Although there is no formula to identify an entrepreneur, they usually share some characteristic features. Decision, imagination, innovative ideas and a dash of optimism so as not to collapse before the slightest stumble.
In that sense, it can be said that Elon Musk is a "flawed" entrepreneur. The businessman, of South African origin, always repeated that he did not trust his projects to live too long. He was even afraid to recommend his friends to invest in them in fear of bankruptcy.
However, his mantra for success was always hard work, sometimes to the point of workaholism. As controversial as bold, in almost a quarter of a century it went from a seller in companies, such as PayPal, to being one of the main competitors in aerospace and electric automotive racing, with SpaceX and Tesla.
At 17, a suitcase and only $ 2,000 in his pocket, he left South Africa - in part to avoid compulsory military service - and arrived in Canada thanks to his mother's nationality.
Musk's adventure in the country of ice hockey and extreme kindness lasted only two years, in which he worked as a farmer in a field of his cousin and even cleaned the boiler of a timber company for $ 18 an hour, while doing his First weapons at Queen's University.
His real dream was to reach the United States, the land where "everything happened", in his own words. That is how he requested the pass, through scholarship, to the University of Pennsylvania.
The eldest of three brothers marked the way, the rest followed him to America. After finishing his specialized degree in business and physics, he chose to continue his studies at the prestigious Stanford. However, his experience in the Ivy League lasted just 48 hours.
According to Maye Musk, his mother, his upbringing was essential to develop the entrepreneurial spirit in his heirs. Upon divorcing engineer Errol Musk, he decided to start from scratch with his children and a somewhat thin wallet.
Therefore, her children helped her with the tasks of her nutrition office. The same cunning with which the future businessman sold Easter eggs at inflated prices to his neighbors then used it to convince a group of scientists to join in building rockets to travel to Mars.
"I don't think I'll see you again," he assured the chairman of the Stanford department, who asked him to extend his career to start his first company. Musk estimated that in six months, perhaps, he could be returning to school, with a university debt of $ 110,000 in tow. But they never saw him again on campus in California.
Step by Step
Technology had always fascinated him. From the futuristic accounts of the books in which he was absorbed during his childhood (so much that his mother came to think that he had hearing problems) to his first steps programming on a computer.
His first project was Zip2, which first focused on helping the media build their online channel, and then specialized in providing them with software to build directories and maps.
His partner was his brother Kimbal, with whom he disbursed $ 28,000 from his father's account to start up the company. Four years later, the computer firm Compaq bought its venture for more than $ 300 million, of which Musk was left with $ 22 million.
What did you do with that first ‘salary’? Many will believe that, knowing his history, he assigned it to a new project. The answer is not entirely wrong. Yes, he did, but before he gave himself a little taste and disbursed $ 1 million to buy one of the 36 McLaren F1 units that were circulating around the world.
Even a 28-year-old Musk, with a less populated hair and wearing a camel-colored sack with shoulder pads, lent himself to a television note at 7 in the morning while receiving his latest model vehicle.
Capricho resolved, invested US $ 12 million to found the online bank X.com a few months after having parted with its first offspring. The dotcom bubble led him to modify his core business; Thus, he turned to payments via email.
A year later it was merged with the software firm Confinity and PayPal was born (which in 2018 processed $ 578,000 million in payments and today is valued at $ 126,000 million.
At that time, his combative spirit began to emerge to fight right and left against the sale of the company. Finally, in 2002, it failed to break the will of the rest of its partners and was acquired by eBay at $ 1.5 billion, of which nearly $ 200 million went to the entrepreneur's pocket.
Despite his frustration, that ‘returned’ would help him create the foundations of two giants of the new century: SpaceX and Tesla.
From entrepreneur to modern entrepreneur
Elon Musk did not found Tesla. The idea of creating an automotive specialized in electric vehicles did not fall which apple illuminating his avid brain. It was other people who drew up the project, designed the first prototype and even tested it.
However, there is no doubt that the South African became the visible face of the company. His leadership was essential to give him a breath of fresh air when he spent moments of anxiety, as well as his own personality generated more of a headache.
It was, in fact, engineers Martin Eberhard and Mark Tarpenning who created the Tzero, a small yellow vehicle that could accelerate from 0 to 100 km / h in just 4 seconds and operated on electricity.
However, before disembarking in the automaker, Musk started his third venture. In his vision, the costs of making rockets and ships to go to space were too high, so he set out to investigate how to reduce them. For that he formed a group of technicians and scientists, although convincing them was not easy.
