Why Elon Musk says that taking "vacations will kill you"

Following the success of its early Internet starters, Elon Musk became what everyone in the late 1990s wanted to be: a dotcom millionaire.

In 1999, Musk sold its first company, Zip2, to Compaq for about $ 300 million. After that, he went on to start X.com, which eventually became PayPal. In 2002, eBay bought PayPal for $ 1.5 billion.

In 2002, he founded SpaceX, which is worth an estimated $ 33 billion, and in 2003 he founded Tesla, which has a current market size of around $ 57 billion.

Although Musk had great success, he has not had much freedom. In fact, according to Musk, "vacations will kill you."

Why the dislike of vacations? It is partly due to work. Musk told Recode Decode that in order to successfully start up, he had to work over 1[ads1]00 hours a week.

And not much has changed.

In 2018, for example, Musk slept on the Tesla plant in an effort to get hold of production on the Model 3 cars.

"I don't have time to go home and shower," he told Gayle King on "CBS This Morning."

"I don't think people should experience adversity while the CEO is on vacation," he said.

In addition to working all the time, Musk – who says he's only tried to take off a handful of times – has had terrible luck when it comes to vacations.

In 2015, Musk said he had only taken off twice in more than a decade, and both times were problematic.

"For the last 12 years, I only tried to take a week off twice," he said on Danish TV in 2015. "The first time I took a week off, the Orbital Sciences rocket exploded and Richard Branson's [Virgin Galactic] rocket exploded on it. the same week.

"The second time I took a week off, my rocket hit," Musk said.

19659002] "The lesson here is, don't take a week off."

Even before Musk attempted to take his first adult vacation, his honeymoon with his first wife Justine in September 2000, he received bad professional news.

At that time, he was CEO of X.com, and the company's executives were not happy with his management. While Musk was on the plane with Justine, executives delivered a letter of trust to the company's board of directors and pushed Musk out as CEO and replaced him with Peter Thiel. When he arrived on his honeymoon in Sydney, Australia, Musk had to fly back to Palo Alto, California, according to the book "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and The Quest for a Fantastic Future," by Ashlee Vance.

But perhaps Musk's most traumatic holiday experience came when he and Justine decided to try their honeymoon again that December.

Musk planned a two-week trip to Brazil and South Africa. While in South Africa, Musk got the most serious form of malaria. After two hospitals misdiagnosed him, "he came very close to dying," Musk said in "Elon Musk," before being properly treated in time.

"It's my lesson to take a vacation," Musk said in the book. "Vacations will kill you."

Since Musk's disastrous trips, he has reportedly been on at least two holidays, including one to Chile and one to Australia.

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