1999. ELON MUSK GETS HIS FIRST MILLIONS AND A $1M SUPERCAR... BUT HIS BIGGEST FEAR THAT DAY WASN'T LOSING THE MONEY 7am. a truck stops outside a small apartment and a 27-year-old Musk watches a McLaren F1 roll off the back "there are 62 McLarens in the world and i will own one of them" "it's a million dollars for a car. it's decadent" he'd just sold Zip2 to Compaq for ~$307M. his cut: ~$22M then he says the line that tells you who he is: "just 3 years ago i was showering at the Y and sleeping on the office floor" his fiancée Justine is standing right next to him. a new millionaire with a new supercar. and this is what he's worried about: "my fear is that we become spoiled brats. that we lose a sense of appreciation and perspective" he knew exactly what the money could buy: "i could go and buy one of the islands in the bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom" "i'm much more interested in trying to build and create a new company" and he meant it. he put "the great majority" of his net worth into x.com, an online bank almost nobody believed in his own words: "it's sort of like a series of poker games" "i haven't gone and taken my winnings... i've just put almost all of it back into the new game" x.com became paypal. paypal turned into ~$180M. the $180M went into spacex and tesla. you know the rest and the car? a year later, Peter Thiel in the passenger seat, on the way to pitch Sequoia. Musk floors it. the F1 spins and goes airborne. no insurance. both walk away napkin math: the toy: $1M in 1999. F1s now sell for $20M+. ~20x the chips he pushed back on the table: ~$22M. today: hundreds of billions. four more zeros the island: still just an island the only time he ever cashed out, he bought a car. everything else went back into the game 26 years later the richest man alive sleeps in an airstream. the 27-year-old who was scared of becoming a spoiled brat never let it happen

HOW ELON MUSK AND HIS BROTHER KIMBAL ALMOST MISSED THE MOST IMPORTANT MEETING OF THEIR LIVES... IT WAS IN 1996, BUT KIMBAL MUSK (ELON’S BROTHER) STILL REMEMBERS EVERY LITTLE DETAIL january 1996. the brothers are building Zip2 in Palo Alto. no apartment, they sleep in the office and cook on a tiny stove so the employees don’t find out then their mom calls. her computer is broken Kimbal flies from Palo Alto to Toronto just to fix it. “this is how much i love her” on the way back the US border stops him “i still didn’t have a proper visa” “i probably dressed too well. i should have dressed like a tourist” they make him open his luggage. inside: investor decks, plus a business card with his Palo Alto address on it he’s not getting in and the next morning is the meeting. the investor they actually wanted “it was for everything” so he calls his friend Jamie. they drive to another border crossing and tell the guards they’re going to see the David Letterman show the guards wave them through Buffalo airport. flight to San Francisco. a few hours of sleep in the morning Elon and Kimbal take the bus to the venture firm, because neither of their cars works the meeting goes well. the deal gets done that same day at the end they get up: sorry, we have to go, we’ll miss our bus the investors stare at them. “what do you mean you have to catch the bus?” and they give each brother a $30,000 budget to buy a car “we forget the rest of the investment” “we think America is the greatest country in the world” napkin math: the money that day: ~$3M from the VC the cars: $30k each 1999: Compaq buys Zip2 for $307M Elon’s share: ~$22M. it goes into X.com, which becomes PayPal PayPal leaves him ~$180M, and that money becomes SpaceX and Tesla the whole chain started with a guy without a visa lying to a border guard about a late-night talk show one broken computer, one closed border, one bus ride, and the richest man on earth almost never got his first check THAT’S HOW CLOSE IT ALL CAME TO NEVER HAPPENING

KIMBAL MUSK: "THE ROCKET LAUNCH WAS AT 4:00 PM. AT 2:30 PM ELON AND I WERE STILL AT DISNEYLAND" september 28, 2008. spacex had 3 failed launches behind it. the 4th was the last shot. there was no money for a 5th. the rocket was on an island in the middle of the pacific. the control room was a mobile home in a parking lot in la. and the musk brothers went to disneyland with their kids. regular lines. no vip passes. what happens in this clip: → 0:05 "literally as cheap as you can imagine" → 0:15 "my brother and i went to disneyland with our kids" → 0:34 the launch is at 4:00. it's already 2:30 → 0:50 they get back a few minutes before liftoff → 1:08 "everyone just started crying" → 1:28 kimbal starts crying too → 1:42 "the last shot we had before we'd be out of business" → 1:47 a team of 500. boeing's version had 50,000 → 2:13 "nasa saying okay, you deserve to live" what actually got me is 0:34. they're checking their watches in a disneyland line while everything they own sits on one rocket. kimbal calls it "a way to use up the day." when there's nothing left to fix, you just wait. to be fair, falcon 1 flew only one more time after that. then spacex retired it. 3 months later, 2 days before christmas, nasa gave them a $1.6 billion contract. i rewatched 1:08 three times. nobody cheers. they just cry. the disneyland trip wasn't them being careless. it was 2 guys who had already done everything they could.

