The Top 1% Mindset Behind The First $5 Trillion Company | Jensen Huang (Nvidia)

In 2024, Jensen Huang stood in front of a room of Stanford students and said, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering. Students, I wish upon you, you know, ample doses of pain and suffering. I thought that was interesting because it's the opposite of what everyone else usually tells you. Now, Jensen runs Nvidia, the company that makes the chips that most of the world's AI runs on. For years, the line he used in presentations to his own team was, our company is 30 days from going out of business. He didn't go out of business, though. And in 2025, Nvidia became the first company in history worth $5 trillion. You're definitely happy if you own Nvidia. You know, a question we ask all the time is, okay, you own Nvidia, but would you buy it now? Well, it just continues to go higher. It is opening at a $5 trillion market cap. Now, the first time I really looked into Jensen Huang was in 2024 when we did our first Top 10 Rules for Success video on him. I spent a lot of time studying tech entrepreneurs as I built my business. I used Jeff Bezos, regret minimization framework to give me the courage to turn down my dream job to become an entrepreneur. I use Bill Gates's sell-through partnership strategy to close my first big deal. I use Steve Jobs's put a dent in the universe motto to come up with my belief mission. But I never spent much time learning about Jensen Huang. And this whole time he was building one of the most valuable companies in the world. So I wanted to make this video to pay tribute to Jensen as well as see what I could learn and model from him and apply to my business and life now. I believe success Success leaves clues, and I'm kind of embarrassed that I haven't done more on his story here on this channel over the years. So I hope this video doesn't give you ample doses of pain and suffering, but instead leaves you with a few frameworks that are helpful for the big mission that you're on with your business too. I'm going to walk you through the whole story of Jensen Huang today, from working at Denny's, cleaning toilets, almost shutting his business, and building the first $5 trillion company in history. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. Believe. The mom who taught English without speaking it. So Jensen Huang was born in Taipei, Taiwan, February 17th, 1963. His father was a chemical engineer at an oil refinery and his mother was a schoolteacher. When Jensen was 5, his father's job moved the family to Thailand and Jensen went to an international school in Bangkok. In the late 1960s, His father traveled to New York City to train with an air conditioning company. He came home determined to send his sons to America for a better life and a stronger education. His mother got the boys ready the only way she could. She didn't speak English, so every day she opened a dictionary, picked ten words at random, and had Jensen and his brother learn them. She couldn't check their pronunciation, but she could check that they did the work. As Jensen says, "My mom taught me English, and she doesn't speak English." He says that kind of learning kind of defines Nvidia and kind of defines. The 9-year-old toilet cleaner. So in 1973, with Thailand going through a lot of unrest, his parents sent Jensen and his older brother to live with an aunt and uncle in Tacoma, Washington. Jensen was 9 and barely spoke English. To pay for school, his parents sold nearly everything they had. The aunt and uncle were new to America too, and they enrolled the boys at the Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, thinking it was a good boarding school. It was actually a reform school for troubled kids. Every student had a job. His brother worked on a tobacco farm.

What?

farm, Jensen cleaned the toilets every single day, scrubbing the inside of the bowls until they were spotless. He was too young for the academy's classes, so every morning he walked across a swinging bridge over the South Fork of the Kentucky River to the public school. He was small with long hair and a thick accent, and the other kids beat him up. In Jensen's words, the kids were really tough. They all had pocket knives. His roommate was a 17-year-old covered in tattoos and knife scars who couldn't read, so Jensen made him a deal. He taught him to read, and in return, the roommate taught Jensen how to bench press. The Denny's dishwasher who played it safe. So after 2 years, Jensen's parents made it to America and settled in Oregon, and the boys moved in with them. At Aloha High School, Jensen skipped 2 grades. At 15, he got his first job on the overnight shift at a Denny's in Portland. He started at the very bottom as a dishwasher, then worked his way up to busboy and waiter, and he kept that job from 1978 to 1983. He still jokes about it.

I was a dishwasher I was a busboy.

