The ENTIRE History of Elon Musk in 9 Minutes — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00This is the entire history of Elon Musk.
2. 0:02We're going from a bullied kid in South
3. 0:04Africa to the first trillionaire in
4. 0:06human history. And yes, we're covering
5. 0:08all of it. The rockets, the cars, the
6. 0:11Twitter chaos, and the moments he almost
7. 0:13lost everything. Now, most people see
8. 0:15Elon one of two ways. Either he's a
9. 0:18real-life Iron Man who wakes up and
10. 0:20invents the future, or he's a rich guy
11. 0:22who got lucky and tweets way too much.
12. 0:25So, you'd think this story is about
13. 0:26genius or about money. It's not. The
14. 0:30real story is about a guy who kept
15. 0:31betting everything he had again and
16. 0:34again and somehow survived every time.
17. 0:37In late 2008, he was days away from
18. 0:39losing both of his companies. Three of
19. 0:41his rockets in a row had failed. His
20. 0:43electric car company was almost out of
21. 0:45cash, and his marriage was falling
22. 0:47apart. What happened that Christmas
23. 0:49changed everything, and we'll get to it.
24. 0:51So, here's the plan. We start with a kid
25. 0:53in Pretoria, then go through the dot-com
26. 0:55money, the rockets, the cars, the
27. 0:57Twitter takeover, and where he is today.
28. 1:00Everything in this video is real and
29. 1:02documented, and some of it sounds so
30. 1:04insane you'll think I made it up. Let's
31. 1:06go.
32. 1:07Elon Musk was born in 2971.
33. 1:10Wait, no. 1971 in Pretoria, South
34. 1:13Africa. And as a kid, he was not the
35. 1:16main character. He was quiet, always
36. 1:18buried in books, and he got bullied
37. 1:20hard. One time a group of kids threw him
38. 1:22down a flight of stairs and beat him so
39. 1:24badly he ended up in the hospital. Rough
40. 1:27start, right? But while other kids were
41. 1:29playing video games, he was making them.
42. 1:31At 12 years old, he taught himself to
43. 1:33code and sold a game called Blastar to a
44. 1:35magazine for around $500. 12. At 12, my
45. 1:39biggest achievement was not getting
46. 1:41caught on my phone in class. At 17, he
47. 1:43left South Africa alone and moved to
48. 1:45Canada with basically nothing. He worked
49. 1:48odd jobs, including farm work and
50. 1:50cleaning boilers, then ended up at the
51. 1:52University of Pennsylvania, where he
52. 1:54studied physics and economics. After
53. 1:56that, he got into a PhD program at
54. 1:58Stanford and quit after about two days
55. 2:01because the internet was exploding and
56. 2:03he didn't want to miss it. Remember
57. 2:05that. Leaving, quitting, betting on the
58. 2:08next big thing. It becomes a pattern and
59. 2:11his first big bet is where it gets
60. 2:13interesting. In 1995, Elon and his
61. 2:16brother Kimball started Zip2, basically
62. 2:19an online city guide for newspapers. The
63. 2:21whole startup ran on one computer. Peak
64. 2:24startup energy. Four years later, Compaq
65. 2:26bought Zip2 for about $307 million
66. 2:29and Elon walked away with roughly 22
67. 2:31million. So, what does a 28-year-old do
68. 2:34with that? He buys a McLaren F1, sure,
69. 2:36but he puts almost all the rest into a
70. 2:38new company called x.com, an online
71. 2:41bank. x.com merged with another startup
72. 2:44and became PayPal. And here's the plot
73. 2:46twist. In 2000, while Elon was on a
74. 2:49flight to go fundraising and start his
75. 2:50honeymoon, the board kicked him out as
76. 2:53CEO. He's in the air, newlywed, and gets
77. 2:56fired from his own company. Imagine the
78. 2:58group chat. But he kept his shares and
79. 3:01when eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5
80. 3:04billion,
81. 3:05Elon's cut was about $175 million. Most
82. 3:09people would have bought an island and
83. 3:10logged off forever. Not him. He split
84. 3:13most of it across three companies that
85. 3:15everyone said would fail. About 100
86. 3:17million into SpaceX, 70 million into
87. 3:19Tesla, and 10 million into SolarCity.
