ION LUCA CARAGIALE NATIONAL COLLEGE, PlOIESTI

Elon Musk
-the real life Iron Man-

Student: Coordinating
Teacher:

Andrei Gheorghe Cristian Suditu Iulia

May 2020

1
 Table of contents

Foreward……………………………………………………………………….3

Chapter I:Elon’s life.…………………………………………………………..4

1.1 Who is Elon Musk?........................................................................4

1.2 Early life…………………………………………………………...4

1.3 Education………………………………………………………….5

Chapter II:Career…………………………………………………….………. 7
2.1 Zip2 Corporation………………………………………………….7
2.2 X.com and PayPal…………………………………………………7
2.3 SpaceX…………………………………………………………….7
2.4 Tesla……………………………………………………………….9
Chapter III:Personal life……………………………………………………...12
3.1 Family…………………………………………………………….12
3.2 Philanthropy……………………………………………………...13
3.3 Controversies………………………….………………………….14
Chapter IV:Elon Musk’s legacy……………………………………………...15
Conclusions………………………………………..…………………………17
Bibliography………………………………………………………………….18
 Foreward

Elon Musk is considered as the new genius of the business world. If you have no idea who
Elon Musk is, here is an introduction to one of the great wizards in business today.
Elon Musk is an entrepreneur born in South Africa. At a very young age, he decided that he
would create businesses in areas that would be of most benefit to humanity in the future. To him,
those three areas were the World Wide Web, Clean Source of Energy and Space travel. He has
accomplished all the three and made billions many times over in entirely different industry.
At the age of 26, he sold his first company Zip2 for 300 million dollars. He then along with a
few others, including now billionaire investor Peter Theil, co-founded PayPal, which became a wild
success.
After selling Paypal for 1.5 billion dollars, where his share was worth hundreds of millions
of dollars, most people would want to just sit and relax on the beach for the rest of their life. But
Elon Musk was not one of them. Taking huge risks with his money, he invested almost all of it into
two new companies he created. One was Tesla Motors, which focused on creating innovative cars
that ran on clean energy, and the second was SpaceX, that started creating rockets to deliver
satellites to space with a long-term goal of getting humans to Mars. Despite both of those companies
almost going bankrupt during the recession, Musk persevered and bounced back.
I chose to talk about Elon Musk in this certificate, because he is one of the few people that
put the good of the mankind first, instead of his. So, no matter how young or old or successful one
is, there is a lot we all can learn from Elon Musk. This is a list of things that I learned by doing this
English certificate: to take risks while I am still young and do not have much to lose, to work hard,
to realize the fact that is only criticism that helps us improve, especially criticism that is grounded in
valid facts, to not stop learning and to be humble enough to seek advice even from not successful
people.

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 Chapter I:Elon’s life

1.1 Who Is Elon Musk?

Elon Reeve Musk is a South African-born American entrepreneur

and businessman who founded X.com in 1999 (which later became
PayPal), SpaceX in 2002 and Tesla Motors in 2003. Musk became a
multimillionaire in his late 20s when he sold his start-up company, Zip2,
to a division of Compaq Computers.
Fig 1.Elon Musk Portrait

Musk made headlines in May 2012, when SpaceX launched a rocket that would send the first
commercial vehicle to the International Space Station. He bolstered his portfolio with the purchase
of SolarCity in 2016, and cemented his standing as a leader of industry by taking on an advisory role
in the early days of President Donald Trump's administration.

1.2 Early Life

Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa, the son of Maye
Musk a model and dietitian from Canada and Errol Musk, a South African electromechanical
engineer, pilot, and sailor. He has a younger brother, Kimbal and a younger sister, Tosca. After his
parents divorced in 1980, Musk lived mostly with his father in the suburbs of Pretoria, a choice
made by Musk two years after his parents separated, but which he subsequently regretted. Musk is
estranged from his father whom he has referred to as "a terrible human being".

