Elon Musk: How I Became The Real 'Iron Man'

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk puts his money where his mouth is. I personally guarantee that value by backing that guarantee with all my assets. Your greatest asset is your ability to take this big dream and make other people believe it's true. The great determined engineers. Dreams transformed three industries. I just wish it through whatever entity is listening, please look at this launch and here's an immigrant from South Africa coming to America to save, you know, NASA, that whole rocket thing they do with the space shuttle. I have a better way to do it. The best way meant risking everything we have, maybe about a week's worth of cash in the bank or less.

I have to choose, then take all the capital I had left from the sale of PayPal to eBay and invest it in Tesla. or Tesla would die, others were not so willing to take a chance on him or his companies. You invested 90 billion dollars, like 50 years, in solar and wind energy at Sun, Solyndra, Fisker and Tesla come into one, I mean I had a friend who said you don't just pick the winners and losers, you pick the losers , it is highly unlikely that Tesla's investment will ever have repaid taxpayers. Electric vehicles aren't

real

ly possible in a way that would be effective for most consumers, but their bets paid off.

Not only did we pay the principal, we paid it with interest and turbo pain, so ultimately the American taxpayer made a profit of over $20 million on this loan. Elon Musk has even bigger dreams that could take him further than anyone else. otherwise you know one must go one step further, the earth is not big enough, SpaceX literally wants to go to Mars and lost too much. I would

real

ly love to go to Mars and that's the rush role of SpaceX when I was a little kid. I'm really afraid of the dog, but then I understood well, well, dark only really means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength of 400 to 700 nanometers.

It's hard to believe that entrepreneur Elon Musk was ever afraid of something Elon sent. Darkness is simply the absence of light so I thought well, it's really silly to be afraid of the lack of photons so I wasn't afraid of falling anymore after that once one of the kids said look at the moon, it's a billion away. miles away and he said, well, no, it's actually less than two hundred and fifty thousand miles away and they said Iranian businessman Elon Musk has spent his life proving people wrong by growing up in South Africa. Musk was the oldest of three brothers and started school a year early.

His father was an engineer. his mother Mae was a model and a nutritionist, he was the youngest, he was about two days old and the shortest, and then he was a bright boy and people didn't like him, so I was a little bookworm, a child and probably a little smart. Aleck, so this is a recipe for disaster, not that he told me much about it, he was picked on quite a bit so he just read and read a lot of books and tried to stay out of people's way during school, so his social life was a lot. less than my other two children and that's the typical nerd.

I read all the comics I could buy or that the bookstore let me read before kicking me out. I read everything I could get my hands on from the time I woke up until I went to At one point, I fell asleep. I really ran out of books, instead of it being an encyclopedia and he has a photographic memory so he could remember everything every time he had a question. My daughter Tosca would say that he is a genius boy. His brother Kimball Musk when Louis was ten years old. IBM evaluated him and it was discovered that he had one of the highest aptitudes they had ever seen: full computer programming.

I tried to take some computer classes, but I was way ahead of the professor, so he didn't help me much, so I watched. She was making a space game called Blastaar Musk and she was already thinking like an entrepreneur figured out how to sell her game. I realized she was 12 years old. We decided we were going to open an arcade here near our high school. We were very interested in video games. We thought it was like that. It's going to be a huge success, we got a lease for a building, we got the game supplier to deliver the equipment to us and all we had to do in the end was get the city to approve what we were doing, but an adult had than submit an application. for a permit from the city and they hadn't told their parents what they were doing, but of course they told us we weren't going to open a Max Chaff arcade.

