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Early life
Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa to a Canadian mother and an English-born South African father. Elon taught himself computer programming and at age 12 sold the computer code for a video game called Blastar for $500. Musk graduated from Pretoria Boys High School and moved to Canada in 1988 at the age of 17, after obtaining Canadian citizenship through his mother. He did so to avoid service in the South African military, and also because he concluded it would be easier to emigrate to the United States from Canada than from South Africa. In 1992, after spending two years at Queen's School of Business, Kingston, Ontario, Musk transferred to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and received a Bachelor of Science degree in business and a second Bachelor of Science degree in physics. He moved to California to pursue a Ph.D. in applied physics at Stanford but left the program after two days to pursue his entrepreneurial aspirations in the areas of the Internet, renewable energy and outer space. In 2002, he was naturalized an American citizen.

Career
Musk started Zip2, a web software company, with his brother, Kimbal Musk. The company developed and marketed an Internet "city guide" for the newspaper publishing industry. Musk obtained contracts with The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and persuaded the board of directors to abandon plans for a merger with a company called CitySearch. Compaq acquired Zip2 for US $307 million in cash and US $34 million in stock options in 1999. Musk received 7% or $22 million from the sale.

X.com and PayPal
In March 1999 Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company. One year later, the company merged with Confinity, which operated a subsidiary called PayPal. PayPal and X.com each had a person-to-person email-based payment system. The original intent was to merge the two systems, but it never happened. The creators of Yelp, YouTube, and LinkedIn all worked with him at PayPal. Elon Musk strongly favored the X brand over the PayPal brand. After initially co-branding PayPal with the X brand, including making PayPal a subdomain of X.com, he moved to officially remove the PayPal brand for good. Following this, Elon was removed as CEO by the board, who appointed former PayPal founder Peter Thiel interim CEO. PayPal's early growth was due in large part to a successful viral growth campaign created by Musk. In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for US$1.5 billion in stock, of which $165 million was given to Musk. Before its sale, Musk, the company's largest shareholder, owned 11.7% of PayPal's shares.

Elon has mentioned reading biographies in multiple interviews: 

Winston Churchill, Thomas Edison in: Elon Musk and the frontier of Technology.(PBS)
Tesla (of course) and Issacson's biog of Ben Franklin in the Kevin Rose interview: Episode 20 w/ Elon Musk 
SpaceX: On 60 Minutes Elon Musk said that he was mostly self taught and learnt most of what he knows from reading books. What books do you think Elon Musk read?
Ben Franklin in: We're live at Elon Musk's SXSW keynote
He's also mentioned Henry Ford and Carnegie (will update with links if I find them)... But it's easy to see the pattern here

He also talks about the process of decision-making and frameworks-for-thinking on multiple occasions. He's mentioned it in the PBS link above and also in this TED interview ("deductive over inductive reasoning, first-principles reasoning..."): Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity ... | Video on TED.com

He's also mentioned Physics, Engineering & Product Design/Business books on multiple occasions (wish I could list them all!), but I have a feeling that he shies away from mentioning names and details for those. 
[...]
Early technical subjects from his father; Likes Edison more than Tesla: Full Length Interview with Elon Musk
[...]
Kevin Rose interviewed Elon Musk as part of his Foundations series. In that interview (which you can find a video of online) Elon says that he's not big into general business books but instead gets most of his insights from reading biographies like that of Benjamin Franklin.
[...]
Along with the other answers he's most recently shared that he's currently reading up on Howard Hughes
[...]
If you go to space-x's youtube channel, there are a few videos of him shot at his desk. behind, you can see a stack of books. One book he has surely read and appreciates, (I could make out from the blurry background) is 'Einstein' by Walter Issacson.
[...]
He has said that his inspiration for starting SpaceX was the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Source: Elon Musk's mission to Mars

Zip2
I'll talk a little bit Zip2 and Paypal and then mostly about space and what we're doing in space. So, I originally came up California to do energy physics at Stanford, actually. And this was in '95. And ended up putting that on hold to start Zip2. I'll tell you a little about the thought process of exactly what happened there. In '95, it wasn't at all clear that the internet was going to be a big commercial thing. In fact, most of the venture capitalists that I talked to hadn't even heard of the Internet which sounds bizarre--on Sand Hill Road. But I wanted to do something in there. I thought it would be a pretty huge thing. I thought it was one of those things that came along once in a very long while. So, I got a deferment at Stanford. And thought I'd give it a couple of quarters. If it didn't work out, which I thought it probably wouldn't, then I'd come back to school. Actually, I talked to my professor. I told him this and he said, "Well, I don't think you'd be coming back," And that was the last conversation I had with him. The only way to get involved in the Internet in '95, that I could think of, was to start a company. Because there weren't a lot of companies to go and work for, apart from Netscape, maybe one or two others. And I didn't have any money. So I thought we've got to make something that's going to return money very quickly. So we thought that the media industry would need help converting its content from a print media to electronic. And they clearly had money. So if we could find a way to help them move their media to the Internet that would be an obvious way of generating revenue. There was no advertising revenue on the Internet at the time. That was really the basis of Zip2. We ended up building quite a bit of software for the media industry, primarily the print media industry. So we had as investors and customers Hearst Corporation, Knight Ridder, most of the major US print publishers. We built that up and then we had the opportunity to sell to Compaq in early '99. And basically, took that offer. It was for a little over $300 million dollars in cash. That's a currency I highly recommend. 

