Imagine a life like this: from working to earn tuition, to being admitted to Stanford and dropping out of school; from sleeping in the office for entrepreneurship, needing help from my mother, to building a huge business empire, worth more than 1.29 trillion yuan, becoming the world's richest man for the second consecutive year.
And Musk is the protagonist of Shuangwen. He has been described by many media as a superhero with extraordinary skills, a realistic version of Silicon Valley Iron Man, and his history of his family has also attracted countless people to worship.
The entrepreneurial giant Musk's ambition is not only to make money, he also wants to realize his dream since he was a child - to send humans to Mars, and is changing the pattern of the space industry with his own strength.
So what kind of person is he, and how did he single-handedly develop the private aviation industry?
A childhood redeemed by books and knowledge
Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa to a wealthy family, the son of a wealthy homegrown engineer and the mother of a Canadian nutritionist and model.
His father often studied some scientific and technological experiments at home, and Musk was very interested in science and technology from an early age. This also laid the foundation for his future entrepreneurial road.
But there is also an undercurrent under the rich life, his parents divorced when he was 8 years old, he lived with his father, but he was not close to him.
Life at school was also not satisfactory, he suffered from school violence at school, and once he was beaten to the hospital and had to go for rhinoplasty surgery.
In such a family environment and school environment, Musk silently dusted himself, he did not talk much, and liked to read quietly alone.
It's an exaggeration to say that Musk can read ten hours a day. In his early days, he liked to read science fiction novels and comics, but by the third and fourth grades, he began to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.
"While many kids go to big parties, drink, and talk about sports events, he hides in the library and flips through all kinds of books." Musk's dad said.
At the age of 10, Musk owned a computer with a copy of the BASIC Programming Language.
Musk forgot to eat and sleep, and in 3 days he completed the course that usually takes 6 months. The game Plus Star was then made and sold for $500.
At the age of 17, in order to avoid military service and be exposed to cutting-edge technology, Musk decided to immigrate to the United States.
At first, he tried to persuade his father to emigrate, but his father did not agree. His mother was Canadian, and the law allowed Musk to inherit Canadian citizenship, so he adjusted his plans to go to Canada and then to the United States.
So Musk came to North America alone, arriving in Canada with only thousands of Canadian dollars of traveler's cheques.
Second, the fledgling, began to "open and hang life"
Originally, I wanted to go to my mother's uncle first, but when I arrived, I learned that he had moved away. So they had to work odd jobs to earn a living, doing blue-collar jobs such as growing vegetables, cleaning granaries, and cleaning boiler rooms.
In 1989, Musk obtained Canadian citizenship and applied to Queen's University of Ontario in Canada.
While immersing himself in his studies, he also made money by repairing computers and selling accessories.
Three years later, Musk transferred to Wharton to study economics. During his time at university, he began to pay close attention to the Internet, clean energy and space that would affect the future of humanity. After earning a bachelor's degree in economics, Elon Musk spent another year in school, earning a bachelor's degree in physics.
In 1995, at the age of 24, Musk entered Stanford University to pursue a Doctorate in Materials Science and Applied Physics, but he left just two days after enrolling because he found himself completely uninterested in learning technology and intended to start a business.
Musk mentioned that he can't bear to miss the great opportunity for the Internet to arrive.
At first, Musk wanted to join the Internet company, but he did not pass the interview due to "shyness". After that, he decided to start an Internet company.
I have to say that his vision is really unique and he has seized the opportunity of the times.
In 1995, he and his brother started Zip2. Users can search for things they want to eat and buy nearby, while also seeing reviews, similar to Chinese dian dianping.
Convincing merchants to put information online is a hassle, and although they go door-to-door, it's hard to find companies that pay the bill.
They had a very hard time, the whole company had only one computer, doing servers during the day and writing code at night.
The brothers lived in the office, ate hastily, took a shower and went to the YMCA. Mothers would save $2,000 a month to visit and support them.
In early 1996, a venture capital firm poured $3 million into Zip2, hired more specialized engineers, and changed its marketing strategy.
A few years later, Zip2 was acquired by Compaq Computer for $307 million, and Musk, who was only 27 years old at the time, also earned $22 million and became a famous figure.
Musk, who is full of enthusiasm, has invested in the financial industry again, and he feels that the financial industry is stupid, has a lot of money, is inefficient, and has great prospects for development. So I invested tens of millions of dollars to co-found the "X.com" with two entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley.
It is an online banking, insurance company and brokerage firm. In order to promote his philosophy, Musk launched measures to attract fans, but the effect was not satisfactory.
However, the service they did not spend much effort to launch through the email payment service suddenly caught fire, which later became known as the "PayPal" and was the originator of online payment technology.
At this point you will definitely think of Alipay, in fact, Alipay is five years later than PayPal, it is imitating PayPal on many levels.
