This is What Tesla’s Elon Musk had to Say About his Success

In a Bloomberg interview with Ashlee Vance recently, Tesla’s chief executive Elon Musk opened up about his success.

He said, “America is the land of opportunity – there is no other country where I could have done this.”
According to the book, “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, by Ashlee Vance, Musk had been inspired by science fiction books when growing up.

This genre motivated him to create “cleaner energy technology or [build] spaceships to extend the human species’s reach.”

Musk began Spacex in 2002 and Tesla in 2003.

“America is still the land of opportunity more than any other place, for sure,” Musk told Vance last week.

“It always seemed like when there was cool technology or things happening, it was kind of in the United States. So, my goal as a kid was to get to get to America basically,” Musk told Kevin Rose in 2012. Musk had been born in South Africa.

“I paid my own way through college—through student loans, scholarships, working jobs—and ended up with $100,000 of student debt. I started my first company [Zip2] with $2,500, and I had one computer and a car that I bought for $1,400, and all that debt,” he told Vance.

It was in 1999 that Musk sold Zip2 to Compaq for about $300 million and he used the money to found X.com, an online financial services platform that merged with Confinity in 2000, and later became PayPal.

“There is definitely no other country where I could have done this—immigrant or not,” he told Vance.