I waited tables. No one can carry more coffee cups than I can. He studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University, where he was the youngest kid in his classes. His lab partner, Lori Mills, became his wife. He graduated in 1984 with the highest honors and took a steady job designing chips at AMD, then moved to LSI Logic. There he met 2 engineers from Sun Microsystems, Chris Malachowski and Curtis Priem, and together they built the graphics chip that helped Sun sales More than double. When Chris and Curtis wanted to start their own company, Jensen didn't jump. He had a good job, a young family, and a wife who didn't want him to quit unless Chris quit too. He wanted proof that there was a market worth at least $50 million before he'd walk away. Decades later, he admitted that knowing what he knows now, I wouldn't do it because Nvidia turned out to be a million times harder than I expected it to be. The hardest decision for me was deciding between getting that stable job as an investment banker that I thought I wanted to do And being an entrepreneur, owning 30% of a company and making $300 a month. And it was really Jeff Bezos's regret minimization framework that saved me. And it's basically this: imagine yourself at age 80 or 85 looking back on your life right now. What decision will you regret most? Will you regret— if I put it through my lens, will I regret not becoming an entrepreneur or will I regret saying no to the job? And for me, I would rather know and fail than not know. So I became the entrepreneur and never looked back. If you lose my money, I'll kill you. So Jensen's boss at LSI Logic was Wilf Corrigan. When Jensen told him about his idea, Corrigan said if he was going to start a company, he would go see Don Valentine, the famous investor at Sequoia Capital. Then he picked up the phone and called Valentine while Jensen was still sitting in his office. The meeting didn't go well. I did a horrible job with the pitch, Jensen said, but thankfully he was already instructed to give me money. So Valentine invested because Corrigan had vouched for him. At the end of the meeting, Valentine gave him one warning. If you lose my money, I will kill you. With Sequoia in, other investors followed, and Nvidia raised $20 million. Jensen now had the money, the partners, and a man at Sequoia who expected him to deliver. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it, and I'll see you there. The $200 pocket cash meeting. So in 1992, the three of them started meeting at a Denny's in East. San Jose, the same chain where Jensen used to wash dishes. He picked it because it was quieter than home and the coffee was cheap. They sat in a booth for hours talking about a chip that would let a regular PC play 3D video games. Curtis quit Sun first at the end of 1992, so the other 2 couldn't leave him on his own. Jensen officially joined on February 17th, 1993, his 30th birthday. They set up in Chris's townhouse in Fremont, California. There was just one problem. And Jensen admits it. None of us had ever seen a PC before. So they bought a Gateway 2000 and took it apart to learn how it worked. To make the company official, Jensen went to a lawyer named James Gaither. The lawyer asked for the $200 in cash that Jensen had in his pocket. Jensen then asked Chris and Curtis for $200 each. So Nvidia started on $600. On April 5th, 1993, he signed the papers. Jensen was the youngest of the 3, and the other 2 made him CEO. Green with envy. The company didn't even have a name. They labeled their files NV for next version. They tried mixing their last names together and got things like Hua Primal and Prehua Mall. They liked Envision, but a toilet paper company already had it, so they looked for a word with N and V, and they landed on Nvidia, the Latin word for envy. They wanted to build chips so good that their competitors would be green with envy. That's why the logo is a green eye. Now, the market became the real test because around 70 other startups were trying to build 3D graphic chips for a market that barely existed. Only of those companies survived. Mark Stevens has sat on Nvidia's board for most of its history, and he remembers Jensen saying, we're investing in $0 billion markets. Jensen was betting that PC games would one day need a brand new kind of chip, and almost nobody else believed it yet. Finish the project and die. Nvidia's first chip, the NV1, drew 3D pictures using 4-sided shapes. Then Microsoft released DirectX, the graphics software for Windows 95, and DirectX only worked with triangles. So the NV1 flopped. Nvidia's second chip was already being built for Sega's next game console, and it used the same 4-sided design. Sega was their biggest customer and their biggest real ally. About a year in, Jensen could see the design was wrong though. If they finished it, Sega would get an outdated chip and Nvidia would still go under. If they stopped, the money would stop too. So years later, he described the choice: finish the project and die, or not finish the project and die right away. The Sega miracle. Jensen had to have the hardest conversation of his life. He went to Sega's president, Soichiro Irimajiri, and told him the truth: Nvidia's design was the wrong choice for his console, and Sega should find another partner. Then he asked for something completely crazy. He asked Sega to let us off of our contract, relieve us of responsibility of fulfilling the contract, but pay us in full. Jensen admits, "I was embarrassed to ask." Irimajiri took a couple of days to think about it. Then he came back and he said, "I'd like to help you." He talked Sega into putting five million dollars into Nvidia, and at that moment it was. It was all the money the company had. Jensen later said, his understanding and generosity gave us 6 months to live. Even with Sega's money, it wasn't enough. In 1996, Jensen laid off more than half the company. Nvidia went from 100 people down to 40. And this is why I love studying successful companies, 'cause you always see in their journey the moment where they, they struggled and almost quit. And I quit on my business one year in. I was not making any money. I was really struggling. And I went to my business partner, I said, I quit. I called him and I, I'm done. And then I hated my life. I hated myself for making that choice. And the next day I went back and I said, hey, I'm going to continue doing it. But studying the successful entrepreneurs that you look up to and respect and seeing how they all struggled as well, for me at least, gives me more confidence to say, okay, if they struggled and they made it through, maybe I'm not an idiot. I just have to model the success. And it's completely normal to go through failures. One shot to save the company. So everything now depended on one chip, the RIVA 128, built with triangles the way DirectX wanted. Back then, getting a new chip right usually took a year or more of building, testing, fixing. Nvidia didn't have a year. Look, we get one tape-out, Jensen told his entire team. A tape-out is when you send the final design to the factory. If they needed a second, Nvidia was finished. Jensen had heard about a company called Icos that made a machine the size of a refrigerator that could act like a finished chip. When he called, they told them, thanks for calling, but we're out of business. They still had one machine in the warehouse though, and Nvidia bought it. The team tested the whole chip on it and did the work in about 6 to 8 months. Jensen said they were running on complete The chip worked though the first time. The RIVA 128 came out in August 1997 when Nvidia had enough money left for about 1 month of payroll. That's where the company's unofficial motto came from, and Jensen talks about it with his team: our company's 30 days from going out of business. It was true. Nvidia sold about a million RIVA 128 chips in 4 months, and in January 1999 Nvidia went public, and later that year it released the GeForce 256, the first chip it sold as a GPU. Microsoft picked Nvidia to build the graphics for the Xbox. When the stock hit $100, Jensen kept the promise and got the Nvidia logo tattooed on his arm. Getting it really, really hurt, he said. The bet Wall Street hated. By the 2000s, GeForce cards were inside gaming computers all over the world, and Jensen wanted them to do much more than run games. Nvidia spent over a billion dollars building CUDA. It was software that lets programmers use a graphics card to run thousands of calculations at the same time. It came out in 2007, and Nvidia built it into its regular gaming cards so it'd reach as many programmers as possible. It cost a fortune and profits tanked. For years, the whole company was worth just above $1 billion on the stock market. Jensen said our shareholders were skeptical of CUDA and preferred we focus on improving profitability. He kept building it anyway, and on a trip to Taiwan, a professor at National Taiwan University named Dr. Chang showed him a room full of GeForce gaming cards on metal shelves with with fans blowing on them. He had built his own supercomputer, and he told Jensen that because of NVIDIA, he could finish his life's work in his lifetime. Building the brain of AI. At Stanford, Andrew Ng and his student Ian Goodfellow built a GPU server in Ian's dorm room and used it to train neural networks, the kind of software that modern AI is built on right now. They saw it run 10 to 100 times faster. So in 2012, a team at the University of Toronto trained an AI called AlexNet on 2 NVIDIA gaming cards that cost about $500 each. It was the first big breakthrough in teaching computers to recognize pictures, and suddenly the software Wall Street had hated was the only thing ready for the job. Jensen put the whole company behind AI. In August 2016, he personally delivered the DGX-1 AI supercomputer to a small nonprofit in San Francisco called OpenAI, and he signed it with his marker: To Elon and the OpenAI team, to the future of computing and humanity, I present you the world's first DGX-1. Today, Nvidia's chips run chatbots like ChatGPT. In 2023, Nvidia became worth $1 trillion, and that September, Denny's put up a plaque at the booth where it all started. In June 2024, Nvidia passed Microsoft and Apple to become the most valuable company in the world, and on October 29, 2025, it became the first company in history worth $5 trillion. Character through suffering. So in 2024, Jensen went back to Stanford where he'd earned his master's degree at night while raising his 2 young kids. He told the students that One of his greatest advantages is that he had very low expectations. Then he said, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering. He explained that greatness comes from character, and character is built by people who have suffered. In 2019, the reform school in Kentucky opened a new building called Jensen Huang Hall, paid for with a $2 million matching grant from Jensen and his wife, Lori. At the end of 2025, Time magazine put him in its Person of the Year issue as one of the architects of AI. And when he looks back at the toilets and the pocket knives, he says, The ending of the story is I love the time Keep building through the hard years. So it's easy to look at Jensen today and giving the keynotes confidently in his black leather jacket and think he was always going to win. For most of his life though, the odds said that he was not going to win. So Jensen started as a 9-year-old cleaning toilets at a reform school in Kentucky. He washed dishes at Denny's. Then he started Nvidia with 2 other engineers and $600. His first chip failed.

