Wen 丨 Hao Qiuhui
Editor 丨 Zhang Yan
Musk is once again in a state of anxiety. While shouting about the production of anti-epidemic equipment, he was also sad for the market value of the waist in 30 days.
The new crown pneumonia is spreading in the United States, and as of 15:00 Eastern Time on March 24, the cumulative number of confirmed cases in the United States has exceeded 50,000. Similar to the Chinese car company's strategic materials, Tesla is preparing to produce anti-epidemic equipment and supporting 1,000 ventilators and 250,000 N95 masks.
This is undoubtedly a drop in the bucket.
In the face of great uncertainty, the US stock index has gone through four circuit breakers in 10 days, which has become a scene recorded in history. Since the establishment of the circuit breaker mechanism in 1988, there have been only five circuit breakers in the history of the US stock market, the first time was when the financial crisis broke out in 1997. U.S. listed companies are in mourning, and the 89-year-old stock god Buffett also calls it "living for a long time.".
Tesla doubled its market value in 2 months, ranking second largest in the world with a market value of more than $180 billion, but it returned to its original shape in 30 days, and the current valuation is only $99 billion.
model 3/Tesla official website
In China, Musk is also in a mess.
Not long ago, the domestic Tesla because the car chip does not match the list, coupled with Musk on Twitter to fan the flames, Tesla was attacked by consumers, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology interviewed, word of mouth greatly discounted.
People familiar with Musk describe him like this, "Ma Yilong (the Chinese name given to Musk by netizens) This person, you can't understand him with normal human thinking, he is a technologist, a straight man of steel, he just uses his own science and engineering man's thinking to do something he thinks is right, in fact, there is no malice", and even called Musk a "iron man" who can do things but can't say scenes. Buffett, Bill Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc. have all been bluntly "attacked" by Musk on Twitter.
But there is no doubt that he is the most concerned person in the automotive field at the moment, not one of them. Those who like him call him geniuses, and those who dislike him call him "crazy."
To this day, what has not changed is Musk's "madness".
<h3>01 Little nerds come to the "Land of Opportunity"</h3>
"I'm just a little nerd," Musk said of himself as a child.
As a child, Musk was not good at words, solitude, and even some self-made cleverness, such a personality made him rarely have playmates except books. But he enjoyed exploring the world in books.
Because of his addiction to reading, Musk Jr. often fell into thinking, resulting in a lack of responsiveness to the outside world, and his parents thought that he had a hearing problem, so they asked the doctor to remove the tonsils to help improve his hearing, but this did not improve Musk's situation.
Later, his parents understood that it was him thinking, because Musk always gave some unexpected answers to some questions at a young age. Once, the little friend pointed to the moon and said that it was billions of miles away from us, and Musk calmly replied: "In fact, the moon is less than 250,000 miles away from us." ”
Musk as a child /"Iron Man of Silicon Valley"
Even if he is afraid of black, Musk Jr. can use science to give himself a reasonable explanation that does not harm black: darkness is only because there are no photons with 400 to 700 nanometer visible light wavelengths. "What's so scary about not having photons?" He thought about it for a moment, and then he was not afraid of the dark.
Usually bored, he would even make gunpowder and rockets at home, but later he was afraid: "Glad my ten fingers and the house are intact." ”
At the age of 9, Musk had his first computer. The study of computers has become his main interest outside of reading, at the age of 10, an IBM test showed that he had a high talent for programming, Musk was very self-taught, many computer courses were self-taught, "I went to some computer classes and found that the teacher's level was not as good as mine." The 12-year-old Musk found video games very popular, so he spontaneously designed a video game called "Blaster" and sold it for $500.
Musk with his mother/Musk tweeted
At that time, Musk had the idea of starting a business.
He once wanted to open a game hall next to the school, and even the business model and process were planned with his brother Jimble, but when he applied to the government, he failed because he was not old enough. But that didn't stop Musk.
Musk, who has loved science since childhood, wants to be closer to the United States, and he believes that the closest thing to the birthplace of science and technology is the land of opportunity.
The 17-year-old Musk successfully traveled to his hometown of South Africa with the help of his Canadian-born mother to start a trip to Canada. The first thing the young Musk did when he fled to a foreign country was to call his mother and ask, "What should I do now?" ”
Musk then boarded a bus to Vancouver, worked part-time, and finally settled at Queen's University in Toronto. Musk in college adhered to the previous self-study habits, although he rarely attended classes, but his test scores were always good.
