elon musk essay 100 words

Elon Musk Essay

Elon Musk is a famous business magnate, investor, and engineer. He is the founder, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX, co-founder of Tesla Motors, and chairman of SolarCity. He has also founded several other companies, including Zip2 and PayPal.

Musk was born in South Africa in 1971. He showed an early interest in computers and technology, and he eventually moved to the United States to attend Stanford University. After college, he started his first company, Zip2. This was followed by PayPal and SpaceX. In 2004, he founded Tesla Motors.

Musk is known for his innovative thinking and vision for the future. He has said that his ultimate goal is to help humans become a multi-planetary species. He is also working on developing the technology to make this happen, including electric cars and space travel.

Musk has been described as a “real life Tony Stark” (a reference to the Marvel comics character). He is an interesting and inspiring figure, and he is definitely someone to watch in the years to come.

Elon Musk is an engineer and entrepreneur who creates and manages businesses to address environmental, social, and economic concerns. He is now the CEO and CTO of SpaceX, as well as the CEO and Chief Product Architect of Tesla Motors. He was an early investor in PayPal, Inc., Tesla Motors, and Zip2, and is credited with being a co-founder of each business.

He briefly attended the University of Pretoria before moving to Canada aged 17 to attend Queen’s University. He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania two years later, where he received dual bachelor’s degrees in economics and physics.

He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University but decided instead to pursue a business career, co-founding web software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. The start-up was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. Musk co-founded online bank X.com that same year, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form the company PayPal and was subsequently bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX, an aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company, of which he is CEO, CTO, and lead designer. In 2004, he joined electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.) as chairman and product architect, becoming its CEO in 2008. In 2006, he helped create SolarCity, a solar energy services company and current Tesla subsidiary. Musk has also proposed the Hyperloop, a high-speed vactrain transportation system.

In 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit research company that promotes friendly artificial intelligence. In 2016, he co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology company focused on developing brain–computer interfaces, and founded The Boring Company, a tunnel construction company.

Elon Musk is the co-founder of Zip2, a web software firm that he started with his brother Kimbal Musk. The firm created and marketed a newspaper industry Internet “City Guide.” He obtained contracts with The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune and persuaded the board of directors to abandon its plans for a merger with CitySearch.

In 2003, Elon Musk formed Tesla Motors, an electric car company. He took on several investors including Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning, Ian Wright, and JB Straubel. After a successful performance review, Elon became CEO of the firm and replaced Ze’ev Drori. total investment is more than 180 million dollars with additional investors

Drori was the original CEO of Tesla but he was not meeting Elon’s expectations. He is now the product architect, meaning he comes up with the ideas for new products, and oversees production of current products. The Roadster was the first car produced by Tesla it is an electric sports car. It goes from 0 to sixty in 3.7 seconds and has a range of 245 miles per charge. The base price for this car is 109,000 dollars.

In order to try and make these cars more affordable to people Elon created a company called SolarCity. This company offers solar power systems for homes and businesses. They also have a solar roof product which is a solar panel that looks like a regular roof tile. This product is still in development. Elon is also the CEO of SpaceX which is a space transportation services company. This company was founded in 2002 and their mission is to make it possible for people to extend life beyond Earth.

Elon has several different business ventures and is always coming up with new ideas. He is a very smart and innovative person. He has helped create some amazing products that have made our lives better. Tesla Motors is just one example of this. We all owe Elon a debt of gratitude for his hard work and dedication to making the world a better place.

Elon stated that Tesla had to cut over 10% of its staff in order to reduce their burn rate in 2008. In 2009, they introduced their first automobile, an electric two-seater sports car, as a more efficient company. The Model S was then released in 2012. On February 29, 2012, Tesla launched the Model X, an electric SUV. Elon has also stated that the third generation vehicle will be significantly less expensive so it can be sold in large numbers.

Elon is also the founder, CEO and CTO of SpaceX, co-founder of The Boring Company, co-founder of Neuralink, and co-chairman of OpenAI. A centibillionaire, Musk is one of the richest people in the world.

