What Elon Musk Haters Should Know Before Throwing Stones Toward Him
Elon Musk: I thought there was >90% chance that both SpaceX & Tesla would be worth $0
Is Elon Musk an a**hole as he wants to colonize Mars? Do you think he should spend his money and mind to save this planet? Is he destroying this planet with his childish dreams?
Ordinary people tend to hold back, criticize, or sabotage extraordinary achievers. They religiously search for a hole in the umbrella so that they can demean a person’s genius only to put him in the average category.
It’s called “tall poppy syndrome” that — unsurprisingly — most Elon Musk haters carry with them.
But why do people criticize or hate highly successful people?
It’s obvious — cutting down the tall poppies makes the field level. It helps people feel good about their mediocrity. Because now, everyone is the same. There is no need to get overwhelmed by one’s exceptional height and feel bad about yourself.
Elon Musk worked in a lumber mill in Vancouver
Elon Musk is no overnight success. The bizarre dance move you see him doing in front of his Tesla has a long and struggling history in the backend.
Born on July 28, 1971, to white South African parents in Pretoria, Elon’ had to endure a lot right from his childhood.
“When I was a kid, I would just walk around reading books all the time. I was also the youngest kid in my grade, so I was quite small. I was kind of a smart aleck. It was a recipe for disaster. I’d get called every name in the book and beaten up,” he explained.
“There was a level of violence growing up that wouldn’t be tolerated in any American school. It was like Lord of the Flies.”
Elon found his escape in books, particularly science fiction books. While his curious mind was full of questions, he said that books like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy guided him to find answers.
His childhood readings inspired him to dream big and do things no one did before. But Elon’s father left him no “emerald mine” in South Africa to fuel his dreams. He had to earn his fortune with a lot of struggle.
I mean a LOT.
In a tweet, Elon said that he left South Africa when he was 17 with just a backpack and a suitcase of books. He worked on his mom’s cousin’s farm in Saskatchewan and a lumber mill in Vancouver to survive.
While staying in Canada, he enrolled at Queen’s University in Ontario. Then he got a scholarship and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, USA, in 1992.
Interestingly enough, he earned money for tuition by hosting large parties with his roommate Adeo Ressi.
“When I was in college, I just thought, ‘Well, what are the things that are most likely to affect the future of humanity at a macro level?’ And it just seemed like there would be the internet, sustainable energy, making life multiplanetary, and then genetics and AI. I thought the first three, if you worked on those, they were almost certainly going to be good, and then the last two are a little more dodgy,” Elon said in October 7, 2015.
He had no apartment to sleep at night
In the summer of 1995, Elon (along with his brother Kimbal Musk) started his first company, Zip2, with only one computer he built for himself and a few thousand dollars.
He rented a small office, worked there almost 24/7, and slept on the couch as he couldn’t afford an apartment. Elon had a girlfriend in that period, and — as weird as it may sound — in order to be with him, she would have to sleep in the office as well.
Moreover, he also had over $100K of student debt on his shoulder to pay off.
“I worked my way through college, ending up ~$100k in student debt. I couldn’t even afford a 2nd PC at Zip2, so programmed at night & website only worked during day,” he mentioned in a tweet.
Zip2 turned out to be a success as they sold it to Compaq for roughly $300 million in 1999 and used the money to found X.com, which later became PayPal.
Elon wanted to buy ICBMs from Russia
In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal in a $1.5 billion deal, which earned Elon $180 million. But Elon didn’t stop there. He didn’t go on a vacation with all those money and spend it on partying. Instead, he decided to buy intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) from Russia.
Yes, you’ve read it right.
He flew to Russia to buy three ICBMs to send something to Mars in order to ignite public interest in space exploration.
He said, “I was trying to figure out why we’d not sent any people to Mars. Because the obvious next step after Apollo was to send people to Mars. . . . I discovered actually that NASA had no plans to send people to Mars or even really back to the moon.”
After the failed attempt to buy ICBMs from Russia, Elon realized he could reduce rocket manufacturing and launching costs by starting a company himself.
So he founded his own rocket manufacturing company SpaceX in 2002.
The chance of success for SpaceX and Tesla was less than 10%
Whether you love it or not, Elon — with his incredible talent, hard work, and determination — changed the world in ways that nobody thought possible. And to do that, many a time, he came close to being broke.
He revolutionized the electric car by creating Tesla, making it a billion-dollar automotive and clean energy company. But when he started it in 2003, the chance of success was less than 10%.
SpaceX also made history as a private aerospace company by sending NASA crews to the International Space Station (ISS) on a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket from American soil.
But nothing was easy for Elon. He got extremely close to going bankrupt several times, particularly in 2008 when SpaceX saw its third failure in a row. It was brutal that literally devastated Elon though he knew from the start that there was very little chance for SpaceX to succeed.
“To be frank, in the early days, I thought there was >90% chance that both SpaceX & Tesla would be worth $0. The press & aerospace / automotive industry at the time (correctly) agreed with me,” he wrote in reply to a tweet.
Despite this, he invested every penny he had in these two companies to keep them alive. At that time, he had no house of his own to sleep in.
After working more than 20 hours a day, he slept on a couch in the factory, sometimes on the floor. He said in an interview that he treats each of his companies as his child. And he can do everything to make them survive.
Now, look at Tesla and SpaceX. Didn’t those companies make Elon the wealthiest man on the planet? But he doesn’t care about money. I mean money is not his goal. Instead, his focus is to build a self-sustainable colony on Mars and make humans a multi-planetary species.
“In fact, he (Elon Musk) measures pretty much every major decision by whether or not it brings the day when we have a self-sustainable colony on Mars, sooner or later?” Garrett Reisman, a senior SpaceX executive and former NASA astronaut, said in an interview with Joe Rogan.
Crazy entrepreneur with crazier ideas
Apart from Tesla and SpaceX, Elon is up to so many crazy things.
Being frustrated with LA traffic, he founded The Boring Company and literally dug underground tunnels to solve traffic jams in LA. He is building Gigafactory in different countries to supply lithium-ion batteries worldwide. He is also aiming for global internet coverage using Starlink.
Moreover, he is working on Neuralink, which will allow people to transmit and receive information between their brain and a computer wirelessly. In that case, a chip will be attached to people’s brains.
How crazy is that, right!
Elon Musk is indeed a crazy genius who is super focused on his goals. And he ignores or destroys everything that impedes his way.
Elon is not perfect. So are you.
Elon Musk is no saint.
He has a very complex and weird personality. He is a terrible boss who is highly demanding and knows nothing but work. He goes to the extreme to get what he wants from his employees. And he doesn’t think twice before firing his employees who fail to show dedication.
Elon certainly has many problems.
He talks shit about the pandemic. He fires people who disagree with him. He gives his son a weird name he can’t even pronounce easily. His tweet makes the crypto world upside down. And, of course, his dance move sucks.
But despite all this, you cannot hate him. No way. There can be room for constructive criticism. But I don’t see any room for hatred. Because he made his own fortune overcoming mountainous struggles.
You cannot hate a self-made billionaire for not saving the world from hunger or climate change. It’s not his job. Likewise, you cannot blame a man for shooting his own rockets to Mars. Well, you might call him crazy or childish. But you cannot throw hatred toward him.
Before doing that, look at the mirror first. What have you done to save the world? How many hungry people are getting your compassion and empathy? What have you done to fight climate change?
Before hating Elon for what he does, elect the government that speaks for climate change, stops wars, and feeds the hungry. Play your part first, then dare to cut the tall poppies to satisfy your ego.
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