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Elon Musk big bets

Paper Type: Free Essay Subject: Business
Wordcount: 1784 words Published: 23rd Sep 2019

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Elon Musk big bets

Introduction

Elon Musk usually starts something by having in mind that his goal is not to have profit but to reveal the possibilities. He is driven by a desire to discover as well as taking big bets.

Nowadays only USA, Russia, China and Elon Musk have launched to space capsule into orbit and successfully brought it back which is one of his biggest bet. Of his career. He is a man with unlimited ambitions because his mind needs to be consistently filled and the bets such as Tesla, PayPal, which he takes, need to be challenging.

Background

•    Elon Musk’s Ventures

Elon has moved from achievements to all the time, bringing to the world a fresh idea of inventions. He has made solar energy affordable for the public through his company Solar City and has made the dream of an electric car possible and inexpensive with Tesla models. This was not enough for him. His SpaceX space travel adventures have proven to be a major success with a promising future. Despite Elon Musk big bet, today he is considered as the most successful daring entrepreneur who has always tried hard to make the world a better place to live. Elon was born in 1971 in South Africa. Milner (2018) proposes that he taught himself computer programming at an early age and sold his first programme years later. He also created a space game called BLASTAR and later he moved to California to pursue a PHD in energy physics at Stanford University. Next, he launched a software company called zip 2 which was basically an online guide for newspapers publisher as well as having a contract with major players in the industry including The New York Times or Chicago Tribune but things were not very smoothed at zip 2 due to relevant issues. At that time, Elon Musk wanted to be the CEO of the company but the Board sold the company to Compaq for three hundred million dollars along with 30 million dollars in stock options. He later received twenty million dollars for his 7% stake in Zip 2. That same year, he co-founded X.com, an online banking company using ten million dollars from the sale of zip 2. A year after that with the dot-com bubble of tech companies closing their virtual doors, X.com acquires shares with another online financial services firm called PayPal. PayPal became the online payment system of choice with millions of users in just a few months but the board again confront him over CEO position due to technical arguments concerning the future architecture of the service. This time eBay bought PayPal for almost two billion dollars. Later Musk received almost 200 million dollars for his 12% stake in PayPal. He then began to dream up that he could land on planet MARS. He decided to start a company that will build an affordable rocket using vertical integration and a modular approach of software engineering. Simmons (2015) proposes that Those ideas bought to life the launch of SpaceX. This was perhaps his greatest vision and he spent the majority of his net worth between SpaceX and Tesla. Although he faced the worst crisis in his career when all of his three companies started collapsing. Indeed things that appear useless had to be closed down and he had to close Tesla sales. Later he decided to raise 40 million dollars out of his own pocket to keep the companies going and maintain the dream alive. Most of his innovative ideas and visions have become true because he never limits himself to dream big.  Beyond headlines and profits, Elon made Big Bets that were quite successful and increase his popularity in the tech world.

Evaluation of Elon Musk Big Bets

•    Tesla and SolarCity

Tesla is a revolutionary idea from the mind of Elon Musk who built an industrial empire of cars, solar energy and rockets. The reason Elon Musk put so much time and efforts to create Tesla was because he thought that transportation should go electric. Tesla was the first auto industry start-up in decades and the only one born in Silicon Valley. Tesla’s plan was to introduce a high quality and high-performance product to first detract buyers and then make an affordable car for the masses. The big issue with Tesla as for electric cars had been the batteries, their cost and how long they last.

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The issue was that there is an unprized externality in the negative effects of gasoline and on the environment as well as national security because we can’t rely on the market industry. In order to have electric vehicles as the long-term transportation mechanism, he has to reach the gap with innovation and Tesla serves as a catalyst to accelerate the day of electric vehicles. Solar City is on the energy production site because it doesn’t help if we have a sustainable consumption of energy but then that energy should be produced in a sustainable way. Solar power could be the single largest source of electricity generator by the midpoint of the century. The SolarCity is all about sustainable energy creation where Tesla is about sustainable energy consumption.

In fact, it’s just a simple extrapolation of the growth of solar power energy. We could also consider that the Earth is entirely a solar power due to the Sun and the ecosystem powered by it.