Founding of PayPal
So we had that, but I wanted to do something more after Zip2. So immediately post the sale, I didn't really take any time off. I tried to think of where were the opportunities, in...this is in early '99, where the opportunities remained in the Internet. And it seemed to me that there hadn't been a lot of innovation in the financial services sector. And when you think about it, money is low bandwidth. You don't need some sort of big infrastructure improvement to do things with it. It's really just an entry in a database. The paper form of money is really only a small percentage of all the money that's out there. It should lend itself to innovation on the Internet. So, we thought of a couple of different things we could do. One of the things was to combine all of somebody's financial services needs into one website. So, you could have banking, brokerage, insurance and all sorts of things in one place. And that was actually quite a difficult problem to solve. But we solved most of the issues associated with that. And then we had a little feature which took us about a day. That was the ability to email money from one customer to another. You could type in an email address or, actually, any unique identifier and transfer funds or conceivably stocks or mutual funds or whatever from one account holder to another. And if you tried to transfer money to somebody who didn't have an account in the system, it would then forward an email to them saying, "Hey, why don't you sign up and open an account?" And whenever we'd demonstrate these two sets of features we'd say, "This is a feature that took us a lot of effort to do and look how you can see your bank statement and your mutual funds and insurance and all that. It's all in one page and look how convenient that is." And people would go, "Hmm...ho hum." And then we'd say, "And by the way, we have this feature where you can enter somebody's email address and transfer his funds. " And they go, "Wow!" And we were like, 'OK...' So we focused the company's business on emailed payments. In the early game going, our company's called X.com. There was another company called Confinity which also started out from a different area. They started off with Palm Pilot cryptography and then they had as a demo application the ability to beam token payments from one Palm Pilot to another by the infrared port. And then they had a website which was called PayPal where you'd reconcile the beamed payments. And what they found was that the website portion was actually far more interesting to people than Palm Pilot cryptography was. So they started leaning their business in that direction. And then in early 2000, X.com acquired Confinity and then about a year later we ended up changing the company's name to PayPal.

Success Through Viral Marketing: PayPal
And that's an approximate evolution of the company. But Paypal is really a perfect case example of viral marketing, like Hotmail was. Where one customer would essentially act as a salesperson for you for bringing in other customers. So they would send money to a friend and, essentially, recruit that friend into the network. And so you had this exponential growth. The more customers you had the faster it grew. It was like bacteria in a Petri dish, it just goes like this S-curve. I ran Paypal for about the first two years of its existence. We launched after year one and by the end of year two, we had a million customers. It gives you a sense of how fast things grow in that scenario. And we didn't have a salesforce. We, actually, didn't have a VP of Sales. We didn't have a VP of Marketing. And we didn't spend any money on advertising.

Selling the Company: PayPal to eBay
In about February of last year, I'm sure you're probably following it, Paypal went public. I think we were the only internet company to go public in the first part of last year. It went off reasonably well. Although, I think we had more SEC rewrites than any company I can imagine. I think we set a record on SEC rewrites. This was right around the end-on time when there was all sorts of corporate scandals. So, they put as through the ringer. Shortly thereafter, about June, July, we struck a deal with eBay, to sell the company to eBay for over $4 billion. But that was when eBay's stock price was about $55 and they hadn't split. So, I guess, in today's dollars we were about $3 billion. So it worked out pretty well. 

Common themes between Zip2 and PayPal
Common themes between Zip2 and Paypal? Well, I guess, both of them involved software as the heart of the technology. Even though Zip2 was servicing the media sector. And obviously, Paypal was servicing the financial sector. The heart of it was really software and internet related stuff. So, certainly that's a huge commonality. They're both in Palo Alto, where I live. I think we took a similar approach to building both companies. Which was to have a small group of very talented people and keep it small. I think Paypal had, at it's height, probably 30 engineers for a system that, I would say, is more sophisticated than the Federal Reserve clearing system. I'm pretty sure it is actually because the Federal Reserve clearing system sucks. So, what else is there? Generally, I think the way both Zip2 and Paypal operated was, it was really your canonical "Silicon Valley" start up. You know, pretty flat hierarchy, everybody had it, roughly, some like you. And anyone could talk to anyone. We have to go for the best idea when's as oppose to a person proposing the idea winning because they are who they are. Even though there are times when I thought that should have been the way it could. Obviously, everyone was an equity stake holder. If there were two paths that, let's say, we had to choose through one thing or the other. And one wasn't obviously better than the other. Then rather spend a lot of time trying to figure out which one was slightly better, we would just pick one and do it. Sometimes we'd be wrong. And we'd pick ourselves from our path. But often it's better to pick a path and do it than to just vacillate endlessly on a choice. We didn't worry too much about intellectual property, paperwork or legal stuff. We were really very focused on building the best product that we possibly could. Both Zip2 and Paypal were very product-focused companies. We were incredibly obsessive about how do we evoke something that is really going to be the best possible customer experience. And that was a far more effective selling tool than having a giant sales force or thinking of marketing gimmicks or twelve-step processes or whatever.

Viral Marketing
I'm not super familiar with Friendster. I mean the essence of viral marketing is, 'do you have something where one customer is going to sell to another customer without you having to do anything'. There are lots of instances of that, Friendster might be one. Obviously, Hotmail was one. PayPal was one. eBay was one. In a situation like that, going back to what I said about product, a product matters incredibly because if you're going to recommend something to somebody, you've got to really love the product experience; otherwise, you're not going to recommend it because you don't want to burn your friend. 

Customer Base: PayPal vs. SpaceX
Can you talk a little bit about difference in the customer base you have targeted in SpaceX that enforces experiences with PayPal how much challenge that presents? Yes. The customer base with SpaceX is dramatically different obviously from PayPal. PayPal is a consumer product whereas SpaceX we're selling rockets and the number of people who want to buy rockets is quite small. If anyone here has explained to everyone a rocket, I'd be glad to sell it to him. So it's much more of an individual selling process. There's a great deal more thought that goes to any purchase of a launch, much more so that signing up a PayPal account which doesn't really cost you much, and there's not a lot of viral marketing that's going to happen with a rocket I suspect. I'm hoping but I'm not counting on it.

Qualities of an entrepreneur
I think successful entrepreneurs probably come in all sizes, shapes and flavors. I'm not sure there's any one particular thing. For me, some of the things I've described already I think are very important. I think really an obsessive nature with respect to the quality of the product is very important and so being an obsessive compulsive is a good thing in this context. Really liking what you do, whatever area that you get into, even if you're the best of the best, there's always a chance of failure so I think it's important that you really like whatever you're doing. If you don't like it, life is too short. I'd say also, if you like what you're doing, you think about it even when you're not working. It's something that your mind is drawn to and if you don't like it, you just really can't make it work I think. 

