Musk loves to read computer and rocket experiments he would often make model rockets and even fired some at school. He was bullied a lot for being different. He got his nose broken and had to get a nose job to fix it.
Elon and a friend rented out a huge frat house while they were in college. They would live there and every Friday through a huge party with a $5 entry fee. This would make them a lot of money since up to 500 people would show up.
x.com was the company that Elon started which later merged with pay pal where Elon became the CEO. Back then persuading people to trust and put their money on the internet was quite hard.
Most of the PayPal people turned on Elon and kicked him out of his CEO role. Elon was not happy at the start of this decision but later accepted it and kept investing in the company making him the biggest shareholder. When PayPal sold to eBay Elon made $250 million dollars, 180 million after tax
Musk went on a vacation back to south Africa (where he grew up) and while he was there, he got malaria it took him 6 months to recover he lost 45 pounds and looked like a Skelton. He famously said “that's my lesson for taking a vacation. Vacation's kill you”
Musk moved to LA where he got back into his passion of space. He joined a mars space club. He wanted to know more and why NASA wasn’t going to mars. He joined the board of directors and then donated $100,000 to fund some research. He bought his way in.
Elon wanted to buy rockets from the Russians but their prices were to high do Elon decided to just build his own rocket company. He went and found the best engineers and tried to get them to join space x. his aim was to create cheap space flight.
Before the space x team had finished the falcon 1 let alone launched it Musk announced the falcon 5. It was called the falcon 5 because of the 5 engines. The falcon 5 was said to be able to reach the iss which would lead to big contracts for space x.
Space x failed the first launch of the falcon 1. So, the next year the space x team came back and attempted another launch. All was going well until the 5-minute mark where the rocket started aggressively shacking and then exploded. Everyone said that Elon had 1 maybe 2 launches till he ran out of money and would have to shut down space x.
The Tesla engineers had lots of clever ways to test the roadster one of which. They had to test how well it could handle low temperatures and if the batteries could survive. Instead of using a fancy cooling place they got an ice cream truck put it in there and did their tests
Tesla replaced the CEO of tesla with Musk because the current CEO was running the cost way to high it would have cost $200,000 to make one roadster and tesla wanted to sell them for $90,000. The CEO was moved to board of directors but was unhappy and left.
Elon and his first wife Justine wanted a divorce because Elon wasn't paying much attention to ger as he was always busy trying to run space x and tesla Justine started to post these problems on her blog. She signed an agreement before the marriage that she would get nothing but later took Elon to court to change that. She got the mansion 2 million dollars in cash $80,000 a moth in child support
After 3 failed launches space x gad one more chance to get it right before all the funding would run out. If this rocket failed it would have led to the end of space x. space x became the first ever privately funded company to reach orbit. It took 6 years and 500 people.
Grifen who almost became a cofounder of space x was now the head of NASA. He said he would give a contact to space x for 1 billion dollars. He later tried to turn on this, but NASA employees disagreed, so SpaceX received a reward of 1.6 billion dollars in funding for 12 flights to the ISS.
After the retirement of the space shuttle the USA had to rely on the Russians to get people and supplies to the ISS. With one person costing the USA 70 million dollars. SpaceX provided a new option at a fraction of the price and in the US
space x has found thousands of ways to cut down on launch costs. A major one is that space x uses consumer electronics instead of space grade ones. It was hard to convince NASA that they work well enough, but this cut the cost down dramatically
Normal combustion engines only turn about 10-20% of gasoline into propulsion the rest of the energy is lost through out the car. While a model S turns about 60% of electricity into motion the rest is lost to heat.
A group of Tesla engineers test drove and bought a Mercedes cls they then ripped everything out and made it all electric so they could see what a Model s would feel like. When they took it out for public drives, they had to weld the exhaust pipe back on so no one would notice.
Tesla was having trouble converting reserves into orders so tesla started getting into trouble with money, so Elon turned 500 people into sales men to try sell the cars. Elon started talking to google about his problems and google started making a deal to buy Tesla. Luckily right before the deal could be made Tesla started making sales.
One of the ways Elon is thinking of getting to mars is to launch a rocket to orbit then send a tanker to fuel it up for its journey to mars. They will have then travel at high speeds and get to mars in around 3 months
Musk is not very good with his employees he tends to get upset at people for very small things he even fires people for typos in emails or saying no to something or it can't be done. He doesn't have many friends because of this. But he just wants things done