$5 million from Sega bought 6 months and he laid off more than half his team.

And then he was fired. Then the Riva 128 saved the company. The GeForce 256 became the first chip sold as a GPU, and the AI boom made Nvidia the first company worth $5 trillion. That's Jensen Huang's story, and now you know it too. The hard years are going to show up for you too and for me, and when they do, I hope we remember Jensen spending years telling his own team the company was 30 days from going out of business and he kept building anyway. You can keep going too, and congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be.

Believe.

Now let's learn how Elon Musk defied the odds and won big. Elon Musk had lost everything. His companies were collapsing. SpaceX had three rocket failures. Tesla was on the brink of bankruptcy. He was out of money, sleeping on a friend's couch, and days away from total failure. One more wrong move, and it was over. In 2008, Musk was at rock bottom. SpaceX had burned through millions, and every. The 3rd launch ended in disaster. Tesla couldn't afford to pay employees. Investors were pulling out. Experts called him a fool. People begged him to stop. They said, give up before you lose it all. Even his closest friends thought it was over. But Musk refused. With his last bit of cash, he gambled on one final rocket launch. If it failed, SpaceX was dead. On September 28th, 2008, the 4th rocket launched. So, the Falcon 9 rocket launched, and the Falcon Heavy booster soared into orbit.

Success!

That moment changed everything. NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract. Tesla secured last-minute funding. In just a few months, Musk went from nearly losing it all to shaping the future of space and electric cars. He could have quit. He almost did. But he bet on himself when no one else would. When everything is against you, will you give up, or will you push through until you win?

You win.

