Thoughts
Elon Musk had almost failed at each and every investment he had made. For the former parts, we got to know that in Zip2, Paypal he was deprived of the power of control. For SpaceX, launching of rockets failed and the financial chain almost broke. For Tesla, Elon's power once got too much and the other co-founders got involved in the news of mistrust and breaking-ups. However, on one hand, Elon sustained his toughness toward failure and also all the members/ employees, on the other hand, he generously provided the team with a shelter of worries, both for money, and for spirits.
Summary
After getting out of the vanity crowd with Silicon Valley, Elon Musk started to move on with his revisit to the childhood fantacy for rockets and space travel. He invested most of what he had to a small group of technicians and engineers, the top talents on space travel and Mars. They tried to send mice to Mars, and with the failure on rocket business with Russia, the daring idea of founding a space vehicle comany is formed. This is Space Exploration Technologies(SpaceX). After a series of failure in launching, Elon had the faith and the team never gave up adjusting the models.
Elon also looked for opportunities to impower humans with eletric cars by investing and managing Tesla, a company founded by Eberhard and Tarpenning. Tesla went through financing problems, proxicy and later in media doubts. It survived its years of hardship till the end of 2008, and Elon tried hard to win investors' faith back.
Words
polish up
on someone's feet
a fleet of cars
child prodigy
akin to
conk out
rat race
pilfer
pil‧fer /ˈpɪlfə $ -ər/ verb [intransitive, transitive]
to steal things that are not worth much, especially from the place where you work
pilfer from
She was sacked after being caught pilfering from the till.
原文参考：
Born in Wisconsin, Straubel constructed a large chemistry lab in the basement of his family’s home that included fume hoods and chemicals ordered, borrowed, or pilfered.
ludicrous
lu‧di‧crous /ˈluːdəkrəs/ adjective
completely unreasonable, stupid, or wrong SYN ridiculous
It is ludicrous to suggest that I was driving under the influence of alcohol.
The court granted him the ludicrous sum of £100 in damages.
That’s a ludicrous idea.
The whole situation was ludicrous. A start-up rocket company had ended up in the middle of nowhere trying to pull off one of the most difficult feats known to man, and, truth be told, only a handful of the SpaceX team had any idea how to make a launch happen.
crate
crate /kreɪt/ ●○○ noun [countable]
1 crate.jpg a large box made of wood or plastic that is used for carrying fruit, bottles etc
crate of
a crate of beer
2 old-fashioned a very old car or plane that does not work very well
crate (also crate up) verb [transitive]
to pack things into a crate
原文参考：
Some of the engineers put on their snorkeling and scuba gear and recovered the pieces, fitting all of the rocket’s remnants into two refrigerator-sized crates.