Elon Musk may be what lots of folks now want to be. A billionaire. However, he was not born so, neither was his journey to the top all smooth sailing.
In 1999, Musk sold his first company, Zip2, to Compaq for roughly $300 million. After that, he went on to start X.com, which eventually became PayPal. In 2002, eBay purchased PayPal for $1.5 billion.
In 2002, he founded SpaceX, which is worth an estimated $33 billion, and in 2003, he founded Tesla, which has a current market cap of about $57 billion.ADVERTISING
Though Musk had much success, he has not had a lot of time off. In fact, according to Musk, “vacations will kill you.”
Why the aversion to vacations? It’s partially due to work. Musk said on Recode Decode that to successfully build his start-ups, he would have to work over 100 hours a week.
And not much has changed.
In 2018, for example, Musk was sleeping on the Tesla factory floor in an effort to catch up production on the Model 3 cars.
“I don’t have time to go home and shower,” he told Gayle King on “CBS This Morning.”
“I don’t believe people should be experiencing hardship while the CEO is, like, off on vacation,” he said.
In addition to working all the time, Musk who says he has only tried to take off a handful of times has had terrible luck when it comes to vacations.
In 2015, Musk said that he had only taken off twice in more than a decade, and both times were problematic.
“In the last 12 years, I only tried to take a week off twice,” he said in 2015 on Danish television. “The first time I took a week off, the Orbital Sciences rocket exploded and Richard Branson’s [Virgin Galactic] rocket exploded in that same week.
“The second time I took a week off, my rocket exploded,” Musk said.
“The lesson here is, don’t take a week off.”
Even before that, when Musk tried to take his first adult vacation, his honeymoon with first wife Justine in September 2000, he got bad professional news.
At the time, he was CEO of X.com, and company executives were not pleased with his leadership. While Musk was on the plane with Justine, executives delivered a letter of no-confidence to the company’s board, pushing Musk out as CEO, and replacing him with Peter Thiel. When he arrived for his honeymoon in Sydney, Australia, Musk had to immediately fly back to Palo Alto, California, according to the book “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” by Ashlee Vance.
But perhaps Musk’s most traumatic vacation experience came when he and Justine decided to try and go on their honeymoon again that December.
Musk planned a two-week trip to Brazil and South Africa. While in South Africa, Musk contracted the most severe form of malaria. After two hospitals misdiagnosed him, he “came very close to dying,” said Musk in “Elon Musk,” before being properly treated in the nick of time.
“That’s my lesson for taking a vacation,” Musk said in the book. “Vacations will kill you.”
Since Musk’s disastrous trips, he has reportedly been on at least two vacations, including one to Chile and one to Australia.
Billionaire Elon Musk is the richest person in the world. As CEO of aerospace company SpaceX, electric car company Tesla and neurotechnology company Neuralink, as well as founder of The Boring Company, which constructs tunnels, Musk has a lot to manage each day.
“I work a lot,” Musk told Joe Rogan during the latest episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience.” “Normally, I’ll be in meetings at work until 1 or 2 in the morning. Saturday [and] Sunday, usually not, but sometimes.”ADVERTISING
So, how does Musk have time to do it all? He keeps his time sleeping to a minimum.
Musk gets “about six hours” of sleep, he told Rogan. “I tried sleeping less, but then total productivity decreases,” he said. “I don’t find myself wanting more sleep than six [hours].”
Musk has said that in the past he worked hundreds of hours a week. Sometimes the billionaire would even sleep on the floor under his desk at Tesla, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“There were times when, some weeks … I haven’t counted exactly, but I would just sort of sleep for a few hours, work, sleep for a few hours, work, seven days a week,” Musk told Kara Swisher in November 2018, recalling his effort to ramp up Tesla Model 3 production. “Some of those [weeks] must have been 120 hours or something nutty.”
Musk admitted that schedule was not healthy, telling Swisher that he had “burnt out a bunch of neurons.”
“No one should put this many hours into your work,” he told Axios in 2018. ”[It’s] not recommended for anyone. You’re gonna go a little bonkers if you work 120 hours a week.”
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