Elon Musk is a business magnate, industrial designer, and engineer. He is the founder, CEO, CTO, and chief designer of SpaceX; early investor, CEO, and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink; and co-founder and initial co-chairman of OpenAI. A centibillionaire, Musk is one of the richest people in the world.
Musk was born to a Canadian mother and South African father and raised in Pretoria, South Africa. He briefly attended the University of Pretoria before moving to Canada aged 17 to attend Queen’s University. He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania two years later, where he received dual bachelor’s degrees in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University but decided instead to pursue a business career, co-founding web software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. The start-up was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. Musk co-founded online bank X.com that same year, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form the company PayPal and was subsequently bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
Table of Contents:
1. Early life and education
2. Career
3. SpaceX
4. Tesla, Inc.
5. SolarCity
6. OpenAI
7. Neuralink
8. The Boring Company
9. Personal life
10. Awards and honors
11. Elon Musk Quotes
1. Early life and education
Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa, the son of Maye Musk (née Haldeman), a model and dietitian from Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, and Errol Musk, a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, and sailor. He has a younger brother, Kimbal (born 1972), and a younger sister, Tosca (born 1974). His paternal grandmother was British, and he also has Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk lived mostly with his father in the suburbs of Pretoria.
Musk attended Pretoria Boys High School and briefly considered studying economics before leaving South Africa in 1989 at the age of 17 to attend Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His mother had Canadian citizenship. He deferred admission for one year to attend Stanford University in California. He left in 1995 to pursue a business career.
2. Career
Musk co-founded web software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal in 1995. The start-up was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. Musk co-founded online bank X.com that same year, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form the company PayPal and was subsequently bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX, an aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company, of which he is CEO, CTO, and lead designer. In 2004, he joined electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.) as chairman and product architect, becoming its CEO in 2008. In 2006, he helped create SolarCity, a solar energy services company and current Tesla subsidiary. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit research company that promotes friendly artificial intelligence. In 2016, he co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology company focused on developing brain–computer interfaces, and founded The Boring Company, a tunnel construction company. Musk has also proposed the Hyperloop, a high-speed vactrain transportation system.
3. SpaceX
SpaceX designs, manufactures, and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 by CEO and CTO Elon Musk with the goal of reducing space transportation costs and enabling the colonization of Mars. SpaceX designs, manufactures, and launches the Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Dragon, and Starlink rockets and spacecraft.
4. Tesla, Inc.
Tesla, Inc. is an American electric vehicle and clean energy company based in Palo Alto, California. Tesla’s current products include electric cars, battery energy storage from home to grid scale, solar panels and solar roof tiles, and related products and services. Tesla was founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. The company’s name is a tribute to Nikola Tesla.
5. SolarCity
SolarCity is an American provider of energy services, including solar photovoltaic (PV) power systems, and a subsidiary of Tesla, Inc. SolarCity was founded in 2006 by brothers Peter and Lyndon Rive, based on a concept created by their cousin, Elon Musk.
6. OpenAI
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. OpenAI was founded in December 2015, with the goal of advancing artificial intelligence in a responsible way. OpenAI’s co-founders are SpaceX co-founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Greg Brockman from notable data startup Cloudera, and entrepreneur Rebekah Mercer. Dimitry Ioffe, Pieter Abbeel, and Patrick Mynyk are also notable founding members of OpenAI.
7. Neuralink
Neuralink Corporation is an American neurotechnology company founded by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, neurosurgeon Joshua B. Drake, and others, developing implantable brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). The company’s headquarters are in San Francisco, California.
8. The Boring Company
The Boring Company is an American tunnel construction company founded by Elon Musk in 2016. The company has built tunnels in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The company’s goal is to reduce tunnel boring costs and transportation times by a factor of 10.
9. Personal life
Musk has been married three times. He first married Canadian author Justine Wilson in 2000 and they had six children together. The couple divorced in 2008. Musk then married English actress Talulah Riley in 2010. They divorced in 2012 but remarried in 2013. They again divorced in 2016. Musk has been in a relationship with Canadian musician Grimes since 2018.
10. Awards and honors
Musk has received several awards and honors throughout his career. In 2010, he was honored with the Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal for his work on SpaceX. In 2013, he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering. In 2014, he received the Smithsonian Institution’s Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication. In 2015, he was honored with the Millennium Technology Prize. In 2016, he was ranked 21st on the Forbes list of The World’s Most Powerful People.
