Elon Musk And The Art Of Success

He is not yet 50, and is already the world’s richest man with a net worth of more than $200 billion. His company, Tesla, is less than 20 years old, and makes just about half a million cars a year, but it is now worth more than the combined value of 10 of the world’s largest legacy carmakers. Elon Musk is an enigma, a genius technologist-entrepreneur who defies categorisation. His achievements fly in the face of conventional labelling, his self belief bordering on arrogance. But he delivers every time, accomplishing the seemingly impossible. And now, he’s coming after the electric car market in India

- Sameer Kumar

South Africa-born Elon Musk, Founder and CEO of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla, certainly isn’t the shy, retiring type. Musk speaks his mind, and doesn’t care who he might offend. Last year, when Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates bought a new electric supercar, a Porsche Taycan, Musk put out a tweet saying, ‘My conversations with Gates have been underwhelming to be honest’. This was in response to a Tesla fan’s online comment, saying he was surprised that Gates chose the Taycan over one of Tesla’s electric cars. Gates, who had in an earlier interview on YouTube said that Tesla is the one company that has really driven growth in the electric car market, did not respond to Musk’s ‘underwhelming’ comment. Maybe he knew Musk enjoys a bit of trash talking every now and then; the Tesla CEO has, at various occasions in the past, tweeted that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s understanding of artificial intelligence is limited, and that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s plans to colonise space make no sense.