5 Business Titans Who Lost Everything and Fought Back

you know turning setbacks into success isn't just hard it's nearly impossible but that's why everybody loves a comeback story right they say failure is the greatest teacher and it is true no entrepreneur achieves remarkable success without a few Battle Scars and some stories to tell if you're on your own business Journey then you could benefit a lot by applying others hard-earned wisdom so in this video we're diving into the stories of five famous entrepreneurs who lost everything and against all of came back even stronger welcome to alux the place where future billionaires come to get

inspired all right so let's take a journey all the way back to 1899 when people still called cars Horseless carriages like any new technology the car started as a luxury product only available to the wealthy but there was a young and talented mechanic who wanted to change that his name you probably guessed it Henry Ford now Henry didn't have money to set up his own factories build his own cars and hire his own workers so he had to start his first company with the help of investors sadly though their Visions weren't aligned Henry wanted to

build one reliable highquality vehicle for the middle class but his investors wanted to sell a variety of different cars to wealthy collectionist for ridiculously high prices and that wouldn't have been a problem if Henry could give each car the attention to detail it deserved but his investors forced him to rush them out which meant the quality wasn't there unfortunately the business lost all of its customers and it shut down after less than 2 years Henry was out of a job so he focused on improving his craft in the burgeoning world of racing where nobody could

match the speed and power of the cars he built and because of this Henry basically became a celebrity engineer which attracted more investors who wanted to build a company with him this time it was the investors who wanted to make affordable vehicles and hry who wanted to make expensive racing cars again those Visions weren't aligned so the investors fired Henry within just a few months but he'd finally learned his lesson in 1903 Henry started the Ford Motor Company also with investors this time though everyone was aligned on the same goal to create a motor car

for the great multitude and that's exactly what they did Ford's first car was the model A which sold for around $750 then came the INF Model T which was even cheaper and when Henry revolutionized his factories with assembly line production he was able to bring the model T's price down to just $260 making it the first car to ever sell more than 15 million units at one point more than half of the world's cars were Model T's so after failing in his first two companies Henry Ford revolutionized the Auto industry made cars accessible to anyone

and built one of the most icon IC companies in the world it's certainly one hell of a comeback and one of the main lessons from this story is to make sure everyone involved with a project is aligned on the same vision when you get that right well you can accomplish incredible things okay so now we're going to jump ahead a few years forward to 1926 when a struggling young cartoonist got his first break in the entertainment business Walt Disney had a dream at the time movie theater only played cartoons before the main feature but he

believed that animation was a beautiful form of Art and he wanted to see his cartoons on the big screen so Walt created a technique that let him layer animations on top of regular film reels that way you could make fulllength films with both liveaction and animation with this Innovation Walt could do something he had always dreamed of bringing classic fairy tales to life and so he came up with an idea for a show called called Alice's Wonderland based on the famous novel of a similar name now the Walt Disney Company couldn't afford to make the

show but it wasn't long until someone bought the idea and put up the money to produce it Walt and his team of animators made over 60 episodes of the Alice show and it was a big success Walt felt like he finally made it in show business but then it all came crumbling down you see the company paying for the Alice show gave Walt extremely tight deadlines to meet them he had to push P his employees to the Limit but it was way too much for them to handle and one day all of Walt's employees suddenly

quit at the same time and that would have been bad enough but to make things worse Walt had signed over the rights to Alice's Wonderland so he had to move from New York to California and start from scratch with a brand new idea Walt was devastated but while he was taking the train back doodling away he created Disney's mascot character Mickey Mouse when he returned home Walt had the brilliant idea of using Mickey in the first cartoon that was synchronized with sound design Steamboat Willie and it was an immediate success Walt then made another series

of musical cartoons the First cartoons ever to be produced in color which won an Oscar and another fairy tale cartoon which was more popular than the featurelength films it was supposed to play before but that was just the thing Walt was a successful cartoonist now but people didn't think cartoons were as valuable as liveaction movies so Walt became obsessed with finally bringing a fairy tale to life on the Silver Screen the project was so expensive and it took so long that everyone thought Walt had lost his mind but no matter how tough his situation or

