Elon Musk's Entrepreneurial Journey: Challenges and Achievements

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of Elon Musk's entrepreneurial journey, focusing on his personal qualities, challenges, and ventures. The report begins with an introduction to entrepreneurship and innovation, followed by an evaluation of three key personal qualities that have contributed to Musk's success: creativity, self-discipline, and an innovative mind. It then critically discusses three entrepreneurial challenges that SpaceX faces with the Starship launch and the vision of establishing a self-sustainable city on Mars, including funding, time constraints, and a lack of objectivity. Finally, the report evaluates Musk's entrepreneurial performance and any shortcomings in one of his ventures. The report uses real-world examples to support its findings and concludes with a summary of the key insights gained from the analysis.

Assessment brief

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
TASK 1............................................................................................................................................2
Critically evaluate any three main personal qualities that made Elon Musk a great
entrepreneur in order to grasp the business opportunities presented throughout his lifetime.
Provide real examples from further research..............................................................................2
TASK 2............................................................................................................................................3
Critically discuss three entrepreneurial challenges that Elon Mask’s SpaceX venture will
face with the recent ‘Starship’ launch and his vision in establishing the first self- sustainable
city on the planet Mars. Justify your discussion with real examples from industry...................3
Task 3 ..............................................................................................................................................5
Carry out additional research to critically evaluate Elon Musk entrepreneurial performance
and any shortcoming during his investment in one of the below ventures:................................5
a) Tesla – the electric cars, solar panels and energy solutions for homes and companies OR. .5
b) Paypal - the online financial services and e-mail payment company OR .............................5
c) Hyperloop - the high-speed transportation system through Tubes.........................................5
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................7
REFERENCES ...............................................................................................................................7

INTRODUCTION
Innovation is a process of executing the planning and ideas which gives result in the
origination of new goods and services & the person who perform this process is known as
innovator. Entrepreneurship can be said as the collection or a group of activities which are
undertaken to start a new business or a start up company providing some goods or services &
entrepreneur is the person who undertake all these activities or design some activities for starting
a new business. Small Business, Scalable Start up, Large Company and Social Entrepreneurship
are the four types of entrepreneurship. It has various characteristics, some of them are
Innovation, Visionary and Leadership quality, open minded, Flexible, Ability to take risk etc.
This report include various concepts of innovation and entrepreneurship like personal qualities of
entrepreneur, entrepreneurial challenges etc. In the context of given case study of Elon Musk and
a rocket Company SpaceX’s.
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TASK 1
Critically evaluate any three main personal qualities that made Elon Musk a great entrepreneur in
order to grasp the business opportunities presented throughout his lifetime. Provide real
examples from further research.
Elon Musk is an entrepreneur and founder of rocket Company named as Spacex, which
was founded in 2002, having headquarter in Hawthorne, California. He started this company
with the purpose of reducing space transportation costs(Arion 2019). Now he is planning to
launch first ride of humanity to mars. Following are the main personal qualities which are stating
Elon Musk as a great entrepreneur:
 Creativity- It remove the limits to the attitude and skill set of any capitalist. High overall
success, increase productivity, exploit employee potential, transcend boundaries,
encourage critical thinking, foster innovation describe the role of creativity in
entrepreneurship. Only because of creativity of any entrepreneur differentiate their
business from typical or social entrepreneur. This quality of entrepreneur convert a
person’s knowledge and skill into income.
Elon Musk is a creative entrepreneur, as at his younger age when he was just 12, he
displayed an advanced computer programming and invent a small scale video game and now his
name comes under the world’s most powerful people. He converted his sharp skills and creative
thoughts into a business entrepreneurship. Firstly he figured out what he can offer, after that he
identified how his knowledge and skills can convert in money. Then he did complete research on
his idea for determining the market, where he can get money (Jiang 2020). After doing a
complete research, he write business plan, decide the name of business, created structure of
business, got business license. He protected his creative assets and set up a distribution system
and market his business. He figured out the ideas of how to design a rocket. Self Discipline: It is the most important quality of a person who want to be successful in
life. A successful entrepreneur always make a habit of doing things in a systematic way
with proper discipline. It helps entrepreneur in increasing inner strength by providing
power to stick to their decisions. It also enhances the entrepreneur approach and
transforms a dreamer into a doer. It is well said that discipline is the only medium goals
and achievement. It completely change the perception of willpower of entrepreneurship,
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helps in the acknowledgement of their weakness. Mainly self discipline helps them to
stay focused on their desired goals.
Elon Musk is known as master of self discipline. He used his disciple for identifying the
ideal customers, in developing the market plan (Carayannis and et. al., 2018). He focused on how
can he generate a balanced and expected stream of new leads for his business. He also used his
self disciple to engage customers logically and emotionally so that interest of everybody can
maintain. He continuously made focus and refocus on all the things happening every hour of
every day in the search of opportunities. At last he used this quality for setting his business for
long term and setting dedicated time.
