You might know Elon Musk as the guy who invented PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX. Or maybe you know him as the guy who's on a mission to eliminate global warming through sustainable energy. Maybe you've heard of him as the second guy in Silicon Valley to create 3 companies with a market cap over 1 billion.
Elon Musk is one of the greatest entrepreneur stories, so today we are going to analyze the mindset of Elon Musk and how he built up a net worth of $14.2 billion.
Elon was born in South Africa. His father was an engineer and his mother a model. He got his first computer when he was nine years old, and when he was 12, he learned how to code computer games by himself and created a game called "Blaster," which he sold for $500.
After finishing high school in South Africa, Elon had a dream to come to America, even though his parents were against it. He went against his parent wishes and moved. He wasn’t able to get to United states directly, so he went to Canada first where he lived with some relatives and worked minimum wage jobs.
When he was 19, he started college in Ontario, Canada, but two years after starting he got a full ride scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, so he moved to America and started school there. Later, Elon started facing depression which pushed him into philosophy and religion.
He was constantly confused because he didn’t understand which questions he needed to ask in order to learn. He eventually came to the conclusion that in order to ask the right questions and learn the right things, he would have to expand human consciousness. In order to expand human consciousness he would to focus on three things, expanding the internet, renewable energy and space colonization.
After graduating college, Elon started graduate school at Stanford, where he was supposed to study applied physics and material science. But two days after staring graduate school, he dropped out and started an IT company with his brother, which they named Zip2.
When starting his business, Elon did nothing but work. He lived in his warehouse and showered at the school locker rooms for two whole years as a way to save money. But it was all worth it, because in 1999, AltaVista – the biggest search engine of the time – bought Zip2 for $307 million.
Now, Elon had money for the first time. So he bought a home, a nice car and a private jet. He then promptly got right back to work. That same year he started an online payment system called X.com.
One year later, X.com merged with Confinity and was renamed to PayPal in 2001. By 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion, and Elon got to walk away with $180 million.
What would you do if you had just made $180 million? Elon took the $180 million he made and reinvested in his businesses.
He put $100 million in SpaceX, $70 million in Tesla,and $10 million In Solar City. He had to borrow money for rent. He was borrowing money left and right but had no way to pay it back because he was reinvesting all his money in his businesses.
Now, Solar City is America’s #1 solar energy provider with a valuation of 1.5 billion dollars. Space X has rockets in space and is valued at $12 billion. And finally, Tesla is getting ready to completely change the car industry and is valued at around $30 billion.
So what can we learn from Elon Musk? Sometimes we have to be crazy, and go all in. And if you want to change the world, then change it. on’t rely on anyone else to do it for you.