Caen is a technology and business journalist who has profiled Elon Musk several times. The most surprising thing about his childhood is his escape from South Africa. I remember thinking and saying that America is where we are great. Things are more possible than in any other country in the world. It's a little cliche, but it's true. The United States is the land of opportunity. by moving

musk

would also avoid compulsory service in the South African army growing up in apartheid South Africa was quite surreal, I mean we didn't support that government, we didn't believe in it, so the idea of ​​going into military service was really part of the question I told my parents I was going to Canada and they tried to convince me not to leave and he flew away and I thought wow he's so independent of course as soon as he lands he calls me and says what do I do now ? except the water bus which is safe from Montreal to Vancouver and that allowed me to see Canada at least from the highway.

He worked odd jobs around the country before settling at Queens College in Toronto. When I went to college, he rarely went to class. He just read. the textbook and then take the exams the biggest pills college could have for dating girls my age I actually met my first wife her parents earned a degree in engineering and business from the University of Pennsylvania and a scholarship to go to Stanford Silicon Valley was The Promised Land I really wanted to go where the really exciting advancements were happening. Elon had the ability to look at the world. This is a real problem that will happen in 20 years.

He looked around and saw the world. Things weren't changing at Stanford. I didn't even go to class. I called the director of the department and told him that I would like to try to sell this Internet company, if it probably would not succeed, so when it fails I want to make sure. that the techniques still come back, my kids do fun things and I never worry too much about them because you know, if no one wanted to drop out of college, they could always come back. My brother was in Canada at the time and I said, look, I think we should try to create an Internet company, so he came and joined me.

He had, you know, $2,000, no friends, barely enough money for an apartment. I think he told me that he was showering in the gym because they didn't have a shower. We lived a few times where there were couches during the day and then they turned into beds at night. Steve Jurvetson is a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. I met Elan and Kimball Musk, his brother, in the mid-90s, when they first set foot. California, I think they had been here for about a week and were launching a new company called zip to Silicon Valley in the mid 90's, in the late 90's there was a gold rush, people flocked to the region looking for riches to succeed on the Internet.

Companies must come up with an idea to bring newspapers into the digital age. He took a CD-ROM with yellow pages, some mapping software, wrote a little code and put it all together to create the first online city listings. More than a salesman, I still had my basic programming skills. I was able to write the software needed for the first company. Now, when Yuan was starting to take into account that the Internet was only a couple of years old, most local companies. They weren't on the Internet the same way you find a local business, if you open the Yellow Pages, they thought it was the media campaigns, newspapers are going to need help getting online and creating a lot of features on their websites.

Someone literally launched the Yellow Pages. book with us and tell us if you think you'll ever replace this and we get the guy who's crazy because not only were we going to replace this but that's not where it ended up go on from there it wasn't long before media companies around the country We registered and were able to get the New York Times company Hearst Knight-Ridder and other companies as investors and clients. In 1999, Compaq's AltaVista division purchased zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options. Musk was only 28 years old. I hope he's crazy. Well, would anyone pay such a large amount of money for this small business we have?

It actually turned out really well for them too, so there was a lot more to it than I did. He did it when the boy solved it: it was the most exciting day, we couldn't believe it because in the world of the Internet you don't know if you will make a million or die tomorrow, in February 1999, Elon Musk sold his first company at the age of 28. joined the ranks of Silicon Valley millionaires since it was acquired by Compaq for just over two million dollars and I made a profit of about 21 or 22 million dollars as a result of which was a phenomenal amount of money for me .

It was obviously a financial windfall, it was super fun to go out and buy some toys, one of your first things to do is go out and buy a big sports car. He comes from a family that really likes vehicle racing and got one of the highest. high performance cars that money could buy at the time was a McLaren f1 and I proceeded to enjoy it in the Bay Area, let's just say there are a number of adventures and news respectful of driving it. I'm sure it felt wonderful to have all of this. money and have people recognizing success.

I think he was also frustrated that this company hadn't become as big as he wanted to be, it hadn't changed the world, it had just slightly altered the course of the newspaper's history, which I think. "I think from their point of view it's an insignificant achievement, so I certainly have the option at that point to retire and you know, buy an island somewhere and drink mai-tais, but it wasn't of any interest to me at all." "It really was." It wasn't a choice that we weren't going to do anything, it was really what we were going to do next, any particular landscape, they were really just stepping stones.

