Assignment 27A

Elon Musk

1. The thing that I found to be most surprising was actually the first thing that was talked about. Musk said no and did not cooperate with the biography for several months, and only changed his mind to cooperate by getting to be the one that got to read through it first, make edits and add footnotes. To me, that was most interesting. The thing that I admire most about Musk is that he is not a rich person who is surrounded by what the author calls 'handlers'; he is speaking his own words/thoughts and does not have someone to buffer between him and those around him. I believe that this is admirable. The thing that I least admired about him was the way that he talked about women. While it could have been a joke or could have been serious and I am looking into it wrong, he talked about the 'minimum' amount of time that a woman would want for someone to spend with them when they are in a relationship. To me, this is something that should not be a set number. It should be something that is simply natural for both people involved. Elon Musk has definitely encountered adversity and has been able to push through it. He has, in most recent memory, done so by coming clean publicly and apologizing for actions that he has taken. In the past, he has simply not given up and continued working hard in order to succeed again.

2. The entrepreneur exhibits a vast amount of competencies, with some of the most obvious being that he is very intelligent and hard-working. Pairing those two things together without many other things would make someone successful; however, Musk has those plus many more. Those are simply the two that I view as the most important, personally.

3. I got a bit confused reading about his life goal of dying with humanity having a bright future. He plans to do so by helping make it possible for humans to migrate to Mars.

4. What should I do with any money that I have to invest, and what is your one start up idea that will make me a billionaire? The first would be something that I would ask in order to invest more of the money that I would like to buy stocks with. This is because, while his portfolio became very risky very fast, he has become a very rich man based on those risks. The other is because he has already started and sold two businesses for large sums of money; large enough that I could sell one and never work a day in my life beyond that.

5. He views hard-work as mandatory. This is obvious through the fact that he profited $22 million on his FIRST (and significantly smaller than his second) start-up company, and turned around and used that money to start another. He could have retired and been comfortable for life after that first company, but did not. This shows that he is a hard-worker. I share that view.