Elon Musk Says He Survived On $1 Per Day Before Becoming The Richest Man In The World

By maks in Business On 7th September 2024
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When most people hear the name Elon Musk, they think of a tech giant and the richest man on Earth. 

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. 

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Yes, that’s right – one single dollar.

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." 

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This wasn’t just an offhand comment; it was a reflection of his mindset at the time. 

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. 

He wanted to prove that he could still make it, even if his lofty dreams didn’t work out. 

"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."

Musk didn’t just talk the talk, though. He backed it up with his actions. 

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. 

"And, of course, pasta and a green pepper and a big thing of sauce. And that can go pretty far, too."

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. 

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"If I can live for a dollar a day, then at least from a food cost standpoint, well, it's pretty easy to earn like $30 in a month anyway, so I'll probably be okay," Musk recalled.

His careful spending didn’t stop there. When he and his brother started their first company, Zip2, they didn’t even have an apartment. 

"We were so hard up, we had just one computer, so the website was up during the day, and I was coding at night," Musk recounted in a speech at USC. 

"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.