The goal in making my second area company was to create something that would have a profound effect. and it seems to me that the financial sector hadn't seen much innovation on the internet and money is really just an entry in a database and that's why it has low bandwidth, it seems like something that should lend itself to innovation, he was very rich. I'm just talking about more money than most people could dream of and it took almost no time between that sale and the start of the company that

became

PayPal. Musk's new company created something we take for granted today: it changed the way the world buys things such as money. transferred from one person to another at the time transactions were very slow people had to mail checks to each other so it could take weeks to complete a single transaction with your windfall from the zip sale it quickly turned around and founded XCOM to make electronic cash transfer possible, but his new company clashed with a rival mobile payments company called Finity and they were really competing with each other and the real enemy at the end of the day was eBay.

We combine our efforts to compete effectively. eBay's integrated system they called the new company PayPal when they looked at PayPal that their goal was not to create a place where person-to-person payments could be made, their goal was to transform the financial industry and they were able to become the leading payment system in the world and they finally threw in the towel and acquired PayPal in early 2002. Musk and his partners sold PayPal for $1.5 billion. Musk was the largest shareholder and left with 180 million. He was 30 years old. I could probably abort an island chain, but that big, no it's not, it's just not of much interest to me.

The islands were not of interest, but outer space was. It's simply a much more exciting inspiring future for those who are exploring the stars rather than the future. where we are forever confined to Earth I was thinking, well, I wonder when we're going to go to Mars, you know, when is it, when is it naphthenic, go to Mars and I went to the NASA website and there was no plan to go to Mars nor any plan. To really take the next step in space exploration, he was saying that he wants to go and allow human civilization to leave planet Earth.

I said this is as big a vision as you can imagine and it will require funds and he has enough funds to do it, so he will do it. Musk had the outrageous idea that private enterprise could revitalize space travel, and in June 2002 he founded Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. Elon was the sole financier ofthe company during these first years. Another incredibly risky move is to say that no one on the planet believes this idea is bankable. I'm going to finance it all myself to the tune of almost a hundred million dollars, which was the majority of his net worth at the time, in a dream to take on. the military-industrial complex now here is an immigrant from South Africa who comes to the United States to say: you know NASA, that whole rocket thing you do with the space shuttle.

I have a better way. In fact, I traveled to Russia three times. Look, buy a refurbished ICBM without the nuke. and Kim's conclusion that what was really holding us back from making much more progress in space was actually that rockets hadn't evolved since the '60s, so the trick is not figuring out how to get to orbit, but figuring out how to do it. get to orbit at low cost, so I had to come up with low cost ways to produce engines, the primary structure, the electronics for the launch operation, as well as run the company with very little overhead and some inventions in all those areas, It is what has brought us to approximately three to a fourfold improvement over the cost of other rockets in the United States.

What SpaceX has been very successful at is taking basically off-the-shelf technology that was developed by NASA 50 years ago and simplifying it that way, it's kind of Henry. Space Ford because Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile, he simply figured out how to make the automobile commercially viable. Musk was more than just a businessman. If you ask Yuan how he managed to teach himself rocket science, he will simply stare. I look at you very seriously and just say quietly read many books Thirty-two-year-old Elon Musk had his next big idea on his family's annual visit to Burning Man, the desert of the counterculture that was happening, although still He was fascinated by rockets and fast cars, he wanted to find a way to end the Earth's addiction to fossil fuels.