Early challenges and bold ambitions. Elon Musk's resilience was forged pretty early on. Growing up in South Africa, he was a shy, nerdy kid who loved science fiction and computers. He also faced brutal bullying in school. Once, a group of boys shoved young Elon down a flight of concrete stairs and beat him so badly that he was hospitalized. Instead of that breaking him, those early hardships toughened Musk's resolve. He became obsessed with technology and problem-solving, teaching himself programming at the age of 10 and dreaming of big adventures in America and outer space. As a young man, Elon left South Africa alone at 17 to seek opportunities in North America. He worked odd jobs and survived on $1 a day food budgets at times, all to chase his vision down. By his mid-20s, that drive was paying off. In 1995, he started his first company, Zip2, sleeping in the office and coding night and day. Just 4 years later, A year later, Compaq bought Zip2 for over $300 million, netting Musk $22 million for his share. He immediately rolled those winnings into a new venture, X.com, an online banking startup that would merge to form PayPal. In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion, and Musk walked away with around $175 million at just 31 years old. Musk could have retired a wealthy man right there, but money was never his goal. Impact was. He often said he felt humans weren't doing enough to advance space travel or sustainable energy. So instead of kicking back, he bet it all on two wildly ambitious startups: SpaceX, founded in 2002 to build reusable rockets and colonize Mars, and Tesla Motors, co-founded in 2004 to popularize electric cars. Over the next several years, Musk poured his entire PayPal fortune into these ventures. He once joked that the fastest way to become a millionaire. Is to start out a billionaire and then launch a rocket company. And he was living that joke. By 2008, after investing around $100 million in SpaceX and tens of millions into Tesla, Elon Musk was all in financially and emotionally. He had gone from dot-com rich to cash-poor entrepreneur trying to do what experts said was impossible. 2008, hitting rock bottom. 2008 was definitely the worst year of my life, Musk later said bluntly. And he wasn't exaggerating. By mid-2008, SpaceX had launched 3 test rockets, the Falcon 1, and all 3 exploded or failed to reach orbit. Each failure was a huge blow. Musk and his team would pick through charred rocket wreckage on a remote Pacific area, then go back to work prepping the next launch with dwindling funds. We were running on fumes at that point. A 4th failure would have been absolutely game over, done, Musk recalled at that time. SpaceX was not going to survive another At the same time, Tesla was also super struggling. The company had burned through most of its initial investment trying to get the Tesla Roadster, which was its first electric sports car, into production. Costs were wildly over budget and delays were growing. To make matters worse, 2008 brought a global financial crisis, the worst economic climate since the Great Depression, and venture funding for a risky car startup dried up. Tesla was unable to raise new money and was months from running out of cash. They couldn't afford to pay suppliers and were missing payroll. Musk, as Tesla's chairman and de facto chief, was scrambling to keep the lights on. Musk's personal life was falling apart as well. He was going through a painful divorce in 2008, which he later said made an already awful year even worse. He had 5 young children at the time and was splitting time between his struggling companies and family responsibilities. The stress was unimaginable. Musk's brother Kimbal described Elon's financial state then as in debt, more than broke. Musk had no liquidity left. He had spent all his PayPal money to fund the companies and now had to borrow money to pay for personal expenses. By his own account, Musk was so financially strapped he had to crash on friends' spare bedrooms because he could no longer afford a home.

Imagine the pressure.

