While Elon Musk is works towards colonizing Mars, he’s also achieved a mind-blowing milestone down here on Earth as the first person in modern history to be worth more than US$300 billion.
Often lauded as one of the greatest entrepreneurial geniuses of recent times, Musk has taken the title as the richest person in the world several times, but never with such a grand figure.
More precisely, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO was worth US$320.8 billion earlier this week, Forbes reported. With a gap of more than US$100 billion, Jeff Bezos follows as the second-richest billionaire.
The incredible achievement comes after Tesla’s market capitalization passed US$1 trillion late September following Hertz’s order of 100,000 of the electric vehicles, which it’s adding to the rental fleets in the US and parts of Europe, Bloomberg reported.
Growing up in South Africa, Musk primarily lived with his father when his parents divorced and was a self-described bookworm, reading everything from encyclopedias to comic books. Experiencing a terrible upbringing … [with] a lot of adversity where he was bullied and chased around by gangs at schools, he found an escape through technology – and well, the rest is history.
With visions as striking as the universe, here are some of the best lessons you can learn from Musk – it might even take you to Mars.
While he does have a bachelor’s degree in economics and another in physics, Musk taught himself rocket science by reading books on rockets and propulsion.
This hunger for knowledge started at a young age. When Musk was a child, he taught himself to code where he then sold his first game, Blaster, for about US$500.
Further formal education was on the cards for the father of seven in the mid 1990s when he was accepted into Stanford’s PhD program in energy physics/material science, although he saw a better opportunity. Musk dropped out after two days to launch Zip2 in 1995 – a software venture which was later sold for US$307 million.
Have a crystal-clear vision
Part of Musk’s success with SpaceX comes down to his well recited elevator pitch, which he used to make cold calls to experts, including Jim Cantrell – an aerospace consultant who had worked for NASA before co-founding SpaceX with Musk.
Musk’s vision starts by defining a goal, understanding what the goal is and why it’s worthwhile.
Cantrell recalls Musk’s spiel: I’m Elon Musk, I’m an internet billionaire, I founded PayPal and I sold Compaq for 165 million dollars cash and I could spend the rest of my life on a beach drinking Mai Tags, but I decided that humanity needs to become a multi-planetary species to survive, and I want to do something with my money to show that humanity can do that, and I need Russian rockets and that’s why I’m calling you.
Go back to basics,
I operate on the physics approach to analysis. You boil things down to the first principles or fundamental truths in a particular area, and then you reason up from there, Musk said.
Don’t be swayed by naysayers
When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars, people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked, Musk has previously said.
If you believe, it can happen
One of the keys to Musk’s success has been his limitless imagination, then turning these farfetched ideas into reality.
If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle, he says. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.
Make mistakes
If things aren’t running flawlessly in the beginning, you’re doing something right.
Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
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