He wouldn't have done it that way. You're not looking at him with a wide enough lens. People who are rich aren't rich by chance. They're rich because they obser

He wouldn't have done it that way. You're not looking at him with a wide enough lens. People who are rich aren't rich by chance. They're rich because they observe the way things are, they take the opportunities that are presented to them as they are able to take them. Sure, he was in California in 1995, he was in the position to take a chance at a startup rather than have a 9-5 he jumped on the bandwagon. If he were 40 with 3 kids and he was just as shrewd as he was when he got his start, he'd have jumped on a different bandwagon - perhaps the realty bandwagon, become a realtor, flipped multibillion dollar houses on loans and still got rich, or he'd have become a stock broker, made himself money that way and turned that into a billion dollars - who knows, the opportunities are endless. You've just gotta look at things in the right way. Self made billionaires are opportunists. They are smart. They are shrewd. They look at the big picture. For every reason they're told they can't do something, they find a solution, they don't see obstacles as deal breakers, they're just speed bumps, irritations that need to be resolved/removed, hoops to be jumped through to get where they're going. They look for the next possibility and insert themselves where they need to in order to leverage what they have to get where they need to go. So you see it doesn't have as much to do with chance as you might think. What was chance was the bubble occurring. But Elon making use of that opportunity when it presented itself was anything but chance, that was all Elon. He spied an opportunity and rode it until he was shrewd enough to get off the elevator... which is what he's still doing. Finding opportunity and leveraging it to make his next billion dollars.