Elon Musk was hailed as a dot-com superstar, and now all the experts were calling him a fool for thinking he could take on Boeing or Ford. Experts openly predicted In fact, Musk later revealed that back then he put the odds of even Tesla survival at less than 10%. The media was largely convinced SpaceX would blow up every rocket and Tesla would go bankrupt like other auto startups. Many in his own circle advised him to shut one company down and focus on the other. Musk faced an agonizing choice: try to save both companies and risk losing everything, or sacrifice one to maybe save the other. Years later, he described this dilemma. I could either split the funds I had between the two companies or focus them on one. This was a really tough decision. I decided in the end to split what I had to try to keep both companies alive, but that could have meant both died. And by stretching his remaining resources so thinly, he nearly killed both ventures—a decision he admitted could have been terrible. He also confessed, "I never thought I'd have a nervous breakdown, but I came pretty darn close." This was Elon Musk at rock bottom, exhausted. Disgusted, broke, ridiculed by his doubters, and genuinely unsure if his dreams were about to completely collapse. And truly, failure was right at his door. In August 2008, SpaceX's 3rd rocket crashed, and Tesla was weeks away from bankruptcy. He was nearly out of time. One more mistake and it was over. Refusing to quit. One more launch. So despite the crushing pressure, Elon Musk just refused to give up. When virtually everyone else would have folded, he kept pushing He greenlit one last launch attempt for SpaceX, the fourth Falcon One flight, even though this would consume the last of his funds. There was only enough money and parts left for one more rocket. Musk later said of this pivotal moment, "This was the last money that we had for Falcon One." That fourth launch worked, or that would have been it for SpaceX. In other words, it was do or die. SpaceX engineers knew they were working with a literal final shot. They doubled down on solving the issues from the previous failures, making a few final tweaks and praying for a little luck. Musk was so stressed that SpaceX engineer Eric Berger noted he was waking up from nightmares screaming in physical pain due to the strain. Still, Elon rallied his team, telling them failure was not an option this time. Meanwhile, at Tesla, Musk was hustling to secure emergency financing to keep the company alive through the end of the year. year. He had already personally put in every dollar he could. I gave Tesla the last of my remaining cash from PayPal, he said, and even that wasn't enough to cover payroll beyond Christmas. So essentially, Musk was juggling 2 ticking time bombs. September 28, 2008, Omaloc Island, Pacific Ocean. The SpaceX team stood on a remote launch site, hearts pounding. Falcon 1 rose from the pad on its 4th attempt, carrying a dummy payload into the sky. Elon Musk watched anxiously as the rocket cleared each milestone had doomed the last launch. 9 minutes later, success! Falcon 1 reached orbit, making the first-ever privately built liquid fuel rocket to do so. Musk and his team were ecstatic. Fate liked us that day, Musk said of the narrow victory. In that triumphant moment, years of failure and despair were wiped away. SpaceX had proven it could build a viable rocket. The achievement was more historic, but more urgently, it meant SpaceX might not die after Now SpaceX had momentum, and incredibly, just 2 days later, a phone call arrived that changed everything. NASA was on the line. On December 23rd, 2008, less than 3 months after Falcon 1 reached orbit, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to haul cargo to the International Space Station. This was part of NASA's new Commercial Orbital Transport Services, the COTS program, and SpaceX's little rocket company had beaten out bigger competitors. Musk was in shock. NASA called and told us we won. I couldn't even hold the phone. I just blurted out, I love you guys, he remembers. NASA had effectively thrown SpaceX a lifeline of funding and credibility. They saved us, Musk said gratefully. The timing was nothing short of a miracle because over at Tesla, things had gone from bad to worse that December. By Christmas Eve 2008, Tesla was literally hours away from bankruptcy. The company needed an immediate cash infusion or it would miss payroll and likely collapse within days. Musk had lined up a last-ditch deal with investors, but it hadn't closed yet. He was running on pure faith. Then, in a dramatic 11th-hour deal, Tesla's investors agreed on December 24th, 2008, to put in the needed funding to save the company. Musk himself put his last remaining personal dollars into the round to convince others to step up. The funding came through at 6 PM on Christmas Eve, the very last hour of the last possible If it had fallen apart, Tesla would have bounced paychecks 2 days later and likely never reopened. Musk later tweeted about that moment: Tesla financing round closed at 6 PM December 24th, 2008. Last hour of last day possible on payroll. Would have bounced 2 days later. Didn't even own a house or anything sellable. That was how close it was, but they made it. Tesla was saved by the thinnest margin imaginable. Now, in the span of just 3 days, Elon Musk went from staring into the abyss to achieving one of the greatest turnarounds in business history. As 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley summarized, you were saved in the period of 3 days by 2 completely unexpected events. Merry Christmas. Musk could only reply, yes, absolutely. Rising from the ashes. With that struggle behind him, Elon Musk charged forward. The rockets haven't failed since, Pelley noted in 2012. And yes, after 2008, SpaceX began racking up successes. They developed the larger Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, and by 2012, SpaceX became the first private company to dock a vehicle at the space station. SpaceX went on to achieve many milestones, pioneering reusable rocket landing in 2015, launching the Falcon Heavy in 2018, and dramatically lowering the cost of space access. As of 2025, SpaceX is the world's dominant launch provider, outperforming even national space agencies. It's hard to believe that in 2008 they were one failed launch away from extinction. Tesla's rise was equally dramatic. After surviving the 2008 crisis, Tesla launched the Model S sedan in 2012 to widespread acclaim, proving electric cars could be fast, desirable, and commercially