What do you like about Elon Musk?

1995 — Applied to Netscape for a job and got rejected

1996 — Was forced out of his CEO position from his own company Zip2

1998 — Struggled to make PayPal succeed

1999 — Almost died when he crashed his $1M Mclaren F1

2000 — Was kicked out of Paypal while on his honeymoon

2000 — Got sick with malaria

2001 — Russia refused to sell him a rocket

2006 — First SpaceX rocket launched failed

2007 — Second SpaceX rocket failed

2008 — Third SpaceX rocket failed with NASA satellites onboard!

2009 — Tesla almost went bankrupt.

2013 — First rocket landing failed

2014 — Several Tesla Model S caught on fire

2015 — Four ro

I recently had an interesting chat with a guy named Steve, who personally knows and has worked with
Elon Musk.

Obviously, he has much more insight into Elon’s character and mindset.

And he immediately pointed to one trait he admired the most about Elon.

Which honestly stunned me at first.

He said (paraphrasing):

“I love his willingness to just blow up the darn rocket”

Here’s what he meant:

Elon Musk has come face to face with failure many, many times.

Publicly.

In front of millions.

He constantly fails and learns from it.

How many times did those SpaceX rockets explode and were on the news?
Everybody would go:

“He’s nuts”

“What he’s trying is just impossible”

“Poor guy, it blew up again”

“They’ll never get it right”

But he never took it personally.

Or threw himself a pity party.

He understood the process.

And he knew those failures would lead him to figure out what went wrong…

And how to fix it.

Elon doesn’t perceive failure as a problem to fuss about.

He didn’t try to cover it up.

Or judge his employees harshly.

He saw it as a pure, unfiltered education.

As a tool to leverage for his own goals.

And he actively tried to fail faster.

So he could learn and optimize faster too.

Every time they’d fail, he’d have a big grin on his face and razor-sharp focus.

Allegedly Elon would say:

“They laugh at you three seconds before they applaud.”

And that’s what he’d tell himself after every public fail.

Success was just on the horizon.

He just had to keep chasing it.

Eventually, he got there.

And now these things land pretty regularly.

And we don’t see the night news bashing Elon anymore.

The big lesson (in the words of Steve, Elon’s Friend) is that failure doesn’t define us…

It refines us.

So be willing for whatever you’re doing to blow up.

Be ready for others to see it.

And maybe laugh at you.

Understand this will happen OFTEN.

Especially at the start of your journey as an entrepreneur.

But at some point, you won’t blow it up anymore.

And they won’t be laughing.

They’ll be clapping.

And that point, you’ll know why Elon kept his cool during all those failures.

Because it’s worth it.

Hope this helps…

And you’re able to leverage this private peek into Elon’s mindset!

If you dig the answer and the lesson, I send daily emails like this on mindset, entrepreneurship,
freelancing, marketing, and more. The link is pretty easy to find in my profile if you’re interested 

There is very little known about Elon before his emergence in Tesla. Even with the little that’s known,
the best things are hidden.
Let’s go down a list:

He was one of the first people to put businesses on the internet. Although Zip2 defines itself as
“providing local businesses with an internet presence”, Elon was one of the first people to begin building
the infrastructure for the internet. This was an archaic form of the modern API that every major
software company uses today. In the mid-1990s, Elon had to deal with dial-up speeds—this meant that
programming had to be simple and succinct. Many people told him Zip2 wouldn’t replace the
Yellowbook, but his company was purchased by Compaq in 1999 for $305 million.

Elon went back to work after the Zip2 sale. It’s important to realize how crazy this is. The internet dot-
com bubble caused a $6 trillion loss in the markets by 2002. The Nasdaq had tumbled from 5,200 to
about 1,000. Elon didn’t care. He had plans to make banking quicker. He wanted a world with faster
transaction speed.

In November of 1999, Elon created X.com. Elon was competing for merchant processing space on eBay
between eBay’s Billpoint and Confinity’s soon to be PayPal. Elon understood that Confinity and X.com’s
merge would be able to dwarf eBay’s Billpoint. In March of 2000, they merged. X.com and Confinity
became PayPal. PayPal went public in 2002, and eBay felt threatened. They were purchased later that
year for $1.5 billion. Billpoint isn’t spoken about today because Elon had the vision to dominate the
venue until eBay couldn’t ignore them anymore.

He has been ousted from both PayPal and Zip2 as CEO. He had many rocket failures at SpaceX. Teslas
had many production delays. The first few years of Teslas had an incredible amount of reliability issues.
He consistently solves problems and remains committed to innovation regardless of prior mishaps. He
doesn’t dwell, he moves forward.

He’s gone through 3 divorces, twice with the same person. The latter two were during critical moments
with Tesla and production delays. He continued working through sleepless nights and kept up with
communication on Twitter. He also has five kids. His recent girlfriend, Grimes, is currently pregnant—
number six is on the way.

He’s listening to people. On Twitter, a person named Joe complained about the consistent beeping
waking up his sleeping children. Elon introduced a “Joe Mode” which cuts the beeping and chiming to a
minimum.