 Innovative Mind: Another important task oriented quality of entrepreneur is that they
have innovative mind. They just think about new ideas and to convert them in a new
product. It is not necessary that innovation will always result in the success of business.
High motivation towards innovation results in taking high risk. Marketplace, customers,
new product, processes, research are various approaches towards innovation.
Encouraging innovation in any business is the only key towards making business more
profitable. While taking action into the process of converting ideas into an innovation,
an innovator may have to face various challenges.
Elon Musk not only thinks about the rocket, he build and launch the rocket, which was
really a huge challenge. It was possible only because of his innovative mind. He captured
innovative ideas, create a supportive environment and did risk taking experiment which promote
openness between team and individuals by sharing responsibilities, rewards and then he celebrate
his success (Landström 2018). His innovativeness can be seen when he was just only 12 years,
he made a video game and become a computer programmer in such a small age. It states that the
Elon Musk have innovative mind and he did various innovations.
TASK 2
Critically discuss three entrepreneurial challenges that Elon Mask’s SpaceX venture will face
with the recent ‘Starship’ launch and his vision in establishing the first self- sustainable
city on the planet Mars. Justify your discussion with real examples from industry.
Elon Musk faced a lots of challenges while he started SpaceX venture. Commercial market
segmentation, Military market access, civil space safety, weak enterprise profitability, oversized
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capital requirements are some challenges which he faced. Below mentioned are the challenges
that SpaceX venture of Elon Mask’s will going to face with the launch of Starship:
 Fund: For performing any task, it is necessary to have proper money or fund. Everybody
takes interest in investing money in huge brands and entrepreneurship is just a starting
stage, so nobody can trust easily on that which result is less share capital. It is necessary
for entrepreneur to search alternatives, from which they can arrange fund.
Musk is going to face a huge problem of funding as going to mars is so expensive. It is a
huge task in which a lots of capital is required as all the required equipments are too costly, even
many of them equipments are not launched yet (Laspita 2019). So, definitely Musk have to pay
high for them. It is a great challenge that he is going to face while doing innovaton of Starship to
mars. SpaceX was expecting a help from Air force for the development of it’s new innovation of
Starship but only because of increasing competition and new invention by military make it
impossible for that. Then this company takes a step aboard to a plan of 7500 small satellites in a
batch for providing broadband services on all over the earth(Ebrahimi and ed. al., 2018). This
will may be help Elon Musk for the great funding or investing opportunities. Also this task is just
like impossible to imagine as most of people think it is just a idea which is not going to
successful.
 Time: Another huge challenge which comes in front of any entrepreneur is to complete
the decided task and show the desired result to the public on time. An entrepreneur faces
many problems in his working period but time management might be the biggest one.
This challenge may differ from business to business. It is depend on the size and nature
of business. Completing the decided task on time by following proper planning and
process of doing work will gives a good impression on the general public which will help
the entrepreneurship to create their interest towards the firm. It can also lead in the
generation of fund.
Elon is planning to launch a Starship for going to mars which is not so easy to prove.
Also it is a time consuming task, it can take 50s or 100s of years to convert this idea into a new
invention and it is not confirmed that how much time is going to consume in the conversion of
this idea. Also this task is going to be held on a huge level, everybody want to see the result in a
desired time period but he wants a lots of time, firstly for arranging equipments, for designing
rocket, for maintain proper plan, arranging funds and then creating a team to perform the task.
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 Less Objectivity: While doing business, profit can be earned only by taking risk. Same
happened in the entrepreneurship, any entrepreneur has to take risk whether their ideas
will work or not. It is an another challenge in front of any entrepreneur that the idea
which they are going to convert is really going to work or not.
Going to mars is just an attractive and good idea made by Elon Musk but converting this
idea into reality is such a huge and risky task (Singh 2018). He started an entrepreneurship to
complete this objective. He started working on his idea by performing various activities. But the
result of all those activities are not cleared. It is not defined whether the objective will be
achieved or not. Is that idea is useful or not because most of people think that this idea is just an
imagination, nothing else. Elon, himself is not sure about it, that this enterprise is going to give
expected result or not. Objectives of the organisation and Musk are clear but it is not sure that
they will achieve their objective or not. Less objectivity means high risk. It can cause a huge loss
on the unsuccessful practices. So, it can be said that Elon Musk is going to face a challenge
which is not so common because it is a complete new idea that no one had tried to do the same.
Task 3
Carry out additional research to critically evaluate Elon Musk entrepreneurial performance and
any shortcoming during his investment in one of the below ventures:
a) Tesla – the electric cars, solar panels and energy solutions for homes and companies OR
b) Paypal - the online financial services and e-mail payment company OR
c) Hyperloop - the high-speed transportation system through Tubes.
Entrepreneurial performance is a result of ideas, techniques which are applied by any
entrepreneur in their business. Sales, revenue, employees working in an organisations are some
factors which states the performance of an enterprise(Harrington 2018). It shows how the
organisation is working and whether they are achieving the goals and targets or not. Elon Musk
used his skills while starting new business by the generation of new ideas and measuring the
result of that business is known as entrepreneurial performance.
