New Delhi: It’s a resilient success story that takes one to read about Elon Musk, initially, he was dropped off from PayPal. Back in the 2000s, Musk was acting chief executive officer of the former X.com that later happened to be PayPal. Actually on a trip to Australia just before marrying Justine the wife, board members including his other friends, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and actually Reid Hoffman, and Dave Dacks made a firm resolve to get him sacked,. This happened during his absentee period, and for a time, he was pretty infuriated with it. He even had darker thoughts in his head about it, but then eventually realized that it was an opportunity to be. This is how he later summarized it, “It was good I got kicked out. Otherwise, I’d still be slaving away at PayPal,” and wondered if he had not left then, maybe PayPal would have eventually become a trillion-dollar company.
Even though he was ousted, Musk still had a big stake in PayPal, which ended up being a huge win when eBay bought the company for $1.5 billion in 2002. Musk made around $250 million from that deal, giving him the financial freedom to chase his next big idea: SpaceX.
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, with a dream of making life multi-planetary. The early years were really hard, and the company had three launch failures of its Falcon 1 rocket. In 2008, SpaceX was almost out of money and close to bankruptcy. The fourth launch would make or break the company.
Fortunately, Musk still had good relations with many of his old PayPal peers. The Founders Fund, led by Thiel and other ex-PayPal executives, made a $20 million investment that kept the lights on at SpaceX. It was “interesting karma” for Musk; he felt as though his capacity to let go of the bitterness over PayPal actually helped him out in the end.
On September 28, 2008, SpaceX marked its first Falcon 1 launch successfully; it was a great moment both for the company and for the industry. Just within a year after that, NASA awarded a $1.6 billion contract to SpaceX and thus validated its position in space exploration.
Fast forward to today, SpaceX is still doing just fine, assisting NASA in their critical missions. Recently, the company launched the Crew-9 mission to rescue astronauts who had been stranded in space because of issues with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
