Originally Posted by
etudiant
Between Paypal, SpaceX and Tesla, Musk has launched three transformative businesses. If that is failure, I'd like to see more of it.
Oookay, a little history lesson is in order, methinks.
PayPal was founded by six people and Elon Musk... wasn't one of them. He tried to ride the dot-com wave and founded a company called X.com. His idea was to sell very expensive PDAs to people who would then somehow perform banking transactions using the said PDA's... infrared port. The idea failed miserably, but Musk was backed by Greg Kouri who had money. X.com offered a merger to a company called Confinity. The companies merged in 1999. In 2000, Musk "decided that X.com would cease operations", read "it flopped". Since being the cash cow was his only role in the affair, two weeks later Musk was thrown out of Confinity (or, as his official biography says, "he was replaced as the CEO", and the name of the company was changed to PayPal.
Tesla is a more interesting endeavour. Tesla hired an engineer called Henrik Fisker who wanted to make a car where the engine would charge a battery, i.e. a hybrid. After a few years of working on the project, Fisker left Tesla and founded his own company to produce Fisker Karma. Tesla tried to sue him but lost and had to pay a million bucks in legal fees and costs. Oh, and do wake me up when Tesla, Inc. makes a profit. It's five billion dollars in debt and counting.
And finally, the SpaceX. Musk's fast talking gained him access to NASA's technology which helped built something resembling a rocket. And it kind of works, even though "reusing" rocket boosters has been proven to be a very bad and very expensive idea. It's not the technical part of the project that's of interest, however, but the financial one. Must finances SpaceX with the money advances for future launches, including from DoD and NASA. Rings a bell?
Hope it helps with your rosy shades.