During his childhood, Musk was an avid reader. At the age of 10, he
developed an interest in computing with the Commodore VIC-20. He taught
himself computer programming and, by the age of 12, sold the code of
a BASIC-based video game he created called Blastar to PC and Office
Technology magazine for approximately $500. A web version of the game is
Fig 2. Young Elon Musk

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 available online. His childhood reading included Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, from
which he drew the lesson that "you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong
civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is
one".1

Musk was severely bullied throughout his childhood and was once hospitalized when a
group of boys threw him down a flight of stairs and then smashed his head into the pavement until
he lost consciousness. The damage to his nose required corrective surgery.

Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School and Bryanston High School before

graduating from Pretoria Boys High School. Although Musk's father insisted that Elon go to college
in Pretoria, Musk became determined to move to the United States, saying "I remember thinking
and seeing that America is where great things are possible, more than any other country in the
world." 2 Knowing it would be easy to get to the United States from Canada, he moved to Canada
against his father's wishes in June 1989, just before his 18th birthday, after obtaining a Canadian
passport through his Canadian-born mother.

1.3 Education

While awaiting Canadian documentation, Musk attended the University of Pretoria for five

months. Once in Canada, Musk entered Queen's University in 1989, avoiding mandatory service in
the South African military. He left in 1992 to study business and physics at the University of
Pennsylvania; he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in economics and a Bachelor of Arts
degree in physics.

In 1994, Musk held two internships in Silicon Valley during the summer: at an energy
storage start-up called Pinnacle Research Institute which researched electrolytic ultracapacitors for
energy storage; and at the Palo Alto-based start-up Rocket Science Games His work at Rocket
Science Games involved assembly programming of device drivers.

1
Strauss, Neil (November 15, 2017). "Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow". Rolling Stone. Retrieved November
15, 2017.

2
Elon Musk, quoted in "Elon Musk Profiled: Bloomberg Risk Takers" www.bloomberg.com, August 3, 2013

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 Bruce Leak, the former lead
engineer behind Apple’s QuickTime who
had hired Musk noted: “He had boundless
energy. Kids these days have no idea
about hardware or how stuff works, but he
had a PC hacker background and was not
afraid to just go figure things out.”3
Fig 3.University of Pennsylvania

In 1995, Musk commenced a PhD in energy physics/materials science at Stanford

University in California. Eager to pursue opportunities in the Internet boom, he dropped out after
just two days to launch his first company, Zip2 Corporation. The company got bought out, and
Musk used his Zip2 buyout money to create X.com, which he intended to shape into the future of
banking. X was merged with a company called Confinity and the resulting company came to be
known as PayPal. Musk was then ousted from the company before it was bought by eBay. 

3
Publishing BusinessNews(2016) Summary: Elon Musk: Review and Analysis of Vance's Book.Business Book
Summaries
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 Chapter II:Career

2.1 Zip2 Corporation

In 1995, Musk and his brother, Kimbal, started Zip2, a web software company, with money
raised from a small group of angel investors. The company developed and marketed an internet city
guide for the newspaper publishing industry, with maps, directions and yellow pages, with the
vector graphics mapping and direction code being implemented by Musk in Java. Musk obtained
contracts with The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, and persuaded the board of directors
to abandon plans for a merger with CitySearch. Musk's attempts to become CEO were thwarted by
the board. Compaq acquired Zip2 for US$307 million in cash in February 1999. Musk
received US$22 million for his 7 percent share from the sale.

2.2 X.com and PayPal

In March 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment
company, with US$10 million from the sale of Zip2 One year later, the company merged with
Confinity, which had a money-transfer service called PayPal. The merged company focused on the
PayPal service and was renamed PayPal in 2001. Musk was ousted in October 2000 from his role as
CEO (although he remained on the board) due to disagreements with other company executives over
his desire to move PayPal's Unix-based infrastructure to Microsoft Windows. In October 2002,
PayPal was acquired by eBay for US$1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk received US$165 million.
Before its sale, Musk, who was the company's largest shareholder, owned 11.7% of PayPal's shares.
In July 2017, Musk purchased the domain X.com from PayPal for an undisclosed amount, stating
that it has sentimental value to him.