Elon Musk is the founder or CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, Neuralink. He
comes under one of the richest person in the world having net worth of approx $105 billion. He
make this wealth most of the contribution of Tesla. He joined Tesla Inc. as a chairman and
product architect in 2004, Later on he becomes the CEO of the company.
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Tesla is a manufacturing company which produce electric cars, battery energy storage,
solar panels, solar roof tiles and many other products, which was founded by Elon Musk, JB
Straubel, Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning. Ian Wright in 2003. Tesla becomes the one of the
largest battery energy storage system supplier in all over the world (Surie 2017). Tesla became
the world’s first vertically-integrated sustainable energy company by acquiring Solarcity in 2016.
Innovation approaches are the plans used by the companies for applying some
technology. Innovation is the only way to ensuring growth in the market. Using new technology
for creating or producing new product, upgrading the product designs, boosting business model
etc. are various approaches to business innovation (Hongling 2018). It is necessary for every
organisation to do something creative as per time to maintain the interest of customers. For doing
innovation, companies use various approaches which are totally depend on the nature, size of
business and the ideas of innovation. Following are the innovation approaches which are
undertaken by Elon Musk in Tesla: Product Design- Elon Musk use product design as innovative approach as he introduced
product by changing designs and as per models. Firstly they introduced Model S, after
that they introduced Model X, Model 3 and then Model Y. Improvement Process- The goal of Tesla has been decided to reach the 5000 units per
week. For achieving this target, they have to improve their various processes like
marketing activities, production process etc. For improving the process of Tesla, Elon
purchase a German company named as Grohmann Engineering because this company is
performing very good in the development of automated technologies. Updated Business Model- Elon Musk update the model of Tesla. Now the company is
based on the direct sales and services but not on the franchised dealership. They are
focusing on every single charging station that is working as the largest hitch for adopting
electric vehicles.
 New Technologies-Tesla is planning to launch long life battery at a new low cost. By
adopting new technology in their organisation, they can made a new product which is
different from other products available in the market. Also, new technologies are coming
day by day, adoption of these technologies help the organisation in the deduction of cost
and provides a new product in the market.
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CONCLUSION
From this above report, it is concluded that innovation and entrepreneurship both are the
process of doing some activities which are undertaken to convert some ideas for the purpose of
generation of income. Innovation helps any organisation for future growth and survival in the
market. Furthermore, it is analysed that self discipline, integrity, persistence, a clear sense of
direction, decisive and action oriented are various qualities and Product market fit, hiring
employees for the first time, arrangement of capital, time management, delegation of tasks are
the challenges faced by Elon Musk as an entrepreneur. Some of them are explained in this report.
It can also be said that Tesla plays an important role in the collection of wealth as he is also CEO
or co founder Tesla Inc. Product design, improvement process, updated business model and new
technologies are various innovative approaches that Tesla had adopted.
REFERENCES
Books and journal
Arion, D., 2019. Physicists as Master Innovators: Why Innovation and Entrepreneurship should
be highlighted in physics education. In APS March Meeting Abstracts (Vol. 2019, pp.
R34-001).
Carayannis and et. al., 2018. The ecosystem as helix: an exploratory theory‐building study of
regional co‐opetitive entrepreneurial ecosystems as Quadruple/Quintuple Helix
Innovation Models. R&D Management, 48(1), pp.148-162.
Ebrahimi and ed. al., 2018. Impact of organizational innovation, learning orientation and
entrepreneurship on SME performance: The moderating role of market turbulence and
ICT. In Competitiveness in emerging markets (pp. 447-480). Springer, Cham.
Harrington, H.J., 2018. Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship: The Only Way to Renew
Your Organization. CRC Press.
Hongling, X. and Shuanghai, L., 2018. An Assessment of the Policy Support for Women in the
Context of Promoting Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Service Industry. Journal
of Sichuan University (Philosophy and Social Science Edition).
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Jiang, X., 2020, June. Agent Based Simulation of Enterprise Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Based on DQN. In International Conference on Applications and Techniques in Cyber
Security and Intelligence (pp. 1058-1063). Springer, Cham.
Landström, H. and Harirchi, G., 2018. The social structure of entrepreneurship as a scientific
field. Research Policy, 47(3), pp.650-662.
Laspita, S. and Sarri, K., 2019, September. The attitude of Greek students towards
entrepreneurship: Latest data and recommendations. In European Conference on
Innovation and Entrepreneurship (pp. 1259-XXV). Academic Conferences International
Limited.
Singh, S.K. and Gaur, S.S., 2018. Entrepreneurship and innovation management in emerging
economies. Management Decision.
Surie, G., 2017. Creating the innovation ecosystem for renewable energy via social
entrepreneurship: Insights from India. Technological Forecasting and Social
Change, 121, pp.184-195.
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