Elon Musk shares story behind his famous 100-hour workweek

Long before he became the first person in history to reach a trillion-dollar net worth, Elon Musk was sleeping on an office couch and showering at the YMCA to keep his first company alive.

The video clip which has resurfaced recently comes from a speech delivered back in 2014 at the Marshall School of Business at USC, where the now 55-year-old explains precisely the practices that led him to his current position atop the global wealth league tables.

How did a 100-hour workweek shape Elon Musk's early career?

In the video, Musk describes building Zip2, the online city-guide software company he co-founded with his brother Kimbal between 1995 and 1999, on a single shared computer. "We had just one computer, and since the website was running through the day, I would code at night, seven days a week, all the time," he said.

The other statement he made in that video was about a girlfriend who had to stay on an office couch just to be able to see him in order to show what it really means when a person gives everything to his or her company. Zip2 Corporation sold itself to Compaq Corporation for about $307 million and made Musk earn $22 million from that venture that he invested into the next company.

The main idea of Musk, explained through numbers in that video, is as follows: "When another person works 50 hours and you work 100 hours, then, during a year period of time, you will achieve twice as much as that person." That approach worked for Musk when he started a new venture called X, which later on turned into PayPal and sold to eBay for $1.5 billion.

This time, it was seen again during SpaceX's first near-debacle in 2008, when the company's first three missions ended in failures and Tesla almost ran out of money.

It came to the surface once again during the production nightmare involving the Model 3 back in 2017 and 2018, when Musk claimed to have slept at the plant in order to personally force the development of the vehicle.

This gruelling technique remained central in Musk's description of how he achieved success, including his famous statement, "Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week."

This renewed interest happened shortly after Musk became the first man in history to hit a net worth of $1 trillion, having made it in the wake of SpaceX's June initial public offering (IPO), which took his total wealth over $1.4 trillion temporarily before dropping down to around $916 billion to $1.05 trillion.