The Character Traits of Elon Musk - Coursework Example

The Character Traits of an Entrepreneur - Elon Musk The Character Traits of an Entrepreneur - Elon Musk The paper talks about the journey of an entrepreneur that started with a conception of an initial idea through to the start-up & growth. The basic knowledge about entrepreneurs is that entrepreneurs are opportunists. The entrepreneur seeks out the opportunity and develops an innovative and autonomous business plan for the opportunity by taking risks and makes it happen. It is the aptitude of an individual to spot the opportunity and make all possible actions to guarantee triumph and achievement (Read, Sarasvathy, Dew, Wiltbank, & Ohlsson, 2010). There is no specific definition of entrepreneurship in books and theories, but researchers tried to bring in theories on some common characteristics, attributes, and behavior of entrepreneurs. However, they have failed to give the exact description of an entrepreneur and they proposed theories that have no formulaic or conventional model except the association between an individual and his ability to establish a business and manage it. In every case of entrepreneurship, the individual has its personal set of behavioral attributes and characteristics that drives him to start his own business or sometimes the situational changes or reasons exist that force him to take such steps and come up with the innovative idea. On the other hand, it is also under consideration in debates whether the characteristics and attributes of becoming an entrepreneur are inherited or they are the outcome of the teachings of entrepreneurship in schools or colleges. It is also believed that with the passage of time, characteristics and behavioral transformation keep on adding and causes the list of entrepreneur’s attributes to grow (Stokes, Wilson, Wilson, & Mador, 2010). Taking into consideration the examples of successful entrepreneurs, Elon Musk is one of the brightest names in the list of most famous business owners who are well established by their autonomous efforts. Elon Musk is 43 years old, South African, Canadian American, who is an engineer, inventor, investor and entrepreneur at the same time. He has established and operate several successful companies. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. He dropped out from Stanford school during his graduate degree to start his first company. He realized the fact that he needs to focus on the growing industries i.e. internet, green energy, and space travel that have major impact on the world and humanity as well (Storm, 2014). Musk faced much criticism for his long run goals and objectives through out his journey of entrepreneurship. However, he was consistent and continued to defend the criticism and gained success. Musk is currently the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of SpaceX, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Product Architect of Tesla Motors and Chairman of SolarCity. He is the founder of SpaceX, and Co-founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and Zip2 (Vance, 2015). He has also predicted a concept of high-speed transportation system, which is called as the Hyperloop (Doeden, 2015). Elon Musk started his first business along with his brother of web software named as Zip2. The company created and marketed the city guide on the Internet for the newspaper publishing industry. The company performed successfully and attained contracts from two of the famous newspapers. Compaq acquired the company and Musk made a fortune out of the sale. Soon after, Musk became the co-founder of X.com. The company provided online financial transactions services and payments via email. However, after a year X.com merged with a company called Confinity, which was offering money transfer service named as PayPal Services. After the merger, the company focused mainly on payment services and was renamed as PayPal. Musk was the largest shareholder of the company and the company performed really well. After a year, eBay acquired PayPal for a huge price. After the two successful businesses, Musk founded his third company SpaceX or Space Exploration Technologies The company develops and creates space launch vehicles and focuses on the rocket technology advancement. The company first launched its two vehicles called Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets, and also the first spacecraft named as Dragon. In later years, the company launched the family of Falcon and many space crafts like Dragon with various functions. In addition, the company received many awards from NASA, and now SpaceX is the largest private rocket motors producer and also owns the record of having a highest power to weight ratio. At the same time, Musk is also a co-founder of Tesla Motors. He is the company’s CEO and product architect as well. The company first made electric sports cars that generated substantial sales in 31 countries. Later, the company built a Sedan car as well, and then Sport Utility Vehicle. Tesla is famous in selling electric power system to many vehicles and it is one of the leading companies of electric cars in the world. Adding to Musk’s businesses, the initial concept of SolarCity was also given by him. SolarCity has become the second largest solar panel system provider in