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JP Rezendes

Ms. Godfrey

Honors Leadership

13 December 2019

Elon Musk Essay

In our world today, many prominent leaders can dominate one industry impressively.

However, there are only a few who can be exceptional leaders in more than one field of

expertise. One of these people is Elon Musk, helping create SolarCity, SpaceX, and Tesla. In this

essay, I will disclose how Musk was able to rise to the top of multiple industries and

simultaneously become an admired leader.

Elon Musk was born in South Africa on June 28, 1971, to his father who was a wealthy

engineer, and his mother who was a model. Musk was influenced greatly by his family, creating

good relationships with his siblings and learning a lot from his parents. Despite this, Elon was

not considered a normal child. Being an introverted genius, he found it hard to socialize and

make friends as a young kid.

In spite of his early social struggles, Musk excelled in school, eventually attending the

University of Pennsylvania. After graduating from here, he attended Stanford University but

dropped out after only 2 days of attendance to focus on Zip2, his first startup company. Zip2, ran

by himself and his brother Kimbal, was a major success, and the company sold for $342,000,000

4 years after its creation. Elon used this money to invest in his next project, X.com, which later

turned into PayPal. Only 3 years after this startup, PayPal was bought by eBay for

$1,500,000,000. This made Elon, who owned 11% of it, a multimillionaire.

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Elon since then has used this money to invest in and grow new startup companies, such

as Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity.The consistent success of each of his startups is one of his

biggest career accomplishments. However, I think that making the world a better planet is the

other biggest career accomplishment. Elon Musk was always a hardworking and tenacious

business man, but his motivation was not entirely the money. Instead, success is derived from the

personal belief and goal that his created technology would positively help not just the people of

earth, but also the planet itself, which has been accomplished through Tesla and SolarCity

I believe that Musk has had a tremendous impact in a few different areas. For starters,

Musk is the ideal entrepreneur. It goes without saying that his work ethic, determination, and

people skills are going to be emulated in the future. Additionally, his success as a CEO will also

try to be duplicated. Through his ability to share his vision with others, CEOs of the present and

the future are going to imitate him. One last area that he is going to have a lasting impact are in

the fields that his companies are, which is electric cars, Space exploration, and solar power. The

advancements that his companies have made will definitely be built off of in the future and

inspire those of the future. For these reasons, since Musk can have people follow him not just for

who he is but for what his vision represents, I would consider Elon Musk as a level 5 leader.

While researching Musk, the biggest takeaway I had was the effect of having a few

certain leadership qualities; vision, risk-taking, and work ethic. Musk demonstrated these

qualities remarkably, and without them he would not have been able to attain the level of success

that he has.

First off, Musk has had incredible vision. This vision has had a major part of not just the

creation of his companies, but the everyday life of his companies, such as the vision to create the
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best electric car. Secondly, Musk would not be where he is today without taking risks. After

becoming a multimillionaire after selling PayPal, instead of living off that money for the rest of

his life, he risked a good portion of his wealth to crebiograte Tesla and SpaceX. Lastly, Musk

had an insane work ethic. At one point in his career, Musk would have 120 hour work weeks and

often sleep at his office. In conclusion, these characteristics have been vital to Musk’s success,

and I think that any leader will benefit greatly by obtaining and utilizing these qualities.

The book that I read for my project was a biography by Ashlee Vance, and I found this

book to be very well written. On the back cover, the New York Times gave the synopsis that this

biography was “exhaustively reported.” This statement definitely rings true, and since this book

covered Musk’s whole life in detail, it makes sense that it was a 400-page read. This being said,

since it was “exhaustively reported”, I found that at many times I would come across paragraphs

and even pages that would go off on a serious tangent. While these tangents gave great

background information, it also made finding instances of Musk’s leadership a lot harder, since I

had to go through a lot of information that proved to be futile. Nevertheless, even though there is

a lot of irrelevant information, the book definitely does not miss any key information, which is

why I would recommend it to another student.