2.3 SpaceX

In 2001, Musk conceived Mars Oasis, a project to land a miniature

experimental greenhouse on Mars, containing food crops growing on Martian regolith, in an attempt
to reawaken public interest in space exploration. In October 2001, Musk traveled to Moscow with

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Jim Cantrell (an aerospace supplies fixer), and Adeo Ressi (his best friend from college), to buy
refurbished Dnepr Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could send the envisioned
payloads into space. The group met with companies such as NPO Lavochkin and Kosmotras;
however, according to Cantrell, Musk was seen as a novice and was consequently spat on by one of
the Russian chief designers. The group returned to the United States empty-handed. In February
2002, the group returned to Russia to look for three ICBMs, bringing along Mike Griffin. Griffin
had worked for the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, as well as NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, and was just leaving Orbital Sciences, a maker of satellites and spacecraft. The group
had another meeting with Kosmotras and were offered one rocket for $8US million. Musk
considered the price too high, and stormed out of the meeting. On the flight back from Moscow,
Musk realized that he could start a company that could build the affordable rockets he
needed. According to early Tesla and SpaceX investor Steve Jurvetson, Musk calculated that
the raw materials for building a rocket were only 3
percent of the sales price of a rocket at the time. It
was concluded that, in theory, by applying vertical
integration and the modular approach employed in
software engineering, SpaceX could cut launch
price by a factor of ten and still enjoy a 70-
percent gross margin. Ultimately, Musk ended up
founding SpaceX with the long-term goal of
creating a true spacefaring civilization. Fig4.The Block 5 variant of the Falcon 9
launching from Kennedy Space Center
With US$100 million of his early fortune, Musk
founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., traded as SpaceX, in May 2002. Musk is chief
executive officer (CEO) and chief technology officer (CTO) of the Hawthorne, California-based
company. By 2016, Musk's private trust held 54% of SpaceX stock, equivalent to 78% of voting
shares. SpaceX develops and manufactures space launch vehicles with a focus on advancing the
state of rocket technology. The company's first two launch vehicles were the Falcon 1 and Falcon
9 rockets (a nod to Star Wars' Millennium Falcon), and its first spacecraft was the Dragon (a nod
to Puff the Magic Dragon). SpaceX designed a family of launch vehicles and the Dragon
multipurpose spacecraft over a span of seven years. In September 2008, SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket
became the first privately funded liquid-fueled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth orbit.

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 On May 22, 2012, Musk and SpaceX made history when the company launched its Falcon 9
rocket into space with an unmanned capsule. The vehicle was sent to the International Space Station
with 1,000 pounds of supplies for the astronauts stationed there, marking the first time a private
company had sent a spacecraft to the International Space Station.
In December 2013, a Falcon 9 successfully carried a satellite to geosynchronous transfer
orbit, a distance at which the satellite would lock into an orbital path that matched the Earth's
rotation. In February 2015, SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 fitted with the Deep Space Climate
Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite, aiming to observe the extreme emissions from the sun that affect
power grids and communications systems on Earth.
In late March 2018, SpaceX received permission from the U.S. government to launch a fleet
of satellites into low orbit for the purpose of providing Internet service. The satellite network,
named Starlink, would ideally make broadband service more accessible in rural areas, while also
boosting competition in heavily populated markets that are typically dominated by one or two
providers. 
SpaceX launched the first batch of 60 satellites in May 2019, and followed with another
payload of 60 satellites that November. While this represented significant progress for the Starlink
venture, the appearance of these bright orbiters in the night sky, with the potential of thousands
more to come, worried astronomers who felt that a proliferation of satellites would increase the
difficulty of studying distant objects in space.