Tesla Motors was founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. The company’s name is a tribute to Nikola Tesla. Tesla’s goal was to produce affordable electric cars. The company released its first car, the Roadster, in 2008. The Roadster was the first mass-produced electric car to use lithium-ion batteries, and the first production all-electric car to travel more than 200 miles per charge.

In September 2015, Elon Musk announced that Tesla would be producing an all-new vehicle, the Model 3. The Model 3 is a more affordable electric car, with a base price of $35,000. over 400,000 people have reserved a Model 3. Production of the Model 3 began in July 2017.

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Illustration by Michael Marsicano

Elon Musk argues that we must put a million people on Mars if we are to ensure that humanity has a future

by Ross Andersen   + BIO

‘Fuck Earth!’ Elon Musk said to me, laughing. ‘Who cares about Earth?’ We were sitting in his cubicle, in the front corner of a large open-plan office at SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles. It was a sunny afternoon, a Thursday, one of three designated weekdays Musk spends at SpaceX. Musk was laughing because he was joking: he cares a great deal about Earth. When he is not here at SpaceX, he is running an electric car company. But this is his manner. On television Musk can seem solemn, but in person he tells jokes. He giggles. He says things that surprise you.

When I arrived, Musk was at his computer, powering through a stream of single-line email replies. I took a seat and glanced around at his workspace. There was a black leather couch and a large desk, empty but for a few wine bottles and awards. The windows looked out to a sunbaked parking lot. The vibe was ordinary, utilitarian, even boring. After a few minutes passed, I began to worry that Musk had forgotten about me, but then suddenly, and somewhat theatrically, he wheeled around, scooted his chair over, and extended his hand. ‘I’m Elon,’ he said.

It was a nice gesture, but in the year 2014 Elon Musk doesn’t need much of an introduction. Not since Steve Jobs has an American technologist captured the cultural imagination like Musk. There are tumblrs and subreddits devoted to him. He is the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man. His life story has already become a legend. There is the alienated childhood in South Africa, the video game he invented at 12, his migration to the US in the mid-1990s. Then the quick rise, beginning when Musk sold his software company Zip2 for $300 million at the age of 28, and continuing three years later, when he dealt PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion. And finally, the double down, when Musk decided idle hedonism wasn’t for him, and instead sank his fortune into a pair of unusually ambitious startups. With Tesla he would replace the world’s cars with electric vehicles, and with SpaceX he would colonise Mars. Automobile manufacturing and aerospace are mature industries, dominated by corporate behemoths with plush lobbying budgets and factories in all the right congressional districts. No matter. Musk would transform both, simultaneously, and he would do it within the space of a single generation.

Musk announced these plans shortly after the bursting of the first internet bubble, when many tech millionaires were regarded as mere lottery winners. People snickered. They called him a dilettante. But in 2010, he took Tesla public and became a billionaire many times over. SpaceX is still privately held, but it too is now worth billions, and Musk owns two-thirds of it outright. SpaceX makes its rockets from scratch at its Los Angeles factory, and it sells rides on them cheap, which is why its launch manifest is booked out for years. The company specialises in small satellite launches, and cargo runs to the space station, but it is now moving into the more mythic business of human spaceflight. In September, NASA selected SpaceX, along with Boeing, to become the first private company to launch astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Musk is on an epic run. But he keeps pushing his luck. In every interview, there is an outlandish new claim, a seeming impossibility, to which he attaches a tangible date. He is always giving you new reasons to doubt him.

I had come to SpaceX to talk to Musk about his vision for the future of space exploration, and I opened our conversation by asking him an old question: why do we spend so much money in space, when Earth is rife with misery, human and otherwise? It might seem like an unfair question. Musk is a private businessman, not a publicly funded space agency. But he is also a special case. His biggest customer is NASA and, more importantly, Musk is someone who says he wants to influence the future of humanity. He will tell you so at the slightest prompting, without so much as flinching at the grandiosity of it, or the track record of people who have used this language in the past. Musk enjoys making money, of course, and he seems to relish the billionaire lifestyle, but he is more than just a capitalist. Whatever else might be said about him, Musk has staked his fortune on businesses that address fundamental human concerns. And so I wondered, why space?

