Ever dreamed about building a super successful company? Yes? What about 4 successful world wide companies? Elon Musk, the visionary billionaire, has built not just one, but more than 4 huge companies with enormous impact on literally the whole world. What’s super interesting is that each of these companies belongs to a field that is different from the other, and some of these company ideas are crazy to the point that many business men consider them to be money burning machines including Elon Musk himself. Yet Elon Musk managed to make these crazy money burning ideas into a world wide success.

The beginnings

Elon musk started programming at a very early age. He built a game and sold it for $500 at the age of 12. He later started a company with his brother called Zip2, then he co-founded x.com which later became the world wide known company named PayPal after x.com merged with their competitor. PayPal was sold and Musk made $180M. Instead of enjoying the rest of his life with the money that he had, he decided to put all his money into crazy company Ideas which are a space rockets company (known as SpaceX), and a purely electric cars company (known as Tesla).

The Intentions of Elon Musk

Tesla

The goal behind Tesla was to create electric cars that can replace all the current combustion cars so that the pollution caused by cars would be reduced. It’s true that to generate electricity you need to burn fuel, however, burning fuel inside cars is much less efficient than burning fuel in factories. Thus, electric cars will still reduce pollution by a huge factor. Also, the plan was to later generate electricity using solar power which will get rid of the need to burn any fuel at all.

SpaceX

The plan behind spaceX was to colonise the Red Planet Mars and to create affordable commercial rocket flights. Elon’s plan is to make sure that humans become a Multi-planetary species so that if something happens to Earth, the human race will still survive.

Failures of Elon Musk

Both Tesla and SpaceX almost failed. Elon Musk himself wasn’t optimistic about the success of Tesla, however, he decided to give it a try because his intention wasn’t just to gain wealth but to save the world.

As for SpaceX, the first 3 rocket launches were a total failure. All three rockets exploded seconds after the launch and the company was nearly broken. At that point, the money burning machine idea was up to its name. The company burned most of Elon’s money.

The Comeback

Tesla

Although Tesla was nearly broke and was at the edge of failure, Elon and his team managed to lift it up and save it with hard work and dedication. So many companies and famous people made fun of Tesla and Elon’s crazy investments. Today (at the time of this writing), Tesla dominates the cars industry. Most of the car makers are now trying their best to switch to electric cars because they know that if they don’t, they’ll be left behind. The idea that was once laughed at is now changing the whole world and is a global success thanks to the real iron man, Elon Musk.

SpaceX

After the first 3 failures, Elon had little money left and decided to throw it all for a 4th and final rocket launch. If that 4th launch failed, the company would have died and so would his wealth, but fortunately, it didn’t. The 4th rocket launch by SpaceX was a total success, the next day of the launch, SpaceX got a contract with NASA. The rest is history. SpaceX managed to build a rocket that ‘lands again after a launch’, which was a huge step towards the goal of making commercial rocket flights. Now SpaceX is one of the most successful companies in the world and its team is working hard on their initial mission which is to ‘Colonise Mars and make humans a multiplanetary species’

Elon has also founded other successful companies that we’ll leave to a later article.

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Image by: Daniel Oberhaus / CC BY-SA