By Alec Hogg
While SA’s deranged President rambles on about his latest disastrous idea called “radical economic transformation”, here’s a reminder of a man who offers the inverse – 45-year-old, Pretoria-born super-entrepreneur Elon Musk.
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Musk, who left the country of his birth at 17, is a household name in his adopted America. Described in leading US media as a mixture between the great inventor Thomas Edison and Apple founder Steve Jobs, nowadays the brightest youngsters in Silicon Valley profess they want to “be like Elon.”
Musk spends his week between the two companies he built and controls – SpaceX and Tesla. The first, a business that supplies the International Space Station and sends satellites into earth’s orbit; the other a revolutionary electric car manufacturer.
The story of Elon Musk has a long way to run. But there are already key lessons the rest of us can take from his experiences. Here are three that stand out:
1. Keep re-investing in what you believe in
At 24 and fresh out of university, Elon Musk founded an Internet start-up called Zip2. Described by biographer Ashlee Vance as a primitive version of “Google Maps meets Yelp”, Musk sold it four years later for $307m.
He reinvested the $22m he got from that sale into a new company then merged into global payments start-up PayPal, where he became the biggest single shareholder.
When PayPal was sold in 2002 for $1.5bn, Musk injected every cent into his three new businesses: $100m to SpaceX, $70m into Tesla and another $10m into SolarCity managed by his cousins from Pretoria, Lyndon and Peter Rive.
Musk is the purest example of an entrepreneur you’ll find. He regards money as energy whose purpose is to change the world for the better. Definitely not something to be hoarded.
2. Never, never give up
With his companies flourishing and his wealth exceeding that of a small nation state, it’s easy to forget Musk did it the hard way. Six years after starting his new businesses, all the cash he’d invested into them had been used. He even needed to sell his car to help fund on-going losses.
Musk went through the fire, personally and financially. After the first three SpaceX rockets exploded – literally incinerated tens of millions of dollars – he kept on trying. When problems with Tesla cars delayed their launch for years past deadline, he never wavered.
Even after Musk had burned through all his money – and plenty more borrowed from friends – he still believed in his dream, refusing to compromise. Just when all seemed lost, the fourth SpaceX rocket flew straight and Tesla’s all-electric car became a huge success. In 2012, Musk was suddenly an “overnight sensation”. But not before absorbing pressure which would have buckled many a lesser being.
3. Read, read, read
Growing up, Musk was geeky and possessed a reserved personality. A late developer, he was bullied mercilessly at school. One of these incidents, where a gang attacked him, put him into the Sandton Clinic for two weeks where his face needed reconstructive surgery.
He took refuge in books. At 14, Musk discovered Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; and devoured other sci-fi classics like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Hard Mistress.
It wasn’t unusual for Musk to read for ten hours a day. The youngster eventually ran through everything he cared to consume in his school’s and neighbourhood library. So he worked his way through Encyclopaedia Britannica.
His voracious reading combined with the teenage Musk’s photographic memory bred in him a love of knowledge – and insights that served him well during the years to come. And look at where that has taken the boy from Pretoria.