Musk later seized an opportunity to transfer to the University of Pennsylvania and deliberately picked two majors, namely physics and business, one to study how to change the world, and the other to study how to make money. During his college years, he wrote three papers, namely "Electronic Scanning Methods for Literature and Books", "The Importance of Solar Energy", and "Supercapacitors".
The first paper successfully helped him get his first pot of gold.
Musk 18th birthday/Twitter
<h3>02 Grab the first pot of gold</h3>
Musk knows what he wants.
In 1995, when the Internet was rising, Musk, who had just received the opportunity to study at Stanford, did not want to miss the opportunity of the times, so he chose to drop out of school to devote himself to the wave of Internet technology entrepreneurship.
Musk, who is only 23 years old, wants to push newspapers into the digital age, so he pulled his brother Jimble, who is far away in Canada, into the company and made the Yellow Pages into an information website, Global Link, which is mainly used to provide location information such as businesses. Musk is in charge of technology, and his brother is in charge of sales.
At that time, many people thought that the idea of online yellow pages information was unrealistic, and some people even threw them a yellow pages and dismissively asked: Do you really think you can eliminate it? The Musk brothers disagreed, believing it was an irreversible trend.
The rise of information technology has accelerated the Internet process, and Global Link has been sought after by some newspaper companies. A year later, the company was favored by a Silicon Valley investor, invested $3 million, and the company was renamed Zip2, so the company was not controlled by Musk.
Under the control of investors, professional managers replaced Musk, and the company's business objects also changed from the C-end that Musk wanted to develop to the B-end that was more profitable at that time, which was contrary to Musk's ideas.
Zip2 was bought in 1999 by Compaq's Alta Vista for $307 million in cash and 34 million shares, and while Musk was surprised that someone had paid a premium for Zip2, he was willing to hand the company over to someone who knew its value better.
Musk personally made $22 million from it, which became his first pot of gold.
Musk at work/Musk Tweet
Ma Huateng and Ding Lei, who were also born in 1971, have not long been in China to start a business, and Musk has become a hot entrepreneurial star in Silicon Valley.
In the same year that he sold Zip2, Musk founded X.com, a company dedicated to online payments. Since the transaction was mainly based on checks at that time, the cycle of offline mailing was too long, and he wanted to use technology to change the link of financial transactions.
Due to the PayPal of a fierce rival, Musk and his founder Peter Thiel chose to give up competition, shake hands, and merge into a corporate X.com. Later, because Musk advocated transferring the technical architecture of the PayPal Unix server to Windows, offending the company's technical faction, they took advantage of Musk's sabbatical to organize the board of directors and vote to drive him out of the management, and the company officially changed its name to PayPal.
Musk, who returned from vacation, found that the company had changed the world, and he became a consultant of the company, and the hot-tempered Musk was surprisingly at ease, did not carry out internal friction on this matter, but chose to support the company's decision, and added 6 million US dollars, becoming the largest shareholder of the PayPal.
In order to quickly develop new users, PayPal viral marketing in the form of bonus incentives, and each person who successfully registers will receive a $20 incentive, and later due to financial problems, the reward has to be reduced to $10. Although PayPal paid a cost of $64 million for it, this move became a classic case of early Marketing on the Internet. It is worth mentioning that Tesla has now also continued to use the old passenger to bring new customers to expand the new.
In early 2002, the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion, and Musk, who owned 11.7 percent of the shares, received a return of about $180 million. At this point, Musk has completed the first phase of wealth accumulation.
"I could have retired, bought an island, had cocktails, and enjoyed a comfortable life, but I had no interest." Musk chose to continue the business, he has enough money.
Musk/Twitter
<h3>03 It's time to land on Mars</h3>
"When will we land on Mars?" One day, Musk suddenly had this question in his head.
So he checked NASA's website and was disappointed to find that NASA had no plans to land on Mars, and that the pace of U.S. exploration of space seemed to have stopped.
He remembered is is isaac Asimov's "Base Series", which he liked since he was a child, which is a vast universe, and it seems that what changed the fate of mankind more than the Internet at that time was the exploration of space.
He had a bold idea: to bring life to Mars and make humans a transplanetary species.
"One day human civilization could move away from Earth, but it would require huge sums of money. When I had money, I did it. Musk, who has money in his pocket, took the lead in funding and tried. In 2002, SpaceX came into being.
Source /SpaceX official
Musk's first step was to build a manned rocket.
