Elon Musk By: Group 22

[Audio] Elon Musk By Group 22. Elon Musk By: Group 22.

[Audio] First, who is Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk is an entrepreneur and business magnate. He is the founder, CEO, and Chief Engineer at SpaceX; early-stage investor, CEO, and Product Architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; and co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI. With an estimated net worth of around US$ 270 billion as of March 2022,[ 3] Musk is the wealthiest person in the world according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and the Forbes real-time billionaires list..

[Audio] Early Life 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 at age 17 to avoid conscription. He was enrolled at Queen's University and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania two years later, where he received a bachelor's degree in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University but decided instead to pursue a business career, co-founding the web software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. The startup was acquired by Compaq for $ 307 million in 1999. The same year, Musk co-founded online bank X.com, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. The company was bought by eBay in 2002 for $ 1.5 billion..

[Audio] Elon's Secrets to business Success. It isn't about the money: He was previously quoted saying in an interview "It's not as if there is a pile of cash somewhere," he said. "It's really just that I have a certain number of votes in Tesla, and SpaceX, and SolarCity, and the marketplace has value on those votes.".

[Audio] He doesn't have anything against the pursuit of wealth "if it's done in sort of an ethical and good manner", but said it just isn't what drives him. The approach certainly seems to be working. The real-life inspiration for Robert Downey Jr's portrayal of Tony Stark of Iron Man fame was worth perhaps $ 10bn when we spoke in 2014. His electric car company, Tesla, has performed particularly well. Shares have surged over the past year to take its value to more than $ 700bn. For that you could buy Ford, General Motors, BMW, Volkswagen and Fiat Chrysler, and still have enough left over to buy Ferrari..

[Audio] Pursue your passions Take SpaceX for example. He set the company up because he was frustrated the US space programme wasn't more ambitious. "I kept expecting us to advance beyond Earth, and to put a person on Mars, and have a base on the moon, and have, you know, very frequent flights to orbit," he said. When that didn't happen, he came up with the idea for the " Mars Oasis Mission", which aimed to send a small greenhouse to the red planet. The idea was to get people excited about space again, and persuade the US government to increase Nasa's budget. It was while he was trying to get that off the ground he realised the problem wasn't "a lack of will, but rather a lack of way" - space technology was far more expensive than it needed to be..

[Audio] Then boom, The world's cheapest rocket-launching business was born. And here's the important thing, its genesis wasn't about making money, but landing a person on Mars. Musk said he regards himself as an engineer rather than an investor, and says what gets him up in the morning is the desire to solve technical problems. It is that, rather than dollars in the bank, that is his yardstick of progress. He knows every hurdle his businesses overcome helps everyone else who's trying to solve the same problem - and it does it forever..

[Audio] Be ready to take risks This one is obvious. You've got to have skin in the game to do well, but Elon Musk has taken more risks than most. By 2002 he had sold off his holdings in his first two ventures, an internet city guide called Zip2 and the online payment company PayPal. He had just entered his 30s and had almost $ 200m in the bank. He says his plan was to put half his fortune into the businesses and keep the other half. Things didn't work out like that. His new companies faced all sorts of teething troubles. SpaceX's first three launches had failed, and Tesla had all manner of production problems, and supply chain, and design issues..

[Audio] Then the financial crisis struck. Musk said he faced a stark choice. "I could either keep the money, then the companies are definitely going to die, or invest what I have left and maybe there is a chance." He kept pouring in money. At one point he was so in debt he had to borrow money from friends just to pay his living expenses. So, did the prospect of bankruptcy frighten him? He says it didn't: "My kids might have to go to a sort of government school. I mean big deal, I went to a government school.".

[Audio] In conclusion, His unpredictable behaviour doesn't seem to have affected his businesses, and the entrepreneur remains as ambitious as ever. Remember to be ready to take risks but manage those risks accordingly.