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Half his fortune on Mars
He had just started Tesla when he made that decision. Ray Dalio suggested he set a little of the money aside in case things didn't work out. Musk replied that he had no need to, and he held to it with a strong, compulsive drive.
Dalio remembers being handed the key to Musk's car, which had a little button and a screen, and Musk walking through the details of it at length. In the same stretch of conversation, Musk described a plan to send a watering can with a plant on a rocket to Mars, to mark the first life on Mars.
Dalio's personality test calls this type a shaper: a very small share of the population who love to move from visualization to actualization. They hold a very big picture and then drop down into the details. Making money is not a big deal to people like that. Musk didn't need a house or security, and he didn't need even the modest level of safety Dalio had wanted.
What was the Mars plant plan?
In 2001 Musk pursued a project often called Mars Oasis, which would land a small greenhouse with plants on Mars and photograph them growing against the red soil. He traveled to Russia to shop for refurbished intercontinental missiles to launch it, and found the prices too high. That experience led him to found SpaceX in 2002 to build rockets himself.
How did PayPal make Musk so much money?
Musk co-founded the online bank X.com, which merged with a payments startup and became PayPal. In 2002 eBay bought PayPal for about $1.5 billion in stock. Musk was the company's largest shareholder at the time of the sale.
Why is Mars so hard to reach?
Earth and Mars line up for an efficient trip only about once every 26 months, because the two planets orbit the Sun at different speeds. Spacecraft launched in that window typically spend roughly six to nine months in transit. The distance between the planets ranges from about 55 million kilometers at its closest to over 400 million at its farthest.
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