Career Development: To MBA or Not?
How did the Wharton degree help? I think a business degree teaches you a lot of the terminology, it introduces you to concepts that you would otherwise--[laughter from audience] Heh, you know, there's terminology, there's something to be said for that--It introduces you to concepts you would otherwise have to learn empirically. I mean I think you can learn whatever you need to do to start a successful business either in school or out of school. A school in theory should help accelerate that process and I think oftentimes it does. It can be an efficient learning process, perhaps more efficient than empirically learning lessons. I mean there are examples of successful entrepreneurs who never graduated high school and there are those that have PhDs. So I think the important principle is to be dedicated to learning what you need to know, whether that is in school or empirically.

Reducing Company Costs: PayPal and SpaceX
The way we've gotten our prices low, our cost low is we've really focused on every element of the launch vehicle. There's really no one silver bullet that has been responsible for a substantial portion of the cost savings. It's been really hundreds of small innovations and improvements, and so we've done improvements in the propulsion system, the structure, the avionics and the launch operations as well as maintain a very low overhead organization. When you add up all the things we've done in those areas, that allows us to produce the launch vehicle at $6 million. As far as PayPal, there were a lot of back-office relationships that we needed to establish and to attach to various heterogeneous data sources. We needed to attach to the credit card system for processing credit cards. We needed to attach to the Federal Reserve System for doing electronic funds transfers. We needed to attach to various fraud databases to run fraud checks. There was a lot that we had to interface with. That took a while. It all came together I think roughly simultaneously. I mean developing the software and having it ready for the general public reasonably coincided with us being able to conclude those deals and interface with the outside vendors, and all that took about a year. I think one thing that's important is to try not to serialize dependencies, so if you can put as many elements in parallel as possible. A lot of things have a gestation period and there's really nothing you can do to accelerate; I mean it's very hard to accelerate that gestation period. So if you can have all those things gestating in parallel then that is one way to substantially accelerate your timeline. I think people tend to serialize things too much. 

Q: 'How did you decide when to sell?'
We had several offers actually from a number of different entities for Paypal, and in fact the closer we got to IPO, the more offers we got, but we always felt that those undervalued the company and subsequently when we went public, I think the public markets kind of indicated the value of the company. That's one of the good things about public markets. It's that they're an objective valuer of companies. When you're a private company it's very hard to say how much you're worth because you have to basically think of some metric. Are you going to go for multiple of future earnings? Are you going to go off something of revenue? What are your comparables going to be? There are all sorts of questions. It's really up for debate what sort of value your company is. When you're public, it's what the market says you're worth, that's what you're worth. Yes. eBay made a number of offers prior to going public that were substantially below the value once we went post public and that kind of cleared up the disagreement and then we sold them. What else? Actually you had a second part to the question. I'm just wondering if you were concerned on getting any traction to a solution. Yes. eBay had initially Billpoint and then there was eBay Payments and it was a really pretty tough long running battle of Paypal versus eBay's payment system. It was certainly very challenging. I think there were times when it felt like we were trying to win a land war in Asia and they kind of set the ground rules or trying to beat Microsoft in their own operating system. It's really pretty hard. That took a lot of our effort to actually beat eBay on their own system. One of the long-term risks certainly for the company was that eBay would one day prevail and one way to retire that risk obviously was to sell to eBay. 

History of Zip2
Writing software during the summer of '95. Trying to make useful things happen on the internet. I wrote something that allowed you to keep maps and directions on the internet and something that allowed you to do online manipulation of content; kind of a really advanced blogging system. Then we started talking to small newspapers and media companies and so forth. We started getting some interest. I mean, half of the time it'd be like, "What's the Internet?", even in Silicon Valley. But then occasionally, somebody would bite and we get a little bit of money from them. There were, basically, only six of us. There were myself, my brother, who I convinced to come down from Canada; and a friend of my Mom's. And then three sales people we hired on contingency by putting an ad in a newspaper. But things were pretty tough in the early going. I didn't have any money. In fact, I had negative money: I had huge student debts. In fact, I couldn't afford a place to stay and an office. So I rented an office instead. Because, actually, I got a cheaper office than I could get a place to stay. I just slept on the futon and showered at the YMCA on Page Mill. It was the best shape I've ever been. There was shower work out and you're good to go. There was an ISP on the floor below us. Just like a little tiny ISP. And we'd draw a hole through the floor and connect to the main cable. That gave us our internet connectivity like a hundred bucks a month. So we had just an absurdly tiny burn rate. And we also had a really tiny revenue stream. But we actually had more revenue than we had expenses. So when we went and talked to VP's we could actually say we had positive cash flow. That helps, I think.

Q: 'Would you recommend starting a space company to first-time entrepreneurs?'
No. That's a good question. No, I would not. I think SpaceX, this is advanced entrepreneuring. I can't tell you how many people have said that the fastest way to make a small fortune in the aerospace industry is to start with a large one so hopefully that doesn't work out. I think space is a tough one for first-time entrepreneurs. You're better off starting with something that requires low capital and space is a high-capital effort.

Justine says Elon is not the sort to give up on things. When they first met in college he asked her out for ice cream. She said she had to study, but he searched the campus for her with two cones, ice cream melting down onto his hands. "You know, that was Elon at 19, with just this single-minded persistence. For a long time, that was kind of what our pseudo-dating life was like. He would ask me out, and I would say no for one reason or another, and it really didn't make any difference!" I asked Justine if she ever thought she was marrying a dreamer; "No", she said, "just someone insanely ambitious, intensely logical, and very determined."

it's so rare to see Musk talk to someone on the phone without simultaneously doing something else: pecking out an e-mail, scanning invoices, mulling over a spreadsheet, shopping for computer equipment, fiddling with his BlackBerry. He often does several of these things at once. The only tasks that seem to command the entirety of his attention are technical discussions related to SpaceX's soon-to-be-launched rocket, the Falcon 1, and job interviews. (Musk personally vets all of SpaceX's employees, and he's in the midst of a frantic--but so far fruitless--search for a CEO for Tesla.)