At that time, rocket space technology was mostly a state secret, Musk visited Russia three times, wanted to spend money to buy a retired rocket for research, and later Musk found that the rocket cost was too high, because of the cost of rocket manufacturing and materials, and all of them were one-time launches.
What disappointed Musk even more was that "rocket technology has not been developed at all since the 60s."
The real way to achieve this is how to strictly control costs.
For anything over budget, Musk ruthlessly refused, but asked everyone to complete seemingly impossible tasks. This caused many people to resign due to dissatisfaction, and Musk did not do anything to retain, and then took over the jobs of the resigned employees.
Musk has never been in the rocket field, but has personally participated in the development, design and manufacture of rocket design. "Because I always get the knowledge I want from books."
Based on the technology of the United States 50 years ago, coupled with the company's manufacture of about 90% of the rocket parts, SpaceX's research and development costs have been effectively controlled, but the launch has not been smooth.
In 2006, spaceX-developed Falcon 1 rocket made its first flight, and it lost control after 25 seconds of liftoff. After a year, the Falcon 1 rocket failed to launch twice, and in 2008, after the failure of the third launch, Musk fell into extreme suffering and uneasiness.
SpaceX Launch/SpaceX Official
"SpaceX shuts down after three failed launches", Musk has exhausted the money invested, and now he has only two choices, either to continue to invest money or to close the door.
Musk isn't going to give up, he's going to put all his money into SpaceX's fourth launch. This is just 1 month after the third launch. He said he knew what the problems of the failed launch were, "solving these problems, and launching again will be successful." ”
On the day of the launch, even though he knew that the problem would be solved successfully, Musk still did not have the courage to go to the scene, but took the child to Disney, and did not enter the launch room until two minutes before the launch.
In September 2008, Falcon One was successfully launched at nearly a quarter of the cost of other rockets. And that's the result of six years of research and development by 1,500 employees. SpaceX also became the world's first private company to develop a recyclable rocket. On January 7, 2020, SpaceX completed its first flight of the year, which is the 48th successful recovery of the booster.
SpaceX Space Work Map /SpaceX Official
<h3>04 The second thing to "save mankind"</h3>
To continue human civilization, in addition to the 1% possibility of colonizing Mars, 99% depends on the sustainability of the earth, which has become Musk's new thinking.
He believes that the first thing to change is people's dependence on fuel vehicles, and the best way is to replace fuel vehicles with electric vehicles.
In 2003, Musk met Martin Eberhard, a Silicon Valley electric vehicle research and development engineer, and was first exposed to Tesla, when the team spent about 5 years to build an electric sports car Roadster, which accelerated to 60 miles per hour in 4.9 seconds.
He believes that people can't refuse cars that perform better and look better. In 2004, Musk invested $6.3 million in Tesla and became the actual controller of the company.
Tesla is on the right track.
For the first time in decades, someone dared to enter the giant automotive industry, and in Silicon Valley, where the manufacturing industry is not developed, it is tantamount to a newborn calf challenging authority, and the auto giants in Detroit are dismissive of it.
Musk's strategy is very clear, starting with high-end electric sports cars, gradually exploring, and launching affordable models to increase sales.
Roadster/Tesla official
In 2006, when Then California Governor Schwarzenegger drove the Roadster to Tesla's conference, Musk, who had always been a media darling, tossed the concept of silicon valley electric cars to the sky, and although it attracted the favor of stars such as Leonardo and George Clooney, there were doubts about electric cars.
In the face of external pressure, Tesla has serious management problems inside.
In 2008, founder Martin Eberhard was fired by Musk and the board of directors for exceeding tesla's management capabilities at the time. Aberhard filed a lawsuit against Tesla for defamation, and Musk eventually resorted to arbitration to settle the matter, and the company fell into a serious financial crisis.
Tesla is not recognized everywhere in the United States, and Musk has to go far away to Europe and choose to alliance with German car companies to win the confidence of the US market. Daimler, the inventor of the internal combustion engine and undergoing electrical transformation, is undoubtedly the best choice, but Musk's European party did not impress Daimler, and a technical report was far less vivid than a modified electric car.
In order to win the Daimler order to survive the financial crisis, Musk promised to change a Smart into a Tesla technology-driven electric car within four weeks, because the Smart is not sold in the United States, they had to buy a car from Mexico for modification, built a temporary factory in the factory, almost never left, the team that worked for four weeks finally waited for the visiting Daimler executives.
After the test drive experience, Daimler was very satisfied with the modified Smart, a $70 million cooperation was finalized, and Tesla became smart's battery system supplier.
