How did Elon Musk become so successful?

Most answers have missed the “secret sauce”. Musk comes from paypal’s original team. The people who went on to do some big innovative things for the world. Take peter theil. He was a co founder and also one of the first investors in facebook when it was scaling up in 2006. If it wasnt for him we wouldnt have facebook get off the ground. Like Theil, who is knows for his contrarian views on business, innovation and policy, musk is no different. Its not that he has brains. All of us have. He has a method which is core to his background of physics. He uses two ideas to create disruption 1. Theil’s 0 to 1 paradigm: which is that regardless of the problem your solving as a startup, you should always aim at making a monopoly so that there is no chance for any other competitor to kill you. Its a powerful idea and works very well. (Think facebook, spacex,airbnb,and their competition) 2. Musk uses “first principles “ approach that he borrows from physics. The tendency of the human mind is to constrain thinking . Henry ford said it aptly that “if i ever asked what is it that you want, people would say faster horses”. Musk tries to break down an existing concept as if it never existed and rebuilds it from ground up to solve each of the problems that existing idea has. For ex: cost of flight was high since rockets could not be re-used. Musk looked at that problem not as an assumption but as something to solve and did very well. His rockets fly back and forth. Another example is the fuel used. He broke down the kind of conventional fuel and asked his team to develop something that was lighter and offered more thrust. Thinking how musk thought created a monopoly siutation, since competitors cant create re usable rockets overnigjt their cost of payload always remain higher and musk outcompetes them on any contract. No surprises for guessing that he is also NASAs biggest vendor.

He always seeks and listens carefully to negative feedback. This allows him to see into his own blind spots or what he just didn't think of; to detect if there's any mismatch between his intentions and people's experience with his products; and to make meaningful improvements constantly.

When friends get a product, he said  to them, “Don’t tell me what you like, tell me what you didn’t like.” Because otherwise your friend is not going to tell you what he doesn’t like. … You really need to sort of coax negative feedback, and you know if someone is your friend or at least not your enemy and they’re giving you negative feedback, then they may be wrong, but it’s coming from a good place. And sometimes even your enemies give you good negative feedback. [View] positive feedback like water off a duck’s back: really under-weight that, and over-weight negative feedback

Inovation,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

EION MUSK

He is a clear motivation for anyone out there, & a best entrepreneur i have ever seen, His one of the project "HYPERLOOP" was my seminar topic in my Engineering degree.

Musk's principle goal is to catalyze world-changing innovations, he received $22 milion at the age of 28 Under these circumstances, most of us would likely retire into a life of recreation and luxury. In Musk’s case, he responded by investing half his net worth into a new venture. thats the nature & attitude of the good entrepreneur & a key to his success is thinking out of the box by investing in one or another without sitting idle, & building is own empire

the path he followed was paved with hard-won knowledge.

He is one of my role model & an motivator to so many teenegers out there

 

Thanks & Regards

Bharath Bhushan