The dot-com billionaire sending a rocket to Mars

Eugene Lacey ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 29 Nov 2002 17:17 GMT

For a man who has just made a cool $1.5bn from the sale of his PayPal Internet business to eBay, Elon Musk seems quite relaxed about it all. The youthful Mr Musk has had some practice in these matters. A previous venture (Zip2 -- maker of software for the media industry) was sold to Compaq for $300m in 1999. Now flush with eBay's cash, Musk has set up his third company, SpaceX, an organisation with the not unambitious goal of creating a permanent manned settlement on Mars -- though all he offered about this on Monday was that "we're building a rocket in LA."

Musk was a member of a distinguished panel of high achievers from Silicon Valley visiting Oxford University this week at the request of the Said Business School. The theme of the "Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford" event was to explore lessons in entrepreneurship that could be learned from the panellist's individual experiences in America's technology epicentre.

Musk's fellow panellists included Kim Polese, chairman of Marimba; Raymond Nasr, communications director of Google; Paul Drasyon, chairman of PowderJect; Sally Osberg, president of the Skoll Foundation; and VC fund managers Steve Cinelli and Samir Perge. The panel was chaired by Michael Malone, former editor-in-chief of Forbes ASAP and author of several books about Silicon Valley.

The timing of the discussion was interesting, as Silicon Valley sinks deeper into recession, unemployment is rising and there is now a net outflow of people from the San Francisco Bay Area to other parts of America. Traffic levels, real estate prices, and contractor day rates are all showing downward trends as every possible metric and measure shows that Silicon Valley is firmly in the grip of hard times. It's arguably suffering from its worst recession ever.

To a man, and a woman, the panellists said that they believe Silicon Valley will recover from the slump and that the example it sets as a region 100 percent focused on its mission to foster new invention, new companies and wealth creation is as relevant as ever.

Kim Polese fleshed out the Valley's ability to survive the recession. "While it may seem dire to many on the outside," the Valley is returning to its more noble roots, she says. "The one thing that people love in the Valley, and that the Valley is known for, is having a lot of fun, being on a mission, building something great, and deriving satisfaction from that and not from cashing out, not from becoming wealthy. As someone who grew up in the Bay Area it was very disheartening to see what was the Valley was becoming. It was very much focused on money, and greed, and self-aggrandisement," she said.