88. 3:23If you're enjoying this, subscribe to
89. 3:25CEO Zone because we break down the
90. 3:27entire history of the biggest companies
91. 3:29in the world one at a time.
92. 3:32But remember, those three bets almost
93. 3:34destroyed him. SpaceX started in 2002
94. 3:37with a ridiculous question. Why is going
95. 3:40to space so expensive? Elon flew to
96. 3:42Russia to buy old missiles to launch a
97. 3:44plant to Mars. And the Russians
98. 3:46basically laughed at him and the prices
99. 3:48were insane.
100. 3:49On the flight home, he did the math and
101. 3:51realized the raw materials for a rocket
102. 3:53cost only a tiny fraction of what
103. 3:54rockets sold for.
104. 3:56So, he figured, "Why not just build them
105. 3:58myself?"
106. 3:59A guy with zero rocket experience
107. 4:01decided to build rockets, and the
108. 4:03universe responded with a big old no.
109. 4:07The first Falcon 1 launch in 2006 failed
110. 4:10seconds after lift off. The second one
111. 4:12in 2007 failed. The third one in 2008
112. 4:15failed. Three failures, and SpaceX had
113. 4:18money for exactly one more try.
114. 4:21Meanwhile, Tesla wasn't going great
115. 4:23either. Quick fact, Elon didn't start
116. 4:26Tesla. He came in as the lead investor
117. 4:28in 2004, became chairman, and later took
118. 4:31over as CEO. By 2008, the Roadster was
119. 4:35over budget and late, the financial
120. 4:37crisis was hitting, and the company was
121. 4:39weeks from not being able to pay people.
122. 4:42On September 28th, 2008, the fourth
123. 4:45Falcon 1 launched, and it worked. It
124. 4:47became the first privately built liquid
125. 4:50fuel rocket to reach orbit, but SpaceX
126. 4:52was still running out of money.
127. 4:54Then came December. On December 23rd,
128. 4:57NASA announced a $1.6 billion contract
129. 5:01for SpaceX to fly cargo to the space
130. 5:03station. And on Christmas Eve, Tesla
131. 5:05closed a last-minute funding round just
132. 5:08days before it would have run out of
133. 5:09cash. Two lifelines, two days apart.
134. 5:12If either one had gone the other way,
135. 5:14there's no Starlink, no Model Y, and no
136. 5:17Starship. And that's the thing. He
137. 5:20didn't win because he was safe.
138. 5:22He won because he was willing to be one
139. 5:24launch away from zero. After that,
140. 5:26things started moving. Tesla went public
141. 5:28in 2010. SpaceX became the first private
142. 5:31company to send a spacecraft to the
143. 5:33space station in 2012. And then Elon
144. 5:36decided to try something every expert
145. 5:38called impossible, landing a rocket
146. 5:40booster upright so you can reuse it.
147. 5:43It took a lot of attempts, and a A of
148. 5:45those ended in giant fireballs. SpaceX
149. 5:48has a phrase for that, rapid unscheduled
150. 5:50disassembly, which is the fanciest way
151. 5:52ever to say it exploded. But in December
152. 5:552015, a Falcon 9 booster came back down
153. 5:58and landed perfectly. And honestly, that
154. 6:01one moment changed the economics of
155. 6:03space.
