ELON MUSK - THE ART OF FAILING SUCCESSFULLY

 "When something is important enough, You do it even if the odds are not in your favour"

                        -Elon Musk

     
            

You might have probably known Elon Musk, if not, Elon Musk is a South African-born American entrepreneur who co-founded the electronic payment firm PayPal and formed SpaceX, maker of launch vehicles and spacecraft. He was also one of the first significant investors in, as well as chief executive officer of, the electric car manufacturer Tesla. He is currently the 3rd richest person in the world with a net worth of $115.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. But this post is not to tell you about the achievements of Elon musk and neither it is to tell you about his biography. It is about to tell you the incidents which proves what a great man Elon Musk is.

Space X

In 1999, Musk founded X.com and after a year later X.com merged with Confinity to form PayPal, where Musk was named as the CEO of the newly minted company, PayPal. But In October 2000, there was a huge fight between Elon and the Paypal cofounders, at that time musk was newly married and he went on a vacation, in his absence, PayPal's board fired him and made Thiel the new CEO. But things worked out for Musk when eBay bought PayPal in 2002 and being the biggest shareholder, he netted $165 million.

Musk would have easily enjoyed his life with that money, but instead, he thought of starting a new company which was SpaceX. SpaceX was founded in 2002 with an aim to make low-cost rockets to travel one day to Mars. Firstly, Musk went to Moscow with his team in an attempt to buy refurbished Russian ballistic missiles. But Russians offered him to sell one rocket at $8 million, Musk felt it very overpriced and he tried to negotiate with them, but the Russians taunted and made fun of him, To this Musk replied, "I think we can build a rocket ourselves". After that failed meeting in Russia, he came back and drew a spreadsheet and found out that the raw materials for building a rocket were only 3%. With $100 million he founded Spacex in 2002, but the main problem was he had no formal education in Rocket Science so he gained his knowledge just by studying books. 

In 2006 he launched his first rocket which failed in just 33 sec after liftoff. He tried again and subsequently his 2nd and as well as 3rd attempt also failed as the rocket off route in space. The 3rd attempt almost killed the company. When the company almost hit bankruptcy, he still didn't give up on his plans and said he will try one more time. He put all the money he had and lived in a rented house, all for just to make his 4th attempt.

On 28 Sept 2008, the day came when the 4th Falcon 1 rocket was successfully launched and achieved earth's orbit. History was created when Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to orbit the Earth. Then came a large breakthrough when the company was just saved from a few days of bankruptcy in December 2008, when NASA made a contract with SpaceX of $1.6 billion for cargo supply to International Space Station.

Not only this, Musk now wanted to make reusable rockets because according to him, reusable rockets are needed to reduce the cost of space travel. After a few failures attempt, SpaceX achieved that also, a successful landing and recovery of the first stage of Falcon 9 was recorded in 2015. Space Organisations like NASA and ISRO are Govt. funded and have a lot more experienced scientist and engineers, but SpaceX was the first company to launch a successful reusable rocket and that too without any formal education in Rocket science. Musk also revealed his plans for getting cargo rockets to Mars by 2022 and crew to Mars by 2024. 

The first stage of Falcon 9 rocket stands on a drone ship after landing

A DIFFICULT CHOICE

One of the difficult choices he made in 2008. A point came in his life when he only left with $30 million and he needs to invest in his two companies(Tesla and SpaceX). His both companies were not performing well and were in a huge loss but the problem was that if he would invest in one the other one would die and if he would split, then probably both will die. Elon, at last, took his decision to split the money between the two companies. The same year he also got funding from NASA and fortunately, both of them came through.

AD ASTRA 

Inside Ad Astra school

Elon has 5 children and for schooling, he sends them to his own school which is AD ASTRA because according to Elon the education system of U.S. is not that up to the mark. According to an Ars Technical report, the kids work together in teams and there is a heavy emphasis on maths, science, engineering and ethics. There is no grade system at school. It's been reported that as many as 400 families applied in 2017, though the school has only 50 students.

PEOPLE CRITICIZE ELON

Yes, that's true after doing a lot more hard work and determination towards his work some people criticize him.  They criticize him on his ideas, his mission of colonizing Mars and majorly for Tesla. Let's find out why do people criticize Tesla.

OIL INDUSTRIES

Many people believed that after coming of electric cars, there will be a huge loss to oil companies. Before this, let's have a look at the future of oil companies. In a report, it was found that if we continue using our resources with the same rate, our oil deposits could run out in the next 30 years. Moreover, if you look at any oil companies, their main mission would be to maximise profit by extracting and selling the maximum amount of oil to you as possible, but now look at Tesla mission "To accelerate the World's transition to sustainable energy". In short Tesla's success doesn't affect the lives of our future generations but oil companies success does affect the lives.

Future energy reserve for oil, gas and coal

JOB LOSSES

Many people majorly taxi drivers think that their jobs would be lost after coming of Tesla. They think like this, because of the auto-pilot feature in the car that allows the car to drive by itself. But this is not true, let's understand this with an example.

First of all driving Tesla on autopilot is not a compulsion but an option. Moreover, there is also an autopilot system in an aircraft but that doesn't mean that an aircraft doesn't need a pilot. Similarly, people need to understand that only cars will be changed, there won't be any job losses after coming of Tesla.

CONCLUSION

Well, there is a lot more to study about his life, only a few incidents have mentioned above. Elon's life is actually famous for a lot more failures than his success. In starting of each and every business no one ever believed that he will succeed, not even Elon himself but his hard work, vision, and determination towards his goals led him to success. There are so many people who only talk about problems but there are only a few of them who actually get down and find the solution to that problem. Elon has shown us an alternate way of living, rather than just relying on a single source. Supporting Elon or any of his projects is your own personal choice but the main motive of this post is to show people to have a different vision and perspective in their life. People like Elon Musk don't only transform society but also transform civilization as well. That is why

WE NEED MORE PEOPLE LIKE ELON MUSK IN THE WORLD.

References

https://www.ecotricity.co.uk/our-green-energy/energy-independence/the-end-of-fossil-fuels#:~:text=Globally%2C%20we%20currently%20consume%20the,in%20just%20over%2053%20years.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/elon-musk-is-now-the-third-richest-person-in-the-world-1.5087865#:~:text=Elon%20Musk's%20net%20worth%20is,richest%20people%2C%20according%20to%20Bloomberg.