Elon Musk wants to save the world.
You already knew it. But did you know just how?
Seemingly sent from the future on a mission to help humanity, Musk has dedicated his life to colossal, almost unbelievable goals, and he's ticked off many of them already. In the process, however, one of the greatest directors of his time personified the yellow traffic light for entrepreneurs and anyone motivated solely by career or business success.
To be a visionary who changes the world, we had to work tirelessly. Musk in turn was forced to make sacrifices in certain areas most people would say are important to their personal definition of complete success and a good life. But if he were to achieve a few of his boldest goals, in the (very) long term, Musk could be considered one of the two or three most impactful individuals to ever walk the planet.
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He seems to have made up his mind, prioritizing the effect he can have through business activities on a normal, stable private life.
“The greatest thing that people miss is her level of determination and commitment,” biographer Ashlee Vance told Vox.com this spring. “For most people, even if they're a really passionate CEO, it's still a job. But for Elon, it's somewhere between a life-and-death struggle or a war... This guy is engaged on an insane level. It has no life on many levels. He works all the time. He burned down three marriages. He doesn't have enough time with his children. It has nothing to do with a normal existence. It's a sacrifice no one else would want to make. ”
Like most leaders with big ideas, Musk's activities seem driven by giant, life-altering events, the forces being intrinsically linked. A snapshot version of his resume reads like a sci-fi novel that manifested itself into reality before the reader could finish the book:online banking before anyone knew it (PayPal), consumer electric cars (Tesla), the colonization of Mars for the masses (SpaceX), the dream of high-speed, underground, long-distance transportation (Hyperloop), and his current obsession with saving the world from what he warns are the dangers of artificial intelligence. With every publicized announcement, it's like the South African-Canadian-American baby with baby faces. a citizen with an elusive accent dares the world's bullies to stop his efforts to save the world.
Time and time again, through his ambitious quests, catastrophic downfalls and epic comebacks, his brilliance, his vision, his billions in personal wealth and his fine grit ultimately wins out.
"He always works with a different understanding of reality than we do," Julie Anderson Ankenbrandt, who worked with Musk at PayPal, told Anderson Vance. Elon Musk:Tesla, SpaceX and the quest for a fantastic future .
"He's just different from the rest of us." ”
A quest for knowledge
Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa to Maye, a Canadian dietitian and model, and Errol Musk, an engineer and sailor – a notoriously difficult man whom the Musk family cherishes do not publicly disparage. Musk is the eldest of the three, followed by Kimbal, a brother who is a partner in many of Elon's ventures, and a sister, Tosca. The family was upper middle class by South African standards – a tough land with machismo and hyper-masculinity that didn't favor brain muscle who liked to get into comics and science books- fiction, video games and Dungeons &Dragons . Maye described her eldest as an early learner who sometimes got lost in thought, so much so that she took him to the doctor to see if he had any hearing loss. "He goes into his brain, and then you see he's in another world," Maye told Vance. "He always does, but now I let him because I know he's designing a new rocket or something. »
BENJAMIN LOWY / CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES
When Musk was 12 in 1984, an early technological success gave a hint of his future. Instead of joining his peers in between to obsess over arcade games and on his Atari, Musk wrote his own game. Blastar consisted of space battles between good and bad “sprites” and landed young Musk in a trade PC and desktop tech publication , along with a $500 prize – hinting at a tendency to dabble in tech in the name of benevolence and receive the attention and exceptional benefits that follow. A few years later, devouring The Traveler's Guide to the Galaxy solidified Musk's driving philosophies:"[Author Douglas Adams] points out that one of the really hard things is knowing what questions to ask," Musk says in his biography. “Once you understand the question, the answer is relatively easy. I have come to the conclusion that we really should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. The only sensible thing to do is to aim for greater collective enlightenment. »
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Zen philosophy might have been what sustained the precocious teenager, who read everything from the local library, then devoured two sets of encyclopedias, irritating the children of family and neighborhood with his prickly ways and unusual quest for knowledge. Being a true craftsman made life lonely and dangerous. Vance details the tough high school years when "I know it all" Musk was pushed down a flight of stairs, beaten unconscious, and stalked by a gang of bullies who went so far as to bully Musk's best friend. Musk to give it up. “It hurts,” says Musk.
After bouncing around a few prestigious South African high schools (even though he was a run-of-the-mill student), Musk traveled to the country aged 17 his mother's native Canada, a gateway to Silicon Valley that held all the promise that Musk's technical mind and unbridled ambition could muster.
Dot-com Days
After A few years of college in Ontario, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where a double degree in economics and physics led to where he dreamed:Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Although academics suited him, graduate school could not hold his attention by competing with the business opportunities on his doorstep. After two days, Musk left Stanford, and along with his brother Kimbal, launched Zip2, which promised to bring the Yellow Pages with directions to the then-new Internet. It was 1995, and the company was a classic startup, with the founders and a handful of engineers sleeping on beanbags in the office, working inhuman hours and living off takeout – Elon and Kimbal literally snuck in in fights in the middle of the office.
