Elon Musk: An Entrepreneur With a Huge Success
Linda E. Buehler Keiser University
Fort Lauderdale, FL
25 February 2016

Elon Musk: An Entrepreneur With a Huge Success
Elon Reeve Musk a man worth $10.7 billion was born June 28th, 1971 in Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa to a beautiful model named Maye from Regina Saskatchewan, and Errol Musk, a South Arican-born electromechanical engineer (“Elon Musk”, 22 February 2016). Elon is the oldest of 3 with having a younger brother and sister. Elon’s parents were divorced when he was still young while he resided with his father most of his youth in South Africa he eventually gained citizenship to Canada through his mother and moved there just before his 18th birthday. Elon had been severely bullied growing up but if anything that might of helped him in discovering the computing with the Commodore VIC-20 at the age of 10 and at the age of 12 sold the code for a BASIC-based video game he called Blastar for approximately $500.00 USD (“Elon Musk”, 22 February 2016).
At the age of 19 Elon attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario after a short 2 years there he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, in which he studied and received a bachelor’s degree in physics at the College of Arts and Sciences, then a bachelor’s degree in economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1995 Musk moved to California to begin a PhD in applied physics at Stanford University only to drop the program after two days to pursue his entrepreneurial aspirations in the areas of the Internet, renewable energy and outer space. In 2002, he became a U.S. citizen two years after marrying Justine Wilson who he had met when he had attended Queen’s University. Musk had tried to sweep Justine off her feet he didn’t succeed the first attempt where he had told her that they had met at some party that she hadn’t even attended, only to find out that he had really just used that as a pick up line, he had seen her across the room and wanted to meet her, which was the only reason he approached her. That love didn’t last long when they both went their separate ways Justine went to Japan to teach ESL for a year then back to Canada where Elon had moved to Silicon Valley where he had built his first company with his brother Zip2 and out of the blue called Justine, flew her out to him periodically their loved picked right back up where it had left off they married in 2000. Elon and Justine had 6 sons but lost their 1st at 10 weeks old due to sudden infant death syndrome. In 2008 Musk decided he was leaving his wife for an English actress named Talulah Riley, which he married in 2010. Elon and Talulah filed for divorce in 2012, only to remarry in 2013 and file again for divorce in December 2014 but since then the action has been withdrawn.
Though Elon’s personal life sounds a bit rocky his professional life has been put together pretty well since a very young age. Musk had successful and wealthy parents which his dad Errol had given him and his brother Kimbal $28,000 to start a web software company in 1995. While at Zip2, Musk wanted to become CEO; however, none of the board members would allow it. Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options in February 1999. Musk received 7% or $22 million from the sale (“Elon Musk.” 22 February, 2016). In March 1999 Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company (“Elon Musk” 22 February, 2016). The company later merged with Confinity, which had a money transfer service called PayPal. They focused on the PayPal service and was renamed PayPal in 2001 (“Elon Musk” 22 February, 2016). Musk ended his role as CEO due to disagreements with other company leadership so in October 2002 Musk was given $ 165 million in stock after it was acquired by eBay. In 2001, Musk conceptualized “Mars Oasis”; a project to land a miniature experimental greenhouse on Mars, containing food crops growing on Martian regolith, in an attempt to regain public interest in space exploration (“Elon Musk” 22 February, 2016). With many trips, turn downs, and storm outs to Moscow Musk finally on a return flight home realized that he could build an affordable rocket that was needed at only 3% of the cost that these rockets were selling for back then. By applying vertical integration and the modular approach from software engineering, SpaceX could cut launch price by a factor of 10 and still enjoy a 70% gross margin. Musk ended up founding SpaceX with the long-term goal of creating a “true spacefaring civilization” Musk founded SpaceX in June 2002 (“Elon Musk” 22 February, 2016). Where he’s the CEO and CTO of the Hawthorne, California base. In a 2011 interview, Musk stated that he hopes to send humans to Mars within 10-20 years (“Elon Musk” 22 February, 2016). Elon stated to Esquire “The next big moment will be life becoming mutiplanetary, an unprecedented adventure that would