viable. By 2013, Tesla turned its first profit, and over the following years it grew exponentially, backed by the Model 3, a mass-market electric car that fulfilled Musk's longer-term vision of affordable electric vehicles. There were still huge challenges. Musk called the 2017-2018 Model 3 ramp as production hell, during which Tesla nearly ran out of money again. But Musk met them head-on. He famously worked 120-hour weeks, sleeping on the factory floor to solve production problems. If I didn't do it, there was a good chance Tesla would die, he explained after that all-consuming effort. His determination, though, it paid off. Tesla overcame the manufacturing crisis and went on to dominate the electric vehicle market. By 2020, Tesla had become the world's most valuable automaker, and as of 2025, it has a market cap of $1 trillion. In fact, Musk, once more than broke in 2008, is now frequently ranked as the richest person on the planet, which shows how wildly successful his vision has become. Today, Musk's companies are literally shaping the future. SpaceX is developing Starship, the largest rocket ever, to enable multi-planetary travel Tesla has sparked a global transition to electric vehicles and clean energy. Musk has also launched other ventures like Neuralink, which is a brain-computer interface, and even took on Twitter and rebranded it to X. Love or hate his bold style, Elon Musk has proven time and time again that extraordinary outcomes require extraordinary levels of work. His journey from the brink of ruin to world-changing success is almost legendary. I can't wait for the movie. Lessons from Musk's comeback. So Elon Musk's story shows tons of powerful lessons for any entrepreneur, any innovator, anyone doing anything that requires a ton of adversity. Perseverance in the face of doom. Musk is an example of just never giving up. He held on when others would have quit, and whether that was through the school bullying or nearly losing his companies— I don't ever give up, Musk has said. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated. This resolve is probably his greatest asset. When you feel like quitting, remember how close Musk came to failure in 2008 and how pushing through that final 1% made all the difference. Don't quit just because it's hard. You might be on the cusp of your next great success. Next, bold vision and risk-taking. Musk is not afraid to bet it all on a big dream. He invested his entire fortune in his vision to revolutionize space and energy, and that kind of bold risk-taking is scary. Musk literally put his own finances and reputation on the line. But with big risk comes the big reward. As Musk famously said, when something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor. So don't let the fear of failure stop you from pursuing what you truly believe in. Be willing to swing for the fences when it actually matters. Next, embrace failure as a stepping stone. Those SpaceX rockets that blew up were brutal at the time, but each one taught Musk's team some really important lesson. Musk often says that failure is necessary for innovation. You have to iterate and learn from what went wrong. So don't see that failure as the end and it's all over. He treated it as a temporary setback on the way to success that he could learn from. This growth mindset kept his team improving until they finally succeeded. Fail early, fail forward, and don't take it personally. Next, insane work ethic and focus. So to pull off the 2008 save and later the 2018 Tesla ramp-up, Musk put in an incredible amount of work. We're talking 100-hour-plus work weeks, sleeping under his desk, sleeping at the factory floor, doing whatever it took. He famously said, no one ever changed the world on 40 hours a week. Now, Musk himself warns that this extreme schedule is not healthy for most people, but the core lesson is that something extraordinary often requires extraordinary effort. So when your back is against the wall, total focus and hard work can be the difference between your your success and your failure. Next, purpose beyond profit. So through all of that hardship, through all that craziness, what kept Musk going was a sense of mission. It wasn't about making money. He was losing money constantly in 2008. It was about advancing humanity, bringing electric cars to the market, making space travel affordable. Having a purpose bigger than himself gave Musk the courage to keep going. In your own path, connecting to a deeper purpose can give you the strength to endure some of the toughest Musk's passion and his vision—it became contagious. It inspired his team and attracted critical support at the darkest moments. From done to destiny, Elon Musk's 2008 comeback story is the stuff of entrepreneurial legend. One moment, he was a step away from total defeat—pretty, pretty dark, as he said—and moments later, he was signing billion-dollar contracts and securing lifelines for his companies. He went from sleeping on a friend's couch wondering if he'd gone insane to gamble on rockets and electric cars to literally changing the world within a few short years. So think about it— if SpaceX's 4th launch had failed, or if Tesla's investors did not come through on Christmas Eve, we might not have reusable rockets relanding on drone ships or electric cars everywhere today. Musk was that close to being a cautionary tale instead of the visionary icon that that we know. What turned it all around was Musk's just refusal to surrender. He was down to his last chips. Everyone told him to fold, but he kept betting on himself, and it worked. By pushing through the worst times, Musk and his team unlocked breakthroughs that made history. His story reminds us that sometimes the biggest wins come just one step beyond your lowest low. So you can ask yourself, when everything is against you, when you're exhausted, when you're on the brink of failure, when every expert says that you can't do it, will you give up, or will you find that last ounce of strength, adapt, and push through until you win? Elon Musk almost quit in 2008. He almost decided to cut his losses, but he didn't. He held on, and in doing so, he changed his life and arguably the world. So the next time you feel like you're at your breaking point, remember Elon Musk's journey from rock bottom to unbelievable success. Remember that the night is darkest just before dawn. Your comeback could be right around the corner too, if you have the courage to keep moving forward. Now let's learn the story of Jack Ma, the man who failed at everything and became a billionaire.

