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Here's your success mentor Darren Hardy.

In 2002, Elon Musk began his quest to send the first rocket to Mars, an idea that would eventually become SpaceX.

He ran into a major challenge right off the bat.

After visiting a number of aerospace manufacturers around the world,

Elon discovered the cost of purchasing a rocket was astronomical, up to $65 million per. Given the non-starter high price, instead of giving up on the idea,

he began to rethink the problem using first principles.

He said, quote,

okay, let's look at the first principles.

What is a rocket made of?

Aerospace grade aluminum alloys plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber.

Then I asked, he said, what is the value of those materials on the commodities market?

It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around 2% of the typical purchase price.

So instead of buying a finished rocket for tens of millions of dollars,

Elon decided to create his own company, purchase the raw materials for cheap,

and then build the rockets himself. And that's when SpaceX was born.

Within a few years, SpaceX had cut the price of launching a rocket by nearly 10 times.

I'm not talking 10%, 50%, 75% or 100%, we're talking 10 times and still making a profit.

Elon used first principles thinking to break the situation down to the fundamentals

bypass the high prices of the aerospace industry and create a more effective solution.

He did the same thing in being able to make Tesla possible as well.

In a separate discussion with him, he said, someone could say, and people do, the battery packs are really expensive, and that's just they will always be, because that is the way that they have been in the past.

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