Reading Reflection No. 1

The entrepreneur I read about was Elon Musk in Ashlee Vance's book, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. Musk is my favorite entrepreneur and I always like to read about what he's working on or how his projects/businesses are going.

1) 

• What surprises me the most is that Musk was able to create a video game as a self-taught programmer. It makes sense that with all of his business ventures (which are all very different if excluding the tech aspect), his ability to solve a problem started from a young age. Its also surprising to me just how many start ups he had (and the variety) before becoming successful. 
• What I admire most about Musk is that he's relentless. He's experienced many failures during his start ups and his current most well known companies, SpaceX and Tesla Motors, yet he continues to try to make improvements. I had watched an interview before of Musk giving a tour of his Tesla factory and gesturing to the couch that he would sleep on while working late. Vance wrote that Musk would sleep on his beanbag next to his desk during the time he and his brother, Kimbal, were working on Zip2. It seems that his ambition is still as present as his earlier years, except now he has more resources. 
• There isn't anything I could pick that I least admire, but the one thing I didn't like about the book was the part that Musk gave one of his employees a 2-week test when asking for a raise. This bothers me because Musk has spoken out about this and claims that Vance did not have the book independently fact checked. Vance does mention in the book that he told Musk he was going to write a book about him with or without his cooperation, and he would not let him read it beforehand for ethical reasons. 
• Musk experienced many failures. These failures created a pattern - they generated a profit for Musk to use to create his next bigger and better project. In both Zip2 and PayPal, Musk was eventually stripped from his role, but he made $22 million for his Zip2 share when it sold, and $160 million for his PayPal share when it was acquired by Ebay. Musk used the shares sold from PayPal to put money into SpaceX, Tesla Motors, and Solar City. Musk's first few rocket launches were not successful, which costed the company millions each time. His companies also suffered through the 2008 financial crisis, so much that they almost went bankrupt and Musk used his own money to keep them afloat rather than ask for the investors help. 

2) That Musk had the ability to turn a past failure into something better, or into a new opportunity. His failures allowed him to thrive in other projects, which ultimately helped him succeed. 

3) None of the reading was confusing to me. 

4) I would ask 1) How long do you think until Mars will be habitable? and 2) What's another opportunity that you think you could solve that could help our environment? I would ask these because SpaceX was founded to make human space exploration and life on other planets possible, and because SpaceX, Telsa Motors, and SolarCity all have something in common - the environment. 

5) Musk is a believer of failing because it means you are innovating. I do share that opinion. Failures provide insight as to what went wrong, which makes us figure out why that went wrong, and we can find another solution; it teaches us by allowing us to find new opportunities within those failures.