Zip2 quickly grew to offer web portal services to newspapers, which were looking to find their way into the new internet age. In 1999, Compaq Computer bought the company for $307 million, and at 28, Musk was worth $22 million. Vance writes, “Much like the video game characters he adored, Musk had progressed. He had solved Silicon Valley and become what everyone wanted at the time – a dot-com millionaire. His next venture will have to live up to his rapidly inflating ambition. ”
Although Zip2 disrupted the traditional print advertising space, Musk's next venture was in global banking.
Inspired by his frustrations as a student at a regional bank, Musk saw an opportunity to revolutionize the industry. Enter X.com, an online money transfer platform that in 1999 was inconceivable to most people and extremely attractive to investors. Despite all the regulations that stand in the way, Musk has had nothing but success. "There were a million laws in place to prevent something like X.com from happening, but Elon didn't care," Ankenbrandt said. Musk's high expectations and spiky personality failed to win him many friends, and twice in the first year of business Musk faced confrontations with his employees - the second involving the board of directors. administration to kick him out of the CEO seat. The company merged with PayPal, which was bought by eBay in 2002, earning Musk an estimated $180 million after tax.
Already a giant celebrity in the small world of Silicon Valley, he was now beginning to attract the attention of the media, which occasionally snapped photos of Musk enjoying his new McLaren sports car with his college sweetheart-turned-wife, writer Justine Wilson (later Musk).
MUSCLE WITH HIS SECOND EX-WIFE. © 2015 BLOOMBERG FINANCE LP
After getting married in 2000, the couple had a large family – five boys and one who died in infancy. Wilson later recounted the ferocity with which Musk pursued her in her early days, but became more and more masterful over time, leaving her feeling overwhelmed and nervous due to the mood swings he Musk has crossed over in his business. Soon enough, in 2008, the media jumped on the couple's nasty and high-profile divorce.
Mission to Mars
Having conquered cyberspace, Musk told his friends that his next adventure would be something that would give meaning to his own life and would benefit humanity. Musk has set his sights on his childhood obsession:space. But Musk suddenly found himself in the hands of a new tyrant:the Russians.
Musk joined the board of directors of the Mars Society, a non-profit organization interested in exploring the red planet, but quickly launched into his own business. Incredulous that NASA didn't have a program on Mars, Musk wanted to launch his own rocket to Mars to inspire public enthusiasm to explore the planet. Russia seemed to have the most affordable equipment. But the Russians proved difficult to deal with and pressed all of Musk's buttons. Hour-long, vodka-fueled meetings dragged on unnecessarily, bribes were expected, and eventually an initial offer of three rockets for $21 million was returned:that was the price of one rocket, a Musk said. An engineer literally spat on Musk, then the Russian contacts taunted him. Jim Cantrell, an aerospace consultant who worked with Musk on SpaceX, said Esquire , "They said, 'Oh, little boy, don't you have the money? ""
Following this meeting, on the plane back to Los Angeles, Musk told his colleagues that he thought they could build their own rocket to Mars.
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SpaceX, short for Space Exploration Technologies, is one of the most revolutionary companies of our time. It challenges what most believed possible with respect to science, humanity, and the role of private enterprise in the future of both.
ART STEIBER / AUGUST IMAGE
During the decade, SpaceX was the first private company to put a payload into orbit (just six years after its founding), successfully fly 10 unmanned vehicle missions to the International Space Station, and win a 2.6 contract. billion dollars with NASA to fly. astronauts at the ISS. Falcon 9's 2015 launch, return and vertical landing on dry land was the first to be significant for its massive cost-saving implications, as the rockets can be reused. In fact, a cost estimate provided by NASA and the Air Force found that the cost to design, build and launch Falcon 9 was well under a third of what it would have cost NASA, in part because about 80% of rockets are made in-house. A few years later, after a lawsuit that upset the long-standing lockdown of military contracts by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, SpaceX landed two deals from the US Department of Defense totaling $180 million to launch satellites, a new source reports. significant revenue for the successful business. in the commercial realm.
These victories alone are remarkable. Then think of Musk beating legacy companies like Boeing and Orbital Sciences, which highlights those accomplishments. It's one thing to disrupt a digital marketplace with infinite earning points; it’s quite another thing to take over a national, single-payer space program in the space of a few years. But by outward appearances at least, what drives Musk's ambition for space exploration, and the colonization of Mars in particular, is much more important than profits, or winning publicly or even beating the bad guys.