Musk did not give me the usual reasons. He did not claim that we need space to inspire people. He did not sell space as an R & D lab, a font for spin-off technologies like astronaut food and wilderness blankets. He did not say that space is the ultimate testing ground for the human intellect. Instead, he said that going to Mars is as urgent and crucial as lifting billions out of poverty, or eradicating deadly disease.

‘I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary,’ he told me, ‘in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen, in which case being poor or having a disease would be irrelevant, because humanity would be extinct. It would be like, “Good news, the problems of poverty and disease have been solved, but the bad news is there aren’t any humans left.”’

Musk has been pushing this line – Mars colonisation as extinction insurance – for more than a decade now, but not without pushback. ‘It’s funny,’ he told me. ‘Not everyone loves humanity. Either explicitly or implicitly, some people seem to think that humans are a blight on the Earth’s surface. They say things like, “Nature is so wonderful; things are always better in the countryside where there are no people around.” They imply that humanity and civilisation are less good than their absence. But I’m not in that school,’ he said. ‘I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness, to make sure it continues into the future.’

P eople have been likening light to consciousness since the days of Plato and his cave because, like light, consciousness illuminates. It makes the world manifest. It is, in the formulation of the great Carl Sagan, the Universe knowing itself. But the metaphor is not perfect. Unlike light, whose photons permeate the entire cosmos, human-grade consciousness appears to be rare in our Universe. It appears to be something akin to a single candle flame, flickering weakly in a vast and drafty void.

Musk told me he often thinks about the mysterious absence of intelligent life in the observable Universe. Humans have yet to undertake an exhaustive, or even vigorous, search for extraterrestrial intelligence, of course. But we have gone a great deal further than a casual glance skyward. For more than 50 years, we have trained radio telescopes on nearby stars, hoping to detect an electromagnetic signal, a beacon beamed across the abyss. We have searched for sentry probes in our solar system, and we have examined local stars for evidence of alien engineering. Soon, we will begin looking for synthetic pollutants in the atmospheres of distant planets, and asteroid belts with missing metals, which might suggest mining activity.

The failure of these searches is mysterious, because human intelligence should not be special. Ever since the age of Copernicus, we have been told that we occupy a uniform Universe, a weblike structure stretching for tens of billions of light years, its every strand studded with starry discs, rich with planets and moons made from the same material as us. If nature obeys identical laws everywhere, then surely these vast reaches contain many cauldrons where energy is stirred into water and rock, until the three mix magically into life. And surely some of these places nurture those first fragile cells, until they evolve into intelligent creatures that band together to form civilisations, with the foresight and staying power to build starships.

‘At our current rate of technological growth, humanity is on a path to be godlike in its capabilities,’ Musk told me. ‘You could bicycle to Alpha Centauri in a few hundred thousand years, and that’s nothing on an evolutionary scale. If an advanced civilisation existed at any place in this galaxy, at any point in the past 13.8 billion years, why isn’t it everywhere? Even if it moved slowly, it would only need something like .01 per cent of the Universe’s lifespan to be everywhere. So why isn’t it?’

‘If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way’

Life’s early emergence on Earth, only half a billion years after the planet coalesced and cooled, suggests that microbes will arise wherever Earthlike conditions obtain. But even if every rocky planet were slick with unicellular slime, it wouldn’t follow that intelligent life is ubiquitous. Evolution is endlessly inventive, but it seems to feel its way toward certain features, like wings and eyes, which evolved independently on several branches of life’s tree. So far, technological intelligence has sprouted only from one twig. It’s possible that we are merely the first in a great wave of species that will take up tool-making and language. But it’s also possible that intelligence just isn’t one of natural selection’s preferred modules. We might think of ourselves as nature’s pinnacle, the inevitable endpoint of evolution, but beings like us could be too rare to ever encounter one another. Or we could be the ultimate cosmic outliers, lone minds in a Universe that stretches to infinity.

