Elon Musk Success Story

Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28th 1971 in South Africa during Apartheid. At the age of 17 he fled South Africa to avoid military service. He ended up in Canada and in 1991 he attended the university of pennsylvania received a masters degree in economics and a kept studying for a bachelors in physics. In 1999 he founded X.com and in 2002 PayPal (formerly X.com) was bought by ebay for 1.5 billion. Musk received 11 percent of this. Also in 2002 Musk founded the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation or SpaceX with the end goal of enabling humanity to become a multiplanetary species.

In 2008 NASA began to put funding into SpaceX and in 2012 SpaceX launched cargo to the ISS the first company to do so. All of this was done by a small boy from south africa fleeing his violent country and an abusive father, how? But more importantly, Why?

At an early age Musk was fascinated with space and how the universe worked, he noticed that there was a need not being filled, Sustainable energy was a must, so was cheap transport. Science fiction novels were his inspiration, particularly Isaac Asimov’s “Thousand Year Plan” 1. Elon was and still is very aware that if humanity doesn’t “get it’s ass to mars” 2 we’re dead. As the saying goes it’s ok to have all your eggs in one basket as long as you can control that basket. This is why i chose Musk as an upstander, not because he did anything for a group of people but because he is doing something for all people of earth, what he is doing will not be like the civil rights campaign, that lasted decades. What elon is doing will last thousands of years. Now you might be thinking, Elon is a fool!, well what can be said to that is, The Inquisition thought Columbus to be a fool and yet he discovered a new world and ushered in a new age for humanity. It’s not just Musk that is aiding humanity but others, like Neil DeGrasse Tyson who educate the public and the Late Stephen Hawking who gave us all something to ponder on how humanity is more than just one people.

What Musk is accomplishing with SpaceX is coming at a critical time, global warming is at an all time high and congress is… well congress only cares about congress. Congress refuses to put money into NASA, the one thing “that enables tomorrow to happen, and without it we might as well just slide back into the cave because that’s where we’re headed right now, broke” 3. What we find hard to grasp is that technology does not solve our problems, we will always have to deal with things be it your neighbor being an ass or jerry in the next star system keeps hurling asteroids at you. We can’t expect technology to just solve our problems because that’s how we get to where we are now with people claiming that we don’t need space travel, but that’s a whole other can of worms, the point is Musk is an activist (I hate using that word) not just for a group of people, NO, he standing up to fate, he is telling people that we can change our planet for the better by working harder and becoming smarter by innovating. He is an inspiration to everyone everywhere, a boy from Apartheid South Africa inspiring a planet to reach up and create a beautiful future for our innumerable descendants.

That’s one thing Musk has said in many of his SpaceX presentations, “you want to wake up in the morning and you want to be able to look forward to the future” 4, this is an amazing goal to have as it speaks to anyone who is intelligent it can relate to all humans. If we can help all of our people we can help ourselves.

Musk is a perfect example of Nelson Mandela’s quote “It’s not about where you start, it’s about how high you aim that matters for success. Some of the youth, can be seen not doing this. This is because they have nothing to reach towards, they should reach towards the infinite. But why should anyone reach to the infinite? Well for starters there’s a lot to explore, and it is the only place that can provide Humanity with a purpose. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about how to combat nihilism in the face of the absence of religion, and he concluded that one must find purpose, something to strive for. Space is that purpose and we need to strive towards it, and Musk is that inspiration that will encourage the next generation to do so and in the process, save earth and humanity.

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