did you think i need to pack this in
never
why not i don't ever give up
i love muscle sleeping i didn't have any
money in fact i had negative money
um i had huge student debts i have a
bunch of houses but
i don't spend a lot of time in most of
them i couldn't afford a place to stay
and an office
so uh i rented an office instead because
that was it was actually i got a cheaper
office then i could
get a get a place to stay and then i
just sort of slept on the futon and a
few years ago people were
laughing at you now not so much
i mean okay spacex
i founded approximately four years ago
with the goal of revolutionizing access
to space
what i really want to try to achieve
here is to make
mars seem possible step three would be
to provide humans to
another planet services to the private
sector and
the government what satisfaction doing
something useful
for other people that i like doing
is being a little bit weird crazy and
eccentric a side effect of the
successful or is it the price of
admission it seems as though almost
anybody who's excelled in a field has a
touch of being a little bit out of the
ordinary warren buffett drinks at least
five cans of coke per day richard
branson drinks 20 cups of tea per day
while jeff bezos has spent 40 million
dollars engineering clocks that are
expected to outlast human existence
it's almost like the rich you are the
more excusable your bizarre behaviour is
and the individual we'll look at today
isn't exempt from this rule elon musk is
an eccentric multi-billionaire
engineering businessman who despite
coming from a poor abusive household in
pretoria south africa
is slowly becoming the sole individual
most trusted with the future of human
life
but it certainly hasn't been smooth
sailing for elon musk from living on a
couch in a rented silicon valley office
instead of getting an apartment we just
rented a small office
and we slept on the couch to three
divorces cnbc
was rerunning their divorce special yes
to being two days from bankruptcy in
2008. we were only a few days from
bankruptcy
it was literally two days or three days
maybe it's safe to say that elon musk
has only just pulled through life by the
skin of his teeth
but sometimes for some unique
individuals that risk pays off the
reward
anything you want cars homes businesses
government power
the ability to travel to space all of
these points will be covered in this
video so join me as we cover
the full story of elon musk
our story begins in pretoria south
africa 1970. and you might ask what was
so significant about pretoria in 1970
that grant's permission for it to be the
birthplace of our story
well at the time not much it was
actually quite insignificant in the
grand scheme of things
but it did happen to be a time and place
where two random individuals by the name
of errol musk and mae holderman would
begin dating
errol and engineer and mei are models
made an almost impulsive choice to get
married because they were quote
bored and lonely well you know i was
lonely alone in cape town
i wasn't in a happy situation and i
thought well
what can be worse marriage can't be that
bad following errol and may musk's
impulsive marriage in 1970 the couple
had three children
kimball tosca and most significantly
elon musk who was born on the 28th of
june 1971
and that's kind of the basis for our
story one big happy family in south
africa a successful engineer with his
model wife and their three happy kids
and on the surface everything looked
amazing however the reality of their
happy family turned out to be somewhat
of a facade the dynamic was actually
quite different behind the scenes
you said i would be beaten up did you
suffer that kind of abuse
yes yeah yeah i think i was i was beaten
up
turns out that elon's father and mae's
husband errol musk was incredibly
abusive and somewhat of a garbage
individual behind the scenes
when i was married i was told about
three times a day
that i'm boring and stupid and
you know and ugly not only was errol
abusive he also denied elon some of the
most basic things required to begin a
career in business
such as a computer he didn't want to buy
a computer and refuse to use computers
and said they would never amount to
anything showing that perhaps errol
wasn't all that interested in seeing his
kids become their best selves
elon has stated that his father was a
terrible human being who carefully
thought our plans of
evil also stating that he had a very
violent unhappy childhood it was
very violent it was not a happy
childhood
her father raises serious issues
signifying the harsh realities of his
upbringing
however the real question over the long
run was this such a bad
thing well that's probably an argument
worth having because a tough upbringing
would actually end up being an asset for
elon's incredible success later in life
giving him the ability to adapt and
overcome the most difficult of
circumstances
but despite being in an abusive
household as well as constant bullying
at school it
has almost been to death if you'd call
that bullied it wouldn't be long before
mae musk would figure out that her child
was somewhat of a genius
from the age of three really i just he
just reasoned with me so well and i
didn't know how he could figure out
things i mean he was three
may realize that there was something
special with her son elon after
discovering that he could reason with
her and complete complex jobs at an
incredibly young age of three
also stating that he was put into school
a year early then following elon being
put into school a year early elon's mind
