Elon Musk – by Ashlee Vance

Elon Musk, what a character. After creating Zip2 and selling it for around $20m, he pumped that all into X.com which became PayPal. After selling that to eBay, he received about $180m after tax. He pumped ALL of that into creating three new companies; SpaceX, Tesla, and Solar City. After being literally hours from complete bankruptcy, each company has made Musk a billionaire. Three companies that have each cleared over a billion dollars… Amazing.

The book is some good insights into how the companies were formed, but also give a good insight into the man that is Elon Musk. Hoping a movie/documentary version comes out soon!

‘How the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is shaping our future’

Elon Musk (dot point) Summary

SYNOPSIS

He jumped into the dot-com mania of 1995 when fresh out of college to fund Zip2, which got sold for 307 million., Musk made 22 million and took all the chips to the next table and poured it into PayPal. Pay Pal was bought for 1.5 billion so he took his share of 200 million to the next poker table where he threw 100 million into SpaceX, 70 million into Tesla and 10 million into a solar city.

He has 5 boys also –

Asked how he survived this schedule he says “I had a tough childhood, so maybe that was helpful”

His ex-wife Justine puts it as ” he does what he wants, when he wants and is relentless about it. Its Elon’s world and the rest of us live in it”.

Musk

1. Elon’s World
2. Africa

As a teenager he was heavily influenced by comic books, his favorite being ‘The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. What he learned was, ‘the really tough thing is to find out the right questions to ask. Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy. The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment’ pg 24

Musk grew up through the hardcore apartheid. A geeky outside not many friends.

His grandpa was a crazy legendary traveler. He fixed up a plane then took it over South Africa to travel. Josh and Wyn traveled through Africa and Europe on this shitty little plane I 1952 unlicensed. They flew 30,000 miles to Aus and back in a single engineer plane. One time they got stranded in an African bush where hyenas and leopards would surround their campfire.

The grandparents ‘were left with the impression that we were capable of anything. You just have to make a decision and then just do it.”

When he was a teenager he went to the bookstore from 2-6 every day after school. Lord of the Ringers, Hitchhikers Guide so he started reading Encyclopedia Britannica. He said ‘ You don’t know what you don’t know’ its crazy.”

The father, Errol sat the kids down and lectured them for hours. Elon would try and convince the dad to go to America but he sent Elon to do all of the chores to play American.

It is clear something awful and profound happened during those years with the father; they all talk about having to endure a difficult childhood with bad moments…

Kimbal says it was “very emotional upbringing but it made us who we are today”

Elon says “I don’t know how someone becomes like he is. It would cause just trouble to tell you any more”

Elon’s encounters at school also horrible. He was kicked in the head and pushed down the stairs where his head was bashed against the ground. They were a bunch of fucking psychos. They beat up one of Musk’s best friends until he agreed to stop hanging with Mushk”

“Musk was not remembered as super bright at this stage in life, and these people were very surprised with what happened.”

“Musk saw it as ‘what grades do I need to get where I want to go ?’

Canada

Musk flew to Canada in 1988 with nowhere to stay. Musk used a payphone to try his uncle. He enquired about the job with the best wage and it turned out to be a gig in the boiler room which started off with 20 people and finished with about 4 people working after two weeks

He then pursued studying Physics at the university.
Kimbal and Elon started going through interesting people they would like to meet; cold calling and asking them for lunch”

Musk said to a girl at this stage ‘IF there was a way I could not eat so I could work more, I would not eat. I wish there was a way to get nutrients without sitting for a meal”

Farooq who was in his dorm at unsaid “When Elon gets into something, he develops a different level of interest in it than other people. This is what differentiates Elon from the rest of humanity’.

1. Elon’s First Startup Zip2

Elon and Kimbal took turns driving and developing business plans on long drives.

