+34Elon Musk's SpaceX: How the world's richest person leads the space exploration pioneer
Elon Musk is the CEO of several companies, but SpaceX might just be the most exciting given its ambition of colonizing Mars with reusable rockets. After receiving $175 million when eBay bought PayPal in 2002, he put $100 million into his new space exploration company.
By 2006, SpaceX had 160 employees and $278 million in funding from NASA as it worked to launch the Falcon 1 rocket. However, the fledgling company looked set to collapse after its first three launches failed. Fast forward 15 years, and the company has about 12,000 staff, is valued at about $137 billion per a CNBC report earlier this year, and has launched 240 Falcon rockets. That success has only come under Musk's highly demanding and intense leadership.Joe Burbank/Getty ImagesWalter Isaacson, whose biography about Musk will be published in September, said he witnessed the billionaire go into"demon mode" with"brutal" moments of rage that could promote productivity but lacked empathy. And Jim Cantrell, who helped set up SpaceX, told Insider's Kiera Fields how Musk would call him at 3 a.m. and demand he come into the office. "Working with Elon was like working with two different people: the good Elon and the bad Elon, and you never knew which you were going to get," he added. One former SpaceX staffer said he frequently worked 12-hour days and often pulled all-nighters:"A phrase we threw around a lot was 'you are your own slave driver.'" Last summer, nine employees were fired after they called on the company to denounce Musk's tweeting, calling it"a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us." And then SpaceX was fined $18,475 for workplace safety violations after an engineer suffered a skull fracture and was left comatose for months. Musk is also building his own town for SpaceX and Boring Company workers in Texas, called Snailbrook. He bought up at least 3,500 acres of land in recent years, and some homes have already been built. Since becoming the world's richest person, Musk has sold property worth more than $100 million to help fund his dream of colonizing Mars. Yet the date for that keeps getting further away. In 2017, Musk said SpaceX would send humans to Mars by 2024. Four years later, it was 2026, then 2029, before settling on an"optimistic" prediction of 2033. His loftiest ambition — a million people on the red planet by 2050 — would involve launching three Starship rockets every day. Starship is the world's tallest and most powerful rocket. While its maiden launch in April did get off the launchpad, it ended up exploding three minutes into the flight. The next attempt is expected before the end of the year, ahead of plans to fly NASA astronauts to the Moon in 2025.Subscribe to push notifications
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