When KFC opened in Jack Ma's hometown, 24 people applied for jobs. 23 were accepted. Jack was the only one rejected. It wasn't his first rejection either. He applied for dozens of positions that got turned down from Every single one. Instead of giving up, Jack taught himself English and dreamed bigger. In 1999, he convinced 17 friends to help him launch an online marketplace from his small apartment. That startup was Alibaba. At first, nobody believed a Chinese schoolteacher could build a global e-commerce company. Investors laughed him out of meeting rooms. He struggled to find any funding. But Jack persisted. He grew Alibaba through sheer determination. Empowering small businesses to sell online. The platform exploded into one of the world's largest companies, and Jack Ma became one of the richest entrepreneurs on the planet. All from a man who couldn't even get hired at KFC. He once said, never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine. Early rejections and perseverance. Jack Ma's journey began with failure after failure. As a young man in China, he struggled academically and even failed his college entrance twice before finally passing on the third try. After college, he faced an onslaught of job rejections. Reportedly, 30 different jobs turned him down. He tried to become a police officer, but out of the 5 applicants, 4 were accepted and Jack was the only one rejected. He even applied to KFC when it opened in his city. 24 people applied and 23 got hired, everyone except Jack. To top it off, he applied to Harvard University 10 times and was rejected each and every time. Most people, they would have been crushed by a fraction of these setbacks, but Jack did not give up or let rejection define him. Each no gave him extra motivation to keep going. He later said that we have to get used to rejection and keep moving forward. This mindset, viewing rejection as a stepping stone rather than like it's the end of the world, became the backbone of Jack's success story. Learning English and seeing a bigger One of the first ways Jack turned adversity into opportunity was by teaching himself English. Growing up in Hangzhou, China, he was determined to learn English even though it wasn't easy for him. As a teenager, he would wake up early and ride his bicycle for 40 minutes to the city's hotel district every single morning just to find foreign tourists to talk to. For 9 years, he acted as a free tour guide for travelers, practicing English with anyone willing to chat. This dedication paid off. Not only did he become fluent, but he also gained a window into the wider world. In fact, one of those tourists gave him the nickname Jack since his real name, Ma Yun, was hard to pronounce. Through these conversations and friendships, young Jack's mindset expanded. He began to dream beyond the limited opportunities he saw around him in China. An Australian family he befriended even invited him abroad, and that trip opened Jack's eyes to possibilities beyond his humble background. Jack eventually graduated with an English degree and became an English teacher in Hangzhou. His starting salary was very low, around $12 a month by some accounts, but he was passionate about teaching and learning. Still, he never lost the urge to do something bigger. His exposure to Western ideas and fluent English skills gave him the confidence to think globally, a rare perspective at Jack often says this period of learning and broadening his horizons was really important to him. It taught him to embrace new ideas, to communicate more boldly, and to believe in himself even when he was just a nobody in the eyes of his employers. The spark of an idea: discovering the internet. Jack Ma's turning point came in 1995 when he encountered the internet for the first time. At the time, the internet was almost unknown in China. Jack traveled to the United States as a translator, and there a friend showed him the World Wide Web. The experience was life-changing for him. One famous story recounts how Jack searched for beer online out of curiosity. He found lots of information about American and European beer, but to his surprise, no information about China or Chinese beer. Sensing a lack of opportunity, Jack searched for general information about China. And again saw nothing. In that moment, he realized that the internet could be a great equalizer for his country. Determined to put China on the online map, Jack and a friend created a simple website listing China-related information, basically an online directory. The site was very basic, and Jack called it ugly, but they put it up anyway. What happened next amazed him. Just hours after launching the site, emails started pouring in from people around the world. Wanting to know more about China and about him. Jack was stunned that in a short time the internet connected him in China to opportunities around the world. This was his lightbulb moment. He later said, this was when I realized that the internet had something great to offer. So motivated by the discovery, Jack started his first company, China Pages. It was an early Chinese internet directory for businesses. He had virtually no technology background and had to borrow money to to get started, but he dove in anyway. China Pages earned a little money and taught Jack his first entrepreneurial lessons, but more importantly, it proved to him that China could engage with the world through the internet. The business wasn't a huge success. It eventually got overshadowed by a government-run competitor, but Jack gained valuable experience. He learned how to build websites, he learned how to persuade others to see his vision, and he learned how the emerging internet could empower small businesses. That spark was lit for now something much bigger for Jack. Building Alibaba from a small apartment. By 1999, Jack was ready to go all in on his biggest idea yet. He convinced a group of former students and friends to join him in creating an online marketplace that would link Chinese suppliers with buyers around the world. Jack was now 35 years old, armed with conviction and the few connections that he The team, 17 friends co-founding alongside Jack, gathered in his modest apartment in Hangzhou to start the company. They decided to call it Alibaba, inspired by the tale of Alibaba and the 40 Thieves. Jack liked that it was a more globally recognized name and the idea of open sesame for small businesses. And in that tiny apartment, Jack delivered a very impassioned speech laying out his vision. He told his team that China's internet business could compete globally And that our competitors are not in China, but in America's Silicon Valley. That was a pretty bold statement at the time. Remember, Jack was an English teacher by trade, not a tech expert or some seasoned CEO. In fact, he didn't even know how to write a single line of code and had never run a big company. Many people thought it was laughable that someone with no technical background could start an internet company. But Jack had other strengths: charisma, vision, belief. He saw in himself not a programmer. But a leader and a dreamer who could rally skilled people to join his cause. So it was just 500,000 yuan, which is about $60,000 in pooled funds as startup capital. Jack and his small team got to work on Alibaba.com. Their goal was pretty straightforward but ambitious: help small Chinese businesses sell their products online to the world. Jack was passionate about enabling the little guys, the small entrepreneurs, to find customers beyond their local This mission would also help bring China's economy into the internet age, and those early days they were pretty hard on Jack. The team worked out of Jack's apartment, often using homemade furniture. Resources were pretty scarce, and at first even convincing Chinese businesses to sign up on Alibaba was really hard. The internet was new and trust was pretty low. Jack had to personally be an evangelist for the idea that online commerce could be trustworthy and valuable for. Them. He was reaching for a dream that not many other people could even understand at the time. