Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark from the recent Iron Man series is the outsized personality behind Stark Industries. As easily distracted as he is brilliant, he finds focusing difficult with attractive women in the room. Stark's technology is unrivaled and reflects its founder's egomaniacal superiority complex and overdriven masculinity. How could Elon Musk ever stack up against such a movie character personality? Founding a billion dollar company before 30 helps. Taking those winnings and anteing up again certainly doesn't hurt--especially if the next two acts are an electric car and a private space exploration company. Let me explain.
Musk was born in South Africa and immigrated to Canada partially due to the prospect of compulsory military service oppressing black South Africans. Eventually he ended up in the United States. (See comments from yesterday) He sold his first piece of software at age 12 and has had a seemingly uninterrupted string of hits ever since.
By now everyone has hopefully heard about a little company called PayPal. PayPal was born out of the merger of X.com and Confinity. Musk co-founded X.com, and after the merger he was the largest PayPal share holder. He owned 11.7% of PayPal when eBay aquired it in 2002 for $1.5 billion--just three years after the founding of X.com... a little math... that's a cool $175.5 million in the bank. Musk took that money and retired to a quiet private island in the Caribbean and was never heard from again. Wait. I meant to say he could have retired to a private island but instead started Tesla Motors.
Musk is perhaps best known for his role at Tesla. Musk took over as CEO in 2008 after a series of technical gaffes left Tesla in a freefall toward oblivion. The company's first car was set to go on sale for $109,000 even though the cost to produce the car had climbed to $140,000--not a profitable proposition. After an additional investment of $20 million he set to work turning the company around. Musk orchestrated coupes such as the purchase of an old Toyota factory worth $1 billion for a paltry $42 million and a successful IPO that infused the company with $238 million. He almost single-handedly put the company on solid footing. Musk also negotiated crucial partnerships with established companies such as Daimler-Chrysler, Toyota, and GM. Most of these deals entailed the licensing of Tesla's battery pack and drive train technology for use in cars manufactured by the other companies and gave Tesla enough breathing room to continue to develop the revolutionary Tesla Roadster.
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| Tesla Roadster |
Accusations that the Roadster is a frivolous luxury for the ultra rich don't disqualify the car as a brilliant piece of engineering. The car accelerates from 0-60 mph in 3.7 seconds compared with 3.14 seconds for the Ferrari Enzo. The car's electric motors produce full torque even at 0 rpm which is an advantage electric drive trains enjoy over their gasoline counterparts. The car travels 245 miles on a single charge. However, Musk's grand plan doesn't stop at producing a billionaire's plaything. He intends to parlay the engineering savvy gained on the Roadster into an affordable consumer electric vehicle. The progression starts with Tesla's production of the Model S priced at a downright affordable $49,000. After PayPal and Tesla, Musk probably called it quits, right? Enter SpaceX.
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| Tesla Model S |
As if Musk needed to burnish his Tony Stark image, in 2002 he founded SpaceX with $100 million of his personal fortune. His goal was the production of reusable launch vehicles. In 2010, SpaceX employed 1100 people and became the first private company to launch a space vehicle into orbit and successfully recover it.
I haven't convinced you that Elon Musk is Tony Stark? Granted, Musk doesn't rely on an arc reactor for sustenance. His suits, though expensive, are not armored or weaponized. This side of a Marvel comic book we're just going to have to accept the fact that we can't have a real life Tony Stark. I don't know about you, but I'll let Elon Musk stand in.
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