A Worthy Tycoon
Business by its definition can be said as a group of activities which ensures the movement of goods, money or services across the market by the term called trade. We generally judge a successful business by the amount of money it circulates or the impact it makes on the market. Since there is not an abundance of such names who have created a special mark in the history of the market by creating giant businesses or companies, I am going to talk about a person whose vision was not only to make a hammering impact on the world in terms of money but with a vision to make an impact on the human civilization and that person can be none other than the famous Elon Musk.
Elon Musk, a prodigy in itself born in a rich family in South Africa had a passion for innovation from his childhood. He was a nerd literally digging into the books all the time. He was such a boring person that none of the children, not even his siblings wanted to play with him. He had a passion for game development and started developing small games from the very tender age when most of us were wondering whether the earth is flat or circular. Question time. Does being a nerd only makes him worthy of being talked around the world? Absolutely No. The quality which makes him the most talkable, most loved or most hated or most fascinating businessman in the world is his ardent desire to colonize MARS. Again, it sounds funny for most of us but let us dig a bit deeper into his life. His parents got divorced and two years after living with his mother, he moved towards his father’s home as he had everything there he thought his mother could not. He later did not go well with his father and isolated himself from him. His father wanted him to study in South Africa but he insisted shifting to Canada and applied for a visa as his mother was a Canadian originally.
So, he broke up with his family and moved to Canada. He had to live miserably doing works in farms and mills for a year as he failed to meet his uncle living there. He took admission in the University of Pennsylvania for his bachelors where he received his dual degree in economics and physics. He then decided to pursue a PhD from the famous Stanford University but soon dropped out. He then decided to form his own company with his brother instead of digging into life like most of the bachelors.
The company was called Zip2 with a vision to create a direct communication between the advertisers and the users for the advertisements given in a newspaper. The website used to run for the day and he used to code and build it alone during the night. The company struggled a bit in the beginning but eventually started making a grip and managed to get a deal with the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. When he started hiring coders, they pointed out the bugs in his unstructured programs and suggested for the changes which Elon did not like but this was the moment he stepped his foot into becoming a great leader. Zip2 got acquired later for 300 million dollars and Elon wanted to be the CEO but being a technical guy, the directors did not have much trust in him and he was shown a way out with some 22 million dollars in hand. But instead of living a lavish retirement plan, he pushed his entire money into his other imagination called X.com which aimed at revolutionizing the banking system at that time. But at this time, he was not alone with this motive and faced tough competition with the rising rivals Paypal. Elon did an excellent job to stay in the competition but also made some decisions which the board members were not in favour of.
Eventually, a merger between those two companies was organized and Elon wanted to continue the role of CEO but the board did not go well with him as he wanted to shift the UNIX based infrastructure of Paypal to a Microsoft based infrastructure and pushed him out of the company which again gave him a lofty amount of dollars which is approximately 132million dollars. He later purchased the domain name X.com from Paypal as he has an attachment with the X letter which you can see in most of the places of his life. Being thrown out of a company you founded one day would have been a huge embarrassment for someone and so was it for Elon but very few bounces back from it like Steve Jobs and Elon also belonged to that group. He had this immense mentality of giving something back to society through technologies and innovation. He slowly started getting interested in rockets. At that time, rockets were expensive stuff to have for the US government and they used to take aid from the Russians for their research and findings. Elon had this idea of starting a private rocket company for their cheaper availability in the country. He started studying material science and the technologies behind the rocket manufacturing process. He had the courage to talk with NASA scientists and Russians for his business. Slowing he kicked into the process and founded another company called SpaceX. He also gave the initial idea of SolarCity which his cousins founded later on and later it became the second-largest solar power provider in the USA which musk later acquired and worked on numerous projects on it for aiming an ecosystem for renewable energy sources.
Elon invested his major part of the money into the business which he could have spent in buying a luxurious villa and a royal lifestyle. He was also deeply invested in renewable energy resources and declared the CEO of a car company called Tesla Motors. His desire to learn was out of this world thing. He is a person heavily looking into the prospects of what artificial intelligence and machine learning could bring into society and thus played a major role in founding an organization called Open-AI focused mainly on AI research.
His interests in AI and human-computer interaction let him to found a company called Neuralink focused on developing research based on the interaction between machines and humans focusing on nanotechnologies. His other milestone is forming a company called the boring company which aims to build tunnels for fast transportation and travel across the world. He also worked actively in the concepts of hyperloops for speedy travel using pressurized capsules.
Enough about his personal life. Now let us talk on the impact he made through the steps he took. Paypal, a name probably you all must know has become a big thing in transferring money worldwide. SpaceX recently became successful in testing a bunch of rockets and even NASA adopted one of theirs in their latest successful mission. Tesla, a company which was in loss for a long period of time became a company to boast fully autonomous electric cars and if you look at the company’s stock and compare it with the value it had a decade ago, it will blow your mind. Elon musk, a name feared to be bankrupt one day recently became the richest person in the world taking over the powerful Bezos. The works which he did may not have created a huge cash flow into the market but surely has a vision and risky attitude which is almost impossible for a lot of persons to have. This man is so heavily invested in technologies and the letter X that he even named his son X AE A-XII which you can easily pronounce.
Now let us talk about some numbers. SpaceX has an approximate revenue of 2billion USD. Tesla has a total revenue of 32billion USD. Musk’s personal worth is about 182billion USD. If you look at the numbers, you will be amazed that Musk not only creates businesses but he himself is a business, A tycoon worthy enough to be talked about for ages.