156. 6:04Then in 2018, he launched the Falcon
157. 6:07Heavy, the most powerful rocket flying
158. 6:09at the time, and for the test payload,
159. 6:11he put his own cherry red Tesla Roadster
160. 6:14in space with a dummy driver named
161. 6:16Starman. A car in space playing David
162. 6:20Bowie. Is that a flex or the most
163. 6:21chaotic thing ever done? Both. Back on
164. 6:25Earth, Tesla was fighting for its life
165. 6:26again. The Model 3 went into what Elon
166. 6:29called production hell in 2017 and 2018.
167. 6:32He was sleeping on the factory floor and
168. 6:35the company was bleeding cash. He also
169. 6:37got in serious trouble in 2018 after
170. 6:39tweeting that he had funding to take
171. 6:41Tesla private at $420 a share and the
172. 6:44SEC came after him for it.
173. 6:46He paid a fine and stepped down as
174. 6:48chairman, but then it all turned around.
175. 6:50Tesla posted its first full year profit
176. 6:52in 2020, joined the S&P 500, and by
177. 6:55early 2021, Elon had passed Jeff Bezos
178. 6:58as the richest person in the world. The
179. 7:00same guy who'd been days from bankruptcy
180. 7:02was now number one.
181. 7:03But he wasn't done making headlines. In
182. 7:05April 2022, Elon offered $44 billion to
183. 7:09buy Twitter.
184. 7:10Then he tried to back out, then Twitter
185. 7:12sued him, then he bought it anyway. That
186. 7:15October, he showed up at the
187. 7:17headquarters carrying a kitchen sink
188. 7:19with the caption, let that sink in.
189. 7:21Yeah, we saw that coming, right? What
190. 7:24followed was chaos.
191. 7:26He cut about half the staff within
192. 7:27weeks, changed how the platform worked,
193. 7:30and in 2023, he killed the famous blue
194. 7:32bird and renamed Twitter to X. He's also
195. 7:35dipped into politics, working with the
196. 7:37Trump administration on government
197. 7:39spending cuts in 2025, then having a
198. 7:41very public falling out with Trump.
199. 7:44Then, plot twist again, getting close
200. 7:46again. We could do a whole video on
201. 7:48that, but let's just say it's a lot.
202. 7:50Meanwhile, he started an AI company
203. 7:52called XAI in 2023, which made the
204. 7:56chatbot Grok. And this is where the
205. 7:58story catches up to right now. In
206. 8:00February 2026, SpaceX bought XAI,
207. 8:03creating a combined company valued at
208. 8:06about $1.25 trillion.
209. 8:08Then on June 12th, SpaceX went public on
210. 8:11the Nasdaq in the biggest IPO in
211. 8:13history, raising tens of billions of
212. 8:15dollars. The stock hit a $2 trillion
213. 8:18valuation, and Elon became the first
214. 8:20trillionaire ever. And just this month,
215. 8:22he said the AI division, now called
216. 8:24SpaceX AI, is getting renamed again to
217. 8:27SpaceX SI.
218. 8:30He renames things faster than I change
219. 8:32my phone wallpaper.
220. 8:33Also, Tesla shareholders approved a pay
221. 8:35package worth up to a trillion dollars,
222. 8:37the largest in corporate history.
223. 8:40So, let's zoom out. You probably started
224. 8:42this video thinking Elon was either a
225. 8:44pure genius or a lucky billionaire. But
226. 8:46look at what actually happened. A
227. 8:48bullied kid who coded at 12. A guy who
228. 8:50got fired from his own company on his
229. 8:52honeymoon.
230. 8:53Three failed rockets, a car company
231. 8:55weeks from bankruptcy, and then, in 1
232. 8:58week, two rescues that saved everything.
233. 9:00That's not luck, and it's not just
234. 9:02genius, either. It's a guy who kept
235. 9:04putting everything on the table, nearly
236. 9:06lost it, and refused to quit.
237. 9:08You can love him, hate him, or just
238. 9:10scroll past his tweets. But nobody's
239. 9:12built anything like this. And the
240. 9:14wildest part? He says we're still at the
241. 9:16beginning.