The Resume of Elon Musk - By Novorésumé

27 December 2023

8 min read

One-page Resume of Elon Musk

As one of the most accomplished CEO's and leaders in the world, he does not need any introduction, as simply saying his name would open most of the doors in the world.

Elon Musk revolutionized, improved and changed many industries, from electric vehicles to reusable rockets to being among the first to create the electronic payments industry to selling 20.000 flamethrowers in 4 days.

With so many achievements and past experiences, one would be right to think that you would need lots of pages in order to cover them all.

However, our team proved the concept of “Less, is More” that recruiters and employers ask for when receiving job applications, and through efficient use of design principles and advice from recruiters we managed to summarize all of the professional experience of Elon Musk in a one-page resume.

The following example of Elon Musk resume is the renewed version which has been created using the professional resume template that you can use to create yours as well and impress recruiters:

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The early life of Elon Musk

Ever since he was a child, Elon would get lost in daydreams about inventions.

He taught himself computer programming at just 10 years old. Two years later, he created and sold his first video game Blastar for $500. He even tried to open his own video game arcade with his brother, Kimbal, but they failed to get a permit.

Elon’s intellectual proficiency didn’t do him many favors at the time though. Musk had few friends and faced a lot of adversity in his younger years. In an interview, he opened up about his terrible bullying, and how it made him the unstoppable iron man he is today. “I didn’t let the haters discourage me, I continued to focus on soaking up knowledge and creating world-changing ideas,” Elon shared.

At 17, Musk moved to Canada where he enrolled at Queen’s University. He then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania two years later, where he graduated with flying colors in Physics and Economics.

When asked about the importance of education in a resume, he had a message for all of the degree-obsessed youngsters: diplomas can be a nice indicator of skills, but they’re not essential for accomplishing great things.

From Student to Entrepreneur

After Pennsylvania, Musk began his Ph.D. in applied physics and material sciences at Stanford. But the experience didn’t last long, because he dropped out two days after to launch his entrepreneurial career.

Before the internet as we know it took off well, Elon realized the importance and benefits of businesses going online. He thought all cafes, shops, and restaurants should have their information easily accessible to people on the internet.

So, in 1995, the 24-year-old teamed up again with his brother Kimbal and launched Zip2, a web software company. This time, no permit could get in their way.

With the internet being so new and alien, it was hard for the company to sell at first. Ironically enough, some of the businesses who rejected it even labeled Zip2’s mission of going online as “the dumbest thing they’d ever heard.”

Zip2 landed it’s first deal with Navteq, a million-dollar company that created digital maps. That’s all it took for other giants to get on board. Elon continued to sign contracts with big names like the New York Times and Chicago Tribune.

He eventually sold Zip2 to Compaq Computers for $341 million, four years later.

Musk walked away from Zip2 with $22 million in his pockets, already planning his next move.

Musk: The CEO of Paypal

In 1999, Elon Musk used the 22 million from Zip2 to co-found an online banking company, X.com. A year later, X.com merged with Confinity, the company behind PayPal. Elon became CEO of Paypal as well as the largest single shareholder of the organization with 11.5% of all shares.

His leadership didn’t go down as planned, though. Elon wanted to commit to a technological renovation most board members didn’t approve of. He wanted to switch the infrastructure from the current Unix to a Microsoft program. This led to the entrepreneur bumping heads with the company leadership.

So, the board called him up while he was on his way to a much-needed holiday to Australia, and kicked him off the company. Since then, Musk has been open about his dislike of vacations.

In 2002, eBay took over Paypal for $1.5 billion. Being the biggest owner, Musk netted $165 million from the sale. Despite hiccups, his second venture proved to be financially successful after all.

Internet Genius Turned Rocketman

How he was treated at Paypal set Musk on a different path. His motivation for success changed. What would inspire him from now on was doing purposeful work that had a positive change in the world. He wanted to wake up in the morning and be glad to be a part of humanity.

Elon then turned towards the future: he would find this inspiration in space engineering, electrical vehicles, underground tunnels, and artificial intelligence.

With only an undergraduate understanding of physics, Elon took a leap of faith. In 2002, he decided to found his own spacecraft company, SpaceX.

The businessman was frustrated with the space industry in the U.S. In particular, he was critical of NASA on two fronts: how much the organization spent on their space program, and how long it was taking for space exploration to hit another breakthrough. Elon wanted results, and he wanted them fast.

Musk hired expert engineers to make his own rockets from the ground up. With inspiring confidence, SpaceX started working on its vision to revolutionize space technology. The ultimate goal?

Colonizing Mars.

Many thought (like it usually happens with Elon Musk), that he was crazy. Only government agencies like NASA or Russia’s Roscosmos had been able to tackle the challenges of space travel.

Granted, SpaceX struggled to show results for many years. They got their lucky break in 2010 when the company successfully launched and landed a payload into the orbit.

Now people were paying attention. It took a while, but Musk finally proved SpaceX’s reliable engineering talent and efforts to the world.

December 2015 brought another historical event: SpaceX became the first private company to upright land and recover a rocket, Falcon 5, into orbit.

Though they’ve made noteworthy progress, it took SpaceX 15 years to land their first rocket and Elon has yet to achieve his fundamental mission of getting to Mars.

Although too ambitious, the company foresees to send its first shipload mission on Mars in 2022, and the human mission by 2024.

As of 2021, the company reached a peak valuation of about $74 billion after a big round of equity funding. Compared to August of 2020, the company’s valuation has increased by a good 60%. Talk about growth!