I was one of those who had the idea to enter the field of solar energy to Lyndon and Peter I of my cousins, he basically passed this idea on to his cousins ​​and said, if you want to start this, I will. It will finance you and it will be your company, but I will be the president and they say it is fine and it works almost perfectly. What they have discovered is that if you do a hundred things, you do ten percent better in the area of ​​solar energy. installing cells for homeowners, can dramatically consolidate an industry that is currently a bunch of mom-and-pop shops, so at Solar City, instead they said, what if there's no money to be made, you want solar cells, We will simply put them in, you don't pay. a penny, it's like leasing a car, but even better, Solar City started in five western states and soon

became

the largest solar service provider in the US. solar cells continue, solar city only growing by In the end, at least that's the fascinating business. model were in the long term they could become the largest energy generator in the United States all of this, but renewable energy was just one part of a much larger goal Musk had a more ambitious plan for a sustainable future he had the idea that he wanted making cars electric help humanity move away from fossil fuels and therefore cities about creating sustainable energy, while Tesla's sustainable energy consumption in April 2004 Musk helped launch Tesla with six, three million dollars of their own money, it was the first auto industry startup in decades and the only one born in Silicon Valley and it's really quite simple, you know, make a high-priced car with low volume because that's essentially the only thing we can afford to do and then step 2 is a mid-priced car with mid-volume since f3 is a low-priced car at high volumes Tesla's plan to introduce a high-end, high-performance product to attract first to the outliers and then make an affordable car for the masses teslascope founder and first CEO Martin Eberhard we hope to change the way people think about electric cars with this car and we hope to open up the market to sell others electric cars, but we also know that if you start by saying, let's first change human nature and make everyone drive small, crappy cars that don't work, so instead let's build a car that people want to drive, let's build a car that is attractive, desirable and beautiful and let's convince people that driving an electric car is not a compromise, your idea is to get in, put it in a high-end car and break the mold of what electric car war was exciting this will no longer be a golf cart this will be a Ferrari any cop is watching when we first saw Tesla they had a good explanation of how they get to market without having to spend an exorbitant amount of money how they would create a brand and the object of desire and consumers and is part of the united history, talked about the intelligence of Silicon Valley and was able to show Detroit how to do something that Detroit didn't think was possible: its batteries, its Drive electronics, it's electric. engines those are skills that are present in Silicon Valley and our president Detroit Tesla's revolutionary technology for the Roadster began with a computer battery as a power source for the car JB Straubel Tesla's chief technology officer was the lead designer of the powertrain electric for the first time It was possible to drive over 200 miles and have performance directly comparable to what a gasoline car could do and Tesla was the first company to take those principles and put them into practice and test it.

California Governor Schwarzenegger came out in favor of roadsters. Presentation party in 2006, proof of this, it's hot. He bought one, as did Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney, but he could. He must sell his idea to regular customers. At that time there was very little activity in the automotive industry with electric vehicles that we were into. age of the large SUV, so it was a little unusual to hear about this company in California planning to come to market with a high-end all-electric sports car. We were passionate about trying to make sure this car was going to work. it just throws down the gauntlet on what the technology could do and really shows the world that electric vehicles you know can be incredibly fast and can have incredibly long range; there was a kind of sense of adventure, you know, doing these things for the first time and doing it in a very simple way, you know, we made some of the first battery packs in my garage in Menlo Park before we could rent a real office, The big problem for Tesla, as with all electric cars, has been the cost of the batteries. and how long they last Eric Noble is president of Car Lab, an automotive consulting firm that evaluates new cars and trucks.

American consumers are very ready for battery electric vehicles. Unfortunately, battery electric vehicles are not ready for American consumers. Tesla's early results seemed to support. This gloomy forecast when we started, the idea was simple and obviously, in retrospect, quite naive: make use of some technology that we developed ourselves, but also some technology that would license AC propulsion, put it together and create an electric sports car . That would be compelling, so let's see where it fell apart. It fell apart when the teenager told Musk that the projected cost had skyrocketed from $65,000 to $140,000 as problems mounted. Musk faced a life or death decision at Tesla that he would have to choose. between investing his paypal or letting his new company collapse and Elon was looking at this and saying the dream is still there, but oh my god, what do I have?