$265,000 to stay out of Rocky. Stallone wouldn’t have taken $500,000 either. He’d written the script and had $106 in the bank. In the video below: “My one love was to at least fail on my own terms.” Rocky cost $1 million and won Best Picture. Cash now, or the right to fail on your own terms?

HOW ELON MUSK AND HIS BROTHER'S FIRST VACATION ALMOST TURNED INTO A TRAGEDY... AND HOW IS IT CONNECTED TO THE SUCCESS OF SPACEX? december 2000. Elon has just been pushed out as CEO of PayPal. he's 29, rich on paper, and for once he takes a break he flies to South Africa with his brother Kimbal. the bush, a safari, the place they grew up running around in Kimbal laughs about it now: "we'd go to the bush all the time. i don't think we ever took malaria tablets" this time they did. it didn't matter january 2001. Elon is back in California and something is badly wrong. doctors check for malaria. negative Kimbal: "i couldn't figure out what was wrong with him" then their uncle, a doctor in South Africa, says it straight: "he has malaria. check again" he was right. malaria hides in the body. and this was the deadly kind Elon: "i had a severe case of malaria. almost died" "i lost like 50 pounds" "took me over six months to get back to normal" and his lesson from all of it: "no more vacations" now the part that matters six months of recovery. no company to run. a guy who almost died at 29 starts asking one question: what do i do next? he checks NASA's website to see when humans are going to Mars. there's no plan. nothing so he flies to Moscow. to buy ICBMs. "literally" "i can afford to pay under nine million dollars for an ICBM. but not 20" the Russians keep raising the price. he walks out and instead of looking for a cheaper seller, he asks a different question: why are rockets so expensive in the first place? the metal, the fuel, the parts cost a small slice of the price tag. the rest is how the industry builds them so instead of buying a rocket, he decides to build one napkin math: the rocket he was willing to pay for: under $9M where the Russians were pushing: $20M+ his cut from the PayPal sale to eBay in 2002: ~$180M how much of it went into SpaceX: ~$100M SpaceX today: valued at $800B+ the company is now worth ~8,000x the money he put in the first three Falcon 1 launches failed. the fourth reached orbit in 2008. he's said there was money for basically one more try most people come back from almost dying and slow down. Elon came back and bet more than half of everything on the most expensive thing on earth a vacation almost killed him. the comeback built SpaceX

1999. ELON MUSK GETS HIS FIRST MILLIONS AND A $1M SUPERCAR... BUT HIS BIGGEST FEAR THAT DAY WASN'T LOSING THE MONEY 7am. a truck stops outside a small apartment and a 27-year-old Musk watches a McLaren F1 roll off the back "there are 62 McLarens in the world and i will own one of them" "it's a million dollars for a car. it's decadent" he'd just sold Zip2 to Compaq for ~$307M. his cut: ~$22M then he says the line that tells you who he is: "just 3 years ago i was showering at the Y and sleeping on the office floor" his fiancée Justine is standing right next to him. a new millionaire with a new supercar. and this is what he's worried about: "my fear is that we become spoiled brats. that we lose a sense of appreciation and perspective" he knew exactly what the money could buy: "i could go and buy one of the islands in the bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom" "i'm much more interested in trying to build and create a new company" and he meant it. he put "the great majority" of his net worth into x.com, an online bank almost nobody believed in his own words: "it's sort of like a series of poker games" "i haven't gone and taken my winnings... i've just put almost all of it back into the new game" x.com became paypal. paypal turned into ~$180M. the $180M went into spacex and tesla. you know the rest and the car? a year later, Peter Thiel in the passenger seat, on the way to pitch Sequoia. Musk floors it. the F1 spins and goes airborne. no insurance. both walk away napkin math: the toy: $1M in 1999. F1s now sell for $20M+. ~20x the chips he pushed back on the table: ~$22M. today: hundreds of billions. four more zeros the island: still just an island the only time he ever cashed out, he bought a car. everything else went back into the game 26 years later the richest man alive sleeps in an airstream. the 27-year-old who was scared of becoming a spoiled brat never let it happen