To get through the day, Musk relies on two stimulants: caffeine and a desire to help humanity colonize Mars. Until he recently started cutting back on the former, Musk consumed eight cans of Diet Coke a day, as well as several large cups of coffee. "I got so freaking jacked that I seriously started to feel like I was losing my peripheral vision," he says. If he realizes how crazy this sounds, he doesn't let on. "Now, the office has caffeine-free Diet Coke." Even so, Musk frequently gets so caught up in his multitasking that it sometimes takes two or three tries at his name, uttered at full volume, to get a response.
[...]
If there's something insane about a CEO who thinks his company's mission is more important than any accomplishment in all of human history--indeed, in all of fish history--there's also something irresistible. "One of Elon's greatest skills is the ability to pass off his vision as a mandate from heaven," says Max Levchin, who co-founded PayPal with Musk. "He is very much the person who, when someone says it's impossible, shrugs and says, 'I think I can do it."
[...]
Elon Musk isn't a software geek or a self-styled visionary. He's not particularly young or brash or handsome, and he can come off as kind of a jerk. He isn't hawking new technology, and he's quite shy.
[...]
At SpaceX, Mueller developed a working engine with only 25 engineers. Musk's salespeople have managed to book 14 flights for customers including NASA, the Malaysian government, and MDA, a Canadian data company, charging from $7.1 million to $35 million per trip. SpaceX was cash-flow-positive in the fourth quarter of last year and is on track to reach profitability when the books close on 2007.
[...]
If simultaneously shepherding three disruptive companies sounds tough, it's business as usual for Musk. As a 12-year-old growing up in the South African city of Pretoria with divorced parents, Musk created a video game, Blaster, and sold it to a computer magazine for the ungodly sum of $500. About a year later, Elon and his younger brother Kimbal, who has long been Musk's closest friend and chief co-conspirator, drew up plans to open an arcade near their school. "It was a very compelling proposition when you're 13 and you love video games," Musk says, letting out a rare chuckle. They gave up when a city official informed them that an adult's signature would be required to obtain a permit and instead sold homemade chocolates to their classmates. In his teenage years, Musk parlayed his small entrepreneurial fortune into several thousand dollars of stock market gains.

Just before Elon's 16th birthday, and without telling their parents, the brothers took a bus to the Canadian embassy and applied for passports. (Their mother, a Canadian national, now lives in Manhattan.) A year later, Elon bought a plane ticket to Canada and, over the objections of his father, left South Africa for good. Musk says he was fleeing compulsory service in the South African Defense Force, which was still repressing the country's black majority. But he is quick to add that he'd long dreamed of coming to America. "I would have come here from any country," he says. "The U.S. is where great things are possible." When I ask Musk if his father ever forgave him for leaving, he answers, "I don't really care." The two seldom speak today.

Musk enrolled in Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario; Kimbal joined him a year later. With almost no money, Musk worked a bevy of jobs--as an intern in Microsoft's Canadian marketing department, an intern for the Bank of Nova Scotia, and as a programmer for a video-game developer called, presciently, Rocket Science. He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania on a scholarship and completed a bachelor's degree in finance and one in physics. After graduating, in 1995, he moved to Palo Alto, California, having been accepted into Stanford's physics Ph.D. program, where he planned to study a variety of energy storage device called capacitors.

Something changed that summer, as Musk watched a nascent venture called Netscape Communications--founded by a kid younger than himself--quintuple in value the day it went public. "It just became clear that the Internet was going to change the world in a major way, whereas the capacitor stuff might bear fruit, or it might not," he says. "My overarching interest was to get involved in stuff that really mattered." Musk withdrew from Stanford after two days on campus, with the vague idea that he would start an Internet company. He had $2,000 in the bank, a car, a computer, and no friends in the Bay Area.

Musk poured his energy into a company he had founded called Zip2, which in some ways was little more than an opportunistic hack. Musk persuaded Navteq, a digital-mapping company, to let him put its maps online. He then purchased a business directory on CD-ROM for a few hundred dollars, wrote a bit of software code that linked the maps to the directory, and created the Web's first yellow pages. That fall, Kimbal and another friend joined him, and the trio rented a small office with a leaky roof for $400 a month. They caulked the ceiling, bought a couple of futons, and replaced the carpet--and they lived and worked in the dank office. Unable to afford a high-speed Internet connection, Musk ran the website on his PC using a dial-up modem. "I'd program it in the night and turn the server on during the day," he says.Eventually Musk persuaded an Internet service provider on the ground floor to let him drill a hole through the ceiling and plug in.

In January 1996 [Nathan - A few months after starting], the three co-founders pitched Mohr Davidow Ventures, a Sand Hill Road venture capital firm, and talked their way into $3 million in funding. (They'd eventually get $38 million more.) In order to get the money, Musk agreed to cede the CEO role to a professional--Richard Sorkin, a Stanford M.B.A. who'd been a vice president at hardware manufacturer Creative Technology. Over the next two years [Nathan - So he was involved with this company for a while], Sorkin navigated Zip2 competently but not spectacularly. While Yahoo, another upstart directory service, marketed itself to Web surfers, Zip2 focused on helping newspaper companies offer maps, directions, and business listings to their online readers. To Musk's chagrin, Sorkin solicited investments from many of the same companies that were licensing its software. "We wound up beholden to the newspapers," Musk says. "They were investors, customers, and they were on the board--and they basically forced Zip2 into a position of subservience." As Yahoo ushered in an era of new media, Zip2, in Musk's view, was stuck kowtowing to the old guard. (Sorkin, for his part, makes no apologies. "It wasn't a philosophical issue," he says. "We went where the money was.")

By 1998, Musk, who remained chairman and executive vice president, was thoroughly frustrated with the direction of his company but found himself unable to do anything about it. Several rounds of funding had diluted his stake to a mere 7 percent. Investors, which now included Knight Ridder, Hearst, and the New York Times Company, occupied four of seven board seats. In April of that year, Sorkin tried to sell Zip2 to City­search, which would have created the country's largest local search company. Musk, who believed Sorkin was squandering the potential to create a viable consumer brand, helped spark a revolt among Zip2 managers, who threatened to quit if Sorkin was not removed. The board fired Sorkin and killed the deal. Unfortunately for Musk, it installed Mohr Davidow's Derek Proudian as CEO and promptly sold the company to Compaq. "What they should have done is put me in charge," he says. "That's OK, but great things will never happen with VCs or professional managers. They have high drive, but they don't have the creativity or the insight. Some do, but most don't."