Gotta get this under control by 2007. Tesla was running out of money fast, no. one wanted to step up to save the unproven automotive startup, Elon Musk had to take the leap alone and make some pretty dramatic changes, essentially recapitalizing the business and investing about twice what we originally expected, what we really expected as outer limit, basically Tesla came to this. point where they only had enough money in the bank for a couple of months and there was no one around who was willing to put up more money. I took all my reserve capital and invested in Tesla, which was very scary because you know it would actually be quite sad that the fruits of my labor with Subduer and PayPal are worth nothing, but there was no doubt in my mind that I would do it. because he tells me that he was too important until he dies.

I am available 24/7 just to help resolve. Well, he called me at 3:00 a.m. m. on Sunday morning. I don't care, we had to go in and make some really difficult decisions about personnel changes and we even had to dedicate their time to the company. I want, I want, I want. named names so if someone is always in the hot seat and is always the root cause of problems, it will not be a positive organization in the long run, it is not okay to be unhappy and be part of this company and if someone can't be happy, what?

TRUE? Musk and his board of directors. he replaced Martin Eberhard, one of the co-founders who had been running Tesla and I think we really exceeded the level that Everhart could handle and they are incredibly evident in 2007, we were either going to have to close the company or you know. It wasn't having to take over as CEO, it was actually a process of building a company, in addition to building a car. You know a lot of people who were a great fit for a company when it was extremely small and didn't end up like you. I also know how to fit in when I was older.

Everhard did not remain silent; he sued Musk for defamation, slander, and breach of contract. I think I was the scapegoat to take the blame for programs that weren't executed well. I must resolve disputes through mediation, but. His company was in serious financial trouble in September 2007. Musk flew to Germany with a plan to raise extra money by forging an alliance with Daimler Mercedes. It is the company that invented the automobile with an internal combustion engine. The manufacturer of Mercedes Smart and its support is very great. a lot of weight, so it was a very important moment. He had to convince the company that Tesla could supply battery packs for his cars.

They were skeptical. Really the key was to demonstrate hardware that worked. You know, if they can't touch it. They can't drive it, it's not particularly real, he pressured his team to retrofit a Daimler smart car with Tesla's electric motor, but first they had to find one, the Challenger. Converting a smart card to electric was doubly difficult because we couldn't find a smart car. small cone card for sale in the United States we had to send someone to Mexico to buy a smart car bring-bring half to the US and then the smoke is very small so we had to install a motor like the charger electronics and everything that was in the patrol car, the challenge was enormous: replace the smart car's gasoline engine with a Tesla transmission and a battery installed in the small space under the hood and do it all in less than 4 weeks , we didn't have much time.

We knew it from the beginning and we prepared almost for battle and, you know, they set up a war room in the workshop, they worked 24 hours a day stealing maps in the factory until the deadline, the Daimler executives arrived and they were convinced that it was like that. It made any sense to work with an American car company, much less a small American car company in Silicon Valley, while waiting for Daimler's decision, he should hire one of the world's leading car designers to help him create his next project, a modern and sexy family sedan that she originally called Model S with Model S.

I thought, well, let's have Kerry Kiska, who had a design studio, do the styling. We paid her a good sum of money to do it. Interestingly, the designs she worked on and came up with. We were terrible and what he didn't tell us was that he was actually working at a competing car company. Tesla officials claimed that perhaps Henrik had come to find out what Tesla was doing right all along; he was planning to form his own company. vehicle itself we were pretty upset with him for basically taking what were at the time the original specifications for the Model S and then going to buy a business plan to create that same car.

