Life of Relentless Sacrifice
Success has come at a tremendous personal cost for Elon Musk. Looking back on his demanding work schedule of up to 22 hours a day, often sleeping in the factory, Musk admits, “No one should work this hard.” Acknowledging the toll it takes, he says, “It hurts my brain and my heart,” but for Musk, this was the price of survival. “If I didn’t do it, there was a good chance I would die.”
A Choice Between Life and Death for His Companies
Elon Musk went through many close calls to determine the fate of one of his companies. In 2008, with $30 million in the bank, he had to decide whether to save one and let the other go or risk losing both by cutting his resources in half to try and save both. I like to think of companies as children,” he said. “Once you’ve got the company, you have to feed it and nurse it, even if it ruins you.” The pressure to succeed was crushing, yet Elon Musk’s resolve never wavered.
The All-consuming Mind of a Young Inventor
From an early age, Elon Musk says he felt different. “When I was five or six, I thought I was insane because my mind was exploding with ideas,” he says. Where others seemed calm, in his mind, there was always a racing imagination, which formed the inspiration for creating. It was the quote by Arthur C. Clarke that made the creation of magic most inspiring: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He wanted to create that magic and make the impossible possible.
From Failure to Innovation
Even though Elon Musk was enthusiastic about his profession, it didn’t come easy for him initially. He couldn’t land a job at Netscape and started his first company out of compulsion. His office didn’t have any funds. So Musk and his brother slept on chairs; showered at the YMCA and did coding seven days a week throughout the night. He reflects, “When you’re starting a company, it’s like eating glass and staring into the abyss.” His indomitable persistence in this torturous process helped to lay the foundation for all his future enterprises.
SpaceX and the Unyielding Will to Succeed
SpaceX fared no better. After three abortive launches, the firm stood on the brink of bankruptcy. Elon Musk managed to scrape together barely enough capital for a fourth and final launch. Failure meant bankruptcy and the end for SpaceX. Yet there was Musk, undeterred: “I never give up. I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated.”
Heroes Become Critics
The hardest experience in Musk’s career was when Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan, his childhood heroes, opposed his concept of commercial space travel when it became public. “It was really tough. those guys are heroes of mine,” says Musk. But that criticism did not deter him either. He still hopes that they will be able to find all that he has accomplished when they come.