how many people doubted him Walt always held on to his belief in animation as an art form in 1937 he finally released Snow White and the Seven Dwarves after years of struggle his team quitting losing creative rights and starting from scratch Snow White catapulted Walt to extraordinary levels of success but most importantly he ignited the imaginations of millions of people all around the world and that right there is a fairy tale of a comeback story if you ask me and it just goes to show the power of persistence and believing in your dream okay so

now let's travel a bit further into the future to 1982 and meet a hot shot hedge fund manager who was a little too confident the world was ending Ray doio had meticulously studied the patterns and the logic of how economies work so when he started a hedge fund called Bridgewater from his small apartment in New York City it didn't take long for him to build a reputation as an insightful analyst race strategy at Bridgewater was to view the markets with a broad perspective and predict big movements in the economy companies gave him massive sums of

money he found the right places to put it and brought back huge returns as long as Bridgewater made money it worked and within just a few years Ry was able to get A-list clients like McDonald's and the World Bank to invest in his fund but eventually he became a little too confident in his abilities and made a bold and quite public prediction the US was about to enter a massive recession now if he was right Ray could make a fortune for himself and for his clients but he was so certain that he basically set up

Bridgewater's entire portfolio to profit from a recession which unfortunately for him never came instead the US went on a massive Bull Run that lasted almost two years which meant that Ray's Investments went under and all of his clients pulled out of the fund at one point he had to lay off all of his employees and ask his father for $4,000 to keep Bridgewater from bankruptcy this was understandably humiliating for Ry he made a very public prediction that did not come true meaning his company and his reputation were on the verge of complete ruin however his

experience taught him one important lesson ry's job was to make decisions good decisions and he had made a bad one because everyone at Bridgewater was terrified to challenge him and he never questioned his own ideas so when Ry started rebuilding his company from the ground up he made sure he never made this mistake again in order to make truly sound decisions Ry needed to create a culture of radical transparency at Bridgewater allowing everyone to voice their opinion regardless of rank everyone's ideas would be valued and challenged including and especially his own Ry was building a

system where ideas were not measured based on who was the boss but on the quality of the idea itself and because of this he was able to build a team he trusted and that trusted him from then on Bridgewater's strategy changed from making big bets on his own predictions to Gathering as many perspectives as possible and making Diversified Investments it took years to get the ball rolling again but Bridgewater made steady profits and in 2002 it all paid off that year the market was down 22% and some hedge funds lost everything but Ry was barely

down a few percentage points his strategy worked after this major companies Pension funds and even International Banks lined up to invest their money with Ry and just 3 years later Bridgewater became the world's largest hedge fund and it still is to this day the lesson Ry learned back in 1982 made him one of the most successful investors in the world to make the best decisions let go of your ego and build a culture of trust and transparency around you okay so you've learned three big lessons so far in this video and yeah they're good to

know right but honestly they won't make a real difference in your life if you never apply them like the old saying goes actually speak louder than consuming content yeah we'll go with that but hopefully the stories we've shared in this video have at least inspired you to be able to take the first real steps on your own business Journey now all you need are the skills and the knowledge to follow through so if you're wondering how to start a company how to create an offer get customers how to structure your business to turn a profit

and how to build systems so you can take control of your time well then we've got you covered that's exactly why we we made the alux app it's essentially a high performance coach in your pocket where we hire the coaches get them to present their most valuable strategies and ideas and give you access to an Ever growing library of content for a full year for about as much as it would cost you for a nice meal out the AO app is where highlevel managers CEOs and entrepreneurs come for the motivation systems and practical guides needed