Tesla sued him, he sued Tesla, and there was all sorts of, you know, infighting. Henrik Fisker didn't give an interview to Bloomberg, but he told us that I think there's enough room in the market for several new car companies pursuing a new type of electrified propulsion system with different philosophies. In November 2008, the courtfailed on Fiskars. favor, it was a setback for Musk, who was also going through a difficult time personally after eight years of marriage and five children. Elon and Justine Musk divorced. I got divorced, my personal life was in chaos, and on top of that, I was attacked by some in the media, my ex-wife, every bad thing you can imagine, there was more bad news when her audacious space transportation company, SpaceX, again he didn't manage to get a rocket in support, the First Lord didn't get very far, he went up for about a minute and then that was it. there was an engine fire and that was it, the second flight actually made it into space, but not too openly, and then on flight 3, we didn't make it all the way to orbit, he started saying: I have enough money for three attempts at He put in a hundred million dollars of his own money and sort of hinted that the idea that after three he wouldn't make it, it would be over SpaceX would die, he should burn the 100 million that he had invested in SpaceX now that it was there.

On his way back to the drawing board, three days after the failure, he announced as the first one who knew what was wrong, he announced that they had raised money to finance a fourth launch and that the fourth launch would happen in a matter of months, which in the rocket industry. It was a crazy announcement, we were able to sell the palms and then just as we solved those problems where you ran into the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, it has been one of the darkest days on Wall Street and in the stock markets of recent history. the biggest drop since 9/11 the dow fell more than 500 points this is what financial armageddon looks like red screams screaming sell sell sell it was a week that shook wall street and indeed the world and a realization of that the economy may still be heading into a deeper recession as 2008 drew to a close Elon Musk faced the worst crisis of his career his three companies appear to be in free fall the worst point was probably just the weekend before Christmas of 2008 when the economic tsunami hit and things changed Worse, if it wasn't necessary, we had to shut it down and just figure out how to get through this stock market period and not go bankrupt.

General Motors shares fell to a more than 20-year low after Goldman cut the automakers. qualification to sell in a worsening sales outlook that was difficult, obviously it was an economic period that swore the bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler and there we were a young company selling a very, very optional car, I mean, it was really the that people wouldn't do. They don't need a $100,000 sports car and they certainly wouldn't want one to get bad reviews. The popular BBC show Top Gear took the Tesla Roadster for a test drive in December 2008, this car was really shaping up to be something wonderful, although Tesla says it will go 200 miles, we estimate that on our track it would run out after just 55 miles and, if it runs out, it's not a quick job to charge it again, the combative CEO charged that the incident was fake. and said he had proof that the Roadster had not run out of power sued the BBC to block reruns of the program the case was later dismissed but things would get even more difficult the founder of his energy company Solar City the bank that had backed their leases backed out of the deal, I certainly didn't anticipate that we would have the worst economic climate since the Great Depression and one that was disproportionately bad for automobiles, I mean, General Motors went bankrupt, I mean General General Motors, already You know, Musk was in the fight for his In our lifetime we had maybe about a week of cash in the bank, or less, and there was very little time left in the year to figure these things out, I mean, there was like two or three business days left. in the year.

I never thought that it was hot, it was possible that I would have a nervous breakdown, but if it were possible for me to have a good rest there, that would be as good as that will happen when Eden is going through his sad period. I was so sad I felt. Like I have a hole in my heart and there's nothing you can do, it just hurts so much and I just didn't see it coming out of it, I was so sad and the next thing I got was this call saying wow, you've done it! wonderful woman, the only bright spot was meeting Talulah Riley, a British actress who had never heard of Tesla SpaceX or Elon Musk, whom they married in 2010.

She could be some sort of unlucky engineer who had walked into a club London and he seemed so helpless he was just sitting in the corner on his Blackberry Cific, he was really out of place and sad, I was, you know, trying to be really sweet to him and instead of humoring him saying oh yeah, when I was gay, this is my rocket and this is my Musk. Personal life was improving and SpaceX's future was finally taking off. The fourth attempt to launch Falcon 1 was a great success and three months later NASA rewarded SpaceX with a $1.6 billion contract to resupply the International Space Station, but Musk didn't have time.

