In December 2008, Elon Musk gave Tesla the last money he had. The wire went through at six in the evening on Christmas Eve.
A few hours later and the payroll checks would have bounced.
He'd sold PayPal in 2002 and walked away with about 180 million dollars. He did almost none of the things a person does with 180 million dollars. He put it into a rocket company and a car company, two industries with almost no history of outsiders winning, and then 2008 arrived and started draining what was left.
By the end of the year he was down to a few hundred thousand dollars and borrowing money from friends to make rent. His marriage had fallen apart that year too.
Two companies. Both nearly out of cash. The same month.
The rockets had failed first.
SpaceX had one product, a small rocket called the Falcon 1, and only enough money to fly it three times. That was the whole budget.
The first one caught fire and fell back to the pad. The second reached space and lost control before orbit. The third separated cleanly, and then the spent first stage drifted back up and tapped the second one... a timing error on a new engine, and the rocket was gone.
Three launches, three failures, no money left.
He built a fourth out of the scraps and put the last of the cash on it.
It launched on September 28, 2008, from a small island in the Pacific, and reached orbit. The first privately built liquid fueled rocket that ever had. He said afterward it was the last money they had, and a fourth failure would have ended the company that night.
It didn't save Tesla.
Tesla had been about to close a hundred million dollar round that summer when the banks collapsed and credit froze. A tiny car startup raising money while General Motors itself slid toward bankruptcy had almost no chance. It was burning cash, had no car in real production, and was days from missing payroll.
So he took over as CEO. He put in his last dollars. He talked the existing investors into restructuring the round as debt to get past the one who was blocking it.
That deal closed at six on Christmas Eve. He gave Tesla the last of his cash and, in his words, "didn't even own a house or anything sellable."
The day before, NASA had called SpaceX with a 1.6 billion dollar contract to carry cargo to the space station. He said he could barely hold the phone.
Two companies pulled back from the edge in 48 hours, at the bottom of the worst year of his life.
People look at Musk now and argue about genius. The genius was already there through all three failures, and it didn't save him.
What saved him was a choice he'd made months earlier, when the money was running out. He could have put everything left into one company and let the other one die. That was the sane move. He split his last dollars between both instead, knowing it could mean losing both.
He said later it nearly gave him a breakdown, and that it could have killed both companies at once.
Most people fold at zero for three.
He paid for the fourth and... it worked.
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