Musk has a more sinister theory. ‘The absence of any noticeable life may be an argument in favour of us being in a simulation,’ he told me. ‘Like when you’re playing an adventure game, and you can see the stars in the background, but you can’t ever get there. If it’s not a simulation, then maybe we’re in a lab and there’s some advanced alien civilisation that’s just watching how we develop, out of curiosity, like mould in a petri dish.’ Musk flipped through a few more possibilities, each packing a deeper existential chill than the last, until finally he came around to the import of it all. ‘If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way,’ he said. ‘And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.’

I t is true that no civilisation can last long in this Universe if it stays confined to a single planet. The science of stellar evolution is complex, but we know that our mighty star, the ball of fusing hydrogen that anchors Earth and powers all of its life, will one day grow so large that its outer atmosphere will singe and sterilise our planet, and maybe even engulf it. This event is usually pegged for 5-10 billion years from now, and it tends to mark Armageddon in secular eschatologies. But our biosphere has little chance of surviving until then.

Five hundred million years from now, the Sun won’t be much larger than it is today but it will be swollen enough to start scorching the food chain. By then, Earth’s continents will have fused into a single landmass, a new Pangaea. As the Sun dilates, it will pour more and more radiation into the atmosphere, widening the daily swing between hot and cold. The supercontinent’s outer shell will suffer expansions and contractions of increasing violence. Its rocks will become brittle, and its silicates will begin to erode at unprecedented rates, taking carbon dioxide with them, down to the seafloor and into the deep crust. Eventually, the atmosphere will become so carbon-poor that trees will be unable to perform photosynthesis. The planet will be shorn of its forests, but a few plants will make a valiant last stand, until the brightening Sun kills them off, too, along with every animal that depends on them, which is to say every animal on Earth.

In a billion years, the oceans will have boiled away altogether, leaving empty trenches that are deeper than Everest is tall. Earth will become a new Venus, a hothouse planet where even the hardiest microbes cannot survive. And this is the optimistic scenario, for it assumes our biosphere will die of old age, and not something more sudden and stroke-like. After all, a billion years is a long time, long enough to make probabilistic space for all kinds of catastrophes, including those that have no precedent in human memory.

Of all the natural disasters that appear in our histories, the most severe are the floods, tales of global deluge inspired by the glacial melt at the end of the last Ice Age. There are a few stray glimmers of cosmic disasters, as in Plato’s Timaeus , when he tells the story of Phaeton, the son of the Sun god, who could not drive his father’s fiery chariot across the sky, and so crashed it into the Earth, burning the planet’s surface to a crisp. Plato writes:

That story, as it is told, has the fashion of a legend, but the truth of it lies in the occurrence of a shift of the bodies in the heavens which move round the Earth, and a destruction of the things on the Earth by fierce fire, which recurs at long intervals.

A remarkable piece of ancient wisdom, but on the whole, human culture is too fresh an invention to have preserved the scarier stuff we find in the geological record. We have no tales of mile-wide asteroid strikes, or super volcanoes, or the deep freezes that occasionally turn our blue planet white. The biosphere has bounced back from each of these shocks, but not before sacrificing terrifying percentages of its species. And even its most remarkable feats of resilience are cold comfort, for the future might subject Earth to entirely novel experiences.

Some in the space exploration community, including no less a figure than Freeman Dyson, say that human spaceflight is folly in the short term

A billion years will give us four more orbits of the Milky Way galaxy, any one of which could bring us into collision with another star, or a supernova shockwave, or the incinerating beam of a gamma ray burst. We could swing into the path of a rogue planet, one of the billions that roam our galaxy darkly, like cosmic wrecking balls. Planet Earth could be edging up to the end of an unusually fortunate run.

If human beings are to survive these catastrophes, both the black swans and the certainties, we will need to do what life has always done: move in the service of survival. We will need to develop new capabilities, as our aquatic forebears once evolved air-gulping lungs, and bony fins for crude locomotion, struggling their way onto land. We will need to harness the spirit that moved our own species to trek into new continents, so that our recent ancestors could trickle out to islands and archipelagos, before crossing whole oceans, on their way to the very ends of this Earth. We will need to set out for new planets and eventually, new stars. But need we make haste?