After all, the road to SpaceX's accomplishments has been littered with high-level ups and downs. Its first three rocket launches failed, and in September 2016 a Falcon 9 exploded in a disastrous and unusual pre-launch test off Cape Canaveral. According to the testimonies of his employees and partners, despite all these challenges, Musk's insatiable drive for excellence was relentless. In a 2013 presentation at the D11 tech conference, Musk said, "Humanity's future is going to branch off in two directions:either it's going to go multiplanetary, or it's going to stay confined to one planet, and eventually there's going to be a extinction event. We want to have a future where we explore the stars. ”
IMAGES ON “KEVORK DJANSEZIAN/STRINGER/GETTY”
Ironically, Musk's personal life has followed a parallel trajectory. If the extinguishing event was her costly divorce from Wilson and shared custody of their five children, the star exploration was her courtship and her on-again-off-again relationship with the much younger British actress, Talulah Riley. The two met in 2008, when Musk was separated from Wilson. When Wilson began sharing details of their split in the tabloids and Musk was described as having "eloped" with the young woman, he penned a response in Business Insider to defend himself, writing that he and Riley had not met before his issues with Wilson. Eventually, this relationship was no longer stable. Musk and Riley wed in 2010, announced a divorce in 2012, then remarried in 2013. Another divorce was filed by Musk in 2014, then withdrawn, only for Riley to file for divorce two years later. The split was finalized in late 2016.
Aside from relationship turmoil, nothing seems to have slowed Musk's big dreams. Earlier this year, SpaceX announced that it would send two paying customers to loop around the moon, as part of its plans to market space travel. Musk predicted a model in which trips to Mars would cost individuals $100,000 and grow a Mars colony to 1 million people.
Driving Force
In Vance's book, Musk's friend , Christie Nicholson, remembers a young Musk obsessed with electric vehicles. "I believe the second sentence from his mouth was 'I think a lot about electric cars'. Then he turned to me and said, 'Are you thinking about electric cars? “,” she told the reporter.
Then in 2004, Musk discovered Tesla.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
There are other luxury cars on the market, and there are other electric cars. But Tesla is something else. Aficionados, including the analyst who called Tesla "arguably the biggest automaker in the world," not least because of the 14-year-old automaker, brought in $10 billion in pre-sales in 2016 on the new Model 3 of $35,000. (now available), are struck by the designs:hawk-winged doors, touchscreen dashboard, flush exterior door handles that magically extend as the driver approaches vehicles, an ignition that starts when the driver sits in the leather seat, a system sound that goes to 11. Then there's the performance. Teslas cruise from zero to 60 in 2.3 to 5 seconds (depending on model) in near complete silence, leaving the rider's stomach on the start.
There are other luxury cars on the market, and there are other electric cars. But Tesla is something else.
Musk, contrary to common assumption, is not a founder of Tesla, but an early investor who spearheaded the fundraising shortly after the company was founded by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, whom Musk has eventually ousted after becoming CEO and investing $70 million of his own fortune. Tesla has oscillated between being a media darling and embroiled in bad press and financial turmoil. Expensive Roadsters are gorgeous, powerful, nothing like anyone has seen. But problems arise. Tesla fails to manufacture by the deadline and demands that 600 customers waiting for their orders spend $9,000 more than indicated. Headlines scream safety concerns as Model S sedans catch fire. The company balked, sold a 10% stake to Daimler and took out a $465 million loan from the US Department of Energy before going public in 2010, raising $226 million – a figure believed to be half the market value of GM and Ford. Eventually, under Musk's leadership, Tesla is touted as the great American automotive success story of the new century.
MUSK SPEAKS AT THE LAUNCH OF THE TESLA MODEL X CROSSOVER SUV. IMAGES ON “JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY”
Musk steered the company through more ups and downs and rose to power again. In 2014, Tesla successfully sued New Jersey to overturn laws governing half of the states that prohibit automakers from selling directly to the public. The Federal Trade Commission then joined Musk's effort to overturn the rest of the state laws, just in time for the 2017 shipment of the Tesla Model 3. The Model 3 is the long-awaited sedan with a starting price of 35 $000 – making the alt-fuel vehicle accessible to the masses. To support his growing number of customers, Musk announced Tesla Energy, which would create a network of electric “boost” stations around the world, an antidote to Tesla owners' pain of finding a boost when traveling far and wide. from home and also an entry point. in the green energy market that promises to save the planet.
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After exiting PayPal in the 1990s, Musk considered investing in solar energy but had to struggling to find a profitable model. Silicon Valley felt the same way:despite heavy investments in alternative energy, the sector has struggled to take off. Along with his South African cousins Lyndon and Peter Rives, Musk founded SolarCity, which bought solar panels and financed and leased them to customers, running software to prove to homeowners how much money they saved on their monthly utility bills. This model successfully curbed consumer reluctance to invest in expensive panels that would likely quickly become obsolete, and within six years, with Musk as chairman and major shareholder, SolarCity became the largest solar panel installer in the United States and went public in 2012. Tesla has partnered with SolarCity to build and sell battery packs that complement solar panels and has begun installing the panels at its booster stations. In late 2016, Tesla purchased SolarCity for $2.6 billion.
