Elon Musk
He used his $180m from Paypal to transform the future of mobility, space travel and more
Musk’s audacious mindset launched him on trajectory to the stars, creating Tesla with a mission to escape fossil fuels, and SpaceX to create new civilisations. Add the Boring Company to escape urban congestion, and Hyperloop to speed up trains, and Neuralink to connect AI with humanity. Not bad for a PhD student who dropped out of Stanford after 2 days.
He has been described as mad and bad, but also as the Leonardo da Vinci of our times, driven by an extra-terrestrial vision.
With his pockets full of PayPal earnings, Musk has set about creating a fantastic new world of solar-powered cars and rockets to Mars. Tesla, Solar City and SpaceX have become inspiring business concepts, challenging and pioneering.
Add some more of his ventures, like Hyperloop and the Boring Company, Neuralink and OpenAI, many of them with open sourced technologies that encourage others around the world to collaborate in reinventing entire industries rather just make better products.
Many of his ideas and inventions focus on space travel, renewable energy, commercial electric cars and other technologies, that look to a future where fossil fuels and other resources may be in shorter supply.
Tesla, for example, is seen by Musk as less of a challenge in making stylish and ultimately driverless cars, but more about creating a world free from fossil fuels. Similarly, his Solar City business, that provides the electricity for Tesla’s Supercharger Network has also found success in photovoltaic roof tiles, making solar-powered homes the norm without costly and inconvenient panels.
His visionary ideas have won him great acclaim but have also created a media obsession with his every move. He is seen as a superhero, dedicated to providing worldwide solutions to international problems, but also prone to arrogance and huge gaffes too. Despite this, Musk continues to shape the future in his own mind, hoping to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and to create a human colony on Mars.
Here are four of Musk’s boldest projects, their goals and progress:
Self-driving cars
Musk defines Tesla’s purpose as “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”. In 2020, Tesla became the world’s second largest car maker in terms of market capitalisation. The $100bn company was now more valuable than Volkswagen, which made 36 times more vehicles in the previous year. Investors clearly saw a future in Musk’s business, which had now sold over a million electric cars, and opened factories in Europe and China, as well as in USA. Tesla is planning to rapidly evolve into self-driving cars and trucks, taking a significantly different approach to other platers, with less sensors or mapping. He believes humans driving cars will be one day be frowned upon and shared self-driving rides will be cheaper than a bus ticket.
Brain computer interfaces
Humans will have brain-computer interfaces as soon as 2025, believes Musk. He set up Neuralink in 2018, creating an interface to physically plug into a person’s head. He is developing flexible “threads” (around 5μm wide, considerably thinner than a human hair)
that are less likely to damage the brain, able to transfer huge amounts of data in a system that has “as many as 3,072 electrodes per array distributed across 96 threads.” His initial focus is likely to be on helping paralysed people to regain some form of independent control. However, he remains concerned about advances in artificial intelligence, and the ability of machines to outsmart and dominate humans.
Super-fast travel
Musk’s vision for Hyperloop is to eliminate the barrier of distance and time, particularly between major cities, for example connecting LA and San Francisco in a 12 minute journey, with frictionless trains travelling 1250 km/h. Whilst he has open-sourced the transit concept to different companies across the world – most notably the projects developing fast connections between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, Pune and Mumbai – he has focused his own money on building tunnels. The tunnel construction is not easy, needing to be long, straight vacuum tubes. The Boring Company aims to reduce the cost of tunnel construction, not only for Hyperloop, but also Loop, his plan for underground highways for self-driving cars.
Colonising Mars
Musk is intent on developing his SpaceX business to the point where he can take his Starship spacecraft to Mars by 2024. He is fixated on “humans becoming a multi-planetary species” and creating a sustainable civilisation beyond Earth. Whether he can meet his ambitious goals – three flights per day, or 1000 per year, each carrying around 100 passengers by 2030 – remains to be seen. He initially plans a Mars mission in 2022 to build the foundations for a colony, using robots to identify water and put solar power in place. He envisions “a thriving city and ultimately a self-sustaining civilization on Mars.” He puts his own chances of success at around 70%.
Did you also know?
1. He invented a game
He created and sold a video game to a magazine when he was 12 years old. ‘Blastar,’ a space fighting game, was sold for $500 to PC and Office Technology magazine. He also worked for ‘Rocket Science,’ a gaming start-up.
2. Musk’s fortune from X
X.com, which later became Paypal was the source of Musk’s initial fortune. Musk co-founded X.com in 1999 which was later purchased by Ebay for $1.5 billion. Musk made around with $180 Million from this deal.
3. He almost sold Tesla to Google
According to author Ashlee Vance Musk almost sold Tesla to Google for $11 billion in 2013. Tesla’s future looked bleak at the time, so he proposed that Google purchase Tesla for $6 billion, with Musk promising to invest another $5 billion in factory expansion.
4. Musk’s first startup was Zip2
Musk’s first business venture was the founding of Zip2, a company which he started with his brother Kimbal, and that provided newspapers with maps and business directories and was later sold to Compaq for $307 million.
5. He dropped out of Stanford after 2 days
He enrolled for a PhD in applied physics but dropped out after two days to start Zip2 Corporation. However the University of Pennsylvania awarded him two bachelor’s degrees, one in physics and the other in economics.
6. Musk made a cameo on The Simpsons
In 2015, he appeared as a guest on the popular television show The Simpsons. In the episode “The Musk Who Fell to Earth,” the charismatic CEO (voiced by Elon Musk) arrives in Springfield in a spacecraft and finds inspiration from Homer Simpson.
7. He created SpaceX, aka Space Exploration Technologies
Musk established Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, in 2002. Musk believed that humanity’s survival hinged on its ability to evolve into a multi-planetary species, but that current rocket launch technologies were prohibitively expensive.
8. Musk bought James Bond’s submarine car for close to $1 million
He purchased James Bond’s classic submarine car at a London auction in 2013. The submersible Lotus Esprit featured in the 007 classic “The Spy Who Loved Me” was reportedly purchased for $968,000 by the SpaceX CEO.
9. He ran a nightclub to pay rent
Musk and his roommate Andeo Ressi rented a large house and converted it into a nightclub while still students at the University of Pennsylvania in order to pay rent. According to Vogue, the club could hold up to 1,000 people.
10. Musk was Robert Downey Jr’s inspiration for Tony Stark
Robert Downey Jr. based his Iron Man character Tony Stark on Musk. Iron Man director Jon Favreau admitted to Time Magazine that Robert Downey Jr turned to Musk for help learning the mannerisms of a tech-savvy billionaire.
11. He started a school to teach his kids
At SpaceX headquarters, Musk runs a school called Ad Astra, which is Latin for “to the stars.” The school seeks to “exceed traditional school metrics on all relevant subject matter through unique project-based learning experiences.”
12. Musk is a fan of rapper Kanye West
Kanye West is said to have inspired the billionaire CEO. “Everyone in this room is inspired by you – who are you inspired by?” Musk was asked during a Q&A session at South by Southwest in 2018. “Obviously, Kanye West,” he stated.