A Letter To you From…
View(s):Dear Friends,
“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
I am a native of South African, born in 1971 to my parents who later divorced. My father was an engineer and my mother, originally from Canada—was a nutritionist. From a young age I was fascinated by science fiction and computers. When I was twelve, I wrote the code for my own video game and actually sold it to a company.
In my late teens, I immigrated to Canada in order to avoid the required military service for white males in South Africa. It was still the era of apartheid, the South African legal system that denied political and economic rights to the country’s majority-black native population.
I was not interested in serving in the army, which was engaged at the time in a battle to stamp out a Black Nationalist movement. Thanks to my mom’s Canadian ties, I was able to enroll at Queen’s University in Kingston, one of Ontario’s top schools.
I had planned on a career in business, and worked at a Canadian bank one summer as a college intern. This was my only real job before I became an Internet entrepreneur. Midway through the undergraduate education, I transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where I earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and a second bachelor’s in physics a year later. From there, I won admission to the prestigious doctoral programme at Stanford University in California, where I planned to concentrate on a Ph.D. in energy physics.
I moved to California just as the Internet boom was starting in 1995, and I decided to be in on it, too. I dropped out of Stanford after just two days in order to start, Zip2 Corporation my first company. This was an online city guide aimed at the newspaper publishing business, and I was able to land contracts with both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune to provide content for their new online sites. I was twenty-four when I started the company, and I devoted all of my energy to see it succeed.
I lived in the same rented office that served as the company’s headquarters, sleeping on a futon couch and showering at the local YMCA, which “was cheaper than renting an apartment”. Still, the company struggled to fulfil its contracts and meet the payroll and other costs, and I started looked for outside financing. Eventually a group of venture capitalists, investors who provide start-up money to new businesses, financed Zip2 with $3.6 million, but I gave up majority control of the company in exchange.
In February 1999 Compaq Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash, which was one of the largest cash deals in the Internet business sector at the time. Out of that amount, I was paid $22 million for my 7 percent share, which made me a millionaire at twenty-eight.
In 1999, I used $10 million of it to start another company, which I named X.com. This was an online bank with grand plans to become a full-range provider of financial services to consumers. The company’s one major innovation was figuring out how to securely transfer money using a recipient’s e-mail address. Maybe it was my track record from Zip2, X.com gained serious attention and generous investors right away. The company received a generous infusion of $25 million in start-up capital from Sequoia Capital, a leading venture-capital firm in California.
X.com went online in December 1999 with a bold offer for new customers: those who opened an online checking account with X.com received a $20 cash card that they could use at an automatic-teller machine (ATM). If they referred a friend, they received a $10 card for each new member who signed up. Within two months, X.com had one hundred thousand customers, which was close to the number reached by its major competitor, Etrade Telebank.
“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”
Now this is when consumer skepticism about the security of online banking was rising. It was our biggest obstacle to success, and there was a setback when I along with the other executives had to admit that computer hackers had been able to perform some illegal transfers from traditional bank accounts into X.com accounts. We immediately started a new policy that required customers to submit a canceled check in order to withdraw money, but there were tensions in the office about the future of the company.
In March 2000, X.com bought a company called Confinity, which had started an Internet money-transfer presence called PayPal. PayPal was originally set up to let users of handheld personal digital assistants, or PDAs, transfer money. It had only been in business a few months when X.com acquired it, and I believed that its online-transfer technology, which was known as “P2P” for “person-to-person,” had a promising future. With time the X.com name was dropped in favour of PayPal.
PayPal grew enormously through 2001, thanks in part to its presence on eBay, the online auction Web site where person-to-person sales were happening in the hundreds of thousands.
By then I moved on to my next venture. In June 2002 I founded SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies. This was my long term fascination of the possibility of life on Mars. I wanted to create a “Mars Oasis,” sending an experimental greenhouse to the planet, which in favourable alignment of the planets is about 35 million miles distant from Earth. The oasis would contain a nutrient gel from which specific Mars-environment-friendly plant life could grow.
Let me stop right there. My envisioning and dreaming will never stop.
“What makes innovative thinking happen…? I think it’s really a mindset. You have to decide”
Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death. However innovation was my strength, I was creative. And most importantly, doing what you are passionate about helps so much as there will be days which are hard to pass. I have had my dark days where I didn’t have a single penny left in my hand. I’ve invested in my companies and I’ve strongly believed in their success.
No matter what people said, and how many bricks were thrown at me, I’ve learnt how to make it my strength. Some may even call me a tad loony, but who cares you know? After all, I believe in myself and I know if I commit myself and think it through I’m going to win it somehow.
By building a reliable rocket at an affordable cost, SpaceX hopes to be able to take small satellites into orbit for a fee of around $6 million. This is half the standard rate in the aerospace business to take something into space. My company already has two customers—the U.S. Department of Defence and the government of Malaysia. Many times we’ve been asked, “If you reduce the cost, don’t you reduce reliability?” This is completely ridiculous. A Ferrari is a very expensive car. It is not reliable. But I would bet you 1,000–to–1 that if you bought a Honda Civic that, that sucker will not break down in the first year of operation. You can have a cheap car that’s reliable, and the same applies to rockets.
I serve as the chief technology officer of SpaceX. All employees are shareholders, and the company’s casual but committed atmosphere is reinforced by the workday presence of my four dogs.
I have testified before members of the U.S. Congress on the possibility of commercial human space flight and have also established the Musk Foundation, which is committed to space exploration and the discovery of clean energy sources. The Foundation runs the Musk Mars Desert Observatory telescope in southern Utah, as well as a simulated Mars environment where visitors can experience what life on Mars might be like, including waste-burning toilets. I think human exploration of space is very important, certainly, from a survival standpoint, the probability of living longer is much greater if we’re on more than one planet.
You see, why the probability of me being called sane is much less than being called insane? Oh well, my dreaming and innovation will go on till I die.
For all of you, I hope you find something that keeps you living life to the fullest.
Keep innovating,
Elon Musk
Written by Devuni Goonewardene
email any feedback to devuni@gmail.com
| Elon Musk Villain or Hero? There are some questions we need to ask ourselves before idolizing men or mankind. It requires a person to be humane and have empathy and a little bit of kindness to be a good person. Among earning billions and having the tesla roadster, giving back to the society is important? Is Elon nice to his family? Strangers and employees? Hm? According to his first wife, when they were dancing at their wedding, Elon had said “I’m the alpha in this relationship. If you were my employee, I would fire you” Food for thought. Is he trying to make the world a better place? Are SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity, Neuralink, and the Boring Company actively working toward society’s improvement? Can we rest assured they’re not clubbing baby seals or racking up human rights violations in the process? Does he prioritise moral conscience above business profit? Lots of successful CEOs don’t care who or what they destroy on the way to becoming a famous billionaire. Is Musk one of them? Does he use his personal fortune for good? Bill and Melinda Gates aim to give away 95 percent of their wealth to charity and have aimed to get rid of polio by 2018. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have similar aims with their eponymous initiative. Where does Musk’s philanthropy fall? There are many ways Musk can contribute to his country. Las Vegas is currently undergoing a water scarcity, maybe if Musk made an effort and spent a little of his petty cash, he would be able to actually make a difference. He did tweet that he will remove the lead contamination out of the water supply in Las Vegas. By the pricking of my thumbs, let’s see Musks CSR efforts to the world! | |