Kimbal and Elon started Zip 2 that was a Yellow Pages like listing for businesses online. They would sell door to door trying to convince restaurants to sign up

“Musk never left the office. Maybe he showered on weekends. He asked the first employees who arrived to give him a kick to wake him up”

They were doing very poor with sales at this stage, going through the dip. Musk said to a venture capitalist, “My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail”.

They sold zip 2 and he made 22 million

2.Paypal

He poured all the money into X.com an online banking service where he saw the banks as incredibly backward. Musk began to hone on his trademark style of entering an ultra complicated business and not letting the fact that he knew very little about the industries nuances bother him”

He got in trouble with the other owners about over-hyping products to the public. Where Fricker took a lot of the employees and just started a new company. Musk was left with a shell

“We all worked 20 hours a day and he worked 23 hours.”

During the Sydney Olympics when he was on the plane, the board voted no confidence of Elon and voted in Peter Thiel. He was an advisor and showed incredible restraint. Thiel rebranded the company as PayPal and Elon kept investing.

He sold his share for 200 million and started thinking about next venture.

3. Mice in Space

Musk wanted to go to Mars so he went to Russia to see if he could buy a rocket. They said it would cost a lot, so he decided to build his own rocket.

Without previously knowing too much about rockets he bought a lot of textbooks and taught himself.

Around this time he and Justine his wife of the time lost his baby at 10 weeks.

Justine said “He doesn’t do well in dark places, he’s forward thinking and that’s a survival mechanism for him”

His strong vision let the company grow fast with awesome engineers in the first year.

March 2006 the first rocket went to space, Falcon 1 and failed. First three were a failure.

Things were not looking good

4. All electric

Whilst Elon was busy with Space X he also was a big part of Tesla. A few engineers at Stanford, a guy called Straubel were passionate about electric cars. They needed an investor so they stumbled upon Elon who was out to change the world

Tesla’s goal was to ‘Get America off their addiction to oil” They hired young bright motivated engineers fresh from uni who were green and not brainwashed with the conventional thinking.

They got mockups of the roadster where Elon took the mockup to burning man festival.

They ran into problems when they were initially selling the car for 75,000 but would have cost 170,000 in full production.

Here they had a complete reboot. When something cost 6500, in December, Musk wanted it to cost 3800 by April, if they didn’t deliver they would lose their job.

One employee missed an event to see the birth of his child and was told “that is no excuse. We are changing the world and history – get your priorities right”

Pain Suffering and Survival

• Roadster named number one fail of 2007
• His marriage was under huge pressure
• He said he was going to spend his last dollar on these companies , if we had to move into Justine’s basement we would”
• He had someone else tell Justine they were to divorce.
• The third failed launch of Space X happened.
• Riley said he ‘looked like death itself’
• He was down to a couple of hundred grand, Tesla was a couple hours away from bankruptcy

Lift Off

• Finally SpaceX took off the ground.. Went from the joke of the aeronautics industry to one of the serious competitors.
• First one to re use rockets SpaceX
• Billion dollar contracts with NASA to deliver to the space station

Elon’s styles –

He quizzed a young engineer who thought Elon was trying to test him. He was actually trying to learn things – he has the ability to store incredible amounts of information in a short amount of time

• He doesn’t say you have to do this. He asked, can you do this by Friday 2 pm? One Minute Manager style, lets them sign up to do their own work

Revenge of the electric car

No oil means much less maintenance over the lifetime. Where most car companies make their money. Everything turned around quickly, a car gets better with updates

Roadsters all of a sudden started getting sold

He built a product in no time that the biggest car makers couldn’t dream of creating

Tesla is currently one of the most shorted stock on the NASDAQ

Tesla has open sourced all its patents

Unified Theory of Musk

Each company connected short-term and long-term

Thinking of a submarine car.

Has the largest lithium-ion battery factory

He asked ‘ what shall I do in this world? Solve cars, global warming and make humans multi-planetary. They are compelling goals and now he has the businesses to do that”

Larry Page Google cofounder “He is single proof that you can be really passionate about something that others think is crazy and you can succeed”