Some in the space exploration community, including no less a figure than the physicist Freeman Dyson, say that human spaceflight is folly in the short term. We humans are still in our technological infancy, after all, only a million years removed from the first control of fire. We have progressed quickly, from those first campfire sparks to the explosions we bottle in tall cylinders, to power our way out of Earth’s gravity well. But not everyone who sits atop our rockets returns safely. To seed a colony on another planet, we need astronaut safety to scale up. Perhaps we should park human missions for now, and explore space through the instruments of our cosmic drones, like the Voyager probe that recently slipped from the Solar System, to send us its impressions of interstellar space. We can resume human spaceflight later this century, or next, after we have reaped the full fruits of our current technological age. For all we know, revolutions in energy, artificial intelligence and materials science could be imminent. Any one of them would make human spaceflight a much easier affair.

‘There is an argument you often hear in space circles,’ I said to Musk, ‘where people say the focus on human space travel in the near-term is entirely misplaced – ’

‘What focus? There isn’t one, you know,’ he said, cutting me off.

‘But to the extent you’re advocating for one,’ I said, ‘there is an argument that says until we ramp up technologically, we’re better off sending probes because, as you know, the presence of a single human being on a spacecraft makes the engineering exponentially more difficult.’

‘Well, we are sending probes,’ Musk told me. ‘And they are very expensive probes, by the way. They aren’t exactly bargain-basement. The last RC car we sent to Mars cost more than $3 billion. That’s a hell of a droid. For that kind of money, we should be able to send a lot of people to Mars.’

T here is a story Musk likes to tell, part of the founding myth of SpaceX, about how he stayed up late one night searching NASA’s website for information about a crewed mission to Mars. This was back in 2001, when the space shuttles were still flying, their launches providing a steady drumbeat of spectacle, just enough to convince the casual observer that human spaceflight wasn’t in serious decline. Today, it is impossible to sustain that delusion.

The idea that humans would one day venture into the sky is as old as mythology, but it wasn’t until the scientific revolution, when the telescope made the sky legible, that it began to seem like a realistic objective. In 1610, the astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote, in a letter to Galileo:

Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travellers, maps of the celestial bodies.

After the hot air balloon and airplane were invented, a few visionaries moved on to planning for space colonisation itself. But it wasn’t until the Space Race, the extraordinary period of progress that began with Sputnik in 1957 and ended with the first Moon landing in 1969, that the idea of cosmic manifest destiny moved from the fringe to the mainstream. In the ensuing decades, it would inspire whole literatures and subcultures, becoming, in the process, one of the dominant secular narratives of the human future. But reality has not kept up.

It has been three years since NASA, the world’s best-funded space agency, fired a human being into orbit. Americans who wish to fly to the ISS must now ride on Russian rockets, launched from Kazakhstan, at the pleasure of Vladimir Putin. Even the successful trips are, in their own way, evidence of decline, because the space station sits a thousand times closer to Earth than the Moon. Watching NASA astronauts visit it is about as thrilling as watching Columbus sail to Ibiza. But that’s as good as it’s going to get for a while. The agency’s next generation rocket isn’t due until 2018, and its first iteration will barely best the Saturn V, the pyrotechnic beast that powered the Apollo missions. American presidents occasionally make bold, Kennedy-like pronouncements about sending humans to Mars. But as Musk discovered more than a decade ago, there are no real missions planned, and even optimists say it will be 2030 at the earliest.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Only a few decades ago, it seemed as though we were entering a new epoch of exploration, one that would shame the seafarers of the High Renaissance. We would begin by mastering lower Earth orbit, so that visits to space were safe and routine. Then we’d go to the Moon and build a permanent base there, a way station that would let us leap to the planets, each in quick succession, as though they were lily pads on a pond, and not massive moving worlds spaced by hundreds of millions of miles. We’d start with Mars and then shoot through the asteroid belt to Jupiter and its ocean-harbouring moons. We’d drink in Saturn’s sublimity, its slanted rings and golden hue, and then head for the outer giants, and the icy rubble at the Solar System’s edge. The Sun would look small out there, and the stars beckoning. We would spread through the Milky Way’s safe zone, the doughnut of gas and fire, billions of stars strong, that surrounds our galaxy’s violent core, and then we’d press out into intergalactic space. We’d use wormholes or warp drives, or some other vaguely sketched physics, to pretend away the millions of light years that separate us from Andromeda and the glittering web beyond it, whose glimpsable regions alone contain hundreds of billions of galaxies.

