The making of Elon Musk: becoming the most influential person in history

Elon Musk is a man with several missions. Here, Jack Delosa explains how he is taking on the aerospace industry, the aviation giants, the energy utilities, the oil companies and the car giants of the auto industry . . . and winning.

Last week, Musk’s Model 3 Tesla was unveiled. The mass-market electric car has pre-sold more than 325,000 units, set to be delivered in the next two years. These numbers mean the company has implied future sales of $14 billion making it the largest one-week product launch of all time.

Tesla, however, being a company driven by a larger purpose has said on its website, “Most importantly, we are taking a huge step towards a better future by accelerating the transition to sustainable transportation.”

In the same week, SpaceX – Musk’s commercial space exploration company – successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket into orbit to deliver a payload to the International Space Station, and managed to bring the rocket back to earth and for the first time in history, land safely on a drone ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Although this isn’t the first time SpaceX has successfully returned a rocket to earth after sending it to space, it is the first time it has successfully landed at sea. Landing at sea is desirable because a rocket returning at 5,000mph from lunar orbit means that if something goes wrong, the landing coordinates can change considerably – somewhere like the Atlantic offers a greater safety margin.

This feat puts SpaceX one step closer to its mission of making humanity multi-planetary – Musk has us landing on Mars within the next 15 years.

As an entrepreneur, Musk has just had the most successful week of his life, but what has driven this billionaire inventor to get to the point where he is gradually becoming the most influential person in history?

When Musk was in college in 1995, he asked himself a question: ‘What do I want to dedicate my life’s work to?’

He decided that the overall vision he held for his life was ‘to enable the future of humanity’. As he explained to Ashlee Vance, who years later was writing a biography on him with his cooperation in 2015, ‘Maybe I read too many comics as a kid. In comics, it always seems like they’re trying to save the world. It seemed like one should try to make the world a better place because the inverse makes no sense. The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment.’

Musk set about researching the key ways that he might influence the future of humanity and came up with: the internet (still in its infancy in 1995); sustainable energy; space travel; rewriting the human genetic code; and artificial intelligence (AI).

He questioned whether rewriting the human genetic code and AI would have a beneficial or detrimental effect on humanity, and therefore decided to base his life’s work on the first three. His vision to enable the future of humanity now had three missions that would act as pathways for him to walk to achieve his purpose.

Musk is an entrepreneur who is driven by a purpose – a vision that extends beyond himself.

This vision breaks down into different missions – the different routes Musk is taking to achieve his vision. If the vision is the summit of the mountain, the missions represent the different pathways he is walking to get there. It is through accomplishing the mission that he actualises the vision.

Musk decided the internet would be his first mission. He would later tell Sal Khan in an interview for the Khan Academy in 2013, ‘It seemed like I could either do a Ph.D. and watch the internet happen or I could participate and help build it in some fashion.’

In 1995, he founded an internet start-up company called Zip2 with his brother, Kimbal. Zip2 would grow into an online map that listed local businesses in the area, and Musk was able to sign up major newspapers such as The New York Times, who could use the platform to advertise local businesses such as restaurants and gyms to their online readers. We are very familiar with this concept today.

However, back then was the first time anybody had created a digital map and combined it with listings usually found in the yellow pages.

The brothers would get their internet connection by running a cable through a hole in the floor and tapping into the internet service provider located on the floor below them. With absolutely no money, Elon and Kimbal would literally live out of their tiny office, working there during the day and sleeping there at night.

The company brought on several investors, who deemed a young Musk too inexperienced to be its CEO. Reluctantly, he handed over the day-to-day management to someone else. Four years later, Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options. At the time, Musk owned seven per cent of the company and made $22 million from the sale.

After the sale of Zip2, Musk immediately invested $10 million into his second start-up, X.com. X.com was another first of its kind, enabling people to transfer money over the internet.

Rather than customers sending a cheque to the vendor and waiting for it to clear – which could take weeks – X.com made immediate payments a reality by taking the world of financial payments online. ‘Money is really just an entry in a database. It’s low bandwidth so it seemed like something that should really lend itself to innovation,’ Musk would tell Bloomberg Business in 2014.

One year after launch, X.com would merge with another company called Confinity to create PayPal – which would go on to become the leading payment system in the world. In 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion. As the largest shareholder, at 11.7%, Musk made $180 million from the sale.

Mission one complete.

Musk now revisited the dream he had in college. He had built two innovative internet companies and felt that perhaps it was time to move on to his other missions in life: space travel and sustainable energy. Like many tech entrepreneurs, Musk had laid his foundations in the internet industry. However, it was what he did next that no one saw coming and today has the whole world watching.

Again without pausing, in 2002 Musk founded SpaceX, ‘to enable people to live on other planets’.

Musk wants to inhabit Mars and believes he can achieve this in the not-so-distant-future. His view is that eventually there will be an extinction event on planet Earth, and at that moment, it will be important for humanity to be multi-planetary.

Having a self-sufficient civilisation on Mars ensures the survival of human consciousness. Therefore, this mission clearly falls within Musk’s vision of enabling the future of humanity.

Musk travelled to Russia three times in an attempt to buy a second-hand rocket. After several negotiations with the Russians failed, he decided that the biggest challenge of starting a rocket company was not in fact the price of existing rockets but rather that there had been no innovation in rocket engineering in 60 years.