What’s in it for me? Learn what drove Elon Musk to the pinnacle of success

Musk’s first start-up turned him into a dotcom, Silicon-Valley millionaire.
Fresh out of college and eager to jump on the dotcom bandwagon, Musk created his first company. In 1995, he and his brother founded Global Link Information Network, which was later renamed Zip2. Their aim was to help businesses clueless about the internet to get online for the first time.
Few small businesses understood the consequences of the internet; they had little idea how to get on, and saw little value in listing their business online or in having their own website. Things were tough at first, Musk and his brother worked very hard and still didn’t sell. They received a lot of rejections, the most amiable ones declaring that the internet was “the dumbest thing they’d ever heard of.”
Things began to change when Mohr Davidow Ventures, the venture-capital firm, invested in the start-up after being impressed with Musk’s energy and drive. They moved Musk down and hired Rich Sorkin as CEO. And, as the money started coming in, they hired better engineers, who changed and shortened much of the bulky coding. This got on Elon’s nerves. He was, after all, a self-taught coder.
However, Mohr Davidow also brought a more refined structure and outlined more realistic goals. Jim Ambras, the vice president of engineering at Zip2, knew that when Musk said a task should be completed in an hour, that actually it would take a day or two. When Musk said something would take a day to complete, it would actually take a week or two.
Finally, in February 1999, PC-maker Compaq Computer offered to pay $307 million in cash for Zip2. But Musk never considered sticking around at Compaq and was already thinking of new projects. He wanted to become a successful CEO.


Losing the war over Paypal left Musk with millions.
Musk, with his newfound money, joined the big-boys’ club. He used his earnings from Compaq to buy a McLaren sports car, a condo and a small prop plane. But the rest of his money went straight into his next business: X.com.
In those days, people were reluctant to buy books online, let alone share bank account details. But by partnering with Barclays, Musk succeeded in establishing X.com as one of the world’s first online banks, backed up with FDIC insurance and three mutual funds for investors to choose from.
Things were going well, but, soon enough, some major competition arrived. Max Levchin and Peter Thiel had been working on their own payment system at Confinity, before creating the first version of PayPal.
After a brief battle, the companies decided, in March of 2000, to join forces: Confinity possessed the sexier product (PayPal), and X.com had the money and superior banking products, so the merge made sense.
But Musk was soon to be pushed aside in his own company once again. Two months after the merge, Thiel resigned, Levchin threatened to do the same, and Musk found himself in charge of a divided company. Though most of his coworkers favored PayPal, Musk persisted in promoting the X.com brand. Meanwhile, computer systems failed regularly and the website crashed weekly.
Then followed one of the meanest coups in Silicon Valley’s history: as Musk and his wife Justine boarded a plane for their overdue honeymoon, the executives went to the company board and asked Thiel to come back as CEO and to demote Musk. The coup succeeded, and Musk was left as an advisor.
The company changed its name from X.com to PayPal and was finally sold to eBay, in July, 2002, for $1.5 billion. Musk netted $250 million, enough to make his wildest dreams possible.