The life story of Elon Musk

Source

The thought of colonizing a planet used to be pure fantasy… just a theme for sci-fi movies and comic books.  But guess what? There’s a real person who’s stated life purpose is to turn humans into space colonizers. Elon Musk. One of the richest men the world with a net worth of USD12B as of September 2015 based on Forbes.

With the innovations Musk's companies have produced, Musk is the closest to a real-life Tony Stark.  He has revolutionized the aerospace, automotive and solar industries like no one had since the Wright Brothers.

Reading "Elon Musk:  Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future" by Ashlee Vance gave me peek into Musk's life story.

So who is Musk?  What is his life story?

He’s the man behind SpaceX, a company that builds affordable rockets in the US.  Why did he focus on affordability?  Simply put, his analogy was why build a Ferrari for every launch when it was was possible that a Honda Accord might do the trick?

SpaceX sends a rocket up about once a month, carrying satellites for companies and nations and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). Its USD60 million per launch cost is much less than Europe’s, Japan’s, even Russians' and the Chinese. (One player for example charges USD380 million per flight.) 

Musk with with Falcon 9.  (Source)

But even if SpaceX is the price leader already, it continues to develop better and more affordable rockets. 

Dragon V2 Spaceship (Source)

Musk is also the biggest shareholder of Tesla Motors which delivered the Model S, a beautifully designed, all-electric sedan.

Tesla Model S (Source)

In November 2012, just a few months after it started shipping, the Model S was named Motor Trend’s Car of the Year out-beating eleven other vehicles from companies such as Porsche, BMW, Lexus, and Subaru in terms of raw speed, mileage, handling, and storage space. And it could be recharged for free at Tesla’s stations located in highways across the US.

Tesla had transformed the car into a gadget—a device that actually got better after you bought it.  While owners sleep, Tesla’s engineers tap into the car via internet connection and download software updates. How cool is that?!

Several months later, Consumer Reports gave the Model S its highest car rating in history—99 out of 100—while proclaiming that it was likely the best car ever built. The Model S was not just the best electric car; it was best car, period, and the car people desired.

America had not seen a successful car company since Chrysler emerged in 1925. One year after the Model S went on sale, Tesla had posted a profit, hit $562 million in quarterly revenue, raised its sales forecast, and become as valuable as Mazda Motor.

In October 2014, Musk unveiled a supercharged version of the Model S with two motors—one in the front and one in the back. It could go zero to 60 in 3.2 seconds. The company had turned a sedan into a supercar.

Musk isn’t technically the original founder of Tesla but he just bought into the company in the early stages (incorporated in 2003, the original founders were Eberhard and Tarpenning and they named it Tesla Motors after Nikola Tesla, the inventor and electric motor pioneer). But as what people say, without Musk’s money, marketing savvy, engineering ingenuity, and leadership, the innovation may not have unfolded the way as it did.

When Musk accomplished these 2 feats - SpaceX and Tesla - analysts started comparing him to Steve Jobs who had successfully claimed similar achievements in two different industries (a new Apple product hit + a blockbuster Pixar movie in the same year).  In Musk’s case, there was even a third feat - SolarCity - started in 2006, it is now the largest installer and financier of solar panels for consumers and businesses.  In 2014, SolarCity was valued at close to $7 billion. Whoa...

And do you know what made Musk get into solar energy? It just made sense to him since enough solar energy hits the Earth’s surface in about an hour to equal a year’s worth of worldwide energy consumption from all sources put together.

Brilliant mind. It makes one curious how his mind is wired. And why ordinary mortals like us don’t have thoughts like that. Hahaha….

Anyway, before telling you how his mind wired, some may remember Musk in his early tech successes. In 1995, he had a company called Zip2 (described as a primitive Google Maps combined with Yelp) which Compaq ended buying in 1999 for USD307M (where Musk got USD22M).

His next startup was a payment solution called X.com but he ended up buying another payment startup called Paypal to consolidate with X.com (again, he wasn’t the original founder of PayPal; he just bought into it).  eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for USD1.5B and being the biggest shareholder, Musk got a lot and that’s what he used to initially fund SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity.   But it wasn’t an easy ride as most of his companies took several years to perfect the inventions and start making money.

So what makes Musk special? What was his growing up years like that made him what he is today?

Musk was born in South Africa in 1971 (his grandparents and parents were born in Canada but they moved to South Africa).