WILL SMITH: "I'M SORRY MOM" HE WAS 9. HE WATCHED IT FROM THE DOORWAY... he has number one hits and box office records. he says a 9-year-old part of him still thinks he's a coward. one night his dad punched his mom so hard she spit up blood. will was standing in the bedroom doorway. less than 10 yards away. people pleaser = a kid who can't fight and can't run, so he keeps the angry person happy. so nobody gets hurt. what he says in this clip: → 0:05 "nobody suffered more than my mother" → 0:13 he watched his father punch his mother so hard she spit up blood → 0:18 that moment "defined who i am today" → 0:32 his brother fought. his sister ran. he became a pleaser → 0:40 as long as his dad was laughing, they were safe → 0:55 his 9-year-old brain decided it was his fault → 1:26 "i was less than ten yards away... yet i did nothing" → 1:52 "that i'm a coward. that i failed" → 1:56 "i'm sorry, my mom. i'm so sorry" what actually got me is that one of the funniest guys in america learned to be funny to keep his dad calm. the fresh prince wasn't just a character. it was a job he started at 9. i rewatched 1:56 three times. it's his own book, his own words, and it still sounds like he's saying sorry to her right now. then the clip ends and his mom walks in. she read that chapter the day before. she told him a 9-year-old could not have done anything. a kid who makes everyone laugh isn't always a happy kid. sometimes it's the only way he knows to keep the house quiet.

BEN AFFLECK (BATMAN) SWORE HE'D NEVER BECOME HIS FATHER. THEN HE DID he watched his dad drink every day. then his own relapse went around the world. 0:12 → two trips to rehab in three years. married, three kids 0:17 → "i don't want my children to pay for my sins. to be afraid for me" 0:27 → "that's one of the hard parts of being the child of an alcoholic" 0:32 → "what if my dad gets drunk. what if he ends up on tmz and it's on my newsfeed" 0:38 → asked if he watched his own relapse video: "i saw a little bit" 0:53 → "i know what it looks like to be drunk. i don't need to watch anymore" 1:03 → his grandmother took her life amid alcohol and barbiturates. his aunt had an addiction. so did his father 1:14 → "my dad was drunk every day. that was just life" 1:22 → "i always said that'll never be me" 1:39 → "i never thought i was gonna get divorced" 2:01 → "it meant i wasn't who i thought i was" what got me is the tmz line. he's not scared of the drinking. he's scared of his kid scrolling past it at school. an oscar, batman, millions in the bank. none of it stopped the thing he watched as a boy from walking into his own house. that isn't a fame story. that's what it looks like when a family habit outlives the promise you made to break it. i break down the craziest stories behind the money, so don't lose me.

DESPITE BEING #1 ON THE FORBES LIST, ELON MUSK DOESN'T OWN A HOME... AND THERE'S AN EXPLANATION FOR IT september 2026. someone posts about Musk's new living setup. his reply: "it's a nice airstream" Gwynne Shotwell, president of Spacex, puts it plainly: "he sleeps on the factory floor" people call it a stunt. he explained it on camera years ago TED, giga texas. Chris Anderson asks: your net worth moves by billions a day, how do you handle that? "i actually don't think about that too much" what keeps him up is something else: "every high quality minute of thinking is a million dollars" of impact on Tesla "i was able to improve the financial outcome of the company by $100 million in a half hour meeting" then the line nobody expects from the richest man alive: "i don't even own a home right now" "i basically rotate through friends' spare bedrooms" "i don't have a yacht. i really don't take vacations" the one exception is the plane. and even that he justifies in hours: without it "i have less hours to work" it wasn't new either. in 2020 he tweeted he was selling almost all physical possessions. "will own no house". then he sold the LA mansions napkin math, his own numbers: 1 good minute = $1M 1 hour = $60M one week of vacation, 8 hours a day = ~$3.4B the companies don't get so a house isn't a house. it's a commute. a yacht isn't a yacht. it's a week offline and the hundreds of billions everyone screams about were never cash in his pocket. it's shares of Tesla and Spacex. you can't sleep in them a man who prices his own rest in billions will never find a good enough reason to stop. the airstream isn't humility. it's the cheapest way to never leave work Elon Musk's story is unbelievable