2.4 Tesla

Tesla, Inc. (originally Tesla Motors) was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin
Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who financed the company until the Series A round of
funding. Both men played active roles in the company's early development prior to Elon Musk's
involvement. Musk led the Series A round of investment in February 2004, joining Tesla's board of
directors as its chairman. All three, along with J. B. Straubel, were inspired by the earlier AC
Propulsion tzero electric roadster prototype. Musk took an active role within the company and
oversaw Roadster product design at a detailed level, but was not deeply involved in day-to-day
business operations. Following the financial crisis in 2008 and after a series of escalating conflicts

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in 2007, Eberhard was ousted from the firm. Musk assumed
leadership of the company as CEO and product architect in
2008, positions he still holds today. As of 2019, Elon Musk is
the longest tenured CEO of any automotive manufacturer
globally.

Tesla's master plan, as iterated by Musk in 2006 was:

Build sports car. Use that money to build an affordable

car. Use that money to build an even more affordable car.
Fig 5.Musk observing an assembly
While doing above, also provide zero-emission electric power demo at the reopening of the NUMMI
generation options.4 plant

Tesla Motors first built an electric sports car, the Tesla Roadster, in 2008, with sales of about
2,500 vehicles to 31 countries. Tesla began delivery of its four-door Model S sedan on June 22,
2012. It unveiled its third product, the Model X, aimed at the SUV/minivan market, on February 9,
2012; however, the Model X launch was delayed until September 2015. In addition to its own cars,
Tesla sold electric powertrain systems to Daimler for the Smart EV, Mercedes B-Class Electric
Drive and Mercedes A Class, and to Toyota for the RAV4 EV. Musk was able to bring in both
companies as long-term investors in Tesla. Musk favored building a more affordable Tesla model;
this led to the Model 3 that was unveiled in 2016, with a planned base price of US$35,000. Initial
deliveries began in 2017, with
the US$35,000 base model becoming
available in February 2019. Musk
originally intended to name the model 3 as
the model E but was blocked
by Ford which held the trademark.

4
Musk, Elon (August 2, 2006). "The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me)"

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 Fig 6.Musk and Senator Dianne Feinstein next to a
Tesla Model S (2010)

In July 2016, Musk released

Tesla's master plan part 2:

Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage. Expand the electric
vehicle product line to address all major segments [including small SUV and pickup truck].
Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning. Enable
your car to make money for you when you aren't using it.5

In July 2016, Tesla commenced developing their autopilot hardware and software in-house,

ending their previous partnership with Mobileye.

As of January 29, 2016, Musk owned about 28.9 million Tesla shares, which equates to
about 22% of the company. As of 2014, Musk's annual salary is one dollar, similar to that of Steve
Jobs and other CEOs; the remainder of his compensation is in the form of stock and performance-
based bonuses. In January 2018, Musk was granted an option to buy up to 20.3 million shares if
Tesla's market value were to rise to $650 billion. Majority shareholder approval for this package
was approved in March 2018. The grant was also meant to end speculation about Musk's potential
departure from Tesla to devote more time to his other business ventures. A report by advisory firm
Glass Lewis & Co. to its clients argued against granting the options.

Besides those large companies Elon Musk also is part of smaller, but still very influential
and important projects: SolarCity, Hyperloop, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, Tham
Luang cave rescue etc.

5
 "Master Plan, Part Deux". July 20, 2016. Archived from the original on July 2, 2017. Retrieved November 25, 2019.

11
 Fig7. An illustrative
picture of Elon Musk’s
investments

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 Chapter III:Personal life

3.1 Family

Tosca Musk, Elon's sister, is a filmmaker. She is the founder of Musk Entertainment and has
produced various movies.