"I couldn't tell you directly that I wanted to create an aerospace company. Then I told them: 'Would you like to help me with a feasibility study to find out if it is possible to make advances in rocket technology? It will be just a couple of weekends of your time.' "he detailed. This is how Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX, was born in 2003.
In the early years, he invested about $ 100 million from his own pocket but several releases did not have the expected performance. Everything changed in 2008, when Falcon 1 became the first to reach orbit, which is why it won a $ 1.6 billion contract with NASA to bring supplies to the International Space Station.
At the same time, he began his term as number one of Tesla. After arriving at the company as an investor five years earlier, contributing $ 7.5 million in its first round, it became a place in the automaker.
First they associated the British Lotus to provide the chassis of its first model, the Roadster, which came to light in 2006 with a price of US $ 100,000, and a new investment round of US $ 40 million, in which Musk also participated.
But the costs began to increase, the company was in charge of more and more processes and the illusion of manufacturing a ‘popular’ model seemed increasingly distant. Several CEOs passed until the partners gave him their confidence to take charge, precisely, in 2008.
To the conquest of Mars
Gradually, Tesla was making its way into the industry and in 2010 became the first American automaker to go public, since Ford in 1956.
The Roadster was followed by Model S and X, although none was as successful as Model 3, the electric car ‘for the masses’. At a price to the public of $ 35,000, he got 500,000 orders in his early days, when, for instance, the Model S had managed to deliver 200,000 units in six years.
From the factory in Fremont, California, it expanded to Shanghai, where it began to build a plant with which it expects to produce about 10,000 vehicles per week by 2020.
Despite the innovations and launches, the automaker makes water from the economic. According to its balance sheets, it gave losses in its last eight years, the most intense red being that of the 2017 report with US $ 2,240 million. In turn, delays in the delivery of the units generated more than one complaint among consumers.
On the other hand, SpaceX remains a private company and in recent months raised $ 1 billion in two rounds of investment. It also appears as the project that most smiles awakens Musk.
In total there were 19 launches last year, a figure that is expected to exceed in 2019. On the other hand, his dream of populating Mars and creating a colony on the red planet is already known. His vision of a multip multiplanetary species ’and the need to leave Earth in batches aboard space taxis are taking shape.
According to his calculations, 2022 could be the year in which the first SpaceX trips are carried out to build the infrastructure for future Martian missions.
What goes up, has to go down
"This year was the most difficult and painful of my career. It was atrocious," he summarized to The New York Times in 2018. The outcome was his departure as chairman of Tesla at the request of the United States Securities Commission (SEC, for its acronym in English). But how did it come to that?
From work, he suffered more than a headache for the automaker's production goals. His mantra had always been that the only way to achieve things was to work hard. Therefore, more than once he slept in the armchair of his office. His style even extended to many of his workers.
"He is not afraid of getting dirty or working on the production line," says Dexter Siga, quality manager at the Fremont plant. And he adds: "Sleep here, really. This man is dedicated to the company. I was talking to one of the employees and they literally sleep on the floor: under the tables or on the carpet. They don't have inflatable mattresses. Why not would you like to work for someone like that? "
In 2018, he admitted to having worked up to 120 hours per week without leaving the company for three or four days, he even spent his 47th birthday locked in the plant.
As for its management, Tesla broke several traditions of the car industry, such as the "chain of command." Musk invites any employee to send emails with their concerns. In addition, if you receive one that worries you, you are known to forward it to supervisors with a three-letter response: WTF (the acronym for the well-known insult).
His management style, frontal and, in many cases, "no filter", has brought several headaches to his investors.
A year ago he participated in the popular video podcast "The Joe Rogan Experience". His sayings were not what surprised him but to see him smoking pot, which brought him problems not only with Tesla shareholders but also with NASA, SpaceX's main contractor. "That does not inspire confidence," said agency administrator Jim Bridenstine.
It was Twitter and his motto ‘first tweet, then I think’ where he made his biggest mistake. On August 7, he published that he had decided to take Tesla out of the Exchange, with an offer of US $ 420 per share and secured financing, all this without notifying the SEC, the regulatory body of the United States.
These 140 characters prompted an investigation by the agency that fined him with $ 40 million and forced him to leave his post as Chairman of the Board. And Tesla? Keep quoting. Shortly before this, he had warned: "The worst is yet to come."
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