SpaceX Entrepreneurial Background Business

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Introduction – Entrepreneurial Background
On June 28th, 1971, Elon Musk was born in South Africa (SA) to a disturbed family structure (Collins, 2018). Musk’s mother was a Canadian model, worked on five different jobs to support the family. On the contrary, Musk’s father was a wealthy SA engineer, which indirectly allowed him to gain keen interests in computers. At the age of 10, Musk witnessed his parents getting divorced while he was suffering from childhood hearing problem. His interest in computers made him create a computer game, named ‘Blaster’, which Musk sold at the age of 12 years (Biography, 2019). Musk believes in ‘Read to Lead’ phenomenon, making him an introvert and bookish at high school (Youshaei, 2018). Musk encountered bullying at high school, which drove him to learn karate and wrestling at the age of 15 years for self-defence (Biography, 2019).
Over the course of life, Musk travelled from SA to Canada and the United States of America (USA) to acquire education from reputed institutions. At the age of 17 years, Musk enrolled into Queen’s University to avoid mandatory placement in SA military. In 1989, Musk acquired Canadian citizenship, which aided to attain American citizenship in latter stages. In the year 1992, Musk moved to the USA to study business and physics from the University of Pennsylvania (Biography, 2019). Musk holds an under-graduation degree in economics and bachelor’s degree in physics. Musk is the owner of Tesla Motors, an electric car manufacturing company, and SpaceX, commercial space travelling company (Denning, 2018). According to Forbes, Musk is the 40th richest person alive with a net worth of US$22.3 billion (Forbes, 2019).
Discussion
Entrepreneurial Traits/Characteristics
Musk has characteristics that are hybrid and differentiate the individual from others remarkably. According to the action regulation theory, proposed by Michael Frese, successful entrepreneurs believe in a different sequence of decisions that lead towards goal accomplishment. The correctness or wrongness of a decision is measured by entrepreneurs through feedback, which influences the choices subsequently (Hirschi, Shockley and Zacher, 2019). In the case of Musk, the implication of action regulation theory is evident from his life events. Musk had a keen interest in computers and algorithms since early stages of life. As a result, Musk chose to pursue economics and physics to understand the relationship between the two disciplines. The action towards educational credentials allowed Musk to launch Zip2 Corporation in 1995, which generated US$34 million until 1999 and further used to create PayPal (Biography, 2019).
A neuro-scientific theory proposed by David McClelland argues that individuals are inclined towards three motivators in life, namely affiliation, achievement and power. The three motivators are highly dominant in average life of a human regardless the age, gender and sociocultural association (Rybnicek, Bergner and Gutschelhofer, 2019). Arguably, Musk also possesses entrepreneurial traits highlighted by McClelland in the ‘Theory of Achievement Motivation’. After gaining unprecedented commercial success through Zip2 Corporation and PayPal, Musk continued his entrepreneurial journey by founding profit-generating space travel venture in 2002, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX). By the year 2008, SpaceX witnessed commercial stability and awarded with cargo handling contract from NASA, which was a major accomplishment of Musk as entrepreneur (Biography, 2019).
Opportunity Recognition and Idea Development Process
In the discipline of entrepreneurship, idea generation and opportunity-recognition, the process is a unique trait possessed by philanthropists that change industrial landscape (Kallner and Nystrom, 2018). Theoretically, this process depends on reverse thinking technique, also recognised as opposite thinking, which questions the standardised approaches of conducting actions for making evident changes in a particular business setting (Murray, Crammond, Omeihe and Scuotto, 2018). Arguably, Musk had the art of reverse thinking in order to identify credible opportunities in the marketplaces and generate game-changing ideas subsequently. Musk identified the crisis related to oil and gas exploration worldwide, which made vehicle-based mobility expensive for the households. Moreover, the absence of seeking alternatives among car manufacturers worldwide was equally found in the industry. Hence, Musk utilised solar energy to shift the fuel dependency in cars and introduced Tesla Motors immediately in 2008.
Furthermore, the theoretical principles of entrepreneurship argue that idea generation is a result of in-depth brainstorming. Entrepreneurs would discuss the questions and recognised opportunities in the market among co-workers and associates openly to examine a situation from different perspectives before making a decision (Hsu, Wang, Lin and Chang, 2018). In the case of Musk, brainstorming is an embedded practice found behind the launch of each successful venture. SpaceX, Tesla, PayPal and Zip2 Corporation are examples of team efforts and discussions led by Musk during the period in order to formulate the business model. Hence, the idea generation and opportunity recognition roadmap for Musk is systematic and theoretically justified for the entrepreneur.
Competitive Advantages
Arguably, competition in electric vehicles (EVs) is growing unprecedentedly over the period due to the intensified penetration of reputed players, such as Jaguar,...