Compaq's cash payment of $307 million for Zip2--at the time, the largest sum ever paid for an Internet company--made Musk a rich, but surprisingly unhappy, young man. Despite pocketing $22 million, he considered Zip2 something of a failure. He had set out to help build the Internet and instead had built software for The New York Times. Rather than taking time off, he immediately began work on a new idea: an online financial services firm that would make traditional ones obsolete. "The banks are terrible at innovation, and financial services is a huge sector, so I thought, There should be something here," he says. In the summer of 1999, Sequoia Capital, the legendary backer of Oracle, Apple, and Cisco, led an investment of $25 million in Musk's new financial services firm, X.com.

Like a lot of nutty ideas proposed during the bubble, X.com was forced to scale back its ambitions. Musk chose to focus on a single feature: the ability to make payments via e-mail. In 1999, he merged his company with a venture-backed competitor called Confinity, which had a similar product known as PayPal; the merged company kept the X.com name, and Musk became CEO. For 10 months, he presided over a heated clash of egos, personalities, and visions. "Elon is obviously really freaking smart," says Levchin, a co-founder of Confinity. However, Levchin adds that working with Musk--which is to say, working for Musk--can be difficult. "He's one of those guys who can be larger than the room," says Levchin. He and Confinity's other co-founder, Peter Thiel, became increasingly frustrated with Musk's penchant for micromanaging, as disagreements over technology and branding festered. In the fall of 2000, Musk went on a two-week trip to meet prospective investors. When he returned, he learned that Levchin and Thiel had orchestrated a coup. The board fired Musk, replaced him with Thiel, and renamed the company PayPal.

Though Musk admits he was hurt by the coup, he managed to keep his feelings bottled up. "I buried their hatchet," he says, as he pantomimes pulling a blade out of his back. "Life is too short for long-term grudges." Of course, it's also true that Levchin and Thiel went on to take PayPal public and make him even richer. But what Musk hasn't gotten over is the fact that the company never became more than a glorified feature, and he still believes that PayPal has the potential to become the world's largest consumer financial services company. "It has 120 million customers, and there's a high trust factor," says Musk. "There's a lot of unleveraged value there."
[...]
Musk's companies don't look much like the Internet companies Silicon Valley churns out these days. Tesla Motors, like SpaceX, is an ambitious gamble aimed at an established market. Musk spurned early-stage investors and bankrolled the company himself; he has put in $37 million to date. Although Tesla has since accepted more than $68 million from VCs and private equity firms, Musk remains the majority shareholder. 
[...]
When I suggest to Musk that he is being reckless with his fortune, he responds coolly. "It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket," [Nathan - This is what Mark Cuban says as well] he says. "The problem with the Silicon Valley financing model is that you lose control after the first investment round."
[...]
The most controversial of Musk's edicts involved the transmission. Martin Eberhard, Tesla's co-founder and then-CEO, argued that it would be quicker and easier to build the car with a single-speed transmission. Musk ordered a two-speed model so that the Roadster would be able reach a top speed of well over 100 miles per hour. Eberhard found these requests difficult to understand. "I've been successful in my career at constraining problems, at keeping them as manageable as possible," says Eberhard, who sold his previous company, e-book manufacturer NuvoMedia, to Gemstar, in 2000, for $187 million. "Elon has resisted that in a push to make the car better--but at the risk of making it more complex." Musk, who several months ago demoted Eberhard to president of technology and installed an interim CEO, argues that Tesla is a hit precisely because he hasn't sacrificed the car's performance to meet any arbitrary near-term goal. "The noteworthy thing about Tesla," Musk says, "is that it's the first electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car as a product." In other words, Musk's car is faster, cooler, and more fun to drive than a comparably priced gas guzzler. The result is that Tesla has collected deposits from 600 customers, which amounts to a $30 million interest-free loan. Of course, Tesla's customers might have judged the car cool enough with only a single-speed transmission or uncomfortable seats or lame headlights. But there's also a chance they would have balked and bought themselves Ferraris.
[...]
When I ask Musk if he'd ever consider hiring a CEO to run SpaceX, he pauses for a few seconds to reflect on the question. "This may be presumptuous, but I have not met anyone who could do this," he says, before revising. "Well, wait, that's not true. Jeff Bezos could do this. Larry Page could do this. Bill Gates could do this. But there's just a really small list of people with the sufficient technical and business ability to do this job."
[...]
SolarCity's business plan, which Musk first proposed to company co-founders (and his cousins) Lyndon and Peter Rive at the Burning Man festival several years ago, is to leave panel manufacturing--an increasingly competitive and commoditized business--to the likes of BP and focus on building a retail brand. Installing solar capacity in a home or small business costs about $9 per watt, but the panels cost only $4 per watt. The installation business, which includes surveying, planning, sales, and the actual bolting on of panels, is expensive and inefficient. "It's all mom-and-pop contractors, and they basically suck," Musk says. "None of them have put any serious effort into honing the whole process--you know, squeezing out excess parts and labor--and then they have no economies of scale as far as buying panels en masse or establishing best practices."

I taught myself how to program computers when I was a kid. Bought my first computer when I was 10, sold my first commercial program when I was 12. [Interviewer: "Not bad."] Yeah. Made a lot of money for a little kid. [Interviewer: "Take me through the process that led to PayPal."] Well, I had a company before that, which was called Zip2, which people generally wouldn't have heard of, but it did things like maps and directions, and yellow pages, and it also did email, calendaring, personalization. But really, that software was provided to the major media companies, like the New York Times Company, Hearst, Knight Ridder, to power their websites, and really have a much more functional experience for the user. So my first company was not a consumer company; it was primarily providing internet software to media companies to enable them to go online.

