Most people think entrepreneurs launch billion-dollar companies because they're chasing a grand vision. Elon Musk says he just couldn't land a regular job.
Speaking at the Montana Jobs Summit back in 2013, Musk shared the real reason he started his first internet company back in 1995 — and it wasn't because he wanted to. It was because nobody would hire him.
"The only reason I started an Internet company back in 1995 was because there were only a few internet companies and I couldn't get a job at any of them," Musk said. "I tried to get a job at Netscape and sent my resume in and tried hanging out in the lobby. But I was too shy to talk to anyone. Then I was like, okay, I guess I'll have to start a company because I can't get a job anywhere."
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At 17, Musk left South Africa with little more than ambition and a Canadian passport, thanks to his mother's citizenship. His first jobs weren't glamorous. According to Ashlee Vance's biography "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future," Musk started out shoveling grain bins and picking vegetables on a farm in tiny Waldeck, Saskatchewan. Population: barely 300.
After that, he graduated to cutting logs with a chainsaw in Vancouver, then took an even rougher job after asking the unemployment office what paid best. Their answer? Shoveling steaming hot, toxic gunk out of a lumber mill's boiler room.
For $18 an hour, Musk had to crawl through a claustrophobic tunnel in a hazmat suit, shoveling residue out through the same hole he entered. As Musk described it, "There is no escape. Someone else on the other side has to shovel it into a wheelbarrow. If you stay in there for more than 30 minutes, you get too hot and die."
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Of the thirty people who started the job that week, only three — including Musk — survived to the end.
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Eventually, Musk decided the whole manual labor thing wasn't a long-term play. He earned degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and was accepted into Stanford's graduate program. But instead of attending, he gambled on Silicon Valley's infant internet industry.
Unfortunately, the internet wasn't quite ready to welcome him either.
Despite credentials from Wharton and acceptance into Stanford's physics program, Musk didn't have the one thing Netscape wanted: a computer science degree and software company experience.
No job offers came. Musk had no backup plan. So he built his own.
The company he launched — Zip2 — eventually sold to Compaq for roughly $300 million in 1999. From there, Musk plowed ahead: founding X.com, which evolved into PayPal, selling it to eBay for $1.5 billion, and then launching the companies that would make him the richest man in the world.
It's easy to look at Musk's empire now and think it was inevitable. But it started the same way a lot of entrepreneurial stories do: with rejection, discomfort, and a decision to move forward anyway.
If Netscape had just hired the shy kid awkwardly loitering in their lobby, today's tech world might look very different.
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