Elon Musk: SpaceX and Tesla were two dumbest ways to make money

Elon Musk isn’t afraid of a bad idea. In fact, the billionaire CEO recently tweeted, “Creating a rocket company has to be one of the dumbest and hardest ways to ‘make money’.”

And as USA Today pointed out, the billionaire CEO recently described starting SpaceX and Tesla, the two companies he’s best known for founding, as possibly “the dumbest things to do” in terms of new ventures.
This is surprising, to say the least, especially with Tesla's market cap exceeding $ 52 billion, while Forbes estimates private rocket company SpaceX at over $ 20 billion.

Source: Internet

“If you were to do a risk-adjusted rate of return estimate on various industry opportunities, I would put building rockets and cars pretty close to the bottom of the list. They would have to be the dumbest things to do,” Musk told Jonathan Nolan, the co-creator of HBO’s “Westworld,” during an SXSW Interactive panel in Austin in March.
Elon Musk isn’t afraid of a bad idea. In fact, the billionaire CEO recently tweeted, “Creating a rocket company has to be one of the dumbest and hardest ways to ‘make money’.”
And as USA Today pointed out, the billionaire CEO recently described starting SpaceX and Tesla, the two companies he’s best known for founding, as possibly “the dumbest things to do” in terms of new ventures.
That’s surprising, to say the least, especially considering that Tesla has a market cap of over $52 billion, while Forbes values the private rocket company SpaceX at more than $20 billion.

Source: Internet

Musk said he founded SpaceX and became CEO of Tesla because he believed in the companies’ abilities to change the world for the better.
“I gave basically both SpaceX and Tesla from the beginning a probability of less than 10% likelihood to succeed,” Musk said, citing the wide array of challenges associated with building rocket ships within the private sector. He also noted the difficulty of launching a mass-market electric car in the ultra-competitive auto industry, where he said there is a “graveyard of companies” that went bankrupt trying to do so.
Despite the risks, Musk said he wants to find solutions for "things that don't seem to work for our lives and the future."
And Musk's career shows that if he is not an adventurer, he is nothing.
Musk has said that a “crazy” number of people tried talking him out of going into the rocket business before he founded SpaceX in 2002. “One good friend of mine collected a whole series of videos of rockets blowing up and made me watch those. He just didn’t want me to lose all my money,” Musk said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in 2014.

Source: Internet

According to reports, Musk earned US$180 million from eBay’s US$1.5 billion acquisition of PayPal in 2002. After merging with his own online payment company X.com in 2000, Musk has been the largest shareholder of remittance services.
Musk said in a speech at SXSW that after selling PayPal, he is trying to make a decision between new companies involving electric vehicles (he had planned to study “advanced energy storage technology for electric vehicles” at Stanford University, and then learn from him The doctoral degree withdrawal program at the age of 24) or space. He believes that space adventure is the least likely to attract many entrepreneurs.
"I thought, 'No one is going crazy to go to space, so I'd better go to space,'" Musk said.
However, Musk did not just focus on SpaceX, which is already an ambitious undertaking. Instead, he decided to join Tesla in 2004 two years later, led the A round of investment, and joined the company's board of directors as chairman.

Source: Internet

On SXSW, Musk said this is "My biggest mistake of my career” to think that he could easily balance his time between SpaceX and Tesla.
Instead, Musk pointed out that SpaceX must experience a series of failures before becoming a viable private rocket manufacturer. In 2008, SpaceX almost completely died because the first three launches of the company's first rocket, the Falcon 1, failed. Musk said of that period at the 2017 International Astronautical Congress (IAC) meeting in Adelaide, Australia, that the fourth failure "will definitely end." Fortunately, the fourth launch attempt was successful, and the company subsequently won a government contract from NASA worth about $1.6 billion.
Musk has said that Tesla almost went bankrupt in 2008, and the company continues to face challenges, including the current delay in the production of the company's Model 3 sedan. Despite this, Tesla shareholders recently approved Musk's $2.6 billion stock compensation plan.
“I don’t really have a business plan,” Musk said at SXSW, noting that he hasn’t had a formal business plan since he launched Zip2, his first successful startup in 1995.
“These things are just always wrong, so I didn’t bother with business plans after that.”