Success is never an accident. It is most times the result of many years of hard work and consistent effort. Elon Musk is popular today for his electric car company Tesla and his space project SPACE X. But long before these, he was already a multi-millionaire and had founded 3 successful companies which he sold for a collective $1.9bn.
The purpose of this article is to paint a clear picture of what it takes to be among the top 1% of any field. It takes years of consistent hard work to get there. Elon Musk is the perfect example of an individual with a very strong work ethic. His story below will prove that to you.
This article will briefly look at the 3 successful businesses Elon Musk founded and sold for a collective $1.9bn before starting Tesla. Let’s go!
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Blaster ($500)
A 12-year-old Elon Musk facing bullying in high school and a not so friendly dad taught himself how to code. According to the Inc. Magazine, he mastered BASIC a general-purpose coding language making use of a commodore PC he acquired himself. He later that year, sold the code for his PC game Blastar to a PC magazine for approximately $500.
This was his first business endeavour which he started and sold.
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ZIP 2 ($340m)
After the sale of Blastar for $500, Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal took a $28,000 seed money from their dad and started another internet venture, Zip 2. They rented an office and slept in it because they couldn’t afford a house.
Zip 2 was a web software startup that created online city guides for newspapers. The software was patronized by the New York Times and other notable media companies.
Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal sold Zip 2 to PC giants Compaq for $340m. The year was 1999 and Elon Musk was 28 years old.
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X.com/PayPal ($1.5bn)
Elon Musk continued on his journey of starting companies and selling them. He took $10m out of his earnings from the Zip 2 deal and joined the internet boom.
He founded x.com an online platform he envisioned to be the future of internet banking. In 2000 X.com merged with a Fintech startup, Confinity, founded by Peter Thiel, another would-be billionaire. Both companies combined to become what we know as PayPal today. Elon musk was named CEO of PayPal and had the highest number of shares in the company.
In 2002 PayPal was acquired by eBay for a whopping $1.5bn.
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What you should know
Elon Musk has often stressed the need to be consistent and have strong work ethics. In a graduation ceremony by the USC Marshall School Of Business, Elon Musk shared his opinion on work ethics according to CNBC.
“You need to work super-hard. Work hard every waking hour,” Musk said in 2014.
“If you do the simple math, and say if somebody else is working 50 hours [a week] and you’re working 100, you’ll get twice [as much] done in the course of a year as the other company.”
We hope this Monday article will inspire you to work harder and strive to get more work done in record time.