Elon Musk Says He Survived On $1 Per Day Before Becoming The Richest Man In the World – 'In America It's Pretty Easy To Keep Yourself Alive'

When you think of Elon Musk, the image of a tech titan, the world's richest man, likely comes to mind. But here's a little-known fact: Elon Musk wasn't always living in the lap of luxury. Before the SpaceX rockets, Tesla cars, and solar panels, a young man was scraping by on just $1 a day. Yes, you read that right – one dollar.

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In a 2015 interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Musk opened up about his college days, when he was far more concerned with survival than revolutionizing industries. Musk said, "In America, it's pretty easy to keep yourself alive." This wasn't just a throwaway line; it was the mindset of someone who had accepted the bare minimum as a steppingstone to greatness.

Musk's ambitions were already sky-high back then, but he wasn't just dreaming big – he was testing his limits. He wanted to prove he could still make it even if all his grand plans fell apart. "So my threshold for existing is pretty low," he said. "I figure I could be in some dingy apartment with my computer and be okay and not starve."

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Musk didn't just talk; he walked the walk – or more accurately, he shopped the shop in bulk to stretch his meager funds as far as they could go. "You get really tired of hot dogs and oranges after a while," Musk admitted. "And, of course, pasta and a green pepper and a big thing of sauce. And that can go pretty far, too."

It's a story that's both surprising and oddly relatable. Here's a man who would become a billionaire, yet he spent his early days living on a diet of bulk groceries to prove that he could survive on almost nothing. "If I can live for a dollar a day, then at least from a food cost standpoint, well, it's pretty easy to earn like $30 in a month anyway, so I'll probably be okay," Musk reflected.

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But Musk's frugality didn't end there. When he and his brother started their first company, Zip2, they didn't even bother with the luxury of an apartment. "We were so hard up, we had just one computer, so the website was up during the day, and I was coding at night," Musk recalled in a USC commencement speech. "Seven days a week, all the time," he added. He even shared that he showered at the YMCA. 

It's a reminder that even the world's wealthiest man started with almost nothing – just a dollar a day.

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