margin.

Today, Tesla Energy has established itself as a revolutionary energy storage venture for sustainable businesses and homes. Musk dared to challenge the widely accepted reality and changed it.

“Boil things down to the most fundamental truths. Then reason up from there.” – Elon Musk

Similarly, you can write down your business challenges, break them down into basic components, and then try to figure out how those components can be bettered.

Consider failure an option and take calculative risk

Today, he may be a multi-billionaire entrepreneur, but things were not always like this. When Musk started SpaceX, he considered failure as a viable option on his new journey towards interplanetary exploration. However, instead of giving it up, he created a contingency plan and went ahead with the SpaceX project.

In Elon Musk’s words, “If we don’t get the first SpaceX rocket launch to succeed by the time we’ve spent $100 million, we will stop the company. That will be enough for three attempted launches.”

The first launch mission of SpaceX, after spending $30 millions, failed. The second launch mission, after spending $60 million also failed. The last and final attempt, failure to which would’ve led to the end of SpaceX, succeeded. Because of this successful launch mission, SpaceX won a contract worth $1.6 billion from NASA. The rest is history!

“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” – Elon Musk

Don’t be scared of failure. The ratio of failure to success is always 50:50, especially when you start a new business. But that shouldn’t stop you from following your dreams. Just draw a line (in terms of the number of months and amount of money you’ll invest) and work hard towards making a dent in the universe.

Think beyond money

What, according to you, was Steve Jobs thinking while working on first iPhone? Or what was it that drove Elon Musk when he was thinking to invest in Tesla Motors? No great person who changed the world in any way did it for money. There was something beyond fame and wealth that motivated them to do great things.

“Going from PayPal, I thought: ‘Well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity?’ Not from the perspective, ‘What’s the best way to make money?” – Elon Musk

So whenever you decide to start a new business, focus on the difference that your product can make to humanity. Money is a by-product and will come to you if your product can solve real-time problems. Learn to think beyond money.

Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it.
The thing that’s worth doing is trying to improve our understanding of the world and gain a better appreciation of the universe and not to worry too much about there being no meaning. And, you know, try and enjoy yourself. Life’s pretty good. It really is.
You want to be extra rigorous about making the best possible thing you can. Find everything that’s wrong with it and fix it. Seek negative feedback, particularly from friends.
Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change as the alternative is disaster.
It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.

Elon Musk lives in the present and dreams of the future. His work revolves around his vision to provide the ordinary with the extraordinary. He wants to change the world and the Mankind. Probably, that is what makes him a superhuman.