He puts everything he has behind his vision. Elon has stated that his investment in Tesla was going to be
the first in and the last out. That’s pretty crazy, considering he owns about 20% of Tesla shares, and
that’s worth anywhere between $20 and $50 billion depending on where Tesla shares stand. Not to
mention that Tesla is a fan favorite to be shorting on the market right now.

Three out of four of the initial funding rounds for Tesla were completely or mostly led by Elon. This is
crazy, considering the CEO of the company, Martin Eberhard, was lying about the production costs of
the Roadster. Elon said in a podcast that, by 2008, Martin had not only stepped down as CEO but he had
left the company. The damage he caused to Tesla almost caused it to go bankrupt. 4 years after
Eberhard’s departure, Elon shocked the world and turned the bankruptcy train around. The Model S was
released.

People have consistently told Elon that his plans about the electric car are dumb. They’ve told him that
the infrastructure for charging is impossible. They told him the demand didn’t exist. They told him that
there isn’t a market for it. It wouldn’t accelerate fast enough. They told him it couldn’t charge quickly
enough. It was too complicated. It can’t be a sports car. It’s not practical. Elon continued to work. Here
are the production numbers, even after all the delays and setbacks that Tesla has gone through.

He shoots straight. Whether that is with Joe Rogan or on a very tiny podcast with only a handful of
subscribers, he doesn’t care. He takes the time to explain the situation, and he tries to explain the
complications of building a car company from the ground up. He has also mentioned that there isn’t a
car on the market the exists today that compares to the Model S in 2012. That’s crazy. Elon is more than
a person, he’s a movement.

He set a plan for Tesla. He had a master plan, part 1. He updated it years later with a part 2. He has, for
the most part, stuck to everything he has said.

He’s not settled in one place. He launched OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company.
In 2017, it beat one of the best teams in a game called Dota 2. The easiest way to explain Dota 2 is to say
it’s high-stakes and high-speed Chess. A group of 5 machines defeated one of the greatest teams to ever
play the game.

He’s using the entire Tesla fleet to better Autpilot technology. The million cars on the road today are all
communicating with Tesla’s datacenters to become smarter over time. The car is learning—Elon’s vision
is to get it to the point of driving itself. Furthermore, Elon wants to release a Robotaxi service by the
second quarter of this year. He wants your car to be able to go out at night, by itself, and drive people
around as a driverless taxi. Your car will return home later at night and will have made you some money.
It sounds insane to me, but considering what Elon has done, I don’t know if anything isn’t possible. He
makes that full-self driving package seem like a bargain at $7,000.

The technology Elon promises today continues to get better with ownership. He released a tweet stating
that the range on the Model S and X had improved. Was that magic? Did they tweak how the battery
uses energy? You instantly get range with an update.

He doesn’t care about the norm. He’s not looking to emulate what’s been done. He tears down an
industry for the purpose of pushing innovation. He cares about using capitalism in order to save our
planet. He is doing what capitalists should have been doing this entire time: Competing. He has stated
several times that his mission is to push for the advancement of electric cars by about 5–10 years,
connect people over the internet in some way, and colonize on Mars.
He sets dreams that everybody thinks will remain dreams—At least, until he starts making progress on
some of them.

What is it like to work with/for Elon Musk?

Is Elon Musk a good or bad person? Why?

My very experienced mentor says that Elon Musk is a fraud. Should I listen to him?

What is Elon Musk like in person?

I only spent the one afternoon with him, at a Model S launch event, but was struck by a few things:

He’s a much more imposing presence than TV appearances suggest – I was surprised at just how tall and
portly (yes, I mean he looked quite fat) he was. He’s a seriously big guy, and I must admit I was a pretty
intimidated by him.

He has a real nervous energy about him – He has a fast walking pace, wanted to get things done quickly,
and you could see he was always thinking ahead, not wanting even idle time to go to waste (eg. While
being introduced to go on stage, he was simultaneously listening to the speaker while answering emails
on his phone)

He comes across quite cold – not unpleasant, just direct, polite and with no airs or pretences. While
speaking with a small team of us, he answered our questions sincerely, but when someone asked what
he obviously considered a dumb question, he didn’t hide the fact that he thought so.

What was most striking was how these personal qualities are mirrored by the overall Tesla Motors
corporate culture. He has a very no-nonsense, direct, “get shit done” persona, and that’s exactly what
the vibe is at the company.

What can we learn from Elon Musk?

We learn that:

When you see a problem, you don’t complain about it, instead you try to find a way and solve it.

You don’t just dream big, but you wake up and work hard (really hard) to achieve it.

You don’t just think about yourself, you care for the causes which affects the nature and the future of
human beings.

You do what needs to be done, not what is easy, nor what is normal.
You don’t give up when you fail, you try to find out what went wrong, you learn from your mistakes and
come back stronger.

You don’t lose confidence when things are not going your way and you stay humble while you are on the
peak of success.

You learn that it is possible to teach yourself rocket science.

And you never forget to be cool…