began exploding with creative ideas at
the age of five or
six which was explained on the joe rogan
podcast i think when i was
i don't know five or six or something i
thought i was insane why did you think
you were insane
because it was clear that other people
did not their mind wasn't exploding with
ideas
all the time from that point onwards
elon stated that his mind was constantly
coming up with ideas which he described
as a never-ending explosion that can't
be turned off
what's going on never-ending explosion
it's just constant ideas
just bouncing around yes so by this
point we could probably agree that elon
musk was born with somewhat of a
creative superpower so with this in mind
did he have some kind of perfect plan to
go from a small town kid in south africa
to a multinational billionaire
well no not really not in the beginning
at least anyway
i mean i should say that you know when i
was a kid i didn't really have any grand
designs
i mean the reason i started programming
computers is because
i like computer games and i play lots of
computer games
at the age of 10 elon musk simply began
programming computers as he enjoyed
computer games there was really no
extravagant planning at the start of his
journey the somewhat refreshing fact
considering that there's always this
feeling that these billionaires have it
all figured out from the beginning but
here's where the difference occurred for
elon musk
after beginning to program computers he
then figured out if he could write
better software and sell it then he
could buy better computers
i learned that if i wrote software and
sold it then i could get more money and
buy better computers
so it wasn't really you know with some
grand vision or anything
after learning to code at the age of 10
elon musk realized that a magazine by
the name of pc and office technology
would buy different pieces of software
to publish in their magazine
there was a computer magazine that you
could sell
software to and then publish the
software and then save your chat
after making this discovery elon decided
to create his first piece of gaming
software called blaster a game somewhat
similar to the popular game
space invaders this game was then sold
to the magazine for a price of five
hundred dollars
i i taught myself how to program
computers when i was a kid um
and uh um bought my first computer when
i was 10 and sold my first commercial
program when i was 12. not exactly a bad
start
for any 12 year old looking to pursue
programming pathways
so it's safe to say that from the very
beginning elon musk was somewhat born to
pursue difficult technical endeavors
with the overall goal of as cliche as it
sounds advancing humanity which would
really show its true colours as elon
musk finished high school preparing for
the next stage of his life
at the age of 17 elon musk moved from
his hometown of pretoria south africa to
north america to attend pennsylvania
university
eventually graduating with dual bachelor
degrees in economics and physics at the
age of 26. now finishing university with
a dual degree in economics and physics
is somewhat of an incredible achievement
but there was another issue here he
wasn't in the place that he wanted to be
sure philadelphia was cool and all but
elon had his mind set on somewhere else
a location where he thought he would
really thrive
i thought okay i really want to work on
new technology
so i want to get to silicon valley
you know which when i was growing up
silicon valley seemed like some sort of
mythical
place silicon valley the place where it
was all happening
the holy promised land for any
entrepreneur looking to take a deep dive
into the world of tech
in 1995 elon musk made the move to
silicon valley to begin working on
energy storage technologies for electric
cars the reason i
came out to stamford was actually to
work on energy storage technologies for
electric cars this is somewhat of an
insignificant fact now but will be
extremely important for later parts of
the video
after moving to silicon valley with a
car computer and two thousand dollars
elon thought
his best path would be to apply for
traditional tech employment but
there was an issue with that mainly
owing to his location silicon valley was
full of thousands of tech guys all of
which competing for a small amount of
jobs
at first i tried to get a job at
netscape because that was the only
internet company
and they didn't respond to me so then i
was like okay
um if i can't get a job at the only
internet company then i better
try starting something and that was that
elon musk went with the old
if you can't get a job create your own
job he was metaphorically thrown in the
deep end but often the deep end is the
best area to learn how to swim
what are the things that are most likely
to affect the future of humanity just in
you know at a
macro level and it just seemed like
it would be like the internet and
sustainable energy
uh making like multi-planetary um and
then genetics and ai
after elon's arrival in silicon valley
elon musk began to critically think
about the areas in tech that would
likely affect the future of humanity
and while genetics ai and making life
multi-planetary were probably out of
elon musk's 24 year old hands
one area of tech that he thought he
might be able to make an impact on was
an area that at the time was barely even
an
aerial attack it wasn't monetizable and
it was far from being a big industry but
would later become one of the most
important pieces of daily human life
we're of course talking about the
