But here’s something not many know: Elon Musk wasn’t always surrounded by luxury.
Before SpaceX rockets, Tesla vehicles, and solar energy projects, Musk was a young man barely getting by on just $1 a day.
In a 2015 interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Musk shared stories from his college years when survival, not revolutionizing industries, was his primary focus.
Musk said, “In America, it’s pretty easy to keep yourself alive.”
He had embraced living on the bare minimum as a necessary step towards achieving greatness.
Even back then, Musk’s goals were ambitious, but he wasn’t just thinking big. He was also pushing himself to see how little he could survive on.
“So my threshold for existing is pretty low,” he explained.
“I figure I could be in some dingy apartment with my computer and be okay and not starve.”
To make his money stretch as far as possible, he bought food in bulk.
“You get really tired of hot dogs and oranges after a while,” Musk confessed.
This story might be surprising, but it’s also oddly relatable.
Here’s a man who would go on to become a billionaire, yet during his early years, he lived on bulk groceries, all to prove that he could survive on nearly nothing.
His careful spending didn’t stop there. When he and his brother started their first company, Zip2, they didn’t even have an apartment.
“Seven days a week, all the time,” he added. He also mentioned that during this time, he would shower at the YMCA.
This whole journey is a powerful reminder that even the richest man in the world started from nearly nothing – living on just a dollar a day.
