Elon Musk

One issue with startups, especially those with multiple founders and funders, is who should be in charge. Sometimes the alpha male wins, as when Steve Jobs marginalized Steve Wozniak and when Bill Gates did the same to Paul Allen. At other times it’s messier, especially when different players feel that they are the founder of a company.

In the early days of Henry Ford and other pioneers, carmakers did most of the work in-house. But beginning in the 1970s, the companies spun off their parts-makers and upped their reliance on suppliers. From 1970 to 2010, they went from producing 90 percent of the intellectual property in their vehicles to about 50 percent. That made them dependent

After a few years, SpaceX was making in-house 70 percent of the components of its rockets.

As his team grew, Musk infused it with his tolerance for risk and reality-bending willfulness. “If you were negative or thought something couldn’t be done, you were not invited to the next meeting,” Mueller recalls. “He just wanted people who would make things happen.”

One thing that Mueller insisted on was that Musk put two years’ worth of compensation into escrow. He was not an internet millionaire, and he did not want to take the chance of being unpaid if the venture failed. Musk agreed. It did, however, cause him to consider Mueller an employee rather than a cofounder of SpaceX. It was a fight he had regardin

Personal networks are more complex than digital ones.

Reid Hoffman, another PayPal veteran, had a similar reaction. After listening to Musk describe his plan to send rockets to Mars, Hoffman was puzzled. “How is this a business?” he asked. Later Hoffman would realize that Musk didn’t think that way. “What I didn’t appreciate is that Elon starts with a mission and later finds a way to backfill in order

Musk answered, “I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.”

PayPal went public in early 2002 and was acquired by eBay that July for $1.5 billion. Musk’s payout was around $250 million.