internet after having experience
writing and selling gaming software as a
teenager elon had the general knowledge
required to begin writing internet
software elon musk began writing
software with a goal of quote
making useful things happen on the
internet trying to make
useful things happen on the internet
possibly hinting that he had no real
idea of what he was trying to create in
the beginning
however this would change when elon musk
would create his first piece of saleable
internet software
described as a software allowing media
companies to convert their paper and
print content into digital content
so we thought well that the media
industry
would need help converting its content
from
from a print media to electronic and
they clearly had money this software was
the basis for elon musk's first company
zip2
which was created with his brother
kimball now starting a tech company
would be exciting for any 24 year old
however as stated by elon himself
he would have no idea how difficult the
first company would end up being
there's a friend of mine who's got a
great saying about creating a company
which is creating trying to build a
company and have it succeed is like
eating glass and staring into the abyss
having moved from south africa and still
having 100 000
worth of college debt elon musk was so
poor that he was unable to afford both a
home and an office for his company zip
too
so what were his options here he
couldn't rent both at the same time
it was either an office or an apartment
and since offices were cheaper than
homes he rented an office space and
simply slept on the couch while
showing at a local gym i didn't have any
money in fact i had negative money
i had huge student debts so um
in fact i couldn't afford a place to
stay and an office so
uh i rented an office instead because
that was i was actually i got a cheaper
office then i could
get a get a place to stay and then i
just sort of slept on a few times this
whole scenario might be what elon musk
later described as the reality kicking
in after starting a company
i mean what tends to happen is it's sort
of quite exciting for the first several
months
of starting a company and then then
reality sets in
things don't go as well as planned
customers aren't signing up
the technology or the product isn't
working as well as you thought so for
anyone who thinks that elon might have
had somewhat of a head start or smooth
sailing in the beginning
it seems as though the reality was
almost the opposite after starting this
first company elon alongside his brother
a friend of his mums and three
salespeople paid on contingency began to
market the product of various news
outlets achieving small flashes of
success here and there
we started getting some interest i mean
half the time be like what's the
internet
even in silicon valley but then
occasionally somebody would bite and
they
would get a little bit of money from
them the company then grew and struck
deals with bigger clients such as the
new york times
as the income grew so did the overall
value of the company and after four
years of running the company elon and
his brother kimball would finally reach
that golden point that most tech
startups could only dream of in the
beginning
the acquisition of the business from a
bigger company in february 1999
3.5 years after the beginning of
development tech company compact
acquired zip2 for a price of 305 million
dollars
of that 305 million 22 million went to
elon and 15 million went to his brother
kimball
so what did this mean for the subject of
our story well elon had gone from a
broke dude living on a couch in his
company office to a multi-millionaire
overnight
and elon's new status of
multi-millionaire meant spending a
portion of the money on some new toys
how are you speaking it's seven o'clock
in the morning and
elon musk anxiously waits for his golden
payoff his prize for paying his dues in
the valley
i expect to receive a car that i've just
bought which is called mclaren f1
it's a million dollars for a car it's
it's a it's decadent approximately eight
months after receiving 22 million for
the sale of zip2
elon musk made his first television
appearance in a cnn segment talking
about the lavish life of millionaires in
silicon valley now this was the first
time that the world got an opportunity
to see the younger slightly cocky at
elon musk
displaying his new 1 million mclaren f1
as well as explaining how he made his
millions at such a young age
back in 95 there weren't very many
people on the internet
and certainly nobody was making any
money at all most people thought the
internet was gonna be
a fad now as a side note about one year
after showing his mclaren on the cnn
segment
elon actually crashed it on the way to a
meeting after fellow billionaire peter
thiel asked elon
what can this car do i didn't really
know how to drive the mclaren
and peter says so so what can this do
and then like i'm probably number one on
the list of
famous last words i said watch this
elon being the insane businessman that
he is then hilariously hitchhiked from
the one million dollar crash site to his
meeting
ensuring that no investor relations were
soured following a late arrival once
once the car was uh taken care of then i
i used to ride too
um and so we we continued the meeting
but all is well that ends well because
in 2007 the car was repaired and unsold
at a profit
unsurprising considering the car would
be worth around 20 million dollars today
but we're getting a bit ahead of
ourselves by talking about elon's car
crash in 2000.
