Energy
A Timeline of Elon Musk’s Long List of Failures
At first glance, it’s easy to be blown away by Elon Musk’s impressive resume.
He’s shooting for the stars with SpaceX, changing the future of transportation with Tesla, Hyperloop, and The Boring Company, and he’s already had a profound impact on the e-commerce and payments sectors through Paypal. It’s no coincidence that most of these are $1 billion+ companies.
But, focusing only on his successes provides a superficial view of the man. To get the full perspective on his career, it is much more interesting to look at the failures and lows he has experienced. These are the moments when most people would have likely given up.
Failing Often
As every entrepreneur knows, any business venture can be upended by failures at any moment – and it is how one bounces back from those failures that counts.
Today’s infographic from Kickresume shows Musk’s struggles and failures throughout his career, and how he persevered to become a modern business icon.
As the ever-quotable Winston Churchill once said:
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
– Winston Churchill
After being ousted out of his own company, having many rockets go bust, and fighting to keep Tesla and SpaceX from going bankrupt, Musk kept pushing forward with courage.
What We Can Learn
Entrepreneurs hold people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson in high reverence. Sometimes, we even put them on a pedestal, thinking we could only dream of making such a profound impact on the world.
However, this is obviously a one dimensional view. These figures are not superhuman, and the reality is that they’ve all experienced tragic failures throughout the course of their careers. They’ve been disheartened, but they bounced back.
We have to recognize that success in business isn’t what it appears to be on magazine covers and headlines. Failure is an everyday part of doing business, and it plagues almost every entrepreneur in some shape or form. The difference is in how you react to it.
Energy
How Much Does the U.S. Depend on Russian Uranium?
Currently, Russia is the largest foreign supplier of nuclear power fuel to the U.S.
How Much Does the U.S. Depend on Russian Uranium?
This was originally posted on Elements. Sign up to the free mailing list to get beautiful visualizations on natural resource megatrends in your email.
The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a ban on imports of Russian uranium. The bill must pass the Senate before becoming law.
In this graphic, we visualize how much the U.S. relies on Russian uranium, based on data from the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA).
U.S. Suppliers of Enriched Uranium
After Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russian-produced oil and gas—yet Russian-enriched uranium is still being imported.
Currently, Russia is the largest foreign supplier of nuclear power fuel to the United States. In 2022, Russia supplied almost a quarter of the enriched uranium used to fuel America’s fleet of more than 90 commercial reactors.
Country of enrichment service | SWU | % |
---|---|---|
🇺🇸 United States | 3,876 | 27.34% |
🇷🇺 Russia | 3,409 | 24.04% |
🇩🇪 Germany | 1,763 | 12.40% |
🇬🇧 United Kingdom | 1,593 | 11.23% |
🇳🇱 Netherlands | 1,303 | 9.20% |
Other | 2,232 | 15.79% |
Total | 14,176 | 100% |
SWU stands for “Separative Work Unit” in the uranium industry. It is a measure of the amount of work required to separate isotopes of uranium during the enrichment process. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration
Most of the remaining uranium is imported from European countries, while another portion is produced by a British-Dutch-German consortium operating in the United States called Urenco.
Similarly, nearly a dozen countries around the world depend on Russia for more than half of their enriched uranium—and many of them are NATO-allied members and allies of Ukraine.
In 2023 alone, the U.S. nuclear industry paid over $800 million to Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy corporation, Rosatom, and its fuel subsidiaries.
It is important to note that 19% of electricity in the U.S. is powered by nuclear plants.
The dependency on Russian fuels dates back to the 1990s when the United States turned away from its own enrichment capabilities in favor of using down-blended stocks of Soviet-era weapons-grade uranium.
As part of the new uranium-ban bill, the Biden administration plans to allocate $2.2 billion for the expansion of uranium enrichment facilities in the United States.
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