How hardships forged Elon Musk’s successes

Originally published at https://evannex.com on August 1, 2022.

Successful entrepreneur and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become well-known for his successes, but he wasn’t always so fortunate. Though he didn’t exactly come from , Musk worked his way up the business ladder with a combination of impressive know-how and hard-earned experience — and he wouldn’t be where he is today without some of his past failures.

Above: Elon Musk at Tesla’s Battery Day event. Photo: Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia Commons

Musk’s successes have not come easily, and The Epoch Times recently detailed how some of his past hardships have shaped his modern successes. He’s had his fingerprints on some of the internet’s earliest and most prominent businesses, like Paypal, and today he’s got his hands full with Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company and Neuralink.

Musk considered himself a bookworm as a child and has revealed that he has Asperger’s. Biographer Ashlee Vance notes that he was bullied by his peers for many years, even being beaten to the point of unconsciousness. Musk has also been outspoken about his estranged father Errol’s mistreatment of him and his brother Kimbal. Still, his thirst for knowledge and his intellectual tendencies would ultimately go on to define his future.

Early on, Musk was a young video game enthusiast-turned-technology entrepreneur. When he was 12, he built his own game, called Blastar. He later sold Blastar to the publication PC and Office Technology for $500. His studies eventually led him to a pair of B.S. degrees in physics and economics. After being admitted into Stanford for a Ph.D. in energy physics, Musk dropped out after just two days to focus on internet startups.

Musk applied to the tech company Netscape, known for its browser Navigator, and never heard back. In this time, however, he went on to found the company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal, later selling it for $307 million to Compaq in 1999. His sale resulted in a personal gain of $22 million, and while he could have stopped there, he continued. At this time, Musk built his company X.com — now known as Paypal, a company that now has a market capitalization of $99 billion.

After Paypal, Musk founded SpaceX and Tesla which would become the foundations of his wealth today. Still, Tesla has faced bankruptcy multiple times throughout its history, and before its success heading into the 2020s, Musk was pouring all of his money into the automaker.

Without his efforts, it’s tough to say if the world would be in a position to move away from gas vehicles. It’s a necessary move, to be sure, and while it wasn’t an easy road, Musk has led the world into this new era of zero-emission vehicles and earned his spot as the world’s richest person.

Originally published at https://evannex.com on August 1, 2022.