let's cast our mind back to the 1999
documentary once again and we'll go from
there
now there were two other things in this
cnn segment that were extremely iconic
and worth documenting when talking about
elon's long-term story
firstly it was mainly a display of how
far elon musk had come in only three
short years
just three years ago i was showering in
the at the y and sleeping on the office
floor
and now obviously i've got a million
dollar car and
quite a few creature comforts but
perhaps the most important and overly
significant section was elon stating
that rather than buying materialistic
items such as his 1 million
car he was more interested in building
and creating a new company
i could go and buy one of the islands in
the bahamas and turn it into my
you know personal fiefdom i'm much more
interested in trying to
uh build and create a new company a new
company that perhaps unbeknownst to elon
would be just around the corner
so this is an atm what we're going to do
is transform the traditional banking
industry
to transform the traditional banking
industry elon's new goal
somewhat of an ambitious goal
considering the size of the banking
industry but after selling zip to for
300 million i'd say that his confidence
was running sky-high and he was ready
for a new challenge
after selling zip to i want to do
something more on the internet
and it seemed to me that there hadn't
been all that much innovation in the
financial sector
in march 1999 only one month after
selling zip2
elon musk founded x.com using 10 million
of the 22 million received from the sale
of his previous company this website
x.com was a website that would later
become known as the now incredibly
popular paypal but in the beginning it
was simply an unknown website called
x.com accompanied by a bunch of funding
and a dream
the basic goal of x.com was for
customers to be able to email money to
each other rather than having to deal
with
everything in cash and then we had a
little feature which took us about a day
that was the ability to email money from
one customer to another a feature that
was relatively unknown at the time
but perhaps the moral or most
significant element of elon's second
company was highlighting the fact that
the second business is always easier
than the first elon had acquired an
array of business experience following
zip2 ultimately leading to smoother
sailing the second time around
he had more money so no more sleeping on
the office couch he knew how to lead a
team of employees so there was less time
wasted on time
wages but perhaps most significantly
elon had figured out a new method of
growing paypal faster than he would have
ever thought possible
one customer would essentially act as a
salesperson for you for all for bringing
in other customers the general setup of
paypal meant that when a user would send
money to their friend
that friend would have to sign up for
paypal and automatically be recruited
into the system
so what did this mean it meant that the
more people using paypal the faster it
would grow
an excellent exponential growth strategy
and it's safe to say that this strategy
caused paypal to absolutely explode
we launched after year one and by the
end of year two we had a million
customers
so it gives you an exam you know it
gives you a sense of how fast things
things grow
but like all things in life it wasn't
all sunshine and rainbows as in october
2000 just one and a half years after
creating the company elon musk was fired
as ceo from paypal
his own company he went on an investment
raising trip and when he got back
what happened well
yeah so
elon explained that despite marrying his
first wife justine 10 months previously
in january 2000 he still hadn't gone on
the honeymoon
so he decided to leave silicon valley
and go away for two weeks
gotten married earlier that year and not
had any vacation or honeymoon or
anything so it's kind of a combined
financing trip with slash honeymoon
yeah the problem with this it was at a
time when paypal had multiple major
problems
underway causing many key individuals
higher levels of stress
while elon was on his holiday he
returned to find that his position as
ceo had been replaced by another key
individual in the company
there was just a lot of worry and that
that caused the uh the management team
to decide that i wasn't the right guy to
run the company not exactly the best
scenario for elon musk
however things always seem to work
themselves out in the long run for elon
musk because in 2002
ebay purchased paypal for 1.5 billion
dollars
with elon receiving 165 million from the
purchase
this whole situation led elon to patch
things up with the former team that
fired him as ceo
and good relations with former business
partners was exactly what he needed
as his next endeavor beginning in 2003
would be so ambitious that he would need
every shroud of good fortune that he
could manage
i think global warming is a very serious
issue and and it's something that
that we have to address and the only way
to address that is is to come up with a
car that doesn't add carbon emissions to
to the environment and i think the way
to do that is with electric vehicles
2003 a year where elon musk would get
involved in the company that he believed
would change the course of humanity
a company dedicated to the environment
dedicated to the best customer
experience
dedicated to success but most certainly
a company that would have to take a
stopover in hell in order to get there
we're of course talking about the now
incredibly popular tesla motors now a
common misconception about tesla is that
elon musk actually started it this isn't
true
the company was started by two
lesser-known engineers who simply had a
vision for transport using energy that
was better for the environment
in 2003 we decided to start a new
company and we wanted something though
this time that actually had a little bit
more of a real mission now let's cast
our mind back a little bit here do you
remember when we mentioned towards the
start that elon actually moved to
silicon valley in the first place to
work on energy storage technologies for
electric cars
the reason i came out to stanford was
actually to work on
energy storage technologies for electric
cars well after first moving to silicon
valley elon thought working on an
internet company was a better
opportunity because of the timing in
1995.