Elon Musk Quotes
“I wouldn’t say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I’d like my fear emotion to be less because it’s very distracting and fries my nervous system.” – Elon Musk
“There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.” – Elon Musk
“If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not.” – Elon Musk
“I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.” – Elon Musk
“You have to say, ‘Well, why did it succeed where others did not?'”
“It’s very important to like the people you work with, otherwise life [and] your job is gonna be quite miserable.” – Elon Musk
“I would just question things… It would infuriate my parents… That I wouldn’t just believe them when they said something ’cause I’d ask them why. And then I’d consider whether that response made sense given everything else I knew.” – Elon Musk
“I don’t believe in process. In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that ‘it’s all about the process,’ I see that as a bad sign. The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.” – Elon Musk
“A company is a group organized to create a product or service, and it is only as good as its people and how excited they are about creating. I do want to recognize a ton of super-talented people. I just happen to be the face of the companies.” – Elon Musk
“People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.” – Elon Musk
“Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive, and determination of the people behind it as the product they sell.” – Elon Musk
“Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.” – Elon Musk
“The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.” – Elon Musk
“Talent is extremely important. It’s like a sports team, the team that has the best individual player will often win, but then there’s a multiplier from how those players work together and the strategy they employ.” – Elon Musk
“I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future.” – Elon Musk
“If you’re co-founder or CEO, you have to do all kinds of tasks you might not want to do… If you don’t do your chores, the company won’t succeed… No task is too menial.” – Elon Musk
“I’ve actually not read any books on time management.” – Elon Musk
“You shouldn’t do things differently just because they’re different. They need to be… better.” – Elon Musk
“Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour workweeks and you’re putting in 100 hour workweeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing, you know that you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve.” – Elon Musk
“It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.” – Elon Musk
“People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.” – Elon Musk
“I always have optimism, but I’m realistic. It was not with the expectation of great success that I started Tesla or SpaceX… It’s just that I thought they were important enough to do anyway.” – Elon Musk
“I’m interested in things that change the world or that affect the future and wondrous, new technology where you see it, and you’re like, ‘Wow, how did that even happen? How is that possible?'”
“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.” – Elon Musk
“The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.” – Elon Musk
“Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.” – Elon Musk
“I think most of the important stuff on the Internet has been built. There will be continued innovation, for sure, but the great problems of the Internet have essentially been solved.” – Elon Musk
“I do think there is a lot of potential if you have a compelling product and people are willing to pay a premium for that. I think that is what Apple has shown. You can buy a much cheaper cell phone or laptop, but Apple’s product is so much better than the alternative, and people are willing to pay that premium.” – Elon Musk
“There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.” – Elon Musk
“If you’re trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.” – Elon Musk
“I think the best way to attract venture capital is to try and come up with a demonstration of whatever product or service it is and ideally take that as far as you can. Just see if you can sell that to real customers and start generating some momentum. The further along you can get with that, the more likely you are to get funding.” – Elon Musk
“We have a strict ‘no-assholes policy’ at SpaceX.” – Elon Musk
“When somebody has a breakthrough innovation, it is rarely one little thing. Very rarely, is it one little thing. It’s usually a whole bunch of things that collectively amount to a huge innovation.” – Elon Musk
“Disruptive technology where you really have a big technology discontinuity… tends to come from new companies.” – Elon Musk
“Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.” – Elon Musk
“What makes innovative thinking happen?… I think it’s really a mindset. You have to decide.” – Elon Musk
“It is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don’t know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive.” – Elon Musk
“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.” – Elon Musk
“I always invest my own money in the companies that I create. I don’t believe in the whole thing of just using other people’s money. I don’t think that’s right. I’m not going to ask other people to invest in something if I’m not prepared to do so myself.” – Elon Musk
“Don’t delude yourself into thinking something’s working when it’s not, or you’re gonna get fixated on a bad solution.” – Elon Musk
“As much as possible, avoid hiring MBAs. MBA programs don’t teach people how to create companies.” – Elon Musk
“Really pay attention to negative feedback and solicit it, particularly from friends. … Hardly anyone does that, and it’s incredibly helpful.” – Elon Musk
“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.” – Elon Musk
“My biggest mistake is probably weighing too much on someone’s talent and not someone’s personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.” – Elon Musk
“I say something, and then it usually happens. Maybe not on schedule, but it usually happens.” – Elon Musk
“Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.” – Elon Musk
“If something has to be designed and invented, and you have to figure out how to ensure that the value of the thing you create is greater than the cost of the inputs, then that is probably my core skill.” – Elon Musk
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.” – Elon Musk
“I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.” – Elon Musk
“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” – Elon Musk
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