When he was a kid, his parents thought he was deaf because when people spoke to him, he seemed to be in trance and had a distant look in his eyes.  But according to Musk, in those trance-like moments, he was able to concentrate on a single task ... he could see images in his mind’s eye with a clarity like an engineering drawing produced by computer software. Wow....

Musk also loved to read. After school, he would go to the bookstore and stay there from 2pm to 6pm to read. When he ran out of books to read at the library (around 3rd or 4th grade), he started to read Encyclopedia Britannica. And since he had a photographic memory, he remembered a lot of facts. At the dinner table, when one of his siblings would wonder aloud about the distance from Earth to the Moon, Musk would say the exact measurement at perigee and apogee. (I can’t even remember these terms! Wahaha…)

Musk was 10 when he saw a computer for the first time in a mall and got awed, and soon got his own computer.  At 12, he designed a video game about alien space fighters he called Blastar and which was featured on a trade publication in South Africa.

(Side note: His gift on being able to study something new and put all the details together is very much still there.  When SpaceX was just starting, Musk and team went to Russia to buy a rocket but the sellers wouldn’t budge in to the price he wants. He told his team that they could just build their own rocket and presented a document detailing the costs of the materials needed to build, assemble, and launch a rocket! Wow...)

Growing in South Africa, Musk was exposed to apartheid.  He was bullied too - very badly. He mentioned in the book that he even got a nose job when he was an adult to repair the damage bullying did to his face.

His classmates in South Africa remember Musk as likable and quiet but not considered as one of the smartest. But the reason for this was Musk didn’t have interest in subjects that didn’t make sense to him where he was ok with just getting a passing grade. But for subjects like like physics and computers which he found important and useful, he got high grades. In his own words: 

There needs to be a reason for a grade. I’d rather play video games, write software, and read books than try and get an A if there’s no point in getting an A. I can remember failing subjects in like fourth and fifth grade. Then, my mother’s boyfriend told me I’d be held back if I didn’t pass. I didn’t actually know you had to pass the subjects to move to the next grade. I got the best grades in class after that. 

At 17, Musk left South Africa for Canada. He spent the next year working a series of odd jobs around Canada like tending vegetables, shoveling out grain bins and cleaning the boiler room of a lumber mill.

One activity which Musk likes to do together with his brother is to read the newspaper and identify interesting people they would like to meet. They would cold-call these people to ask if they were available to have lunch. Among those that they called was a top executive at a bank. It took six months to get a sked with this bank executive but the 2 made an impression that this bank executive ended up offering Musk a summer internship at the bank and became his trusted advisor.  His exposure during his internship greatly influenced him to do his tech startups (Zip2 and X.com) and the rest is history. 

That is Musk's life story in less than 2,000 words. :)

So what else is in Musk’s pipeline other than turning humans into an interplanetary species?

The latest software update of Model S gives the car autopilot functions. The car has radar to detect objects and warn of possible collisions and could guide itself via GPS. “Later, you will be able to summon the car,” Musk said. “It will come to wherever you are."  Wow.

Tesla’s third-generation car, or the Model 3, due out in 2017, is expected to be priced at around USD35,000 - a milestone that would officially make electric cars truly mainstream. 

Tesla has also begun modeling a type of submarine car that could transition from road to water.  Double wow.

SpaceX, on the other hand, is developing reusable rockets. Instead of the conventional disposable rockets which break apart and crash into the sea, SpaceX is testing rockets that can return to Earth on a floating pad at sea or precisely land back at their original launchpad.   Imagine, rockets that can be used over and over again for trips to space (just like planes!).  Reusable rockets are expected to further cut prices to at least 1/10 versus its rivals. Amazing.

Musk also unveiled something he called Hyperloop – a new mode of hi-speed transportation via cars in pods inside a tube. You might wondering how fast is fast when he says hi-speed?  The Hyperloop could take you from LA to SFO in 35 minutes!  He explained that the pods would float on a bed of air produced by skis at their base. Each pod would be thrust forward by an electromagnetic pulse, and motors placed throughout the tube would give the pods added boosts as needed. These mechanisms could keep the pods going at 800 mph. And it's going to be solar-powered.  Mind-blowing, right?!

Hyperloop (Source)

I hope I get a chance to visit SpaceX, the Tesla factory or even the Hyperloop test site and see all the brilliant engineers of Musk working on these mind-blowing inventions.

The things which Musk's companies have developed are the kind of things we used to see only in fictional movies and books.   And once upon a time, a kid in South Africa read about them too.  But this kid, unlike us ordinary mortals, didn't just stop at the pure enjoyment of reading about them.  He was able to figure out how to make them happen. :)