Elon Musk has just become the richest person in the world, overtaking Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
The Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur’s net worth has crossed $185bn (£136bn) after an increase in the share price of the electric car company.
So, what is the secret of his success? A few years back I spent almost an hour discussing exactly this with him. To mark his new milestone we decided to dust the interview off and share it with you. So here is Elon Musk’s guide to success in business.
1. It isn’t about the money
This is absolutely central to Elon Musk’s attitude to business.
When I interviewed him in 2014 he said he didn’t know how rich he was.
“It’s not as if there is a pile of cash somewhere,” he said. “It’s really just that I have a certain number of votes in Tesla, and SpaceX, and SolarCity, and the marketplace has value on those votes.”
He doesn’t have anything against the pursuit of wealth “if it’s done in sort of an ethical and good manner”, but said it just isn’t what drives him.
The approach certainly seems to be working.
The real-life inspiration for Robert Downey Jr’s portrayal of Tony Stark of Iron Man fame was worth perhaps $10bn when we spoke in 2014.
His electric car company, Tesla, has performed particularly well. Shares have surged over the past year to take its value to more than $700bn. For that you could buy Ford, General Motors, BMW, Volkswagen and Fiat Chrysler, and still have enough left over to buy Ferrari.
But Musk, who turns 50 this year, doesn’t expect to die rich. He said he thinks most of his money will be spent building a base on Mars, and wouldn’t be surprised if the project consumed his entire fortune.
In fact, like Bill Gates, he would probably regard ending his life with billions in the bank as a mark of failure because he hadn’t put that money to good use.
2. Pursue your passions
That Mars base is a clue to what Elon Musk believes is the key to success.
“You want things in the future to be better,” he told me. “You want these new exciting things that make life better.”
Take SpaceX. He told me he set the company up because he was frustrated the US space programme wasn’t more ambitious.
“I kept expecting us to advance beyond Earth, and to put a person on Mars, and have a base on the moon, and have, you know, very frequent flights to orbit,” he said.
When that didn’t happen, he came up with the idea for the “Mars Oasis Mission”, which aimed to send a small greenhouse to the red planet. The idea was to get people excited about space again, and persuade the US government to increase Nasa’s budget.
It was while he was trying to get that off the ground he realised the problem wasn’t “a lack of will, but rather a lack of way” – space technology was far more expensive than it needed to be.
Et voila! The world’s cheapest rocket-launching business was born.
3. Don’t be afraid to think big
One of the really striking things about Elon Musk’s businesses is how audacious they are.
He wants to revolutionise the car industry, colonise Mars, build super-fast trains in vacuum tunnels, integrate AI into human brains and upend the solar power and battery industries.
There’s a common thread here. All of his projects are the kind of futuristic fantasies you’d find in a kid’s magazine in the early 1980s.
Put it like this, his tunnelling business is called The Boring Company.
Musk makes no secret of the fact he was inspired by the books and movies he consumed as a kid in South Africa.
4. Be ready to take risks
This one is obvious.
You’ve got to have skin in the game to do well, but Elon Musk has taken more risks than most.
By 2002 he had sold off his holdings in his first two ventures, an internet city guide called Zip2 and the online payment company PayPal. He had just entered his 30s and had almost $200m in the bank.
He says his plan was to put half his fortune into the businesses and keep the other half.
Things didn’t work out like that. When I met him, he was just emerging from the darkest period of his business life.
His new companies faced all sorts of teething troubles. SpaceX’s first three launches had failed, and Tesla had all manner of production problems, and supply chain, and design issues.
5. Ignore the critics
What really shocked him – and it was clear in 2014 he was still very upset by it – was the delight many pundits and commentators took in his travails.
“The liberal schadenfreude was really quite astonishing,” said Musk. “There were multiple blog sites maintaining a Tesla death watch.”
I suggested people may have wanted him to fail because there’s a kind of arrogance about his ambition.
He rejected that. “I think it would be arrogant if we said we were definitely going to do it, as opposed to we’re aspiring to do it, and we’re going to give it our best shot.”
6. Enjoy yourself
Follow this guide and, with a bit of luck, you’ll become impossibly rich and famous too. Then you can start to come out of your shell.
Elon Musk is famously a workaholic – he boasts of working 120-hour weeks to keep production of the Tesla Model 3 on track – but since we met he seems to have been enjoying himself.