[regarding the idea behind X.com:]
...the idea was to aggregate all of your financial services seamlessly in one place, make it really easy to use, so you don't have to go to multiple financial institutions to take care of your mortgage, your credit cards, your banking relationship, insurance, mutual funds, you just go to one location. And we had a feature, which was the ability to email money to anyone in the system.
[...]
4 of 22
Just towards the end of my undergrad I was thinking that the internet would be something that would really fundamentally change the world and change humanity forever in a very significant way. It seemed to me like humanity was acquiring a nervous system. Previously you would have people who were isolated cells, if you will, but the communication mechanisms were weak, and there was really no way that any one cell had access to all the information of the collective consciousness. You'd have to go to libraries here and there, and talk to people, and that sort of thing. But the way it is today, you could be in the jungles of Congo and have a satellite link to the internet, and have access to essentially the entire knowledge of humanity. I mean, that's pretty intense. That's a huge, huge difference. [Interviewer: "When was this?"] Uhhh, like in '94. [...] I'd been on the internet for a few years before that [Nathan - This is how you get the jump-start!] since I'd been in the physics arena. You know, in the sciences people were using the internet for many years, as early as the '70s they were using the internet. But it was very difficult to use, it was text-based, it was very difficult to get access to it. [Nathan - So look for tech like this! The Oculus Rift definitely seems analogous.] You had to be either in the government or at some academic institution. But once it became clear that the internet was going to be widespread, that everyone would have access to it, that's when it occurred to me that this is really going to fundamentally change humanity. And that became clear right around the '94 time-frame.
[...]
6 of 22
I think it's worth nothing that when someone has a breakthrough innovation it is rarely one little thing. Very rarely is it one little thing. It's usually a whole bunch of things that collectively amount to a huge innovation. But the problem is, because it's hard to convey a complicated thing to people, the innovator (or the innovator's PR department) will say "Oh, such-and-such is the reason why it's better", this little catch-phrase.
[...]
Innovation is a collection of complex things that are usually difficult to convey, so there's some soundbite that's given.

7 of 22
I think generally people's thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It's rare that people try to think of something on a first-principles basis. They'll say, "We'll do that because it's always been done that way." Or they'll not do it because, "Well, nobody's ever done that, so it must not be good". But that's just a ridiculous way to think. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up; from first principles, as the phrase that's used in physics. You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that and then see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn't work, and it may or may not be different from what people have done in the past. It's harder to think that way, though. [Interviewer: "Why's it so hard to think that way? And how have you broken that pattern?" Um...I don't know, I've just always thought that way I suppose. I mean, I would always think about something and whether that thing was really true or not, and could something else be true, or is there a better conclusion that one could draw that's more probable. I don't know, I was doing that when I was in elementary school, and I would just question things. Maybe it's just built in, to question things.

8 of 22
So I built up Zip2, the first company, sold that to Compaq for about $300 million, and then wanted to still do another company on the internet, and that's where I thought, "Well, where is there still room for a lot of innovation on the internet?" And that's how I chose the financial services sector, because money is just an entry in a database, and it's low bandwidth, you don't need any big infrastructure upgrade on the internet to make it work [Nathan - unlike YouTube?] and so it seemed like there must be room for innovation. And that's how I decided to do something in the financial services arena, even though I really had essentially almost no background in financial services, except for an internship at a bank.

17 of 22 - Inspirations
[Good stuff I need to transcribe]
I think Edison was a good role model, probably one of the biggest role models.

20 of 22 - Risk of Failure
Well, it's like the Nike slogan: "Just Do It". You know, "Just showing up is half the battle". You've got to try hard to do it, and don't be afraid of failure. But you also need to be rooted in reality. It's easy to "get high on your own supply", as Scarface said. You've gotta not be afraid to innovate, but also don't delude yourself into thinking something's working when it's not, or you're going to get fixated on a bad solution. [pauses to think] And also, don't be afraid of new arenas: you can get a book, you can learn something, and experiment with your hands, and just make it happen, find a way or make a way to make something happen.

21 of 22 - Henry Ford (Need to transcribe)

Q: "Three pieces of advice to entrepreneurs?"
A: "Well, first of all I really need to give some thought to how can I provide advice that would be most helpful, and I'm not sure I've given enough thought to give you the best possible answer, but I think certainly being focused on something that you're confident that will have high value to someone else, and just being really rigorous in making that assessment, because a natural human tendency is human thinking, and so a challenge for entrepreneurs is to say "well what's the difference between really believing your ideals and sticking to them versus persuing some unrealistic dream that doesn't actually have merit. And that is a really difficult thing to do--can you tell the difference between those two things? And so you need to be very rigorous in your self-analysis.

I think certainly [be] extremely tenacious. And then just work like hell. You just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. All those things improve the odds of success. If other people are putting 40 hour workweeks and you're putting in 100 hour workweeks, then even if you're doing the same thing, you know that you will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve. [Nathan - That's assuming that those last 60 hours are as productive as the first 40.]

Will post video next week of designing a rocket part with hand gestures & then immediately printing it in titanium

Working with him isn’t a comfortable experience, he is never satisfied with himself so he is never really satisfied with anyone around him. He pushes himself harder and harder and he pushes others around him the exact same way. The challenge is that he is a machine and the rest of us aren’t. So if you work for Elon you have to accept the discomfort. But in that discomfort is the kind of growth you can’t get anywhere else, and worth every ounce of blood and sweat.

So...if you were to Google Elon or go on YouTube, most of the interviews are about business, but I thought since this is about dreams and life skills we'd focus more on various turning points in Elon's life, from where he grew up in South Africa to where he is now, because everyone has a journey. So I thought it would be cool that, when you look at your life, there's going to be certain parts where if you went this way, you end up here, but if you go this way you end up there, and in Elon's case he went from Victoria, South Africa, to Kingston, Ontario, Canada, to Pennsylvania (which is East Coast), to Stanford which is in northern California, to down here. 

[Spends some time pointing at places on the map where Elon has lived, for the kids.]

If you add up all the amount of times that he came somewhere, it was 11,786 miles. And so when you look at your life, wherever you are, think about the fact that maybe you're where you started your first five or ten or fifteen years, maybe you are where you are with your high school, but the point is: Elon had a journey, he got to where he was, so I was going to talk to you particularly about three things: How important the place was that you grew up, the people you were around, that you surround yourself with, and lastly, and is the purpose that you have the reason why you found and saw the people that you surrounded yourself with. So the first question I want to ask you is: South Africa. You know that Nelson Mandela is from South Africa, Charlize Theron is from South Africa, [a doctor]. Why do you think South Africa--and you're obviously from South Africa--what do you think about the culture and the people there make it a place where you have all these visionaries that grew up there?

Elon: Well, I think there's great visionaries from almost any country...and certainly this group of people who came from South Africa...There's certainly an eclectic mix of people in South Africa. A wide range of cultures. And sometimes interactions are pretty helpful to coming up with new ideas. I think that the United States also has a great mixture of cultures. In fact, more amazing people come to the United States than probably anywhere else in the world. The reason I wanted to come out here was the forefront of technology is in the US, and I like technology, so that's where I wanted to go.

