My Personal Reflection on the Biography of Elon Musk

The biography, Elon Musk written by Ashlee Vance provides me a tremendous and detailed peek into the world’s major entrepreneur Elon Musk’s life and experience. Born in South Africa in 1971, Elon Musk, a child who liked to have daydream over all inventions, developed an interest in computer programming and successfully developed and sold his first programmed game called Blastar at age of 12.

Granted Canadian citizenship in 1988, Elon Mush started attending Queen’s University. He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and eventually graduated at Stanford University with a physics major. Realized how much potential the internet market has, Elon Musk and his brother founded their first company, ZIP2, which would create a searchable directory of businesses and tie this into the map. ZIP2 became a big success and was purchased by another Computer Corporation in 1999 with about three hundred million dollars.

Elon Musk used this money founded a new company called X.com which led to the creation of PayPal today, and he earned 1.5 billion dollars by selling it to eBay. Intending to explore space commercially, Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 and started working on making rockets commercially. He also became the co-founder of Tesla in 2003. Over the years of developing new technologies, solving much financial crisis and doing audacious experiments, SpaceX and Tesla gradually rise and became the most famous company in each of their areas. Elon Musk and his companies met lots of crisis during the years, both Tesla and SpaceX were few hours close to bankruptcy. However, Elon Mush took the risks and did the best he could.

Elon Musk who has an enthusiastic and audacious heart had little internal conflict in the biography because he always knows what he wants and what goal does he want to achieve, and once the goal is decided, he would take the pressure and the busy hard-work, and he would never give up. One of the biggest external conflicts he met would be the launching of the Falcon 9 rocket. Elon Musk and his team have been working extremely hard for years and Falcon 9 rocket is the only place they can demonstrate their result. Lots of people both inside and outside of the company did not believe that a new company can lead ahead of the government and achieve their goal of landing and recycling the rocket.

Moreover, Tesla was hours away from going bankrupt when deficient funds, technical bottleneck, and unsuitable management all happen at the same time in the company. Elon Musk was still calm at that time and led his team solving all the issues step by step within a couple of days. Elon Musk is “insane” just as what he described himself, but the qualities that caused his success mostly are not his genius, but his diligent, brave, rational, persevere, and enthusiasm.

Comparing to Him, I realized that I need to be bold in trying new things and stimulate my work ethic. From all the hardships Elon Musk encountered and his solution to each of them, I am not only motivated by his attitude but also afforded practical knowledge which can help me to become a successful man in the future. I realized that being hard-working, trying new things, taking risks and pressure, keeping calm and thinking logically in the long-term are the most important features of being a successful man.

I got a few takeaways that once I decided to do things, I cannot give up easily, that I need to step out of my comfort zone and challenge myself, and that I should put my thought into action rather than just talking. I highly recommend people to read this biography because this biography gives me lots of life lessons realistically and practically. Instead of listening to the theories, this book contains real events so different people can learn different life lesions form it.