Musk met his first wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson, while both were students at
Ontario's Queen's University. They married in 2000 and separated in 2008. Their first son, Nevada
Alexander Musk, died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of 10 weeks. They later had five
sons through in vitro fertilization: twins in 2004, followed by triplets in 2006. They share custody of
all five sons.6

In 2008, Musk began dating English actress Talulah Riley, and in 2010, the couple married.
In January 2012, Musk announced that he had ended his four-year relationship with Riley, tweeting
to Riley, "It was an amazing four years. I will love you forever. You will make someone very happy
one day7." In July 2013, Musk and Riley remarried. In December 2014, Musk filed for a second
divorce from Riley; however, the action was withdrawn. The media announced in March 2016 that
divorce proceedings were again under way, this time with Riley filing for divorce from Musk. The
divorce was finalized in late 2016.

Musk began dating American actress Amber Heard in 2016 but the two split up after one
year due to their conflicting schedules.

On May 7, 2018, Musk and Canadian musician Grimes revealed that they had begun
dating. On January 8, 2020, Grimes announced that she was pregnant with their first child. Grimes
gave birth to a son on May 4, 2020. According to Musk, his name is "X Æ A-12" (pronounced “Ex
Ash A Twelve”), although this may not be a legal name in California due to it containing characters
that are not English letters.

6
 Kimble, Lindsay (November 18, 2016). "Elon Musk and Talulah Riley Are Divorced for a Second Time". People.
Retrieved April 24, 2017.
7
  "Elon Musk Divorce: Announces Split From Talulah Riley On Twitter", The Huffington Post, January 19, 2012.

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3.2. Philanthropy

Musk is chairman of the Musk Foundation, which states its purpose is to provide solar-
power energy systems in disaster areas as well as other goals. In 2010, the Musk Foundation
collaborated with SolarCity to donate a 25 kW solar power system to the South Bay Community
Alliance's hurricane response center in Coden, Alabama. In July 2011, the Musk Foundation
donated US$250,000 towards a solar power project in Sōma, Japan, a city that had been recently
devastated by a tsunami.

In July 2014, Musk was asked by cartoonist Matthew Inman and William Terbo, the
grandnephew of Nikola Tesla, to donate US$8 million toward the construction of the Tesla Science
Center at Wardenclyffe. Ultimately, Musk agreed to donate US$1 million toward the project and
additionally pledged to build a Tesla Supercharger in the museum car park.

In January 2015, Musk donated US$10 million to the Future of Life Institute to run a global

research program aimed at keeping artificial intelligence beneficial to humanity.8

As of 2015, Musk is a trustee of the X Prize Foundation and a signatory of The Giving

Pledge.

In October 2018, in an effort to help solve the Flint water crisis, Musk and the Musk
Foundation donated over $480,000 to install new water fountains with filtration systems for access
to clean water at all Flint, Michigan schools. As of 2019, approximately 30,000 children in all 12
area schools have free, safe drinking water from the water filtration systems.

Musk has been a top donor for the ACLU.

In October 2019, Musk donated US$1 million to TeamTrees a tree planting initiative to plant

20 million trees led by the YouTube community and in collaboration with Arbor Day Foundation.9

8
"Elon Musk Donates M To Make Sure AI Doesn't Go The Way of Skynet". Mashable. 2015. Retrieved June 21, 2015.
9
Strub, Chris (October 29, 2019). "Elon Musk Donates $1 Million To #TeamTrees, Changes Twitter Identity To
'Treelon'". Forbes. Retrieved November 18, 2019.

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3.3.Controversies

Musk has received criticism over his views on and actions related to the COVID-19
pandemic. On January 31, he likened some aspects of COVID-19 to the common cold and called the
panic over the pandemic "dumb".When the Alameda County Sheriff ordered all non-essential
businesses to shut down, Musk initially refuted the order. Musk called the lockdown 'fascist' on
a Tesla earnings call stating:

“If somebody wants to stay in their house, that's great. They should be allowed to stay in
their house and should not be compelled to leave, but to say that they cannot leave their house, and
they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist, this is not democratic, this is not freedom. Give
people back their goddamn freedom”.10

Musk later sent out numerous tweets opposing mandatory lockdowns such as "FREE
AMERICA NOW".11 Musk has additionally been criticised for tweeting false claims, including that
children were "essentially immune" to the disease, and for saying "based on current trends there
will be no new cases of the virus in the US by the end of April." In addition, he promoted articles
which suggested that healthcare companies were inflating COVID-19 case numbers for financial
reasons and promoted a widely discredited paper on the benefits of chloroquine, and retweeted a
video calling for an immediate end to social distancing restrictions.