JORDAN BELFORT'S (THE WOLF OF WALL STREET) INSANE ADDICTION THAT ALMOST ENDED IN TRAGEDY he told this story on camera like he was describing a bad day at work. quaaludes = a sedative banned in the us since 1984. 0:18 → he takes old quaaludes. thinks they're duds because they won't kick in 0:24 → drives out to make a phone call because he thinks his house phones are bugged 0:30 → everything hits at once. he drives home at 1 mile an hour 0:38 → thinks he made it without a scratch. police show up. car is totaled 0:42 → "to this day i can pass a lie detector test. i don't remember having an accident" 0:50 → the fight with his wife. he grabs his 3-year-old daughter 0:59 → drives the car straight through the garage door 1:12 → "i was on a 3-month bender. i thought aliens were coming through the window" 1:21 → "i was like, i don't have a problem" 1:27 → his daughter wasn't hurt. it was april 16th. the next day he got sober what got me is the 1 mile an hour. he was so far gone he thought driving like that meant he was in control. a man running hundreds of millions couldn't tell he was destroying his own car. and a day later he almost did worse with his kid in the seat. that isn't a money story. that's what addiction looks like when nobody around you can say no. i break down the craziest stories, so don't lose me.

ELON MUSK: "I DON'T THINK MOST PEOPLE WOULD WANNA BE ME"... THE HARD LIFE OF ELON MUSK this post was hard to write. this story made me stop and think Lex Fridman podcast, november 2023. Lex asks what he's going through that people don't see first he laughs it off. then: "my mind is a storm" "they may think they would wanna be me, but they don't know. they don't understand" "do you get lonely?" "sometimes" "there are many nights i sleep alone. i don't have to, but i do" then Lex brings up isaacson's biography and the childhood in it. beaten at school until his face was unrecognizable. a father his own brother calls "psychological torture". will he ever forgive? "what is forgiveness?" "i don't think i have a resentment, so nothing to forgive" "holding onto grudges does not affect the future in a good way" read that again. no anger. no closure. no "i'm still working through it" just one test: does it move the future? no? drop it that's either the healthiest thing you've ever heard or the loneliest because a man who can't afford grudges probably can't afford a lot of other feelings either. rockets, cars, ai, 24/7. the storm never gets a day off everyone wants his money. almost nobody would take his head with it the richest man on earth, sleeping alone by choice, and not even angry at the man who made him this way would you trade places with him?

In October 2003, Elon Musk told Stanford students his rocket company had 30 people and had never flown a rocket. Then its first three rockets failed.This June, SpaceX went public in the biggest IPO in history. I t’s worth more than $2 trillion.That night he estimated a NASA shuttle flight at roughly $1 billion. His own rocket, he said, would sell for $6 million. He hadn’t put a dollar into Tesla yet. His first $6.5 million went in four months later.Eight years earlier he had “negative money” and heavy student debt.The full 48-minute talk covers Zip2, PayPal, a 30-person SpaceX, and a Q&A where he gets specific about money.None of the rules need a rocket company:Take the cash. Compaq bought Zip2 for a little over $300 million in cash — “a currency I highly recommend.”Earn before you raise. Zip2 paid about $100 a month for internet through a cable dropped through a hole in the floor to the provider below. It was already making more than it spent when he went to investors.Let customers sell. PayPal had no sales force and spent nothing on advertising. It reached a million customers by the end of its second year.Keep the team small. PayPal ran on roughly 30 engineers. He told the room the system was more sophisticated than the Federal Reserve’s own clearing system, “because the Federal Reserve clearing system sucks.”Start cheap. He repeated the old aerospace joke that the fastest way to make a small fortune in rockets is to start with a large one — and told first-time founders to pick something that needs little capital. He did it in that order: two cheap companies first, then ~$100 million of his own PayPal money into the expensive one.Before you borrow a dollar to start anything, get one customer to pay you.

THE SADDEST MOMENT IN ANY ELON MUSK INTERVIEW. HIS EYES SAY IT ALL while i was making this post, i could barely hold back tears march 2012. Musk is 40. his first 3 rockets blew up, and he almost lost everything on the 4th. then 60 minutes asks him about his heroes. Neil Armstrong = first man on the moon. Gene Cernan = the last one. both told congress private rockets like his were a bad idea. what happens in this clip: → 0:01 the question lands → 0:15 "i was very sad to see that" → 0:24 "those guys are heroes of mine" → 0:39 "to see them casting stones in your direction?" → 0:43 one word. "difficult" → 0:52 he admits he hoped they'd cheer him on what actually got me is the 7 seconds after "difficult". he looks away. he swallows. he doesn't say anything. to be fair, Armstrong later wrote to cbs. he said they cut his words too hard. he wanted to encourage the newcomers. 2 months later dragon reached the space station. 9 apollo astronauts signed a photo of his rocket for him. i rewatched 0:43 four times. a billionaire, and he can barely get one word out. that clip isn't about a rich guy getting criticized. it's what it looks like when the people who made you dream say you're wrong. i think his heroes would be proud of him now