In 2002, PayPal was wholly owned by eBay, the world's largest online business at the time, for $1.5 billion, with Musk owning 11.7 percent of the shares.
In Musk's own words, he bid farewell to the entrepreneurial life of "swallowing glass while staring into the abyss." His truly glorious life is unfolding.
Iii. Begin to build a "space empire"
Musk, who sold PayPal, started a new venture. From an early age, he believed that sooner or later the earth would be unfit for human existence.
So he founded SpaceX, and sending people to Mars is Musk's ultimate goal. Perhaps he did not have clear and unambiguous steps at that time, but gradually became clear in step-by-step practice.
At the 67th International Astronautical Congress in 2016, Musk mentioned that his ultimate goal is to help humanity become a cross-planetary species and space civilization to ensure that human civilization can continue in the event of a huge catastrophe.
He did it not because it could be done, but because he felt that it was something that should be done and did not want to wait for someone else to achieve it.
Let's focus on Musk in 2002. With the goal, it had to be implemented step by step, and he asked the Russians to buy rockets, and the result was a very high price.
After careful consideration, Musk believed that he also had the ability to create rockets at a very low cost, so he founded SpaceX, a space exploration technology company, in June 2002, and recruited a group of scientists to start research.
Tesla was founded in 2003, and Musk became Tesla's CEO a year later. For him, the genius is the biggest dream, and Tesla is only responsible for providing the dream fund.
In March 2006, after four years of hard work, SpaceX's first work, Falcon One, appeared. However, with a loud noise, the rocket was scrapped, and the first launch was unfavorable, and the whole audience was in an uproar.
After suffering the ridicule of the media, Musk was not discouraged, saying: "No matter whether you go to heaven or earth, you will not give up until you succeed."
In 2007, Musk made a second launch, and as a result, the rocket exploded again a few days later.
The second test failed miserably, and although it did not eventually succeed in entering Earth orbit, a large amount of data was collected from the test flight. So Musk faced the media and claimed it was a 95% successful test flight!
In August 2008, SpaceX made its third launch and everything went well, with teams watching the live broadcast cheering.
Unexpectedly, when the first stage of the rocket disengaged after the rocket lifted off, the impact force caused by the residual fuel caused a violent impact between the first and second stage rockets, and the third test flight also ended in a fiasco.
In the 2008 financial crisis, Musk fell to the bottom of his life. His rockets failed three times, and tens of millions of dollars of investment and the hard work of the team were burned.
This is not the worst, but even more serious because the input cost is too high, Tesla is also on the verge of bankruptcy.
The blow to his career had not eased him, and his marriage was on the verge of collapse.
That year, his wife, Justin, had mental problems after a car accident, and the couple often quarreled. On June 16, 2008, Musk and his wife Justin went through divorce procedures on this day.
Soon after, the Musk couple's divorce case became more high-profile. The mainstream media began tracking the court decisions after their divorce.
In the end, they settled, and Justin received a property, two million dollars in cash, $80,000 a month in alimony, 17 years of child support, and a Tesla Roadster.
But Musk didn't concede, he sold all his properties, borrowed money from friends and family, and prepared to make a last-ditch attempt. If you don't succeed, you may only go bankrupt.
On September 28, 2008, Falcon 1 took off for the fourth time.
Little by little time passed, and by the eleventh minute, Falcon 1 had successfully entered Earth orbit!
Musk recalled: "SpaceX almost ran out of money, I messed up the first three launches, fortunately, the fourth launch was successful, and we spent the last bit of money in our hands on this launch." That day, fate took care of us, and if that launch failed, SpaceX would go bankrupt. ”
At the end of the year, SpaceX received a $1.6 billion order from NASA and provided 12 cargo replenishment services to the International Space Station, officially opening the road to commercial spaceflight.
After that, Musk's SpaceX still made outstanding contributions in the field of spaceflight.
Recently, Musk said that the SpaceX team will make great progress this year - the launch target for 2022 is 60 times, and the Starlink project is expected to achieve more than 4200 Satellites in 18 months, accounting for about 2/3 of all active satellites on Earth. Apparently, he was one step closer to his space dream.
epilogue
There seems to be nothing he can't do badly, and his business empire covers aerospace, automotive, transportation, new energy, healthcare, telecommunications Internet and artificial intelligence.
As such, Musk is a god-like being in the eyes of many people.
Perhaps as evidenced by what veteran tech journalist Ashlee Vance said in his biography "Iron Man of Silicon Valley," in the secular age of technological development, we also crave heroes and myths, but still need faith and meaning.
In fact, the meaning of heroes is not only to save the world, but also to make us extraordinary. Human beings not only have the needs of survival, but also the needs of self-transcendence and self-realization.
Author: Exclusive Universe