On May 11, Musk reopened Tesla's Fremont production line in defiance of Alameda County's
orders. The same day he tweeted "Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County
rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me."
Additionally Musk announced that Tesla would be moving headquarters to Texas or Nevada and
that Tesla had filed a lawsuit against Alameda County challenging its "shutdown" of the Fremont
factory. The Alameda County Public Health Department explained it was waiting on a plan that the
electric car company had promised to provide on 11 May that would walk through how it would
protect workers' health during the coronavirus pandemic. An opening date of Monday, May 18 had
been penciled in for Tesla following approval – the same date that Fiat Chrysler, Ford Motor
Company, and General Motors were also due to restart production

Chapter IV:Elon Musk’s legacy

10
Quoted from his public Twitter page “@elonmusk”
11
Isobel Asher Hamilton (March 20, 2020). "Elon Musk tweeted a piece of misinformation about children being
'essentially immune' to the coronavirus, but Twitter isn't taking it down"

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 Society is not always kind to its heroes. We ask for an ill-defined yet idealized sort of
perfection, and when our heroes fall short, we make sure they fall twice as hard. Some might write
this phenomenon off as a minor inconvenience for the rich, successful or famous, but times have
changed. The human costs of war pale in comparison to the battles humanity will face in the years
to come.
More so than any time in our history, we are inundated with existential threats to our way of
life. The future of the planet depends on our ability to accelerate scientific discovery and deploy
new technologies, and that’s precisely what Elon Musk is doing.
Musk has committed literally all of his considerable resources, and all of his talents, to
addressing those threats. He does not need the money, he does not need the fame, and his legacy is
already a lock. Yet, he is facing a societal firing squad that has decided that he is too eccentric to be
allowed to solve these problems for us. One tweet from Musk about taking a company private, and
the Department of Justice opens up an unprecedented investigation into him. A delay in production
of a radically new type of vehicle, and his stock goes tumbling.
As concerned as I am about the problems we face in energy, climate, transportation and the
new space race, there is one overarching problem that scares me more: We do not want modern
heroes to succeed in their efforts to tackle these challenges on our behalf. Musk has been given
every reason to call it quits, buy an island and retire. That has not stopped him yet, but it is pretty
clear the absurd behavior of an ungrateful public is taking a toll. If you care about the future, it's
essential to put the work of our future-makers in the appropriate context. 
Few people realize it, but Tesla is not a luxury car company. The stated mission at Tesla is to
accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy.
Consider that for a moment. A car company took it upon itself to enact a much larger
societal shift to a better form of energy. The luxury car is just a beachhead market for the underlying
technology and it’s a phenomenal product, with diehard fans and loyal customers.
Tesla could have stopped there and would get all the respect in the world. Even just building
a new car brand in this era is accomplishment enough, but Musk himself made the choice to
dedicate Tesla to the even more ambitious mission with enduring societal impact. Instead of
marveling at the ambition, we’ve fallen into the habit of chronicling the inconsequential delays in
Model 3 production on a weekly basis. A recent Fortune article opened with, “Tesla CEO Elon