The main reason behind the funding spree is two of SpaceX’s ongoing projects, which, needless to say, require quite the capital.

The first project, Starlink, aims to deliver high-speed internet to every corner of the world through what is called a constellation of satellites.

About 1000 of these satellites have already been launched and if you live in the US, Canada, or the UK, you can preorder the Starlink service for $99 and expect to start using it in mid-2021 or 2022.

The second big project is the Starship rocket, which is being built with the aim of sending cargo and about 100 people to the moon and Mars (which has been the end-goal of SpaceX all along).

The Making of Tesla Motors and SolarCity

Although Musk was not a founding member of Tesla, he’s arguably the company’s backbone and innovator.

Elon wanted to create a good future to look up forward to and be inspired by, and sustainable travel was definitely in the picture. Concerned about CO2 emissions and determined to promote sustainability, he financed Tesla with the long-term goal of creating affordable mass-market electrical automobiles.

Taking his first active role in 2004, Elon invested $6,36 million on the start-up. This early round of financing immediately catapulted him to the chairman of the board.

When Tesla released its first electric car, Roadster, in 2008, Musk became CEO. That was a big undertaking because he was already working 80 hours a week as CEO of SpaceX.

Despite the overload, the genius took advantage of the opportunity to intertwine the two businesses.

Fun Fact: The Roadster is marked in history as the first roadworthy vehicle sent into space. Yes, Musk flew the electric car into orbit with a rocket.

The Roadster was just the beginning. Musk continued to be the CEO and a controlling investor, laying $9 million on the Tesla Motors Series B, and $12 million on the third series.

2020 saw the company’s stock rising by 95% and 2021 has definitely kept up that pace. After an increase in share prices in January, Musk surpassed Jeff Bezos and became the world’s richest person with a net worth of $185 billion. This was a short-lived title, though, lasting only a month because, well, tweets.

It’s no secret that Musk is a big fan of Twitter (and that his Tweets have a pretty heavy impact on the market). Not long after Tesla announced that it had added $1.5 billion in Bitcoin to their balance sheet, Musk headed to Twitter to express his opinion that Bitcoin’s prices “do seem high”. That was enough to cause Tesla’s stock price to dip and Musk to move back to second place behind Jeff Bezos.

Twitter and Bitcoin aside, let’s talk about SolarCity. In an effort to advance the use of sustainable energy, Musk merged Tesla with solar energy company SolarCity in 2016. SolarCity was started by Elon’s cousins. The relationship was solidified through a $2.6 billion deal. They’re working hand in hand to invent products that better the generation through the storing and consumption of sustainable energy. Since the acquisition in 2016, however, solar installations have been in decline and according to analysts, SolarCity was significantly responsible for Tesla’s 2019 cash-flow deficit.

The Boring Company

The Boring Company started out as a tweet, as many things do when it comes to Musk.

In December 2016, Elon Musk went online to complain about the awful road traffic, and how he wanted to fix it by digging tunnels.

If it was anyone other than the $30 billion CEO, this would have been another tweet of someone complaining. But in January 2017, just one month later, The Boring Company hit the ground (no pun intended).

The ambitious entrepreneur didn’t just intend on toning down traffic. He wanted to do it faster and with cheaper tunnel-digging technologies than the current machines in use. The plan was to build new tunnel boring machines that ran on electricity and were three times more powerful than anything else on the market.

The Boring Company has been doing real tunnel work for almost three years now. In 2018, they completed their first underground tunnel in Hawthorne, California. They’ve also raised $10 million in 4 days by selling 20,000 flamethrowers, which Musk later renamed “Not-A-Flamethrower” after customs officials stated they wouldn’t allow items called flamethrowers.

So far, Musk has not delivered on his dystopian promises of alternative road traffic. However, progress has been made. The Boring Company transports gas-burning equipment through an electric skate method. That helps to cut down the emission that comes with the construction.

If Elon Musk’s track record is anything to go by, we won’t have to wait much longer until The Boring Company is fully sustainable.

Neuralink

As if all his ventures weren’t enough, there is one more eccentric project worth discussion: Elon Musk’s 2016 start-up Neuralink.

Straight out of a Black Mirror episode, Neuralink is developing technology dedicated to brain capacity enhancement. In a nutshell, Musk wants to create tiny machines that can treat brain diseases and improve our neurological functions.

As dystopian as that seems, the basic technology for Neuralink already exists. Theoretically, such advanced machinery can even give people living with paralysis the ability to move again.

By 2019, the company had received $158 million in funding and announced that they were working on a device that would be able to implement very thin threads into the brain. Experimentation with humans was planned for 2020 and was postponed for 2021, so we are yet to see where Neurolink is going with this project.

The first version that we have created in 2016 proving the concept “Less, is More!” which inspired many persons to reduce the length of their resumes and impress recruiters is the following:

Conclusion

Elon Musk has left a mark in history as one of the greatest entrepreneurs and innovators of our time. Between electric cars, solar energy, space travel, tunnel digging, and neuroscience, is there any aspect of our future Elon Musk has not contributed to?

Although Musk was a millionaire by his late 20s, he has had to build his empire from the ground up. It took thousands of hours of relentless work, ambition, thinking outside the box, and a courageous spirit to become one of the most successful and creative men alive.

So what is Elon going to invest in next?

No one really knows, but it’ll surely be something out of a science fiction movie.

We’ll doubt it, call him crazy, and then he will change our minds....again.