The next Elon Musk?
Meet the next Elon Musk.
Austin Russell
Austin worked at a laser institute at the University of California instead of going to high school. Where he then built a self-driving technology company Luminar Technologies Inc. worth $3.62 billion.
At just 25 years old, he was named the youngest self-made billionaire.
I guess the natural answer here is J.B. Straubel, Tesla's Chief Technical Officer. He's got the engineering and manufacturing experience, ...
Wow! I know that an optics prodigy, Russell developed the idea for Luminar when he was just 17 and studying physics at Stanford University.
Not that I like Zuck but didn't Mark Zuckerberg turn in to the youngest self-made billionaire at age 23?
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with this logic, bill gates daughter should be a trillionaire or something
Besides that, everyone knows he and his dad are not on good terms
Nobody is fully self-made. But what he accomplished, not a lot of people would be able to replicate it.
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Starting a new car company and going head to head with the entrenched big car manufacturers doesn't sound easy to me.
Starting a private space company that wants to go to mars, and is profitably on the way, also doesn't sound easy.
Doing those 2 things at the same time is insane.
In that sense, his dad owning a business is just not that big of a deal. In the same sense you could say he was lucky not to be born in 1700.
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No one is arguing. All he said is most people can't do all that, aside from the "diamond mine".
There is always an unfair advantage. But you don't go from owning a diamond mine to being the richest human on the planet, launching rockets into space without working incredibly hard.
How do you define "self-made"? What is the threshold? Personally, I do consider Elon to be self-made.
I’d say to be self made you’d have no financial assistance from your family.
Richard Bransons first venture was a phone sales business that used his local pay phone. That’s self made!
He borrowed 28k from his father to start zip2.. And made 22 million. Not sure if he borrowed additional money for Paypal but I would say from just knowing this, he is 99.9% self-made.
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Nah, every Somali kid can get USD 28k no questions asked. People are correctly downvoting you because you fail to note this is a "just world"(TM) where the rich are that way because they work harder , are more ethical and wise and god is justly compensating them because of that.
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Yes of course that’s right. Any money in the ‘more’ direction is better than the opposite way. Question is, how obtainable is that amount of money. Fairly easy imo. Credit cards, friends, etc. he could have gotten that money anywhere is my point.
Not sure.
Wasn't possible for me. The first time I started being serious about creating a business, I had about 6 months of saving from my first engineering job and moved back to my parents empty apartment which was given away to my dad to stay while he needed to stay on site about a day per week. I negotiated 6 months to kick start the business but 2 month later my dad changed his mind and kicked me out as from his point of view creating a business isn't work as I didn't bring enough revenue yet to pay rent. I was from his view just an unemployed asshole even though I never work more at this stage than I have ever done in my entire life.
I ended up leaving the country and find a job 17000km away, things would have been quite different in another context where entrepreneurship isn't looked down on. We all know here how making your first dollar from your own product is an achievement, how making your first thousand of dollar, your first 10k, the only way my dad was seeing is in term of not bringing enough compared to what he thinks an engineer can make.
I appreciate your story. The context of Elon's story to your story (I'm assuming) is vastly different and his situation is the one I am addressing.
If you’d said 5k-10k I’d say that was accessible to pretty much anyone in the west, but 28k is a real friendly startup payment!
Don’t forget, this 28k is the icing on the cake. How much rent was he paying when he started his company? How much additional support did he receive from his family? How many contacts did his dad introduce him to?
Obviously you don’t know the answer to those questions, but, having a wealthy family who will invest 28k in your project would be extremely useful for any business person.
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