•    SpaceX and Neuralink

Seen as a catalyst by many American citizens, Elon Musk has a big vision to enable human civilisations to leave the planet earth and that’s going to require funds but he knew that he has enough funds to do this bet. He has the outrageous idea that private enterprise could actually reenergise space travel and in the year 2002, he founded Space exploration technology or simply SpaceX.  He started this company so that human can colonize Mars and save the Earth. His idea was not how to get out into the orbit but how to get there cheaply and he knows that rocket has not evolved since the seventieth century. He came out with low-cost ways to produce engines, to launch operations differently and inject some inventions in other areas. Basically, SpaceX tends to take offshore technology or stuff that was developed by NASA years ago and produced something from it just by figuring out the valuable pieces.

Solutions & changes

•    Alternative Battery Technologies

By 2007, Tesla was running out of money and Elon Musk has to solve the issue alone. He got to a point that his company had only enough money in the bank for a couple of months and there is nobody around who was willing to put more money in Tesla.

He makes some dramatic changes and essentially reforming the business as well as investing all his reverse capital for Tesla. At that point, the key things were to supply battery packs for cars such as Mercedes. He pushed his team to build a smart car with a Tesla electric motor and this was a great solution for the use of alternative battery technologies.

•    Energy Storage and Electric Vehicles

Battery puts power in our devices but they could not unlock the true potential of renewable energy and they could not provide us answer to storing energy when we really need it. The fact is that it’s not just carbon dioxide that causes environmental issues but we have to look into the potential green solution.  Renewable energy is also different to store so we have to consider carbon caption energy that lasts longer and that is powerful. Although Batteries are set to be the key to the green energy revolution powering higher energy performance, road vehicles and also to unleash the true power of renewable energy in order to achieve that, we need the next generation of batteries. The whole point of renewable energy is to make for a cleaner environment and also save the planet and that’s why Elon Musk wants to built electric vehicles.

Recommendations

My recommendation is mainly driven by my belief that if we have to survive climate changes or energy issues, we need to develop renewable energy. Indeed, it is a big bet but technology pushes the boundary and the expectations like never before. We could actually build lithium battery powered by wind and solar power in order to help stabilize the power light. I think like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk is a perfectionist in the art of engineering because he is changing the car the way Jobs change the phone.

Finalizing Elon Musk Big Bets

To conclude, If Elon Musk had his way, the world would be totally powered by renewables and he would be colonising Mars because he is a big picture man with big plans and maybe his quest for the lithium battery would prove to be one of the most significant tips in electric revolution vehicle.

References

  • Vance, A. (2016). Elon musk – tesla, spacex and the quest for a fantastic future : Book summary. Place of publication not identified: Primento. (2016). Retrieved December 11, 2018, from INSERT-MISSING-DATABASE-NAME.
  • MILNER, Y. (2018). Elon musk: The visionary. Time International (atlantic Edition), 191(16/17).
  • Sizing up Elon Musk’s big bet on the Big Frickin’ Rocket … (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.geekwire.com/2017/sizing-billionaire-elon-musks-big-bet-spacexs-big-frickin-rocket-future/
  • Baldwin, D. B. (n.d.). Elon Musk’s Big Bets. Retrieved from Module
  • https://hbr.org/product/elon-musk-s-big-bets/717431-PDF-ENG
  • (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2014-12-05/elon-musks-big-bet-on-battery-technology
  • Elon Musk’s Big Bets Harvard Case Solution & Analysis. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.thecasesolutions.com/elon-musks-big-bets-case-solution-80348
  • Simmons, M. (2015, November 24). What Self-Made Billionaire Elon Musk Does Differently. Retrieved from https://www.inc.com/michael-simmons/what-self-made-billionaire-elon-musk-does-differently.html
  • Lambert, F., Fred, & Electrek. (2018, May 04). Elon Musk warns people betting against Tesla of a ‘next level short burn of the century’. Retrieved from https://electrek.co/2018/05/04/elon-musk-tesla-shorts-warning-short-burn-of-the-century/

 

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