So, that one person is important in the sense that he can get stuff done, set the vision, tone, drive, passion and inspiration.
This is not to detract from the contributions that Elon has made, but to indicate that there are potential Elons all around you. How many engineers would've built something similar if they had resources? Consider that even John Carmack, despite millions in personal fortune, had to abort Armadillo Aerospace because it was too expensive. If he had a PayPal-size exit, we may've had a SpaceX many years earlier!
What do you think rare is, then?
I'd argue that wealth is step 1, but step 2 is a willingness to gamble that wealth, to lose it, and to hustle.
It should also be noted that he was not a founder at Tesla, even. He bought his way in.
Actually Musk has said in the past that they had a LOT of trouble hiring early on. They had goals of reusable rockets right around the start of the company, and most people in the industry didn't take them seriously.
Nobody wanted to work for the laughing stock of a company that dreamed of doing something that most thought was impossible (affordably reusing rocket stages).
it's just that there are lots of low risks ways to make money with lots of capital than to risk wasting it on engineering or 'boundary-push' style business movements.
Big projects are cool, and great PR -- but safe trading and high interest accounts pay out more consistently, and often better.
It'd be nice to move the incentive over to value-building/engineering more than banking, though.
There are hundred's of billionaires, wealthy from selling their companies. How many of them thought about building a company like SpaceX, literally putting their whole fortune on one thing, which at the time, had no clear chance of success.
There are many, not potential, but actual Elons out there. Only one has the right circumstances buoy him to the place where his visions come to fruition. And those circumstances include every factor in the spectrum, from personal traits, ideas, capabilities, etc to social, economic and cultural factors.
Almost all of technological change, one that spearheads mankind's next push into the great, is driven by people with will the size of mountains. It is their will that shakes the foundations, bull dozes the old, constructs the bigger, faster, higher new.
And Intel probably lost such a person.
> There are hundred's of billionaires
So why couldn't a non-brilliant billionaire team up with a brilliant non-billionaire to make cool shit happen? Or a capital-raising syndicate? Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?
That is what the original commenter meant. If there are Elons out there with no money, they could band together to go to a VC, but then the risk taking process is skewed, because the brains and brawn are distributed.
Unfortunately it's the baby in 1 month with 9 mothers problem.
Just like SpaceX is killing it vs Blue Origin where one was on a relative shoe string and the other basically as much cash as it could reasonably spend, throwing money at a problem usually isn't the solution to the problem. Magic Leap also comes to mind in this category.
Intel had such a person. Patrick Gelsinger, mentored by Andy Grove. But Intel's Broad ( Andy Bryant ) decided he was never going to be CEO and so ultimately left Intel. BK became CEO, and the rest is history.
Edit to add: Elon was first included on the Forbes list of billionaires in 2012, 10 years after he founded SpaceX. At that time Forbes estimated his net worth at $2 billion. In October 2011 they estimated his net worth at $680 million.
I think the key point is that he wasn't doing it just to make more money, but to do what he always wanted to do (make humanity an interplanetary species). Taking the time to break that huge goal down into steps that can be individually profitable (and thus fuel the next stage) and then executing on them so well is just... awesome.
Your comment inspired me to go hunting for the original SpaceX pitch deck (or similar initial documents). I found one but it's a lot more recent - anyone have a link to the first one?
Paypal sold for 1.5B [1], and Musk just got 165 million.
That's not a lot of money for building a space company, especially while buying into and growing Tesla at the same time.
Musk risked and almost lost everything, with both SpaceX and Tesla coming close to bankruptcy at the same time.
The SpaceX approach of ignoring conventions, building components in house on the cheap, plus Musks drive/vision and capability to attract young and motivated (relatively cheap) employees probably made the difference there. As well as ultimately attracting Nasa funding to develop a commercially viable rocket.
- Paypal
- Tesla
- SpaceX
etc
Multiple times in the book it describes how he gambled it all on whatever project he was working on and it paid off for him. He is clearly brilliant and exceptional at hiring great people work for him. I think it's also important to realize that survivor bias is also at play here.
Yup. The odds of winning three 1-in-1000 bets is 1:1e9, so we should expect to have a couple Elon Musks in the world out of dumb luck. =)
Many of those who can only really do it once, and then retire with all of the money anyone could ever need to live a life of luxury until they die. Elon seems to prefer doing it over and over again without that much concern about his actual financial state.
Seems hard to believe that Id wasn't worth a billion dollars. I wonder where the equity went, supposedly the other 3 founders got nothing when they left because that's the agreement they all made when they started it.