Generally, Musk companies work in synergy:Tesla is tackling the fossil fuel problem, prompting Tesla owners to invest in solar panels for their homes. SpaceX is driven by the belief that life on Earth is likely to expire, at least in part, as fossil fuels are likely to cause its demise and life on Mars may be the only answer.
With its companies in largely prosperous, Musk's wealth and fame mean he's no longer the underdog wonderkid, but rather seen as a trusted futurist and one of the greatest innovators and entrepreneurs of our time. Musk, famously, was Robert Downey Jr.'s muse when he was preparing for his role as the existentially complicated billionaire tech industrialist/superhero Tony Stark — Iron Man — in the recent blockbuster movie franchise. P>
It's a classic marketing tactic:Illustrate an enemy, instill fear in your audience, then sell them the antidote to fight the villain, which makes you the hero. Whether the enemy is global warming, the villain in the video game, or technology itself, Musk's quest for a better world, whether on this planet or another, continues to grow.
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Musk's recent ventures include OpenAI, a non-profit open source company that aims to mitigate the dangers of becoming too powerful for corporations and governments . OpenAI is backed by $1 billion in pledges from Musk's tech friends, including Y Combinator's Sam Altman. Speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Musk said:“With artificial intelligence, we summon the demon. You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he's like, yeah, he sure can control the demon? It does not work. Neuralink, recently founded by Musk, aims to develop chip technology that would be implanted in the human brain to merge human thought with software to stay ahead of artificial intelligence and improve mental performance human.
Other projects include Hyperloop, a solar-powered public transit system that promises to transport passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes at 800 mph. The Boring Company, inspired by its own frustrations of sitting in a traffic jam, will open up underground roads by creating free new underground tunnels.
A High Life
In a long 2010 essay Marie Clear , Justine Musk, who shares custody of Musk's five sons with her ex-husband, detailed her relationship with the entrepreneur. It reads like an eye-opening – if sometimes painfully honest – tale of the glamor and challenges of committing to a passionate and brilliant man accustomed to success. The romance began with Musk ardently pursuing the popular Wilson when they were both students at Queen's University in Ontario and ended with him refusing her demands to change the dynamics of the relationship, which she says reduced her to a fairly subordinate.
Being a maverick has made Musk a success in business, but that spirit doesn't necessarily translate into relationships.
"Elon does what he wants" , explained Justine Musk Squire a few years after their separation. “If you want what he wants, life can be very exciting – that’s how he seduces people, I think:he taps into a shared dream. But he rules by the force of his will. What he has has a price, sometimes for Elon, sometimes for his loved ones. But someone always pays. ”
The challenges of people who are very successful in their professional and financial lives but who struggle in their closest relationships are hardly unique to Musk. After all, magazine and TV tabloids (now blogs and Instagram accounts) have long thrived on reporting scintillating details of larger-than-normal breakups and marriages, affairs and reconciliations, family and friendship feuds. of the very rich and famous.
“He always works with a different understanding of reality than the rest of us,”
Laurel Steinberg, Ph.D., is a therapist who has an office on New York's 47th Street, in the heart of Hedge Fund Row. Many of its residents are its clients.
“Every day in my office I see the superhero warriors of the 21st century:law firm partners, tech titans, venture capitalists says Steinberg. "They are men and women who set extraordinary goals, feel fully alive when they are in the midst of the hunt, but once they have conquered their conquest, that thrill of victory fades and without happiness sustainable. While this pursuit and capture can be repeated in the professional world, it is possible for highly ambitious people to unwittingly apply the same formula to their personal relationships with disastrous results. Steinberg points out that many powerful individuals are used to leading and having their way, which creates great challenges in a romantic partnership designed to be equal. “Then it becomes a parent-child dynamic,” says Steinberg.
MUSK WITH HIS FIVE SONS IN 2010. ROBERT TRACHTENBERG / TRUNK ARCHIVE
Most recently, Musk has been linked to actress Amber Heard ( Justice League ). Three high-profile divorces and a handful of tabloid romances don't rank Musk in the record books for personal drama. Some accounts describe him as an actively involved father more than willing to bring his five sons on his private jet for vacations. And despite the always fervent approach to his work, he might even be making strides in finding his own balance.
"Elon finds that he has to have a double standard," said Adeo Ressi, a fellow entrepreneur and friend Musk's academic. Squire . “He always had a standard for himself that he applied to the rest of the world. But it is difficult for him to relate to people who do not measure up…. And the only thing that has made Elon happier more recently is some sort of appreciation for his uniqueness. »
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This article originally appeared in the September 2017 issue of SUCCESS magazine.