When Musk realized there were no missions to Mars on the books, he figured Americans had lost interest in space exploration. Two years later, the public response to the Columbia shuttle disaster convinced him otherwise. ‘It was in every newspaper, every magazine, every news station, even those that had nothing to do with space,’ he told me. ‘And yeah, seven people died and that was awful, but seven people die all the time, and nobody pays any attention to it. It’s obvious that space is deeply ingrained in the American psyche.’ Musk now sees the Space Race as a transient Cold War phenomenon, a technological pissing match fuelled by unsustainable public spending. ‘The Soviets were crowing after Sputnik, about how they had better technology than we did, and so therefore communism is better,’ he told me. ‘And so we set a really tough target and said we would beat them there, and money was no object. But once the ideological battle was won, the impetus went away, and money very quickly became an object.’

NASA’s share of the US federal budget peaked at 4.4 per cent in 1966, but a decade later it was less than 1 per cent, where it has remained ever since. The funding cut forced NASA to shutter the Saturn V production lines, along with the final three Moon landings, and a mission to Mars slated for the late 1980s. That’s why the agency’s website looked so barren when Musk visited it in 2001.

Aghast at this backsliding, and still thinking it a failure of will, Musk began planning a Mars mission of his own. He wanted to send a greenhouse to Mars, filled with plants that would become, in the course of their long journeying, the most distant travellers of all multicellular life. Images of lush, leafy organisms living on the red planet would move people, he figured, just as images of the Earth rising, sunlike, on the lunar plain had moved previous generations. With a little luck, the sentiment would translate into political will for a larger NASA budget.

When Musk went to price the mission with US launch companies, he was told transport would cost $60-80 million. Reeling, he tried to buy a refurbished Russian intercontinental ballistic missile to do the job, but his dealer kept raising the price on him. Finally, he’d had enough. Instead of hunting around for a cheaper supplier, Musk founded his own rocket company. His friends thought he was crazy, and tried to intervene, but he would not be talked down. Musk identifies strongly as an engineer. That’s why he usually takes a title like chief technical officer at the companies he runs, in addition to chief executive officer. He had been reading stacks of books about rockets. He wanted to try building his own.

Great migrations are often a matter of timing, of waiting for a strait to freeze, a sea to part, or a planet to draw near

Six years later, it all looked like folly. It was 2008, a year Musk describes as the worst of his life. Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy. Lehman had just imploded, making capital hard to come by. Musk was freshly divorced and borrowing cash from friends to pay living expenses. And SpaceX was a flameout, in the most literal sense. Musk had spent $100 million on the company and its new rocket, the Falcon 1. But its first three launches had all detonated before reaching orbit. The fourth was due to lift off in early Fall of that year, and if it too blew apart in the atmosphere, SpaceX would likely have numbered among the casualties. Aerospace journalists were drafting its obituary already. Musk needed a break, badly. And he got it, in the form of a fully intact Falcon 1, riding a clean column of flame out of the atmosphere and into the history books, as the first privately funded, liquid-fuelled rocket to reach orbit.

SpaceX nabbed a $1.6 billion contract with NASA in the aftermath of that launch, and Musk used the money to expand rapidly. In the years since, he has reeled off 15 straight launches without a major failure, including the first private cargo flights to the ISS. Last year, he signed a 20-year lease on launch pad 39A, the hallowed stretch of Cape Canaveral concrete that absorbed the fire of Apollo’s rockets. Earlier this year, he bought a tract of land near Brownsville, Texas, where he plans to build a dedicated spaceport for SpaceX. ‘It took us ages to get all the approvals,’ he told me. ‘There were a million federal agencies that needed to sign off, and the final call went to the National Historic Landmark Association, because the last battle of the Civil War was fought a few miles away from our site, and visitors might be able to see the tip of our rocket from there. We were like, “ Really ? Have you seen what it’s like around there? Nobody visits that place.”’

