If you only know Elon Musk from memes, then you don’t know anything about Elon Musk.
By the age of 48, he has become one of the 50 richest people on the planet, has developed a spacecraft to fly to Mars, has created the safest electric car in the world, has provided energy to an entire island and is drilling a high-speed tunnel under Las Vegas. He also plans to turn people into cyborgs.
In this article, we will talk about the ambitious billionaire Elon Musk. We are sure you will be interested.
Biography Brief
Elon Musk was born in South Africa in 1971. He was a typical nerd child. He had an impeccable memory and read every book in the house. When older family members had questions, they turned to schoolboy Ilon for an answer. It seemed that his head is an encyclopedia.
Surprisingly, Musk was not just an inquisitive and intelligent boy, but also a young entrepreneur. At the age of 12, he programmed the first computer game. And figured out how to sell it. Together with his brother, Elon decided to open a game room. They agreed with the equipment supplier, found a room for rent. The last step was the approval of the local authorities, which the brothers never received, since only adult citizens could engage in entrepreneurial activities.
At the age of 17, Musk left his home and went to the land of opportunity – America. He received two bachelor’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, in engineering and business. Next was Stanford. But Musk’s studies were not particularly exciting. He dreamed of changing the world and told the university administration about his desire to quit his studies and create an Internet company with the condition that if the idea was not successful, he would be accepted back to Stanford.
First business success
Don’t eat enough, work all night long and wash in the gym, because your own apartment is so poor that there is no bathroom. What does it say? About future success! This was confirmed by Elon Musk.
At the age of 24, together with his brother, Musk created the company Zip2. They had nothing but $2,000 and a strong desire to act. The firm’s concept was to digitize newspapers. Given that the cyber age was just beginning, Musk’s idea was groundbreaking. He wrote a simple computer program and created the first online city directory. Most people did not take the brothers’ idea seriously. Moreover, some newspaper owners were furious trying to prove that converting newspapers from print to digital was crazy.
But the Musk brothers didn’t stop. As a result, they were able to make such media giants as The New York Times and Hearst Corporation their clients. And in 1999, Compaq, a computer corporation, bought Musk’s startup for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock.
At 28, Elon Musk became a millionaire.
Innovation used by the whole world
However, the monetary success did not make Musk any happier. He dreamed of creating a company whose activities would cause the effect of “Wow!” And he did it. Elon Musk founded PayPal. The company has transformed the entire financial industry and become the world’s leading payment system.
In 2002, eBay Inc., then the main competitor of Musk’s new company, bought PayPal for $1.5 billion. Musk received $180 million from this deal.
When the whole planet is not enough
Musk was in no hurry to spend his millions on “earthly” pleasures. Innovative thinking took him far. Far beyond the planet. In 2002, Elon Musk created SpaceX and set himself the goal of colonizing Mars.
The idea did not inspire confidence among investors, so Musk invested almost all his earned money in the company – $ 100 million. He was to build a missile system. And he went to Russia to buy a decommissioned rocket for experiments.
Musk understood that flying into space was not a problem. The problem is the prohibitive cost of flying. Therefore, his main task was to reduce costs. Musk did it too. He was able to improve the technology for entering orbit, reducing costs by several points compared to other space corporations.
The main brainchild of SpaceX is the Starship spaceship. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that it is a reusable spacecraft. Moreover, it will fly not only to Mars and the Moon, but also within the Earth, delivering cargo and people to remote points of the planet in half an hour. The Starship transport system is the most powerful of all existing and planned space rockets. Its diameter is 9 meters, height – 118 meters. Starship is capable of transporting up to 150 tons of cargo.
Musk plans to send the first working expedition to Mars in 2022 to survey the red planet for water and hazards, and to build the basic infrastructure for colonization work. The second stage of the space mission is scheduled for 2024.
Musk’s project is very ambitious. Even NASA (the US federal space agency) is going to first explore the Moon by sending astronauts there in 2024, and only then proceed to the colonization of Mars.
In 2018, Musk publicly announced that his company’s first private space tourist would be billionaire contemporary arts curator Yusaku Maezawa. Maezawa’s flight around the moon will take place in 2023.
Elon Musk continues to work to reduce the cost of interplanetary travel. He dreams of making flying to another planet the same price as flying to a nearby city.
An electric car is not only a golf car
Musk has always dreamed of ridding the world of fuel dependency. And I decided to start with the automotive industry. In 2004, he took over the electric vehicle company Tesla, investing $6.3 million of his own money in it. Musk’s plan was to create a high-speed, ultra-modern electric vehicle to draw attention to Tesla. And then start producing affordable electric cars for the masses.
The company’s goal is to deliver a complete, desirable and compelling electric car, breaking the stereotype that tiny electric cars are only good for golf.
With the help of an electric propulsion system, Tesla’s first Roadster car could cover a distance of 300 km without recharging. It developed a speed of 200 km / h and accelerated to 100 km / h in 4 seconds. Actors Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio became the “star” buyers of the Roadster.
Skeptics have said that Tesla will not be able to mass-produce low-cost cars for ordinary people. Indeed, the production costs were enormous. Investors refused to help a young and unreliable startup. When spending $140,000 per car, Musk was faced with a choice: either close the company or invest all of his earnings from the PayPal sale into it.