What about the people you surround yourself with, your mom, your brother, your sister, your cousins. What kind of impact did they give to you? Because you might have a dream, but you still need people around you to either support or discourage you from your dream. So did you have a very supportive family?

Elon: They weren't unsupportive, but I can't say they were particularly supportive. My father was quite unhelpful...and, yeah, I got beaten up a lot at school. [laughter]

Really?

Elon: Yeah. It sucks, actually.

For what?

Elon: [Shrugs] For no good reason, I think. I read a lot of books, and up until 10th grade I was pretty much the smallest kid in my class, and then I grew after that. And I think part of it was my own fault for being a bit of a smartass sometimes. Being a small porkish smartass is a recipe for disaster. [laughter] And life is very [??]. [??] is like, nothing.

So what would you suggest to our students, though, say they've been bullied, maybe their mom and dad aren't supportive. And like you, I was the shortest in my class until 10th grade. So I always got bullied. So what would you suggest? How did you deal with that when you were a kid?

Elon: Mostly, I ran. [laughter] So...yeah. I think run or hide. Those are the two options, really. Hide in classrooms during recess. [shrugs]

So that's what you suggest?

Elon: I'm not sure what the other options are. When I left South Africa, I left by myself when I was seventeen, against my parents' wishes, With almost no financial support. So when I was in Canada, I needed to support myself through various odd jobs and then I managed to get a student loan and go through college, but I paid for my own college. Well, with loans plus work, and I eventually paid off the loans.

And why did you choose Canada? Why Queens University?

Elon: My mom was born in Canada. My grandfather was an American from Minnesota but my mom hadn't applied for citizenship before a certain age, so she didn't have that. But she was born in Canada, so I applied for her Canadian passport and mine at the same time, and then I [???].

And then from Canada to UPenn to Stanford...what was the reasoning for that? Why not just go directly to Stanford, to the west coast? [??]

Elon: In Canada the colleges are less expensive, it's kind of like a state school, like if you go to University of California or one of the Cal State universities. The tuition is much less than it is at other places. So I paid my way through college and the only way way I could go someplace other than Canada was through a scholarship, so I didn't really think about US universities. But after my second year at Queens I applied to UPenn and actually did get a scholarship, so I ended up going there in the third year. And then after graduating I decided I wanted to persue grad studies, and I applied to Stanford and got in.

So let's talk a little bit about some of the turning points. I've read that when you were 12 you sold your first computer code for $500. So again, you have that idea, as all the students have, who did you reach out to? Did you reach out to your mom? Did you reach out to your cousin? How did you make that, "Oh I have this product", to "Here's $500 Elon!".

Elon: Well, I read a lot of computer magazines and there was a computer magazine that you could sell software to and that would publish the software and then send you a check. And I love playing videogames, so I needed more money to buy a better computer and more videogames, so I wrote some software and sold it. [Nathan: This TOTALLY changes the way I had looked at this anecdote in the past. This makes it sound more like Michael Dell's experience selling newspaper subscriptions, where half of the battle (creating the product) was taken care of, and he just needed to focus on the other half (selling the product). In Elon's case it was the reverse: the magazine handled selling the product, he just needed to focus on creating the product. So when starting out, look for simpler opportunities where you don't have to do everything.]

When you were 12, did you have doubts? Because a lot of students might have those doubts, where we have an idea, they think it's good, but again, the idea to the completion. Did you say, "Oh I like this idea, I'm going to try it out, so I'm just going to do it"?

Elon: Well I just really like computers and programming was kind of fun. It seemed kind of amazing that you could make a computer do all these things. So...I didn't think they would actually buy the software, but you know, if you don't try, you definitely have 0% chance. So I mailed it in and they bought it, and I don't think they knew I was 12 years old, actually.

Do they know you now?

Elon: After I sold the second program to them I went and visited their offices.

And then you fast-forward to college and I watched an interview recently and you tell people, "I thought about what I want to do, I thought about the Internet, ??, and space travel, and now people might believe you because you have four companies that you created or started or invested in. But back in college, did you share your dreams with your classmates, because can you imagine if I were with you in college and you say, "Hey I want to fly into outer space!" Did you have a desire to share that with your classmates? Or again, going back to the idea to the completion, what are some steps that you might have taken, so that students can think about that.

Elon: When I was in college I just thought about the things that might most affect the future of the world. And there were actually five things, three of which I was confident would be positive, and two which I thought could be an uncertain outcome. And the three that I thought were definitely good were space, particularly making life multiplanetary, sustainable power, and the Internet. And then there's reading and writing of genetics, and artificial intelligence, which are more of a thorny issue. So I didn't think at the time I would be involved in all three, but those just were what I thought would most affect the future. And in fact, at first...it's not at though I expected to start a company. I actually applied for a job at Netscape, which was the only Internet company in '95. And then that summer I didn't hear anything, and then I tried to hang out in the lobby.

That's what Steve Jobs did!

Elon: Yeah, but I was too shy to talk to anyone. So that didn't work. So then I just started writing some Internet software, and then my brother came down and joined me and we created a company. But we still had virtually no money, we had a few thousand dollars. And so we could afford this really crummy office, which was cheaper than an apartment, so we just slept on a couch in the office and then showered at the YMCA. [laughter]

One more question and then I'm to going to open it up to the students and some of the volunteers. So I was talking to Andy Bell, he's the CEO of the shelter, and he talked about how the solutions that we want to find for any problem isn't just about resources, it's about relationships. So for you, a guy by the named of Harry Rosen,

Elon: Yeah, right. Wow, you really know a lot of details.

I read a lot. So Harry Rosen was one of the guys who was instrumental in helping Elon with Tesla and SpaceX...? Is that accurate?

Elon: Not so much with SpaceX, but more with Tesla. And in 2003, about a year after Tesla and SpaceX were started--so SpaceX was the reason he called me, but then he wasn't all that helpful with SpaceX, but he was helpful in getting Tesla going. And he brought JB Straubel, who ended up being one of the cofounders of Tesla, to the lunch. And they were trying to do a hydrogen airplane or something, which sounds cool, but I don't think very practical. But then they also mentioned electric cars, 'cause Harold had done an electric car company called Rosen motors that didn't ultimately succeed, but both JB and Harold were really interested in electric cars. And I mentioned that I was going to be doing my grad studies on ultracapacitors for use in electric cars, and then they said I should get a test-drive in a prototype for AC Propulsion, of a--it was an electric conversion of a kit gasoline sports car. And that really made it clear that you could create a long-range, fast, electric car. And so we created Tesla as a result.

