We know how it ends. He didn't
Originally written in Chinese. Translated with AI, reviewed by Gary. Read the Chinese original →
This is probably my favourite photo of the past few years. It suddenly struck me that it deserves a post of its own.
It shows the aftermath of an early SpaceX Falcon 1 launch failure. Elon Musk is crouching there, looking at the rocket wreckage spread across the floor.
Looking at this photo today, it feels inspiring, because we already know the rest of the story. But if you go back to that moment, there was nothing inspiring about it.
SpaceX was founded in 2002. The first Falcon 1 launch in 2006 failed. The second, in 2007, failed again. The third, in 2008, failed as well.
The scariest part: by the third failure, SpaceX had almost run out of money. It had just enough for one last launch.
At the same time, Tesla was also running out of cash, and the 2008 financial crisis had arrived. Musk had put almost all of his own money into the two companies.
So the situation then wasn't "let's give it another go".
It was: if the fourth launch failed, SpaceX would very likely be gone.
On 28 September 2008, Falcon 1 launched for the fourth time.
It reached orbit.
A few months later, NASA gave SpaceX a contract worth about US$1.6 billion. Only then did Falcon 9, Dragon and Starlink get the chance to happen.
What I find interesting about this story isn't just "never give up".
Repeating the same mistake over and over is pointless too.
After each of the first three failures, SpaceX didn't simply try again. It found the cause, fixed it, and tried again.
Fail → Learn → Fix → Try Again.
If you had looked at the data after the third failure, SpaceX's success rate was 0%.
A very rational person might have told you: three attempts, three failures, time to stop.
But after the fourth launch succeeded, the company's fate was completely different.
This is one of the things I find fascinating about building a business.
Failure is often linear: each time you lose a bit of money and a bit of time. But success is sometimes non-linear: one breakthrough can reprice years of effort all at once.
Looking at the photo again, what moves me most isn't "so even Elon Musk failed once".
It's that the man in the photo had no idea whether he would ever succeed.
We know how it ends. He didn't.
All he could see was wreckage on the floor, money running out, and one last chance.
Building a business is often just like that.
You don't need to know whether you'll succeed in the end. You just need to make sure that after every failure, you're still at the table, and closer to the answer than last time.