Musk isn’t shy about touting the speed of his progress. Indeed, he has an Ali-like appetite for needling the competition. A Bloomberg TV interviewer once asked him about one of Tesla’s competitors and he laughed in response. ‘Why do you laugh?’ she said. ‘Have you seen their car?’ he replied, incredulously. This same streak of showmanship surfaced when Musk and I discussed the aerospace industry. ‘There have been a number of space startups,’ he told me. ‘But they have all failed, or their success was irrelevant.’

But SpaceX does have competitors, both industry giants and scrappy startups alike. The company has just spent three years in a dogfight to become the first commercial space outfit to launch US astronauts to the space station. The awarding of this contract became more urgent in March, after the US sanctioned Russia for rolling tanks into Crimea. A week later, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin quipped: ‘After analysing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest the US deliver its astronauts to the ISS with a trampoline.’

SpaceX was an early favourite to win the contract, but it was never a lock. Critics have hammered the company for delaying launches, and in August it suffered a poorly timed mishap, when one of its test rockets blew up shortly after lift-off. In the end, NASA split the contract between Boeing and SpaceX, giving each six launches. Musk said that he would move into human missions, win or lose, but his progress would have been slowed considerably. The contract is only for short hops to lower Earth orbit, but it will give Musk the chance to demonstrate that he can do human spaceflight better than anyone else. And it will give him the money and reputation he needs to work up to a more extraordinary feat of engineering, one that has not been attempted in more than four decades: the safe transport of human beings to a new world.

G reat migrations are often a matter of timing, of waiting for a strait to freeze, a sea to part, or a planet to draw near. The distance between Earth and Mars fluctuates widely as the two worlds whirl around in their orbits. At its furthest, Mars is a thousand times further than the Moon. But every 26 months they align, when the faster moving Earth swings into position between Mars and the Sun. When this alignment occurs where their orbits are tightest, Mars can come within 36 million miles, only 150 times further than the Moon. The next such window is only four years away, too soon to send a crewed ship. But in the mid-2030s, Mars will once again burn bright and orange in our sky, and by then Musk might be ready to send his first flurry of missions, to seed a citylike colony that he expects to be up and running by 2040.

‘SpaceX is only 12 years old now,’ he told me. ‘Between now and 2040, the company’s lifespan will have tripled. If we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on Mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of thousands of people.’

Musk told me this first group of settlers will need to pay their own way. ‘There needs to be an intersection of the set of people who wish to go, and the set of people who can afford to go,’ he said. ‘And that intersection of sets has to be enough to establish a self-sustaining civilisation. My rough guess is that for a half-million dollars, there are enough people that could afford to go and would want to go. But it’s not going to be a vacation jaunt. It’s going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff, like when people moved to the early American colonies.’

Even at that price, a one-way trip to Mars could be a tough sell. It would be fascinating to experience a deep space mission, to see the Earth receding behind you, to feel that you were afloat between worlds, to walk a strange desert under an alien sky. But one of the stars in that sky would be Earth, and one night, you might look up at it, through a telescope. At first, it might look like a blurry sapphire sphere, but as your eyes adjusted, you might be able to make out its oceans and continents. You might begin to long for its mountains and rivers, its flowers and trees, the astonishing array of life forms that roam its rainforests and seas. You might see a network of light sparkling on its dark side, and realise that its nodes were cities, where millions of lives are coming into collision. You might think of your family and friends, and the billions of other people you left behind, any one of which you could one day come to love.

The austerity of life on Mars might nurture these longings into regret, or even psychosis. From afar, the Martian desert evokes sweltering landscapes like the Sahara or the American West, but its climate is colder than the interior of Antarctica. Mars used to be wrapped in a thick blanket of atmosphere, but something in the depths of time blew it away, and the patchy remains are too thin to hold in heat or pressure. If you were to stroll onto its surface without a spacesuit, your eyes and skin would peel away like sheets of burning paper, and your blood would turn to steam, killing you within 30 seconds. Even in a suit you’d be vulnerable to cosmic radiation, and dust storms that occasionally coat the entire Martian globe, in clouds of skin-burning particulates, small enough to penetrate the tightest of seams. Never again would you feel the sun and wind on your skin, unmediated. Indeed, you would probably be living underground at first, in a windowless cave, only this time there would be no wild horses to sketch on the ceiling.

