The two most interesting and influential businessmen in the world are Elon Musk and Jack Ma. These two men changed the world of business forever. Whether this is good or bad, time will tell. But these two entrepreneurs have something in common. Let’s take a look and compare these two serial entrepreneurs and see how different and similar their lives are.
Table of Contents
Definition
A serial entrepreneur is someone who, at one point or another in their life, has started several businesses.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk was born in June 1971 in South Africa. He came from a wealthy family thanks to his father, Errol Musk. But his parents divorced when he was young and he chose to live with his father. He later regretted it. Despite the divorce, Musk was interested in video games and computers. By the age of 12, he had learned to program a computer. He later sold the code for a video game he had created for $500.
Education
During his studies, he traveled to both the United States and Canada. Musk was able to get a Silicon Valley tech internship back in 1994. Just a year later, in 1995, he went to Stanford but decided to drop out because the Internet was new and he wanted to get in on the action by starting his own startup.
Startups
Together with his brother and friend named Greg Kouri, he founded Zip2. The company’s goal was to provide a city guide, all online. These people put all their money into this work, so much so that the brothers Musk and Kouri had to rent a small office to spend the night in it. They were showering at the local YMCA.
Musk, being an ambitious man, sold Zip2 and later founded X.com in 1999. It was the financial services and payments business. But in 2001, the company changed management and was reorganized into PayPal.
Inspired by the science of space, Musk joined the Mars Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to colonizing Mars via the Internet. With the money he made in the previous decade, he was able to fund his startup, known as SpaceX, in May 2002.
He then founded other companies such as The Boring Company, Neuralink and OpenAI. Musk is also a member of the automotive company Tesla Inc and is one of the richest people in the world with a whopping $265 billion to his name.
Jack Ma
While not a household name in the United States, Jack Ma is well known in China. He was born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. He studied English as a child, and for nine years he arranged bicycle tours for tourists to help them practice their English. He befriended one of these tourists, who nicknamed him “Jack”.
Education
Ma had a hard time in college. He failed the entrance exam twice due to poor mathematical ability. The Chinese language entrance exam can be taken every year, and it took him three years to pass it. Ma later graduated from Hangzhou Normal University (then Hangzhou Normal Institute) with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. After college, he began teaching English and international trade at Hangzhou Dianzi University. Ma also stated that he tried ten times to apply to Harvard, but was unsuccessful.
Startups
After college, Ma applied for more than 30 jobs and got rejected every time, even at KFC. But in 1994, he heard about the Internet and started his own company called Hangzhou Haibo Translation Agency. He found little information about his home country of China. So, he and his friends made an “ugly” site with information about China. It was launched at 9:40 am and by 12:30 pm it had received emails from Chinese investors. Ma then founded China Pages, his second company, in the mid-1990s. In three years, he earned the equivalent of $800,000 at the time.
Interestingly, he never wrote a single line of code and never sold anything to clients. He even got his first computer at 33. Together with 18 of his friends, they created Alibaba, a marketplace. They achieved success in 1999 and 2000 when they acquired $25 million in foreign venture capital investments from Softbank and Goldman Sachs. Ma, wanting to improve global e-commerce, founded Taobao Marketplace, Alipay, Ali Mama and Lynx.
Eventually, Ma left Alibaba in October 2020. Since then, he has rarely been seen. He had two public appearances. Some speculate that because he was critical of Chinese banks, he may have been a victim of enforced disappearance or gone into hiding. One of his last performances was October 2021 in Hong Kong.
Similarities and differences
To compare these two serial entrepreneurs, Musk and Ma started their ventures from the Internet. Since then, they have both created numerous start-ups and have been chairmen of major companies.
Musk seems to be more interested in space, cars and technology in general. He has amassed a large online fan base and has also been the subject of much controversy.
Ma, on the other hand, has focused on commerce, e-commerce, and transfers. Ma is well known for his philanthropy in the fields of education, climate change and public health. But his criticism of his country’s economy caused him to disappear from the public eye.
If you compare these two serial entrepreneurs, they had the same beginning, but ultimately their lives are very different from each other.