D*MN... $200 TO $17,700 IN 30 DAYS WITH REA OPUS 5.5 COPYTRADING FOREX SYSTEM, 87% WIN RATE. i don’t trade my own setups, i copy a verified provider through my broker, the ai runs on a $120 subscription the problem was never the provider, it was copying every signal blind, including the ones that blew up haiku 5.5 reads each signal the second it lands, checks the spread and the news calendar, and scores it opus 5.5 gets the scored signals, decides what to copy and at what size, and skips the rest from september 13 to october 13 every copied trade went through that filter on xau/usd, and 87% closed green average win was 0.6r against a 1r loss, which is why 87% is not as crazy as it sounds max drawdown hit 13%, and that number matters more to me than the 87% the filter isn’t perfect: opus 5.5 rejected 4 signals that would have closed green, money i left on the table next i’m building a second check on top of it, so the filter stops throwing out winners yesterday i pulled $7,700 to my card in one go, and $10,000 stays in for month two the sober part: one month is not a track record, and gold can erase a month in an afternoon if you copy anyone, log every signal your filter skipped, the misses teach more than the wins month two target is $10,000 to $189,000, same filter, same provider, bigger size THERE IS NOTHING ELSE LIKE THIS OUT THERE i’m dropping the full setup of my system soon, every prompt and every filter, so keep my name on your radar

A doctor's mistake when he was 30 days old. matthew perry felt it for the rest of his life. he was a colicky baby who cried all the time. around 1970, an older doctor in a white coat told his parents: if he cries, just give him this. phenobarbital = a strong barbiturate. a sedative that is very easy to get hooked on. what he says in this clip: → 0:13 "i don't blame my parents at all for this" → 0:35 the doctor's fix was phenobarbital → 0:44 he got it for 30 days, from day 30 to day 60 → 0:46 there are baby photos of him, knocked out cold → 1:01 he thinks it messed up his sleep for life what actually got me is how calm he is. no anger. he says if he was a parent back then, he'd have done the same. the baby stopped crying. the doctor said it was fine. the problem was solved. 14 years later he drank a whole bottle of cheap wine in a backyard in ottawa. he said it was the first time he felt normal. i rewatched 0:55 three times. "stoned babies are fun, i guess." he laughs. it's not funny. a 30-day-old on barbiturates isn't a story about bad parents. it's what happens when a quick fix works and nobody asks what it costs later. what did your parents think was totally normal back then?

MAYE MUSK, MOTHER OF THE RICHEST MAN ON EARTH, SLEEPS IN ELON'S GARAGE... AND SHE SAYS SHE CHOSE IT india today conclave, march 2026. the host puts her old post on the screen: "there is no food in the fridge. the garage where i slept is on the right. the shower only has one towel, so i left it for Elon" that's Elon's house at starbase, texas she lands around midnight. security offers a lovely hotel room 45 minutes away her answer: "i come to visit my son and i'm going to be in a hotel? i don't need that" no couch. but there's a single bed in the garage. "this is mine" and it's not new for her. when Elon and Kimbal sold their first company, her priority was getting her mom and sister out of south africa to canada. a two-bedroom condo. maye slept in its garage for 10 years "i would rather stay in the garage and be with my family than stay in a five-star hotel and not see them" the media made it "Elon makes his mom sleep in a garage". her reply: nobody asked me. i chose it now the money part 2020: Musk says he's selling almost all physical possessions. ~$100M of california houses go 2021: "my primary home is literally a ~$50k house at starbase. i rent it from spacex" napkin math: $50k against a net worth in the hundreds of billions is ~0.00001%. for someone with $100k saved, that's living in a house that costs about a penny why live like that? her answer: "he's working all the time" she sits in the corner of his meetings all day. every hour a new team of engineers walks in, and he "knows every nut and bolt in that rocket" he even let her into an xai meeting. "you're going to be bored". she was. "they talk in acronyms" most people get rich to buy distance from the work. this family spends it on distance from comfort the richest man in the world, one towel, and his mom in the garage. and both of them think that's normal money didn't change this family. it just made the garage famous