Elon Musk: Craziest Innovator alive?
Elon Musk is a exceptional entrepreneur who have built several successful companies such as PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX. What makes him special compare to the rest is his capability of applying First Principle Thinking into engineering & design for his ideas. He also been working crazily around 80-100 hours per week during his career without taking much time off. In addition, Musk is also an inventors where he personally involve in developing his company products such as SpaceX & Tesla.
Early life
- Born on June 28, 1971 in South Africa.
- Enthusiastic reader when he was at 10 years-old.
- Taught himself programming at the age of 12
- Learn entire BASIC course in 3 days that was designed to take 6 months
- Successfully wrote a video game called Blaster using BASIC.
Education
When he was 17, Musk enrolled into college at Queen’s University for undergraduate programme. 2 years later, He transfer to University of Pennsylvania for pursuing Bachelor of science degree in physics and Economics. During his time in college, he always wanted to involve in things that could change the world during time in college, such as Internet, sustainable energy, space exploration & making life multi-planetary.
Career
PayPal
He Initially co-founded X.com, an online financial payment company & eventually merges with their competitors called Confinity into PayPal. However, he got sacked as CEO roles during his time on Honneymoon. In 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion where Elon Musk earned $180 million from his shares.
Tesla
In 2004, Musk join Tesla by bringing in 70M of his profits from Paypal and becoming the chairman of BOD. He involved in designing their first electric car along with both founders Martin Eberhard (left) & Marc Tarpenning (right). Aiming to create a better electric cars in terms of quicker, better and affordable than gasoline cars. Tesla believes the world would stop relying on fossil fuel and move towards environmental future.
SpaceX
He then took his remaining profits from Paypal and invested into SpaceX. The aim is to develop fully and rapidly reusable rockets, a feat that will transform space exploration by delivering high reliable vehicles at radically reduced costs. Before founding SpaceX, Musk learnt how to build rockets from books. Then, he took trips to Russia to buy rockets along with his partners but unfortunately the negotiations failed where he realised the rockets are fairly overpriced. After heading back U.S, he starts recruiting group of engineers & builds their own rockets that could land the booster itself after launching. During 2015, after countless times of rocket launching failure attempted, SpaceX have successfully launch and landed the Dragon CRS-10 first stage booster.
Boring & Hyperloop
The aim of Boring company is to dig fast and using lower tunnels cost that would make Hyperloop (a high speed transportation pod) workable and allow rapid transit across densely populated regions such as from New York to Washington DC in less than half & hour.
openAI
The mission is to ensure artificial general intelligence as highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work by benefiting humanity. During Valve’s yearly Dota2 tournament, the AI has crushed “Dendi” who is a top Dota players in 1-vs-1 match.
SolarCity
Specializes in producing solar panels that provide renewable clean energy while securing low utility rates. In 2006, Musk have becomes the first investor in SolarCity who is founded by his cousins. It has merged with Tesla company and now offers energy storage services through Tesla; including a turnkey residential battery backup service that incorporates tesla’s Powerwall.
Sources:
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html
https://blog.adioma.com/how-elon-musk-started-infographic/
https://astrumpeople.com/elon-musk-biography/
https://venturebeat.com/2013/05/29/elon-musk-dreams-big/
https://www.biography.com/people/elon-musk-20837159