On IPO day, with $2.11 trillion on the scoreboard, this clip is the most important context for understanding what actually happened (Save this)
In 2008, SpaceX and Tesla were both weeks away from ceasing to exist.
The third Falcon 1 rocket had failed consecutively, Tesla was out of money, and
@elonmusk was going through a divorce at the same time.
Tesla closed its financing round at 6:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve, the last hour of the last possible day and would have gone bankrupt two days after Christmas had it not come through.
The decision Musk faced that year was one of the hardest of his life.
He had roughly $30 to $40 million left, and two choices, put everything into one company and let the other die, or split the money between both and risk losing them both.
He describes both companies as being like children and says he could not bring himself to let either one starve.
So he split the money.
Both companies survived by a margin thin enough that a single bad week would have erased them and the same pattern played out with the rockets themselves.
The first three Falcon 1 launches failed.
SpaceX barely scraped together enough parts and money for a fourth attempt, and Musk said if that fourth launch had failed, the company was dead.
The good chief engineers he tried to hire would not join a company that looked like a long shot, and the bad ones were not worth hiring so he became chief engineer of his own rocket.
That decision, born out of necessity, is a big part of why SpaceX learned faster than any aerospace company in history.
What an incredible story!