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse. Overcoming challenges. So just when Alibaba started gaining some traction, huge challenges emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Many internet startups were failing as the dot-com bubble burst open. Money was drying up. Jack Ma, ever the optimist, kept his team motivated. He told them that even if the hype was fading, the dream of the internet won't burst, meaning he firmly believed the internet's long-term potential was real even though there was short-term skepticism. Still, Alibaba needed money to survive. Jack went overseas looking for investors, but when Western venture capitalists literally laughed in his face— he was actually laughed out of Wall Street offices when he pitched his idea of a Chinese e-commerce site— no one believed that a small Chinese No one believed that a small Chinese company led by a former schoolteacher could ever compete globally. But Jack finally found some believers. In 1999, just as Alibaba was nearing a breaking point, Goldman Sachs invested $5 million, and shortly after, SoftBank, which was led by Japanese investor Masayoshi Son, invested another $20 million. This was a huge turning point. $25 million in total funding gave Alibaba the lifeline it needed to continue to weather the storm and keep growing. Jack Ma says that perseverance is the key. If he had given up after those early rejections, the lack of funding, Alibaba would never have made it. So instead, he kept knocking on doors until one finally opened. With this new funding, Alibaba survived the early 2000s and started to thrive. By 2002, the company finally became profitable, but the challenges didn't end there. In 2003, eBay, the American e-commerce giant, entered the Chinese market by acquiring a local website. They were a global heavyweight with deep pockets, and suddenly Alibaba especially with its new consumer-focused platform, was an underdog fighting against the Goliath. Many predicted Alibaba would be crushed, but not Jack. He doubled down his understanding of Chinese consumers and small sellers. Instead of charging fees like eBay, Jack made it free for users, which attracted millions of sellers and buyers who preferred a no-fee marketplace. He also introduced Alipay, which was an escrow-based payment system to build trust in online transactions. So buyers' payments were basically held safely until they confirmed receipt of the goods, which addressed the trust issue that foreign companies didn't quite understand. Jack's intimate knowledge of his home market and his customers-first philosophy was starting to pay off, and over a few years, he overtook eBay in China. eBay was forced to retreat the company in 2006, defeated by this small local startup that just wanted it more. And a great moment came when eBay offered to buy Alibaba to stop the competition, Jack refused to sell. He was in this for the long haul, not for some quick payout. Instead, he partnered with Yahoo, and in 2005, they invested a $1 billion stake in Alibaba, giving Alibaba even more fuel to grow. But through all these fights and battles, Jack Ma's guiding principle was to never give up and keep adapting. He famously said, today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine. And he lived that quote during the hardest times when no one was believing in him. Him when he was running out of money or facing a giant competitor, Jack kept faith that if he kept going, the hard days and the worst days would eventually become good. And he was right. Jack Ma's triumph and legacy. So in the end, Jack Ma's crazy dream became an astonishing reality. Alibaba grew from that tiny apartment startup into one of the world's largest e-commerce companies. By the 2010s, it was a dominant force not just in China but globally. It offers services from online retail to cloud computing and digital payments. In 2014, Alibaba made global headlines with its record-breaking IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. Investors who once laughed at him now scrambled to buy a piece of Alibaba. The company raised around $25 billion in its IPO, which was the largest stock offering ever at the time. The former jobless man who couldn't even get hired at KFC had built a company so valuable that it shattered world records. Jack Ma instantly became one of the richest people on the planet, and his net worth was soaring into the tens of billions of dollars. But beyond the wealth, Jack was now hailed as this visionary entrepreneur on a world stage. He proved that an ordinary person, a man who started as a poor, academically average kid, could change the world through his perseverance and his vision. Alibaba's success also empowered millions of small business owners in China and beyond Fulfilling Jack's original mission to help the little guys benefit from the internet. Jack Ma's story has some fairy tale-like qualities, but he never forgets how it started—with rejection and resilience. Even after success, he remains humble about all of his abilities. He often says that he was not a tech genius or Superman, just someone who was willing to keep trying and learn from mistakes. In 2019, Jack stepped down as Alibaba's chairman. On his 55th birthday to focus on his philanthropy and education projects, returning to his teacher roots. It's inspiring that after achieving so much, he still chose to give back and help others reach their potential, which kind of became a full circle moment for someone who began as a modest teacher with big dreams. So here's the moral of Jack's story for me. His journey from repeated rejection to crazy success shows that anything is possible if you don't give His life shows that you need to have grit and vision and self-belief. He faced more rejection early on than most of us might in a lifetime, but he kept pushing forward. He once said, if you don't give up, you still have a chance.

Giving up is the greatest failure.

Jack really lived that advice. He met every failure with a new attempt to go again, every no with a new idea and way to get around it. And eventually, the man who couldn't land a simple job created thousands of jobs for others and built a company that changed the world. Imagine if Jack Ma had given up after that KFC rejection or the Harvard rejection. The world would never have heard of Alibaba, and Jack would just be another unhappy man who quit on his dreams. Instead, because he kept going, he reaped the sunshine he talked about and proved to all of us that we can too.

To learn how Soichiro Honda built an empire after total failure, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. Soichiro Honda, the founder of Honda Motors, was rejected by Toyota, lost his factory in World War II. And had an earthquake destroy everything he built. He was broke, humiliated, and at rock bottom.