To celebrate Tesla being on the verge of financial disaster, I had to make a decision: take all the capital I had left from the sale of PayPal to eBay and invest it in Tesla or Tesla would die, the company is really shaky. on the brink of failure and there's a board meeting at the end of 2008 where they're discussing what's going to happen and Elon just says, well, I'm going to raise a $40 million round to keep the company running and the members The board members wonder how I'm going to do that and he says, I'm going to put it all on myself and that incredible confidence and bravado catalyzed a change in people's opinion and we and everyone else around the table thought, oh God. mine, do we want to be part of this?

Let's get as much of this investment as possible. He saved the company in its darkest hour with an act of heroism that is difficult to describe. There's nothing like spending your last remaining dollar on a project you believe in. Fortunately, they were able to do it in one good week. but it definitely took its toll from a mental strain standpoint. The disabled man's game just burned out some circuits right after their emergency cash infusion came word that they desperately needed a $40 million deal with Daimler for smart car batteries. Daimler then added 50 million for 10% of the company decided not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Musk was focused on bringing his family car to life, so I said, look, we really need to have our own design studio and that's when I hired Host Home Fronts to design the green Model S. The agenda was irresistible to Van Holt, a legendary figure in automobile design who had already revolutionized the look of the WGM and Mazda. He is completely passionate about ridding the world of this addiction to fossil fuels and that was something he talked about from the very first sentence first conversation we had with a new team must completely revamp the look of the Model S a sedan doesn't have to be a brick It doesn't have to be a big block-shaped car, we wanted to bring this kind of passion and feeling that we are returning to this market, the architecture of the monoliths is very similar to the escape word, the floor of the vehicle is the battery pack and the motors between the rear wheels and everything above is the basis of opportunity.

In March 2009, Musk presented the prototype of the model. The S could seat seven passengers and as much luggage as a pickup truck, but to build it he knew he needed a portion of the U.S. government's new $7.5 billion loan program to support alternative energy vehicles and thus the Model S was truly successful. It was important that the loan come through government funding was controversial. New York Times writer Randy Stross called the program the rescue of ultra-high net worth people who invested in Tesla Motors. Musk hit back. Randy Cross is a huge jerk and an idiot, okay, it wasn't a bailout, but the Obama administration agreed to lend Tesla four hundred and sixty-five million dollars to mass produce the Model S, a move that astonished many in the industry; it is highly unlikely that Tesla's investment has ever returned. for the taxpayers, electric vehicles are not really possible in a way that will be effective for most consumers, but this is just the religion of electric vehicles and, like Jonestown, that religion will come to an end, there are very people sure that they want Tesla to fail because it is an attack on the conventional automobile industry, of course, the biggest impact that test will have will not be the cause we do ourselves, but the fact that we demonstrate that attractive electric cars can be made that the people really want to buy.

The government loan came with a challenging condition to get the money. First he had to find a place to build his electric car. Tesla spent $300 million since 2003. Elon Musk needed to put his models into production quickly. But, as he took risks, he took another giant gamble by purchasing a plant. in Fremont California abandoned by Toyota The Dream Factory location where Tesla was always the new factory that was 50 percent of the Toyota factory sent to the General Motors factory is one of the largest car plants in the world is a great location near Tesla headquarters the reality is for very little money, Toyota took a ton off their books from an industry perspective, it seemed incredibly smart on Toyota's part and incredibly naive on Tesla's part, car factories are great pieces of capital invested to remodel a factory, a tremendous incremental investment is needed, the acquisition was released. government funds to start production even though Tesla had turned a profit only once since his Musk foundation took his company public in June 2010, the smartest money in the world is betting on Tesla, not everyone was so optimistic about the company's future Tesla shares. voted by Wall Street as least likely to succeed, you don't want in this stock, you don't want to, you shouldn't even write the damn thing that there hasn't been an IPO of a car company in the United States since Henry Ford and so. caught people's attention, investors ignored the skeptics.

