Elon Musk & Family: Entrepreneurs At Heart
A Vanity Fair article contains some anecdotes about Elon Musk and some of his family members having the entrepreneurial bug since they were teens in South Africa. Lyndon and Peter Rive are Elon’s cousins and the co-founders of SolarCity. His brother Kimbal worked with him at Zip2, which was sold for several hundred million dollars. After working with Elon, he went to culinary school and is now running a company that owns a chain of restaurants. Elon is on the board of SolarCity and still has regular contact with his two cousins. Kimbal is on the board of SpaceX and Tesla.
When they were young in South Africa, they tried to sell chocolate eggs and met with some success. Then they planned to start their own video game arcade and were well along in the game before they found out a license to operate it was required, but they were too young to be granted one.
In South Africa, Elon was sort of the ringleader and he also made and sold his own video games. Much later, in California, he dropped out of graduate school at Stanford because he had a hunch the Internet boom could be lucrative. Kimbal worked with him at Zip2. Of course, after selling two Internet startups he had over 100 million dollars, and began to invest in other ventures like Tesla and SpaceX.
“There’s a lot of playing, hanging out, eating well, and talking about business. We fire each other up by talking about the really cool things. We don’t make a point of it, but it just kind of happens. Kimbal is trying to transform food. We’re tackling energy. Because we get business and we get people, it’s what we like talking about,” said Peter Rive.
One of the perils of these kind of articles is that people read them because they are fascinated by wealth and want to be rich, so they try to pick up some tips that might help them do that.
The larger truth though is that there are millions of entrepreneurial people who are also intelligent and persistent who never experience such financial success. Doing so requires luck as well, but you can’t manufacture that or control it.
Ray Kurzweil has a saying, “To wit: invention is a lot like surfing; you have to catch the wave at the right time. This is why I have become an ardent student of technology trends. I now have a research staff that gathers data on a broad variety of technologies, and I develop mathematical models of how technology in different areas evolves.”
Kurzweil obviously studies the trends and has people supporting him with information. In the case of the Musks and Rives, the entrepreneurial fire seems to have spring forth naturally. There is also a knack that some people have for predicting what is coming next.
Elon Musk was interested in electric vehicles and clean energy for quite a while before he became involved with Tesla and Solar City. So, he didn’t time the trend or the market – he had a genuine interest in technology that started to grow in popularity. (Electric cars have been around for over one hundred years.)
You might say that if Musk was mostly interested in computer programming, he still would have likely been a multi-millionaire, but he wouldn’t have become famous.
Image Credit: Steve Jurvetson, Wiki Commons
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