He quit his Stanford PhD after 2 days. He put his last dollars into a rocket that kept exploding. He slept on the factory floor. He built the most valuable car company and the world's most successful private space program — simultaneously. At every turning point, you make the call.

$22 million in the bank. Musk was 28 years old. The rational move was diversification — put the money somewhere safe, keep some for living, invest the rest across assets.

Instead, he put $12 million — more than half — into a new company: X.com, an online financial services platform. X.com would later merge with Confinity to become PayPal.

He was betting more than half his net worth on a startup in a sector — online banking — that regulators, incumbents, and most VCs believed would be captured by existing financial institutions within five years.

$165 million from the PayPal exit. Musk was 31. He was already thinking about Mars.

His concern was that humanity was not on a path that guaranteed long-term survival. A single-planet species was a species with a single point of failure. He had begun researching what it would cost to send a plant to Mars — not as a government program, but as a private demonstration.

He discovered that the Russians would sell him refurbished ICBMs. They laughed at him in the meeting. He flew home and decided to build the rockets himself.

He was about to invest $100 million — two-thirds of his liquid net worth — into a rocket company. He had no aerospace engineering background. Every professional he consulted told him he was going to lose his money. He also, simultaneously, invested in Tesla Motors — a startup trying to build electric cars, which every automotive expert said was impossible for a startup to do profitably.

2008 was the year Elon Musk nearly lost everything.

SpaceX's first three rockets had failed. The fourth launch attempt was the last one he could afford. Tesla was hemorrhaging cash. The financial crisis was destroying investment markets. His first marriage had ended. He was sleeping at the SpaceX factory.

He was described by friends during this period as a man who genuinely did not know from week to week whether he would still have a company. He borrowed money from friends to pay his rent.

He had enough money for one more rocket launch.

Tesla was trying to produce the Model 3 — a mass-market electric car at $35,000. The target was 5,000 cars per week. They were producing 2,000. The production line was failing. Automation that should have sped things up was slowing them down.

Musk moved into the Fremont factory. He slept on the floor near the production line. He worked 120-hour weeks. He was simultaneously running SpaceX. He gave a late-night interview to a podcast host and made comments that resulted in an SEC investigation.

The board was under pressure to replace him. Analysts said Tesla would never hit its production targets. Short sellers were betting billions against the company.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 was already the most successful orbital rocket in history, having landed and reused boosters hundreds of times. The company was profitable. The Starlink satellite internet service was generating revenue. NASA contracts were flowing.

Musk announced that SpaceX would redirect the majority of its engineering resources toward Starship — a fully reusable, stainless-steel rocket designed to carry 100 people to Mars. It was the largest rocket ever built. It was also a massive bet of money and engineering talent that was already proven and profitable.

He was betting the stable, successful company on its most audacious project yet.

In April 2022, Musk made an offer to acquire Twitter for $44 billion. In July 2022, he tried to back out, citing concerns about the number of bot accounts on the platform. Twitter sued to force the deal through. A Delaware court scheduled a trial.

Musk's lawyers believed they could win the trial and void the agreement. Twitter's lawyers believed they would win and force the sale. The outcome was genuinely uncertain.

Musk settled and completed the acquisition in October 2022 for the original $44 billion price.

Elon Musk quit Stanford after 2 days. He put most of his first exit into a second startup. He put two-thirds of his second exit into a rocket company and an electric car company, simultaneously. He nearly went bankrupt in 2008. He slept on factory floors. He launched a rocket with his last money and it worked.

Tesla, SpaceX, and their associated companies are worth over a trillion dollars combined. He is, as of this writing, the wealthiest person in the world by most measures.

The pattern is not complicated: bet on the most important problem you can see, put in everything you have, don't stop when it looks hopeless, and measure success by whether the problem gets solved — not by whether you stay comfortable while solving it.

Whether you agree with his politics, his methods, or his recent decisions — the pattern itself is undeniable. And the question this simulator was really asking, across seven decisions, was simpler than it looks: when you were faced with the same choice, did you protect yourself, or did you go all in?