Tesla raised $226 million in its initial public offering. Now you should have the capital to get the ball rolling with the Model S. You just saw on his face this kind of righteous relationship and this feeling that all this suffering is worth it. It's anger and it's real now In 2010, after winning the $1.6 billion NASA contract, SpaceX became the first private company to successfully launch and return a spacecraft from orbit, making SpaceX the first purely commercial development from scratch to reach orbit, the first successful launch. At SpaceX I just wish that, through all the entities that are listening, you bless this launch and two years later, in May 2012, it made history as the first private company to send a payload to the International Space Station back to Earth.

Earth in the long term. The long-awaited launch of Tesla's new sedan was also taking its time. The Model S began rolling off the production line, although questions remained about range and service. Not everyone was applauding at a 2012 presidential debate. Republican candidate Mitt Romney criticized President Obama for the administration. Loan to Tesla that groups Tesla with other financially troubled green companies. You invest 90 billion dollars, that is, 50 years of forays into solar and wind energy to absorb them. Solyndra, Fisker and Tesla, and you enter one. I mean, I added a friend who said no. He didn't just pick the winners and losers, he picked the losers, but Tesla was not a loser in the eyes of the auto industry.

The Model S was the first electric sedan to win the motoring trends. Car of the year. Musk didn't have much time to celebrate some. Months later, the New York Times published a devastating review of the Model S, reporting that the battery had died during its test drive from Washington to Boston, and publishing an image that no CEO would want there to be a sad photo of a car owner. on a platform as if that was the only possible outcome for such a push and that is simply not true. Musk went on the offensive unless people said, "Oh, you know, it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, don't fight the New York Times." and it's as if the battle between the reporter and the renegade CEO ended when the New York Times' public editor concluded that the report was inaccurate but not done in bad faith, but the story didn't affect its results.

Remember that losing comment from a presidential candidate about the $465 million government loan it really feels good to have paid back the American taxpayer that's really what's important here and we not only pay the principal but we pay it withinterest and and bonus payment and, ultimately, the American taxpayer made a profit of more than 20 million dollars with this Tesla paid off the loan nine years ahead of schedule, never lacking in optimism or confidence. Musk made a surprising promise for the nearly $70,000 car we guaranteed. The value of the Model S will not be less than that of a Mercedes S-Class after three years.

I personally guarantee that value and back that guarantee with all my assets, not just Tesla, they have guaranteed free charging for life. of the car and has expanded the charging system throughout the country, you will be able to travel from Los Angeles to New York simply by using the Tesla Supercharger network and the Supercharger system is free, so not only is it free now, it is free for always, that's the Tesla's commitment its commitment to customers has paid off since its initial public offering Tesla shares rose more than fivefold. SpaceX and Solar City were also making profits and this is the largest and most important customer, but almost three-quarters of our customers are commercial.

SpaceX says it has more than $4 billion in revenue under contract, but of all its ventures perhaps the most successful was the one addressing the world's energy need. Solar City is now the largest provider of solar services in the US and has more than quadrupled in value since its initial public offering in December 2012. Solar City has been very, very impressive. I mean, there are thousands of people with panels on their ceilings and a lot of big offices. I think eBay has city solar panels, so it's having a very big and visible impact on the world. He really wants to change the world and in my vision of the future we will have clean, renewable energy sources powering the grid and all our vehicles will run.

This is really the future. It is something wonderful. The stories about Iran have a confidence in himself that is simply impressive, and it is especially impressive when you think about the things he is confident in: the idea that humanity will reach Mars, that not only will humanity reach Mars, but that he , during his lifetime, Elon Musk will obtain. a Mars Crusader or a shrewd businessman named one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine risk-taking multitasking CEOs estimated their net worth at $6 billion in June 2013 divorced for the second time

musk

divide his time between his five children his businesses and thinking about the future is just meaningful really the question is are all the things I'm working on really going to matter or have the potential to really matter