The man who's too busy trying to solve the world's problems
likely deserves a vacation. Yes. Yet the number of times
Elon Musk has kicked up his feet during his entire adult life
can pretty much be counted on one hand. And when he has tried to go on vacation
it hasn't always worked out. While on his honeymoon with his first wife Justine to
catch the 2000 Olympics, he got some bad news as soon as they
landed at Sydney airport. The board of X.com, the precursor to
PayPal, had decided to fire him as CEO, replacing him with Peter Thiel. So much
for the honeymoon. He flew back to Palo Alto, California to
fight to get his job back to no avail. He tried to go on his
honeymoon again three months later. This time, he nearly lost his life.
While at a game reserve in his native South Africa, Musk contracted the
deadliest form of malaria and didn't even know it. When he returned
to the US and fell ill, doctors misdiagnosed him and he nearly
died. By sheer luck, a visiting doctor who happened to have experience with malaria
cases saw his blood work, suspected he had
malaria, and immediately ordered antibiotics.
Musk got the treatment just in time. As Ashlee Vance details in his book about
the entrepreneur, the doctor told musk that if he had
turned up a day later the medicine likely would no longer have
been effective. Musk later told Vance: that's my lesson
for taking a vacation. vacations will kill you. He spent 10 days
in the intensive care unit and took six months to recover, losing 45
pounds. And the curse continued. When he took a
week off in October 2014, an unmanned Orbital Sciences Corporation
rocket exploded seconds after liftoff. It was supposed to carry food, water, and
supplies to the International Space Station.
It wasn't his own rocket but it was perhaps a sign of things to come.
And sure enough, the next time he tried to take vacation his SpaceX rocket
exploded. The lesson here is don't take a week off.
And Musk has pretty much lived up to that promise with few exceptions.
He claims he doesn't have time to slow down - not even on his birthday.
When he turned 47, he was hard at work at Tesla's factory.
In fact, he stayed there all night. In a previous video, I talked about how he's
been known to sleep at work. That year in particular, 2018, was
excruciatingly painful. He put in 120 hour work weeks as the
electric automaker struggled to mass produce its most affordable vehicle yet,
the Model 3. Taking time off as his employees sweated on the factory floor
was out of the question, explaining to CBS: I don't believe people
should be experiencing hardship while the CEO is, like, off on vacation.
Tesla got over that painful period but Musk isn't slowing down
as he juggles several companies. He recently revealed that his brain machine
interface startup Neuralink implanted a chip inside a
monkey's brain that he says allowed it to control a
video game with its mind. The Boring Company opened new offices in
Texas as its tunnel projects expand. A day in the life of Elon Musk involves
back to back to back meetings and not casual ones as
he recently explained on the new social media app
Clubhouse. My days are, like, insane torrents of information.
The meetings that are scheduled are not, like, nice to have meetings. They're, like,
this meeting is essential. It's pretty intense. When someone on the
question and answer website Quora asked how they could be like Elon Musk,
an unlikely person responded. His ex-wife Justine who was married to
him for eight years and had a front row seat inside the life
and mind of one of the most successful people in the world.
She wrote: Extreme success...comes at the cost of many other things.
Happiness is more or less beside the point. And the essential ingredient for
extreme success is to be obsessed, be obsessed, be
obsessed. In this case, nothing less than
transitioning the world to sustainable energy
and building civilizations in space. If we are able to increase the rate of
innovation, then life can become multi-planetary.
This is the goal we should strive for. While Musk is reluctant to take time off,
many other successful people make it a point to get away.
Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Group, has been known to relax
on his private Caribbean island. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings swears by six weeks
off every year, saying he often does his best
thinking when he's hiking in a mountain somewhere.
It's hard to imagine a scenario where Musk takes even one week off,
let alone six, though at the rate he's going he admits it might be high time
for some me-time. I was thinking, like, man, how long can i keep this up?
I don't want my brain to explode. I was thinking, like, maybe I should, like, at
some point, like, take a week off or something.
Clear my mind. That won't involve lounging around at the beach, however,
which he once said will leave him super duper bored.
More like walking outside of a flying plane which he did in England in 2015
with his second wife Talulah Riley. If and when he does decide to finally
take a real vacation again, it might just be aboard a certain
Starship on a journey out of this world. That would be an extended vacation
because the trip to Mars would take about six months each way.
Musk recently said he's highly confident people can visit the red planet as early
as 2026 though his timelines do tend to change.
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