Know-it-all Elon Musk, whose nose was broken by classmates as a child, has three ambitious goals. . Investment bankers and analysts told Forbes how the richest people in the world have achieved success and how their investment strategies and approaches to doing business differently. The hero of the sixth episode is the main investor of our time, Elon Musk.
When Elon was ten years old, his parents - a Canadian model and a South African electrical
engineer - divorced, the children (and Musk had a brother and sister) began to
live mainly with their father in Africa. According to the Washington Post,
Musk's father was a tough person and treated children appropriately, for
example, forcing them to sit for hours in silence and listen to his moralizing.
The situation was no better at school. Classmates laughed and mocked the
reclusive botanist Ilona, and once beat him so badly that they had to repair a
broken nose in the hospital. Musk became more and more withdrawn into himself,
the computer became his outlet. He learned to program on a simple Commodore
VIC-20 home computer and even developed the Blaster space arcade. Selling which
he earned the first $ 500. You can still play it.
At the age of 17, Elon
Musk left for Canada to avoid being drafted into the army and not to participate
in the policy of apartheid. He first enrolled at Queens University in Kingston,
Ontario, and two years later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania,
where he earned bachelor's degrees in physics and economics from the Wharton
School. Later, Musk said that physics gave him a very good structure of
thinking: first, lay things out to the fundamental foundations, and then start
from them. Musk then enrolled in Stanford's PhD program to drop out after a
couple of days and focus on his startup Zip2, which combined city maps and
Yellow Pages data. Two years later, the sale of Zip2 earned Musk $ 22 million.
Early in his career as an
entrepreneur, Musk set several goals for himself. Let's list them in ascending
order of ambition: make internet banking easier, stop global warming, and turn
humans into a multi-planetary species. In principle, we can say that everything
is going according to plan: Elon Musk created and launched PayPal, Tesla
Motors, Solar City, and SpaceX and rightfully bears the title of the main
inventor of our time. Jon Favreau, the director of the Iron Man film series,
has admitted that his image of the millionaire superhero Tony Stark is based on
Musk's personality. Musk himself even appeared in the role of himself in the
second part of the franchise, and some episodes of the film were filmed at
SpaceX headquarters.
In general, Musk is a fan of science
fiction and cinema, which is reflected in his actions. So, the SpaceX Falcon
rocket got its name in honor of the spaceship from "Star Wars", and
in 2013 Musk bought the submarine Wet Nellie, which can be seen in one of the
Bond films "The Spy Who Loved Me". Musk paid almost $ 1 million for
the ship and is now planning to rebuild it based on Tesla Motors technology.
Despite the fact that
Elon Musk is the CEO of Tesla, he did not come up with the car, which is now
associated exclusively with his name. In 2003, Tesla Motors was founded by
Martin Eberhard and Mark Tarpenning, and Musk, along with them, took part in
the investment round A. And in late 2007, after joining the Tesla board of
directors, Musk fired Eberhard as CEO. The founders filed a lawsuit against
Musk, accusing him of trying to rewrite the history of the company and
appropriate the original idea for himself. As a result, the parties came to an
amicable agreement, and now the official version of Tesla is that it has five
founders - they are investors of that very round A. Musk's strange obsession
with becoming the embodiment of the company will play a cruel joke with him
more than once - something a similar thing is happening right now.
Despite the fact that
Tesla receives subsidies from the state because it uses solar energy, the
company has been on the verge of bankruptcy many times, and only new rounds of
funding have saved it. Well, the current capitalization of Tesla largely
demonstrates the credit of trust issued to Elon Musk himself, and he
understands this very well. All the more surprising is the series of recent
events and actions by Musk, as a result of which Tesla shares lost 30% in one
month. Let's restore the chronology of the disaster.
On the
evening of August 7, Elon Musk, in the best
traditions of Donald Trump, published a mysterious tweet in which he announced
that he was going to buy back all Tesla shares from the exchange at a price of
$ 420 and he already had the funds for this. Recall that Musk's personal
fortune is estimated at a little less than $ 20 billion, while the amount of
the deal was supposed to be all $ 49 billion.
Two hours
later, Musk posted an appeal to employees on Tesla's website, in
which he explained that the need to demonstrate good reporting and a large
number of speculators playing for the fall in stocks distracted the company
from its long-term strategy. Moreover, after his tweet, the share price has
changed significantly. Musk could not help but know about the effect of his
announcement, and the whole situation can be regarded as an attempt to
manipulate the market. Furthermore. An Arab fund was announced as a potential
buyer, but since the production of electronic media is a strategic industry in
the United States, foreign investors must get approval.
On August
25, Musk announced that there
would be no buyback. The stock fell. Clearly, there was confusion among both
investors and Tesla employees. Instead of doing business, everyone wondered
what was going on.
On September 4, Tesla's chief reporting officer, Dave Morton, resigned after
working less than a month. He explained his actions by the fact that Musk
ignored his opinion about the buyback of the company. The ill-fated tweet was
posted the day after Morton went to work.
On
September 8, the cherry on the cake in
the chaos was the appearance of Musk smoking marijuana on the air of the
popular show. This sent Tesla shares into an even bigger fall.
On
September 27, the SEC accused Musk of
fraud. Among the requirements of the regulator was a ban on Musk from
continuing to occupy leadership positions in public companies. Of course, Musk
could have delisted Tesla shares and turned the company into a private one -
then he would have spit on the SEC requirements, but he no longer had funding
for the upcoming buyout. Musk's first reaction was indignation: he announced
that he would not agree to a deal with the SEC. Tesla shares plunged 13.9%.
Over the weekend, Elon Musk, apparently, thought hard, assessed the prospects, and
decided to choose the least of evils. On Saturday, it was announced that he was
ready to make a deal with the SEC - to pay a $ 20 million fine and leave the
post of chairman of the board of directors of Tesla. Also, according to the
requirements of the SEC, Tesla will have to add two independent directors and
create a committee to control Elon Musk's communications. Considering that he
remains the CEO of the company, and Tesla's board of directors consists of nine
people - Musk himself, his brother, and three other people who cannot be called
independent - this is a rather benign outcome. Well, the company itself,
indeed, will not be hurt by changes in corporate governance, because the
situation when the same person is both the CEO and the chairman of the board of
directors is a classic example of a violation of standards and the basis for a
conflict of interest.