So my question is, for the students, they have a dream, they have to find people--like Harold--how did you actually meet Harold, was it a friend of friend?

Elon: I'm not entirely certain. I think he heard about SpaceX and then gave me a call and suggested having lunch. Just out-of-the-blue.

Does that happen a lot, people from out-of-the-blue say, "Hey Elon, we want to help you!"

Elon: It does these days, it didn't happen at the beginning. [laughter]

So what would you suggest for people who aren't in a more-established position as you. How do you find those business contacts, the people who can help you?

Elon: Well, I think if you go to places where such people are likely to be, and then just keep trying just cold-calling people out of the blue. I got a couple summer jobs that way...Yeah, just go out and try to meet as many people as possible. That's a good way to go. [Nathan: His cold-calling was one of the major new bits of information I got from this interview. It's just like Richard Branson and Steve Jobs. Jobs has an interview in which he notes that most people never try to pick up the phone and cold-call someone. So that's a big piece of advice for would-be entrepreneurs: practice cold-calling people who might be able to help you.]

Thank you. So, any questions from the students or volunteers? I know Nijari...?

Did you have any downfalls where you felt it was bad, but it was good in the long run?

Elon: Well, there have certainly been problems that we've encountered along the way. All my companies, at one point or another, came close to failing--very close. 2008 was probably the low point because we had our third rocket failure in a row--so we'd only had failures up to that point. And I'd only planned to have enough money for three launches, so...fortunately we were able to scrape enough money to do a fourth one, but if the fourth one had failed then it would have been game-over for SpaceX. And then also later that year was the financial meltdown, we weren't able to raise outside money for Tesla, so I committed all the money I had left, and then the existing investors agreed to match that amount. But we only closed that financing round and got the money at 6pm on Christmas Eve. [audience: Wow.] That was the last hour of the last day that it was possible. We would have gone bankrupt right after Christmas.

So basically, you did fundraising?

Elon: Well, creating any company, you've gotta...to _grow_ any company you've got to convince people to give you money. And in order to convince people to give you money, they have to think there's a good chance the money will be worth more after they give it to you. But in terms of the amount of time spent raising money, it's a pretty small percentage of what I do. Well under 5%. Maybe 2% of the time.

Agnes.

Are you scared to go up to space?

Elon: I wouldn't say I'm scared to go up in space, but there are certainly some risks in going to space, but I think you can reduce to a very low likelihood...I think it can be made very safe. And ultimately, in order for humanity to become a spacefaring civilization and travel to other planets, it's really important to make spacetravel super safe.

Are you going to Mars?

Elon: I'd like to, yeah.

Are you going to take animals up there first?

Elon: Well...I think probably not...I'm not sure who would take care of them. [laughter]

Do you have any pets?

Elon: Yeah, a Labrador and a border collie.

He has five kids too.

Any other...anyone else have any questions?

Hi, you said that initially you were very shy to approach people and then you got to a point where you know where to go and whom you need to talk to. How did you get from that point of being an introvert and a shy person to meeting all those important people and pushing your idea and being at the right place at the right time. How did you make that transition?

Elon: I just forced myself to do it, even though it was mentally very painful. [laughter]

Who was the first important person that you met with?

Elon: Well...it depends on how important is important. [laughter] [thinks for a few moments] I suppose the first really important person I met was this guy by the name of Peter Nicholson, who was...this was when I was in Canada and I was trying to get a summer job, and I read this article in the newspaper about this guy, and he seemed really smart, and so I just...actually, I couldn't get to him directly, but then I called the newspaper and asked to talk to the writer and then met with the writer, and then the writer connected me with Peter Nicholson. He was the Head of Strategy for the Bank of Nova Scotia, which is one of the largest banks in Canada. And he later became the chief economic advisor to the prime minister. So he's a really smart guy. I had lunch with him, and then I said, "Well, if there's any chance of a summer internship that would be great", and he actually ended up giving me a job working for him for that summer.[Nathan: Cold-call people who can help you!]

Thank you for sharing.

Two more questions.

How did you make the Tesla?

[cut in the footage]

Elon: ...in the chassis, remove the gas and power train, and put in an electric powertrain. And then there were two elements to it. There was that, and then the other part was that we'd licensed a bunch of technology from AC Propulsion. ?? Now both of those premises turned out to be pretty stupid, 'cause it actually ended up costing us way more to convert a frame that was designed for a gasoline car to electric than if we'd just designed something from scratch, but we still had a lot of the downsides of the car that we used as the base platform, which was thet Lotus Elise, and in terms of licensing the technology from AC Propulsion, none of it was really ?? it was really difficult to manufature, so we had to redesign all the powertrain technology. On the other hand, if we had to do everything from scratch, then maybe we wouldn't have started the company. Even though it was a mistake, it might've been a good mistake.

Did you find any planets with life?

Elon: So far nobody's found any direct signs of life. But the telescopes indicate that there's a huge number of planets out there, that are similar to Earth. So it seems likely that there's at least primitive life, like single-celled life, bacteria, that kind of thing, then there's a much smaller number that owuld have sophisitaced life like plants or animals, then a much much tinier number that would have life that we could talk to. And that number might be zero in our region of the galaxy. Hopefully it isn't, but we don't see any direct sign of communications ??

...yet.

Elon: Yet. It would be cool to discover life, but not if that discovery is the approaching invasion fleet.

Do you drive the car that you designed?

Elon: Yeah. It's important to always use your product and think every day about how it could be better. [Nathan: This was a major lesson from Twitter. They weren't using their podcasting technology so they pivoted to something they DID use.]

How do you deal with fear? Fear or being wrong, fear of failure, ?? How do you deal with that?

Elon: Well, I'd say I feel fear quite strongly, so it's not like I don't have fear. I think if it's important enough then I just override the fear. Ignore it. But it does cause me a lot of stress and anguish. [slight laughter]

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.