16
Musk is known for setting ambitious goals and timelines for the electric car company, but he isn’t
known for hitting them.” 12
The Boring Company is one of Musk’s more recent creations. This company constructs
tunnels for his breakthrough HyperLoop transportation venture, because the United States doesn’t
even crack the top 15 countries in the World Economic Forum’s rankings for ground transportation.
And no U.S. city made the top 20 in the 2017 Sustainable Cities Mobility Index from Arcadis. In
short, we are falling further behind the rest of the world with every day that passes. 
So Musk designed an entirely new mode of transportation called Hyperloop in a joint venture
between Tesla and SpaceX. Then, he committed to the engaging students in the research effort to
develop the solution and advance the technology.
They ran tests on their own, without getting any government funding, and he realized he is
going to have to dig the tunnels for Hyperloop himself, so he started that company too.
He did not ask for help. State and local governments offered nothing but red tape along the way, but
he pushed forward, no matter the obstacles put in front of him. That is what makes this so appalling.
Elon Musk is the modern American incarnation of rugged self-reliance, yet the country in which he
operates can barely recognize it and thinks they are owed something over and above what he has
already given them.
If people just let the guy do his thing,we will be traveling between major cities in a matter of
minutes. He does not want help or money. He just wants to fix the problem.
Not one to limit his endeavors to the planet he currently occupies, Musk turned his attention
to space when he founded SpaceX in 2002. Since then, the company highlight reel has been nothing
short of a scientific miracle.
That reel includes the first privately funded liquid-propellant rocket to get to orbit; the first
private company to launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft; and the first private company to send a
spacecraft to the International Space Station. Beyond the accomplishments as a private company,
SpaceX was the first of any type of organization to execute a propulsive landing for an orbital rock
and the first to reuse such a rocket. The U.S. is not exactly leading the way in Science, technology,
engineering and mathematics (STEM) education, so let’s put those achievements into context: A
private company is outpacing all of the world’s governments in the advancement of space travel. 
Conclusion
12
https://fortune.com/2018/06/05/tesla-elon-musk-model-3-production-delay/

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 What is clear about Elon Musk is that operates differently than most other successful people
today. He is not after the fame or money, his goal is to create a bright future for us and for the next
generations. Beside the billions that he made with his innovative companies, like SpaceX, Tesla,
PayPal, SolarCity, The Boring Company etc, almost by himself, he created a better future for the
humankind.
He carried the environmental friendly cars and energy to another level. While many auto
manufacturers have, over the years, tried to get the electric car to catch on, Musk’s efforts
have arguably led the charge throughout the past decade. What began as a campaign to
develop an ultra-affordable, high-quality automobile has since evolved into a multi-pronged
venture focused on safe and efficient emissions, innovative use of electric and solar power,
and self-driving technology. Though Tesla has already become synonymous with the electric
car, we are bound to see more from Musk’s team in the years to come.
Elon Musk has accomplished over the years his spaceflight-related achievements alone:

-Developed and successfully launched the world’s most powerful rocket to date

-Successfully re-launched a rocket for the first time in human history

-Developed the first private spacecraft to dock on the International Space Station

While many of Musk’s space-related goals may seem like the stuff of science fiction,

he and his team continue to make strides to bring his futuristic visions into reality. Perhaps
his most ambitious venture to date, SpaceX was created to satisfy Musk’s yearning for
humanity to truly enter the era of safe and affordable space travel.
At some point, we all have to acknowledge that we need Elon Musk more than he needs us. 
Most citizens have abdicated responsibility for society’s biggest problems to their government,
private industry or some abstract notion of an international governing body that does not exist. But
here is the thing: People who do not get their hands dirty do not get to sit back and be the arbiters of
the solutions. We need more people working on big problems which do not stop until they achieve
their goals. Too many smart, creative people are sitting on the sidelines critiquing heroes rather than

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trying to be one themselves. Elon Musk does not need accolades, but he could use a few
competitors.

Bibliography:

“Elon Musk:How the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is shaping our future” by Aslee Vance

Web bibliography:

1. https://www.biography.com/business-figure/elon-musk

2. https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-elon-musk-net-worth-2017-10#but-by-august-2018-
musk-told-the-new-york-times-that-he-had-taken-to-working-120-hours-a-week-there-were-
times-when-i-didnt-leave-the-factory-for-three-or-four-days-days-when-i-didnt-go-outside-
he-told-the-times-this-has-really-come-at-the-expense-of-seeing-my-kids-and-seeing-
friends-21

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

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