Can entrepreneurship be made applied simultaneously to different domains, subsequently improving the lives of the people?

Well, you must have heard about SpaceX talking about plans to send humans to Mars in the near future for a sum of 200,000 $, or maybe Tesla’s model S revolutionizing the future of electric cars, or about PayPal which has made it’s way in almost every online payment and money transfer system. (And there’s nothing to fret about if you haven’t). The point is, all these companies are the brainchild of Elon Musk, the visionary behind the ideas that could change the whole world.

You must be thinking that this would be a biography of Elon Musk, or maybe how he ended up reaching to such great heights. You aren’t wrong, but then isn’t it fascinating to know what made him achieve such goals, goals which would be ridiculed by you-know-who when you claimed to achieve them in future.

So, let’s get started.

Every story has a beginning.

At the age of 10, he developed an interest in computing with the Commodore VIC-20, an 8-bit home computer, and the first one to sell 1 million units. Apart from that, he taught himself computer programming at the age of 12, and sold the code for a BASIC- based video game called Blaster to a magazine called PC and Office Technology for approximately 500$.

Well that’s a great start already. But there’s more to add to it.

Much influenced by the Internet boom occurring some years later he ends up deciding that he’ll quit the world of academia, and focus on setting up a company along with his brother. This led to the formation of Zip2 in 1995, which primarily provided and licensed online city guide software to newspapers. He combined a free Navteq database with a Palo Alto business database to create the first system. The company then began to assist newspapers in designing online city guides, and struck up deals with newspapers like New York Times, ultimately being purchased by Compaq for US$307 million.

With the US$10 million he got from the purchase of Zip2, he set up a company called X.com (sounds like a name of a top-secret government site, but it wasn’t), an online financial services and e-mail payment company. An year later, the company merged with Confinity, which had a money transfer service called PayPal. The merged company later focused on the PayPal service and later it was renamed PayPal. In 2002, PayPal was occupied by eBay for US$1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk received US$165 million.

In 2001, Elon Musk conceptualized Mars Oasis, a project to land a miniature experimental greenhouse and grow plants on Mars, “so this would be the furthest that life’s ever traveled in an attempt to regain public interest in space exploration and increase the budget of NASA. Musk tried to buy cheap rockets from Russia, but returned empty-handed after failing to find rockets for an affordable price.

On the flight home, Musk realized that he could start a company that could build the affordable rockets he needed. According to early Tesla and SpaceX investor Steve Jurvetson, Musk calculated that the raw materials for building a rocket actually were only 3 percent of the sales price of a rocket at the time. By applying vertical integration, producing around 85% of launch hardware in-house, and the modular approach from software engineering, SpaceX could cut launch price by a factor of ten and still enjoy a 70 percent gross margin.SpaceX started with the smallest useful orbital rocket, instead of building a more complex and riskier launch vehicle, which could have failed and bankrupted the company.

The company’s first two launch vehicles are the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets (a nod to Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon), and its first spacecraft is the Dragon (a nod to Puff the Magic Dragon). In seven years, SpaceX designed the family of Falcon launch vehicles and the Dragon multipurpose spacecraft. In September 2008, SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket became the first privately funded liquid-fueled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth orbit. On May 25, 2012, the SpaceX Dragon vehicle berthed with the ISS, making history as the first commercial company to launch and berth a vehicle to the International Space Station. Currently SpaceX is both the largest private producer of rocket motors in the world, and holder of the record for highest thrust-to-weight ratio for any known rocket motor.

Well that’s the good side of it. The bad part was that first three launches were drastic failures, and the company was almost on the verge on bankrupcy. Musk said in an interview that if the fourth launch turned out to be a failure too, that would have been the end of the company.

The latest achievement of the company has been the launch of the world’s first reusable rocket for space Falcon 9, which turned out to be a successful launch.

And it doesn’t stop there.

After being in the board of directors as a chairman and overseeing the Roadster product design at a detailed level, he assumed leadership of the company Tesla as the CEO and product architect following the financial crisis of 2008. Along with developing models like Model S(four door sedan), Model X(SUV/minivan), and Roadster(sportscar), Tesla has made its technological patents to be used by anyone in good faith in a bid to entice automobile manufacturers to speed up development of electric cars.

“The unfortunate reality is electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.”

On August 12, 2013, Musk unveiled a concept for a high-speed transportation system incorporating reduced-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules ride on an air cushion driven by linear induction motors and air compressors.

After earlier envisioning Hyperloop, Musk assigned a dozen engineers from Tesla and SpaceX who worked for nine months, establishing the conceptual foundations and creating the designs for the transportation system. An early design for the system was then published in a whitepaper posted to the Tesla and SpaceX blogs. Musk’s proposal, if technologically feasible at the costs he has cited, would make travel cheaper than any other mode of transport for such long distances. The alpha design document estimated the total cost of an LA-to-SF Hyperloop system at US$6 billion, but this amount is speculative.

Along with this Musk provided the initial concept and financial capital for SolarCity, which was then co-founded in 2006 by his cousins, and now is the second largest provider of solar power systems in the United States. One of the underlying objectives of SolarCity and Tesla is to combat global warming.

And it’s just the beginning.