HOW ELON MUSK AND HIS BROTHER'S FIRST VACATION ALMOST TURNED INTO A TRAGEDY... AND HOW IS IT CONNECTED TO THE SUCCESS OF SPACEX?
december 2000. Elon has just been pushed out as CEO of PayPal. he's 29, rich on paper, and for once he takes a break
he flies to South Africa with his brother Kimbal. the bush, a safari, the place they grew up running around in
Kimbal laughs about it now:
"we'd go to the bush all the time. i don't think we ever took malaria tablets"
this time they did. it didn't matter
january 2001. Elon is back in California and something is badly wrong. doctors check for malaria. negative
Kimbal: "i couldn't figure out what was wrong with him"
then their uncle, a doctor in South Africa, says it straight: "he has malaria. check again"
he was right. malaria hides in the body. and this was the deadly kind
Elon: "i had a severe case of malaria. almost died"
"i lost like 50 pounds"
"took me over six months to get back to normal"
and his lesson from all of it:
"no more vacations"
now the part that matters
six months of recovery. no company to run. a guy who almost died at 29 starts asking one question: what do i do next?
he checks NASA's website to see when humans are going to Mars. there's no plan. nothing
so he flies to Moscow. to buy ICBMs. "literally"
"i can afford to pay under nine million dollars for an ICBM. but not 20"
the Russians keep raising the price. he walks out
and instead of looking for a cheaper seller, he asks a different question: why are rockets so expensive in the first place? the metal, the fuel, the parts cost a small slice of the price tag. the rest is how the industry builds them
so instead of buying a rocket, he decides to build one
napkin math:
the rocket he was willing to pay for: under $9M
where the Russians were pushing: $20M+
his cut from the PayPal sale to eBay in 2002: ~$180M
how much of it went into SpaceX: ~$100M
SpaceX today: valued at $800B+
the company is now worth ~8,000x the money he put in
the first three Falcon 1 launches failed. the fourth reached orbit in 2008. he's said there was money for basically one more try
most people come back from almost dying and slow down. Elon came back and bet more than half of everything on the most expensive thing on earth
a vacation almost killed him. the comeback built SpaceX