With the funds, Tesla accelerated the creation of the mid-price car Model S, he invited aston Martin designers to optimize the body shape for the Model S, but the designer secretly built his own electric car company, not only did not meet Musk's requirements, some important parameters of the Model S were also taken away by the designer.
Musk was furious and took the designer to court, but lost.
Model S/Tesla official
In 2008, a sudden financial crisis struck, which put Tesla in a desperate situation.
"Who would pay $100,000 for a sports car?" Moreover, Tesla is only a small car company, compared with the bankrupt General Motors and Chrysler at that time, they are not worth mentioning, Tesla is crumbling. There was even a column set up by a group of departing employees to discuss when Tesla would go out of business.
At the time, Tesla had enough money on its books to last at most a week.
"I had to make a choice, either to put the money I got from selling my PayPal into Tesla or to bring Tesla out of business." But Tesla is too important, and he won't give up.
Musk borrowed $40 million in his personal name to support Tesla's continued operations, while also paying his ex-wife's $10 million divorce pension and $20 million in subsidies to pay for SpaceX's fourth launch.
Musk's actual move impressed Tesla employees, who thought of ways to raise funds to rescue Tesla, so that most employees became Tesla shareholders.
Musk said it was the darkest time of his life, and "the brain cells were exhausted a lot."
Fortunately, Tesla's fundraising is going well, the Model S is released as scheduled, the fourth rocket launch is also a success for the first time, and SpaceX gets a $1.6 billion contract from NASA.
Watchmaker/Yiou automotive business analyst Wang Rui
The dark times are over.
Today, Tesla has accumulated 1 million vehicles off the production line, and the sales volume of 368,000 in 2019 has made Tesla a hot electric vehicle leader, and the production of China's gigafactory has made Tesla's development prospects clear.
Tesla's 1 millionth vehicle rolls off the production line/Tesla official
<h3>05 The world is too "boring"</h3>
Musk's wild thinking has exploded with too many technological fantasies, and he can't stand that there are too many boring beings in the world. For example, traffic jams.
In 2016, Musk was blocked in the road, he suddenly wanted to build a tunnel traffic system underground, and set up a flag on Twitter, choosing a day to start a tunnel excavator, from the idea to the official project took only 2 hours, the company named "boring (boring company)". Now boring's first landing project has been steadily progressing, and recently foreign media revealed that boring has completed the excavation of the first tunnel of the Las Vegas underground tunnel project.
Musk's crazy ideas don't stop there.
Starlink project STARLINK/SpaceX official
Supersonic electric planes, hyperloops, reusable rockets, commercial spaceports, Tesla stores in Texas, model visions, autopilot technology, nationwide charging networks, robot batteries replacement, solving Los Angeles traffic problems, building Boeing 787 dream models, 80,000 people colonizing Mars, known as Musk's 12 visions.
Watchmaker/Yiou automotive business analyst Hao Qiuhui
Today, part of the vision is already in the process of being realized. In Musk's eyes, this world is boring, but it is endlessly happy because of unlimited creativity.
Someone asked him, are you really going to change the world? He replied calmly, "I just want to make the future more hopeful." ”
While he was busy with the rocket and automobile business, renewable energy became Musk's focus.
At a family gathering, Musk told his cousin the idea of Sun City, the United States solar energy is mostly a mom-and-pop store, the lack of large companies, and solar energy will be the main direction of the world's development, Musk is willing to fund the project, but the requirement is that he serve as chairman. So he hit it off with his cousin and started the Sun City project, which was one of the first companies to start the solar direct rental model.
At that time, consumers could rent solar roofs with zero down payment, and when the lease expired, consumers could choose to buy or return them, which lowered the threshold of solar roofs and became very popular, and now Sun City is one of the largest solar energy companies in the United States.
In addition to Musk's vision, he also runs many novel technology projects, such as the controversial brain-computer interface project and the creation of a global low-cost Internet connection service with 12,000 low-orbit satellites. According to the latest news, the brain-computer interface project will be tested on the human body as soon as this year, on March 18, US time, Musk's SpaceX company used the Falcon 9 rocket to launch the sixth batch of Starlink satellites, and now there are 360 Starlink satellites in operation.
Like the title of "tech maniac", a number of technology projects have become possible in Musk's hands.
He works wildly, practices boldly, and practices his technological values in the midst of repeated failures: "I don't want to be anyone's savior, I just think about how to make things better, and the future will not disappoint me." 」 ”