the United States. SolarCity offers renewal energy projects and successfully playing its role against global warming issue in the United States. Musk has also planned to build a production plant of a single largest solar panel in the world. In addition to his business enterprises, Musk has also been involved in philanthropic activities, he has established a charitable organization known as Musk Foundation that mainly focuses on the health of kids, their education in science, and green energy. In the long journey of success and achievements, Elon Musk was often asked about the risk involved in making a move industries which had high chances of facing failure. However, he explained that he was motivated and determined to change the way things were moving, and he wanted to take the technology move ahead and create a future better. He had a belief in making things happen and making them in a better way than fear of facing failure. Elon Must has a personality of working passionately and his devotion towards work made it possible to accomplish his goals. He is an entrepreneur with an attitude of believing and loving his work and what he does (Gasparski, Ryan, & Kwiatkowski, 2011). Elon Musk is a great inspiration for future entrepreneurs. His life gives a lesson to learn that is to do what an individual is passionate about and pursue his goals with whole dedication. The entrepreneur must have a mental ability to think creatively and he must be able to analyze the problems and situations and should be able to predict changes that need to happen. He must not expose the secrecy of his business to its competitors. At the same time, the entrepreneur must have clear objectives regarding his business nature and he must have the quality of making and maintain personal relationship towards customer, suppliers and employees with good communication skills, a clear way of communicating with the people in surrounding plays a role of asset and bring ease in dealing with different types of people. Because an entrepreneur is a person who develops his enterprise and has total possession over it, he is the one who can take measured risk and can work under the conditions of uncertainty as well. He must be innovative and his traits must reflect the urge to work independently. Furthermore he must have the quality of steadily trying something new and better and must not be satisfied with the activities in a routine. He should be capable of spending life in hard times as well. He has to be determined but should also have patience with the ability to lead a team and have a sense of being competitive in the market by taking his personal responsibilities. He must be future oriented and tends to endure the times of adversity and above all he must have the skills to covert the conditions into opportunities (Alvarez, 2005). Looking at a broader side of theories relating entrepreneurship, theorists gave various types such as the business entrepreneur, which refers to the one who envisions the idea of making product or service whereas trading entrepreneur deals in undertaking the opportunities of trade but does not create the product. Moreover, the industrial entrepreneur is the one who is an essential manufacturer of any product after realizing the need and demand of the consumer market. The corporate entrepreneur exhibits his innovative skills in managing corporate duties. The agriculture entrepreneur deals with the activities related to agriculture and crops, raising them and markets them. Lastly, the technical entrepreneur is considered as a craftsperson who concentrates more on producing the object rather than making sales (Shane, 2000). According to the theories over entrepreneur types, Elon Musk is one his kind, he is a business entrepreneur as well as the industrial entrepreneur, who first realized the potential need and came up with new advancements for the people. In order to conclude it could be stated that this paper gives an intense example of a successful journey of an entrepreneur who had conceptualize an idea and made that happen from the start up to achieve great success and his businesses are \still continuously growing with proactive decisive approach and high energy. Elon Musk is a self-motivated person with clear vision and struggle who has the will to take on greater risks with adaptive behavior. References List Alvarez, S. A. (2005). Theories of Entrepreneuship: Alternative Assumptions and the Study of Entrepreneurial Action. New York: Now Publishers Inc. Doeden, M. (2015). SpaceX and Tesla Motors Engineer Elon Musk. New York: Lerner Publications. Gasparski, W. W., Ryan, C. L., & Kwiatkowski, S. M. (2011). Entrepreneurship: Values and Responsibility. New York: Transaction Publishers. Read, S., Sarasvathy, S., Dew, N., Wiltbank, R., & Ohlsson, A.-V. (2010). Effectual Entrepreneurship. New York: Taylor & Francis. Shane, S. A. (2000). A General Theory of Entrepreneurship: The Individual-opportunity Nexus. New York: Edward Elgar Publishing. Stokes, D., Wilson, N., Wilson, N., & Mador, M. (2010). Entrepreneurship. Cengage Learning. Storm, B. (2014). Elon Musk: Biography of a Self-made Visionary, Entrepreneur and Billionaire. New York: Createspace Independent. Vance, A. (2015). Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. New York: HarperCollins. Read More