The entrepreneur chose the latter. He took control of Tesla. Fired a quarter of the workers, including one of the founders of the company. To save the firm, Musk convinced automotive giant Daimler to buy electric batteries from Tesla to make smart cars. To do this, the Tesla team had to completely reconstruct a gasoline smart car into an electric one in just 4 weeks.
Furthermore, the production of the Model S family sedan was launched. It became the first electric car to receive the title of Car of the Year according to the popular Motor Trend magazine in the USA in 2013. But Musk’s joy was short-lived. Soon, media mogul The New York Times published an article stating that the Model S battery does not meet the declared capacity, and the only way to move the electric car is a tow truck.
Musk was furious because The New York Times’ statement was untrue. He issued an angry response in response, although many believed that arguing with a media mogul was a deliberately failed idea. But Musk won this battle. The New York Times acknowledged that the article contained inaccuracies.
After the Model S, the Tesla lineup was replenished with the Model 3 and Model X electric cars. Together, the letters of the three models form the abbreviation S3X, where, according to Musk’s idea, 3 is an inverted letter E. Thus, Musk wanted to show that an electric car is not only environmentally friendly and modern, but also sexy.
In 2012, the first Supercharger electric filling stations from Tesla appeared. At the moment, Elon Musk’s charging stations are open in more than 50 countries around the world.
In 2015, Tesla launched the production of large-sized batteries for a wide range of applications. Two years later, Musk built a back-up power storage facility in the US that could power 30,000 homes for an hour.
Solar energy for every home
In 2006, Elon Musk came up with the idea of creating a company in the field of solar energy. He invited his cousins to bring the idea to life. This is how the company SolarCity appeared, the main investor of which was Musk.
SolarCity offered people to install solar panels on the roofs of their houses. In fact, I rented panels. The benefit to buyers was that the rent for solar panels was lower than the payment for electricity to the state. A year later, SolarCity became the number one solar power provider in the US.
Later, SolarCity began to collaborate with commercial firms. In 2008, the company covered more than 18,000 square meters of solar panels on the roof of an eBay office building. SolarCity’s clients also include British Motor Car, the world’s largest trader Walmart, computer giant Intel, and even the US Army.
In 2016, one of the islands of the Samoa archipelago was covered with SolarCity solar panels and Tesla batteries. Local residents (about 600 people) were fully provided with renewable energy.
Elon Musk on artificial intelligence
The billionaire has repeatedly expressed the idea of the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI). If nothing is done, then humanity will cease to be the dominant species, and the maximum that awaits homo sapiens is the fate of a monkey in a cage. Musk finds it foolish to deny the superiority of AI. The human brain, although it is able to accommodate petabytes (1015 bytes) of data, which is comparable to the volume of the entire Internet, however, the human speed of information reproduction is negligible.
The only salvation for homo sapiens, according to Musk, is merging with AI. Developments in the field of cyborgization are carried out by another billionaire company – Neuralink. Her activities are focused on research in the field of medicine. Musk claims that Neuralink’s developments are able to restore sensory and motor functions in case of paralysis, as well as cure neurological diseases, incl. schizophrenia and autism.
Scientists from Neuralink have created a special technology. Microfilaments with electrodes that are much thinner than a human hair are planned to be implanted in the brain. The operation will be carried out by a specially designed robot surgeon. Its high-precision optics helps not to touch the vessels and avoid inflammation. The technology requires breaking the integrity of the skull (drilling), but in the future Neuralink wants to use lasers and make the operation less traumatic.
The implanted neurothreads will be connected to special chips. The chips will transmit signals wirelessly from the brain to a receiver, a small box located behind the ear. And the receiver, in turn, to a computer or smartphone. Thus, a person using the power of thought will be able to type text and use the Internet.
The technology is called “neural lace”. It is assumed that the implanted threads will be able to find problem areas in the brain, improve cognitive function and heal damage. Over time, “lace” will take root, becoming an integral part of the brain. And it will allow a person to compete with highly developed AI.
Drilling company
At the end of 2016, exhausted by endless traffic jams, Elon Musk organized The Boring Company, an underground tunnel drilling company. The billionaire bought a used drilling machine and said that The Boring Company designers would take it as a prototype and create a machine capable of digging tunnels 10 times faster. After some time, this happened: a drilling machine called Godot was developed.
The problem of ground traffic, according to Musk, can be solved in two ways: use the air by building flying cars, or go underground by tearing out tunnels. The first option is unsafe, noisy and dependent on weather conditions. The second option is devoid of these shortcomings.
Mask’s idea is not new. However, it is he who is going to bring it to life, solving the main problem: high costs. Musk plans to use special electric skateboards (sleds) with which the car will move through the tunnel. Thus, the diameter of the tunnel will decrease, which means that the costs will decrease.
Musk already has a customer. By the end of 2021, The Boring Company will build the first commercial high-speed tunnel for an urban convention center in Las Vegas. Passengers will move through the tunnel on unmanned Tesla electric cars at a speed of 200-250 km/h.
Elon Musk doesn’t just look to the future. He makes the future. Eco-friendly, renewable energy sources in the service of humanity. Humanity itself is like an interplanetary species. For Elon Musk, these are not just fantasies and dreams. These are goals that he is confidently moving towards and intends to achieve during his lifetime.
Friends, learn confidence from people like Elon Musk. Believe in yourself unconditionally. And strength to you on the way to achieving your goals!