dramatically enhance the richness and diversity of our collective consciousness. It would also serve as a hedge against the myriad-and-growing-threats to our survival. An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as yet unknown technology could spell the end of us. Soon or later, we must expand life beyond our little blue mud ball or go extinct”(Elon Musk: Entrepreneur on the grandest scale 01 October, 2008). Which leads us to another achievement of Elon’s in which he joined Tesla’s board of directors as its chairman; but wasn’t very deeply involved until the company had a financial crisis in 2008, then became CEO and product architect. When the markets turmoil, Musk wrote on a company blog, that the company will “reduce activity on detailed production engineering, tooling, and commitments to suppliers” for the Model S, until a loan funding from the Department of Energy is received (Morrison..C. 15 October 2008). He also brought Mercedes and Toyota in as long-term investors in Tesla. In 2014, Musk announced that Tesla Motors will allow its technology patents to be used by anyone in good faith in a bid to entice automobile manufactures to speed up development of electric cars (“Elon Musk” 22 February, 2016). Musk was the highest paid CEO in 2014. In addition to being one of the top CEO’s still to this day he also holds the Chairman of SolarCity which is the second largest provider of solar power systems in the U.S. Musk as introduced a proposal for a new form of transportation called Hyperloop a hypothetical subsonic air travel machine that stretches approximately 350 miles from Sylmar to Hayward and would theoretically allow commuters to travel between the cities in 35 minutes or less, providing a shorter traveling time than even a commercial airplane can currently provide as well as cheaper travel (“Elon Musk” 22 February, 2016). Finally in December 2015, Musk announced the creation of OpenAl, a not-for-profit AI research company. By making AI available to everyone, OpenAl wants to “counteract large corporations who may gain too much power by owning super-intelligence systems devoted to profits, as well as governments which may use AI to gain power and even oppress their citizenry.” (“Elon Musk” 22 February, 2016). Recently Elon announced that the has hired Apple’s alloy expert Charles Kuehmann to lead materials engineering at both companies and is now VP at Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX aims to dramatically reduce the cost of rockets and if there’s an industry who mastered the art of making complex vehicles cheap, it’s certainly the automotive industry, both companies extensively use aluminum alloys (Lambert..F. 24 February, 2016). Kuehmann’s materials design knowledge is going to be extremely beneficial for the future which is what Elon builds his businesses around.
Elon Musk is a very successful CEO/manager he’s got a few different managing styles in my opinion. He’s a bit authoritative in giving his employees clear direction on what he wants to achieve and by accepting feedback on the task. On of Elon’s famous quotes is “I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better. I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.” (BrainyQuote.com). Then on the other hand he’s a bit of a pacesetting manager in the fact that he works about 80-100 hours Monday through Friday at both companies to make sure things are getting done how they wanted them to and that improvements are being made where they need to be as soon as they can be made. He personally takes tasks on himself and is very hands on about what is being done. When he’s performing his tasks he expects his employees to follow right behind him if not try to shine above him on whatever task they are working on. He’s a high motivated entrepreneur and will continue to be successful through out the rest of his life. Elon would be great to work for as long as you want to make a difference in the world and you strive to become something better then you were yesterday each day.

Refrences

Elon Musk. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved February 25, 2016, from BrainyQuote.com Web site: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/elon_musk.html Elon Musk. Entrepreneur on the grandest scale. 01 October, 2008. Rretrieved from http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a5077/elon-musk-1008/ Elon Musk. n.d. In Wikipedia. Retrieved February 22,2016., from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk Lambert..F. 24 February, 2016. Elon Musk hires Apple’s alloy expert to lead materials engineering at both Tesla and SpaceX. Retrieved from http://electrek.co/2016/02/24/apple-alloy-expert-tesla-spacex/ Morrison..C. 15 October, 2008. Elon Musk steps in as CEO at Tesla, lays off staff. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/external/venturebeat/2008/10/15/15venturebeat-elon-musk-steps-in-as-ceo-at-tesla-lays-off-99182/html