i i thought well i can either work on
electric vehicle technology
and do my phd at stanford um and watch
the internet get built
or i could put my studies on hold and
try to be part of
the internet but by 2003 the internet
was significantly more mainstream and
perhaps elon wanted to come back to his
dream of building electric cars
if the big car companies are not going
to create electric cars by themselves
then
it's necessary to create a startup to do
electric cars
for this reason elon decided to provide
tesla with 6.5 million dollars worth of
funding in february 2004
approximately eight months after the
company was created ultimately resulting
in elon musk being appointed as the
chairman of the company between 2004 and
2008
elon musk and the team at tesla
relentlessly worked on producing their
first car the tesla roadster which was
unveiled in 2006
two years after elon musk began
involvement in the company hello
everyone this is sebastian blanco i'm
here for autoblog green
and netscape.com we're at the unveiling
of the tesla roadster the car was then
released to the market in 2008
incredibly exciting for the company
however elon musk would have never been
able to predict how difficult of a year
2008 would end up being for him
for 2008 is not a good time to be a car
company especially a startup car company
and
especially an electric car company that
was like stupidity squared
the global financial crisis an economic
downturn that would end up challenging
even the most sophisticated in the
business world and economic downturns
generally challenge car companies more
than any other company as when people
don't have much money buying a 100 000
electric car isn't usually at the top of
a financial budget
for this reason just before christmas of
2008 tesla was about two or three days
away from bankruptcy
in fact in at the end of 2008 we were
only a few days from bankruptcy
it was literally two days or three days
maybe tesla alongside another company
created by elon called
spacex which will be discussed later
were both given a success probability of
about 10
each i gave basically both spacex and
tesla from the beginning
a probability of less than ten percent
of likely likely to succeed
with elon musk saying that he wouldn't
even let his friends invest in the
company as he didn't want to lose their
money
then on top of all this 2008 would be
the same year when elon musk's first
marriage would come to an end
justine musk elon musk's first wife
explained that she felt as though she
had become nothing besides trophy wife
also claiming that elon would constantly
put her down for not doing as well as he
did
possibly a problem stemming from their
equal social status in university but
huge differentiation 10 years later
following the divorce with justine elon
musk then proposed a british actor
tallulah riley after dating for only 10
days
elon proposed really quickly the idea of
being swept off your feet is appealing
and
um i'd probably have said yes to anyone
that seemed half sensible
if they proposed just 10 days just
because it's kind of an interesting
thing to do however by 2013 this
relationship had also resulted in
divorce
but things weren't all that bad on the
relationship front elon appeared to be
having serious problems but by 2013 the
business side of things was absolutely
booming with the global financial crisis
somewhat of a distant memory in tesla
stock increasing by 450
between the start and end of 2013 things
were looking
up so much so that the struggles of
tesla were put on the back burner while
one of evon's more ambitious goals began
to become more of a priority
what i really want to try to achieve
here is to make
mars seem possible uh make it seem as
though
it's something that we can do in our
lifetimes in september 2016
elon musk announced that getting humans
to mars was officially one of his main
goals well in the case of spacex
i just kept wondering why we were not
making progress towards
sending people to mars remember we
previously mentioned that elon had a
company by the name of spacex
well spacex was founded in 2002 after
elon realized how expensive it was to
purchase space travel rockets in an open
market
saying that he could make them for about
three percent of the price the
fundamental
issue is actually the cost of access to
space
rockets were super expensive and the
cost
cost per pound a kilogram to orbit had
actually gone up over the years not down
the goal of the company was to make
cheap rockets and sell them to both
private purchases as well as the
government
now while the business side of the
company was kind of cool the ultimate
goal for elon ever since 2001 was
way cooler colonizing mars which even
has a set
date 2024. after landing humans on mars
in 2024
elon's next goal is to cut the cost of a
mars trip to the same price as the
average u.s house price
around hundred thousand dollars
hopefully enticing people to move to
mars permanently
uh which is around two hundred thousand
dollars then i think the probability of
establishing
a self-esteem civilization is very high
elon has since passively hinted that
getting people to mars is currently his
number one priority ultimately
displaying his commitment to making life
multi-planetary
doraleous does it really make sense for
me to spend time
designing and building a house or should
i be allocating that time to getting us
to mars i should probably do the latter
so you know like what's more important
mars or a house i like
mars okay
is coming from a wealthy well-brought up
background a requirement to make a
change in the world do you have to
conform to the rules of society to be a
good human being are there limitations
for where your imagination can take your
reality elon musk doesn't seem to think
so he set the example just because he
might come from an abusive household in
pretoria south africa
doesn't mean you can't restructure the
reality that you're living from a nobody
to a programmer to an engineer to a man
whose sole mission has become ensuring
the future of human existence
and perhaps if you're watching this
video in the far future maybe you're
watching this video on autopilot in your
electric car or we've already been to
mars and you're using some kind of
futuristic piece of technology that none
of us can even conceptualize at the
moment and if that's the case i want you
to remember that all of it started with
one individual an individual who just
wanted to make the world a better place
an individual who upon birth wasn't much
different to you or i
an individual who put humanity before
himself elon musk
you