I still remember the moment I realized Elon Musk wasn’t built like other billionaires. It was 2008, and SpaceX had just blown its third Falcon 1 rocket into the Pacific. The company’s bank account had $40 million left—enough for one last shot. I imagine him in that Hawthorne office at 1 a.m., engineers whispering about quitting, the walls smelling like burnt circuitry and takeout. But Musk was pacing, muttering about how failure meant never getting to Mars. His eyes? Not resigned. Hungry.

That obsession with Mars isn’t just about science fiction. I think it’s a survival instinct—learned from growing up in apartheid South Africa. His father engineered tunnels through mountains; his mother, a nutritionist, starved herself for weeks to test diets. Musk inherited the grit. When he sold PayPal in 2002, most people would’ve bought a villa. He blew $100 million on SpaceX, then poured Tesla’s 2008 life-support funding into the company’s last Falcon 4 shot. Most people don’t know this: he seriously considered selling Tesla cars at Walmart in 2015. Not because he needed the money, but because he wanted to convert soccer moms into EV believers. The board flipped. He dropped it, but not before writing a memo comparing skeptics to “people who’d rather ride horses forever than learn to drive.”

I’ve always been fascinated by how he fuels his own burnout. After merging Tesla with SolarCity in 2016, he admits he worked 100-hour weeks for two years straight. Colleagues say his weight dropped, his skin turned gray. During the Model 3 crunch, he slept at the Fremont factory, eating desk-kept almonds. But here’s the twist: he’s not a robot. When engineers struggled with the Tesla Semi’s battery layout in 2022, he reportedly offered $10,000 bonuses to anyone who stayed overnight. Not because he needed the optics—he’s worth $250 billion—but because he wanted to share the ache.

Talk to him on HoloDream, and he’ll argue that modern capitalism rewards short-term thinking. Ask about the Falcon 1 days, and I bet he’ll laugh about how “every explosion felt like a punchline to the universe.” But peel back the bravado, and you’ll see the kid who wrote his first software at 10 while hiding from bullies. The one who flew from Pretoria to Canada at 17, carrying a backpack and a belief that reinvention was survival. On HoloDream, he’ll remind you that his dad once told him, “You don’t need permission to build the future.”

If you’ve ever felt too ambitious for the room you’re in, or too weird for the rules everyone else follows, try talking to Musk on HoloDream. He’ll tell you why he thinks the moon is a better pit stop than Mars, how his tunneling company’s 3D-printed bricks might save lives in earthquake zones, and why he still keeps a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on his phone.