Tesla and Elon: A perfect reflection

In the mist of a financial crisis, Tesla Motors was saved by a man who was forced to learn to be resilient early in his life.

Elon Musk seems to be on the news day after day doing something extraordinary. Inventing something cool or just talking big game on some talk host show. He is currently the CEO of the well known company SpaceX, as well as Tesla, and Solarcity. He is no ordinary capitalist that just wants to get rich off of wall street, but instead a man that wants to take “One giant leap for mankind”. A man who talks about landing and colonizing Mars within the next 100 years is beyond a visionary, which some would even call crazy; He is without doubt a amazing. We are talking about Elon Musk after all. He is from South Africa where he was born in Pretoria. His mother was a professional dietician and a model. His father an engineer. Both his mom and dad would mold Elon Musk into one of the greatest entrepreneurs we have seen in the current decade. The part of the story that most people don’t know is that Musk grew up in a very abusive deprived household. His father was emotionally abusive and he was very tough on Musk and his brother. After coming home from school, Musk and his brother had to sit for a few hours everyday and get lectured by their dad. Musk describes his childhood as a living hell.

"They got my best [expletive] friend to lure me out of hiding so they could beat me up. And that [expletive] hurt. For some reason they decided that I was it, and they were going to go after me nonstop. That’s what made growing up difficult. For a number of years there was no respite. You get chased around by gangs at school who tried to beat the [expletive] out of me, and then I’d come home, and it would just be awful there as well."

Elon Musk sat in the emergency room as a child emotionally and physically scared. He was not supposed to be the man he is today. He was not supposed to be the brilliant leader of two of the most promising and influential companies leading humanity past these technological frontiers. He was supposed to grow up and be just like his father, it was supposed to be another tragic cycle of family violence. After all, time does not heal all wounds. Elon Musk sat in the emergency room afraid of the confusing world he was brought into. Unknowing of where he may end up. He saw videos of families he wished to be a part of and would be masked in envy for something he dreamed of having. Fear like he encountered as a child, he would never see again. A time in misery was a time when this future genius would grow into the man we would soon know. When you first hear about him, the first thing that you will probably think of is his success. He might at first have seemed to have lived such an extravagant life, but darker things always lie beneath what seems good. His jolly smile is a deception all in itself and it does a damn good job misleading the public of the horrors that he had to live through.
Musk’s pains and sorrows would not end there. The brutal beatings and abusive family, would inevitably bring Musk to North America where he would attend school at Queens University and eventually graduate and finish school at the University of Pennsylvania. After Musk transferred from Queen’s University to the University of Pennsylvania, he rented a house, which he would throw large parties attracting over a thousand kids and would charge each single one of them for entry. Musk already showing a strong spirit in his entrepreneurship would begin to foreshadow his future spirit and creativity. His roommate, and fellow entrepreneur, helped coordinate the late night party mansion during the time that Musk attended Penn. Ressi, Musk’s roommate at Penn told reporters that Musk was never interested in partying,

“There were some nights where I’d be like, ‘Where’s Elon?’ and I’d go up to his room and pound on the door and he’s in there alone playing a video game.”

Musk was known to be very introverted, but he was not anti-social in any regard. If it was not about technology or something intellectual, Musk would immediately have exited the room. This is where one of his greatest obsession began to brew, during these lonesome escapes. Electric cars. Musk was always obsessed with them from a young age, and it would only be a matter of time before he would put the passion behind the idea to make it become a reality. Tesla Motors would be the foster child of this dream. Why do I say foster child? Tesla was the creation of a small group of obsessive and nerdy Silicon Valley engineers who, as Business Insiders Drake Baer best said “went on to collaborate with — and collide with — the young billionaire”, which today the company has grown into a technological powerhouse which many still think was founded by Musk himself.
Drake Baer describes this ‘collision’ as the sole reason why Tesla Motors is what it has become today. Having a smart motivated captain at the helm, Tesla was able to steer into the right direction with insight and hope. Tesla Motors was a failing company before Musk and was especially hit hard during the financial crisis of 2008. Luckily for the company, Elon Musk threw in a little bit of his own cash to help the struggling company stay afloat. Musk did not originally come into the big picture until 2005, when he himself became the head of board of directors and one of the main investors in the company. Musk became the CEO and product architect of Tesla in 2008, which is a position that he currently holds today. One of the reasons that Musk truly transformed Tesla was that he incorporated a strategy where the company would focus on one product at a time. This strategy actually worked very well. This would lead to the birth of the first Tesla Roadster, which was a sports car. Musk did a great deal of boasting that its car was featured on the cover of Time in December 2006 before it began selling, and it received one of the “Best Inventions 2006 — Transportation Invention” award. Tesla finally went public in 2010, and began selling the Model S Sedans. It was at this time when the company reached another low point in its endeavors. Tesla nearly ran out of money. Again. What did Elon Musk do? He ordered everyone who worked for him at Tesla to become salespersons and to begin calling customers to finalize a deal in which the customers would agree to buy the car.
Tesla was saved by Musk’s ability to think outside the box for the last time.
The reason why I say for the last time is because Tesla would spiral out of control into the beautiful hands of good old success. Elon Musk brought Tesla out of a ditch that was dug twice, and both times Tesla Motors should have been buried. Dead. But the company made a great historic comeback since 2012. The reason this happened is because Tesla began to expand in different realms of technology and started to expand internationally. For the first time in a while, an American company was invading the borders of the world. The story of Tesla is the story of Elon Musk, and they are more intertwined than you think. The luck and resilience of the company came down to the strength and resilience that Musk learned early in his life. If you try to learn anything from the success of Tesla and Musk; Then you can not ignore his upbringing and its importance in shaping who he was.