to Achieve Financial Freedom inside you'll find collections of lessons curated by industry experts as well as daily coaching sessions designed to get you to your goals faster and not just with Finance also with your emotional Wellness your physical health relationships and your intellectual wisdom and the best part is you can effortlessly measure how close you're getting to reaching your goals as you make progress toward them and since you're a subscriber here at alux if you download the app and scan the QR code on screen right now you'll get 25% off our yearly plan our goal

with the alux app is to make self-development as simple and actionable as possible so hopefully your business Journey will be a smooth ride to the top and you'll never have to make a comeback like Ford Disney or Doo all right now moving on because as far as comeback stories go there's probably none as iconic as this next one in 1985 Steve Jobs realized he had made a terrible mistake you see Steve started Apple when he was a 21-year-old hippie College Dropout with a knack for computers so when his little garage startup turned into silicon Valley's

hottest new tech Corporation he simply was not ready to lead the show now Steve wanted to change the world with computers but even he could accept he had no business running a major corporation with stockholders Supply chains and accountants so instead of becoming CEO himself Apple hired people with more experience to run the business while Steve focused on what he was best at making great products so one of the CEOs they hired was a guy called John Scully and at first he and Steve got along great they seemed to share the same vision for Apple

But as time went on he started to notice that Scully was more concerned with increasing Apple's short-term profits rather than building amazing computers and this became a huge problem Steve had just spent years on two major products with the newest Tech but that was expensive so they simply weren't selling this drove Steve crazy and to fix the problem he pushed everyone at Apple to work so hard their employees were quitting in droves it got so bad at one point that Scully threatened to replace Steve as team leader and because of this Steve went to the

board of directors and tried to get him fired unfortunately though the board was also getting tired of Steve and they instead decided to fire him so at 30 years old Steve had been humiliated and pushed out of his own company now in terms of money he had more than enough but his Pride had been HED and he was now obsessed with building something even bigger than Apple so instead of retiring Steve Took on two new projects first he started another computer company called Next however next was even more chotic because now Steve had no CEO

or board of directors telling him what he couldn't do but that also forced Steve to learn how to lead a company and so next did some things really poorly and other things really well but we'll talk about that in a minute for now Steve's second project was making much more progress so soon after getting fired from Apple Steve bought a company that built the computers for making computer generated images for movies you know it as CGI the business was struggling though so Steve rebranded it to Pixar and instead of making computers they pivoted to making

3D animated movies this is starting to sound familiar well you're right okay just like Walt Disney brought the first handdrawn animated movie to life with Snow White Steve and Pixar did the same with computer animation through Toy Story and history repeats itself Toy Story was also an industry shaking success in fact Steve made Pixar a public company right before its release and because people bought the stock like crazy and he owned most of the shares he became a billionaire and that's already enough of a comeback but really Steve was just getting started here you see

the '90s were were a great time for most tech companies except Apple wasn't really one of them they had lost thousands of customers because ever since Steve left they stopped improving their computer's operating system and meanwhile Microsoft Windows had become so popular that the US government thought it was a monopoly simply put Apple needed a brand new operating system but they were so broke they couldn't afford to build it from scratch so instead they needed to buy a company that all already had an operating system and funnily enough their only option was next even though

next was never a big success Steve was always focused on Innovation so their operating system was years ahead of Apple's in 1997 Apple bought next for $427 million and when Steve came back he came back with a passion at first he was just leading the operating system project but it wasn't long before he climbed the ranks and became Apple's CEO and this time he was ready for the job Steve was still tough on his employees but now it wasn't to protect his job or his image he genuinely collaborated with people all in service of making

the best products they could when Steve took over Apple was on the brink of collapse but under his leadership they released some of the most Innovative products the world had ever seen including the iMac the iPod the iPhone and the iPad it was just hit after hit after hit and in 2011 after years of unprecedented success Apple became the world's most valuable Company Steve changed the world more than a few times and it is not a stretch to say that he has one of the craziest comeback stories out there it's a testament to what you

