Elon Musk and The Art of Failing Successfully: A Shadow Side

Introduction

There's this meme which displays "Task Failed Successfully" that meme can be a perfect example for one particular person who faced a lot of failures and yet successful in it. Yes, we are referring about the Real Life Iron-Man, Elon Musk. From applying for a job in Netscape to launching rockets to Mars, Musk have traveled way too long in his life with numerous failures. There are some, the world knows and there are few that went under the radar. In this post, we're going to shout out loud about those failures which made the very man, Elon Musk and the dark side of Tesla!

 

Ousted as CEO from Zip2 and PayPal

Like I said earlier, the first stepping stone for him was, unsuccessful in applying job for Netscape. The Musk brothers founded an online guide for newspaper in 1996, Zip2. He ended up being ousted as CEO and sold it for $300Million with a share of 7% to his name. That's roughly $22Million.

With that money he started X.com, an online financial services later combined with confinity to form PayPal in 2000. He do yet again ended up being ousted as CEO and to worsen it, it happened when he was in his honeymoon. Ouch!. For a brief time he was self conscious about him, being a CEO.

Repetative Rejection of collaborations for Rocket Launches 

Later the very next year, he learned from his failures and experience, have founded SpaceX, an American Aerospace manufacturer. It still a success but he faced a lot of rejections over the globe. The unknown rejection was the Russian denied to collaborate with him for his crazy ideas of sending Mice and Plants in rockets and another time for the Impetus behind the SpaceX by stating "Young Boy. No". It is believed that between being Ex-CEO of PayPal and CEO of spaceX he almost died of cerebral malaria and it made him to say, as i quote "Vacation will kill you"

 

Numerous Rocket Explosions and Tesla's lack of Productions

In 2006 and the following years SpaceX launched three different rockets one for each year, all ended being exploded with critical failure and one with NASA's satellite. It was a hard blow to both Tesla and SpaceX then went to a brink of bankruptcy. 

Between 2008 and 2013, SpaceX had tasted success in launching various rockets for various purposes but a  launch to ISS as a cargo load went to be almost success since it landed in ocean and it became the 1st unsuccessful landing in SpaceX history.

That partial failure in 2013 triggered the successful failures again, now with a total 5 rocket explosions. The 2nd and 3rd landed on a drone ship, while 4th exploded in launch and the 5th exploded with Facebook's satellite for Africa Onboard, worth $300M. The SpaceX claim, a conspiracy, "they haven't ruled out the UFO may have caused it. 

Not only the SpaceX faced it's demons. The Tesla supposed to deliver Model X 18 months before its official announcement date. The Model 5 had faced major battery combustion.

Tesla

Tesla unleashed its power which gave a new face for super car, proved the electric cars are far better than petrochemical engines. Tesla is not just a super car manufacturer but has it's own lithium mines in Nevada. Tesla also faced difficulties like others. In 2017 Tesla, Microsoft, Dell and Apple was allegedly involved in illegal mining of Cobalt in Democratic Republic of Congo(DRC). Most of the electronics gadgets we use today requires battery. Batteries made up of various resources out of which Lithium, Ion and Cobalt concentrates more. Countries like Australia, Bolivia and Chile are rich in Lithium wheres the middle part of Africa are rich in Cobalt. 

Is Africa the poorest country?!. No,  Africa is said to be the richest country in the world in terms of natural resource. Geo-politics showcased Africa as a poor country so that the rich would get benefit from there by mining the natural resource. This is where the Tesla failed to crosscheck  their vendors. Tesla owns the Cobalt from umicore where umicore buys it from Glencore. Glencore a mining company which mines Cobalt in DRC. They use child labors and unskilled employees to mine cobalt. A recent mine crash in DRC found 43 bodies of which most of them were illegal miners but they had been working for the Glen core directly.But this is one part of the story.

The second resides with Bolivia. Unlike Australia and Chile Bolivia is considered to be the poorest country and an easy place to mine Lithium. Tesla allegedly penetrate the mining market of Bolivia. But, the president, EVO MORALES stopped this activity and took control all the private mining in the sake of government. 

This is where Musk's mastermind plays and tried to move his factory into Brazil which he did it successfully. To his luck, There was an people protest going against the Bolivia president. This was provoked by some of his enemies and corporate. With this Coup d'e'tat movement, started in Bolivia to make Evo Morales to step down from his position. After this the opposite party came into ruling and removed all the restrictions made by him.

This lead to mine more lithium from Bolivia and shift into Brazil for battery production.

But it did not stop here. Moving to the past, Tesla's Model 3 had created nearly 50% of the batteries defected in their Nevada plant. This incident was happened and reported to the business insider by an anonymous worker. 50% of battery wastage leads to the loss of raw materials. Tesla said they are here to create a Eco-friendly environment but it failed to keep its word.

Conclusion

The famous actor, Robert Downey Jr had said "Failures are not the first stepping stone for success but learning from it are the first step". "Listen, Smile, Agree and then do whatever the f@*k you were gonna do anyway". I think the Fictional Iron Man did really resembles the Real Life Iron Man and the perception of Elon Musk. The success he accomplished will sure overshadow his failures though they are more, but one thing is clear in his mind that he his never going to rest until he gets his things right.