can achieve when you learn to work with others and you never stop innovating and speaking of changing the world our final story is about an entrepreneur who's trying to do that in even more ambitious ways and this one is really more like two comebacks in one see if you want to build wealth like most people you might work in an industry like banking or real estate but instead of doing that Elon Musk built his fortune on self-driving electric cars and spaceships and you better believe it wasn't easy now before starting his two main companies SpaceX

and Tesla Elon was already a wildly successful entrepreneur he sold businesses and made almost $200 million but money was never elon's main goal ever since he was a kid his mission was to push the human race forward and now with the money to do so he gave himself two ambitious goals first Elon wanted to reduce the cost of reaching space and ultimately take humans to Mars yeah okay so to do that he started SpaceX with $100 million that would be enough to design build and launch three rockets into space and if at least one of

those launches was successful SpaceX would attract customers like NASA who need to get stuff up to space and be able to survive that part's important too secondly Elon wanted to speed up Humanity's transition into sustainable energy so he invested around $6 million into Tesla which hadn't even designed its first electric car at that point basically neither of elon's new companies were profitable yet and he was betting everything on their success and while they were making a bit of progress things were much more difficult than Elon expected in 2006 SpaceX had its first launch but the

rocket engine exploded after just 33 seconds the next year they had another launch and while this one didn't explode it didn't reach space the third launch also didn't make it and now SpaceX had burned through elon's entire $100 million investment meanwhile Tesla was not fairing any better it turns out making electric cars was really difficult and really expensive Tesla was selling cars for less than what they cost to make so each year Elon had to keep putting in millions of dollars to keep the company afloat by 2008 his $6 million investment turned into more like

40 million and that year everything came crashing down for Elon apart from getting a divorce the US economy had its biggest crash since the Great Depression meaning that no investors were coming to give Tesla and SpaceX the money they desperately needed in fact not even Elon could fund them anymore he had to make a choice which he described as having two children and being forced to let one of them starve you see Elon could either put all of his money into one business save it and let the other one die or split it between the

two and give both of them only a tiny chance to survive knowing that most likely neither of them would but thankfully at the last minute Elon got one of his friends to invest $20 million in SpaceX just enough for one more launch and he put in the last $40 million of his own savings into Tesla just enough to survive for a few more months Point Elon was all in if this didn't work out everything he'd done up to this point would have been for nothing but thankfully there was a glimmer of hope NASA had just

announced they would award $1.6 billion to a company that could take supplies up to the International Space Station this was a moonshot opportunity for SpaceX if their last launch went well they could win the prize and the company would live on but they only had a few months to prepare when that launch date came Elon and the SpaceX team waited anxiously the rocket reached orbit meaning the launch was a massive success a few months later Elon got a call SpaceX W NASA had just awarded them one $ 1.6 billion which meant they could now attract

investors and employees and get Humanity One Step Closer To Mars but for now though Elon had more pressing issues to worry about he didn't have any money left and as the year came to a close Tesla only had enough to survive for two more days after that they were bankrupt because of this Elon spent those two days desperately reaching out to investors and on Christmas Eve at 6:00 p.m. with literally only 60 minutes left to do this he was able to secure a $40 million investment Elon he must have been breathing the biggest sigh of

relief in business history here Tesla had just been saved a few months later those same investors put an additional $50 million in and Tesla got a huge loan from the US government which allowed them to start producing a revolutionary new car so after the most stressful year of his entire life Elon miraculously found a way to save his two sci-fi companies from complete Financial ruin today SpaceX is making rockets that land themselves building a network of satellites that give you internet access and making a ton of money and Tesla well it's by far the world's

most valuable car company and it's made Elon ridiculously wealthy in 2021 he became the richest person on the entire planet and at one point was worth over 300 billion if anything his comeback story goes to show that if you want to win big you have to be willing to risk everything and if you're ready to take your own business Journey seriously alux sir come and join us in the alux app for 25% off your yearly subscription we'll see you on the inside [Music]