‘Even at a million people you’re assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars’

It is possible that Mars could one day be terraformed into an Earthly paradise, but not anytime soon. Even on our planet, whose natural systems we have studied for centuries, the weather is too complex to predict, and geoengineering is a frontier technology. We know we could tweak the Earth’s thermostat, by sending a silvery mist of aerosols into the stratosphere, to reflect away sunlight. But no one knows how to manufacture an entire atmosphere. On Mars, the best we can expect is a crude habitat, erected by robots. And even if they could build us a Four Seasons, near a glacier or easily mined ore, videoconferencing with Earth won’t be among the amenities. Messaging between the two planets will always be too delayed for any real-time give and take.

Cabin fever might set in quickly on Mars, and it might be contagious. Quarters would be tight. Governments would be fragile. Reinforcements would be seven months away. Colonies might descend into civil war, anarchy or even cannibalism, given the potential for scarcity. US colonies from Roanoke to Jamestown suffered similar social breakdowns, in environments that were Edenic by comparison. Some individuals might be able to endure these conditions for decades, or longer, but Musk told me he would need a million people to form a sustainable, genetically diverse civilisation.

‘Even at a million, you’re really assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars,’ he said. ‘You would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. No oil.’

I asked Musk how quickly a Mars colony could grow to a million people. ‘Excluding organic growth, if you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people,’ he said. ‘But you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people. In fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high. It would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip, so more like 100,000 trips. And we’re talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship.’

Musk told me all this could happen within a century. He is rumoured to have a design in mind for this giant spaceship, a concept vehicle he calls the Mars Colonial Transporter. But designing the ship is the easy part. The real challenge will be driving costs down far enough to launch whole fleets of them. Musk has an answer for that, too. He says he is working on a reusable rocket, one that can descend smoothly back to Earth after launch, and be ready to lift off again in an hour.

‘Rockets are the only form of transportation on Earth where the vehicle is built anew for each journey,’ he says. ‘What if you had to build a new plane for every flight?’ Musk’s progress on reusable rockets has been slow, but one of his prototypes has already flown a thousand metres into the air, before touching down softly again. He told me full reusability would reduce mission costs by two orders of magnitude, to tens of dollars per pound of weight. That’s the price that would convert Earth’s launch pads into machine guns, capable of firing streams of spacecraft at deep space destinations such as Mars. That’s the price that would launch his 100,000 ships.

A ll it takes is a glance over your shoulder, to the alien world of 1914, to remind yourself how much can happen in a century. But a million people on Mars sounds like a techno-futurist fantasy, one that would make Ray Kurzweil blush. And yet, the very existence of SpaceX is fantasy. After talking with Musk, I took a stroll through his cathedral-like rocket factory. I wandered the rows of chromed-out rocket engines, all agleam under blue neon. I saw white tubes as huge as stretched-out grain silos, with technicians crawling all over them, their ant-farm to-and-fro orchestrated from above, by managers in glass cube offices. Mix in the cleanroom jumpsuits and the EDM soundtrack, and the place felt something like Santa’s workshop as re-imagined by James Cameron. And to think: 12 years ago, this whole thrumming hive, this assembly line for spaceships , did not even exist, except as a hazy notion, a few electrified synapses in Musk’s overactive imagination.

Who am I to say what SpaceX will accomplish in a century’s time? For all I know Musk will be hailed as a visionary by then, a man of action without parallel in the annals of spaceflight. But there are darker scenarios, too. Musk could push the envelope, and see his first mission to Mars end in tragedy. Travel to Mars could prove elusive, like cold fusion. It might be one of those feats of technology that is always 25 years away. Musk could come to be seen as a cultural artifact, a personification of our post-Apollo hangover. An Icarus.

I asked Musk if he’d made peace with the possibility that his project could still be in its infancy, when death or infirmity forces him to pass the baton. ‘That’s what I expect will be the case,’ he said. ‘Make peace with it, of course. I’ve thought about that quite a lot. I’m trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me,’ he said. I nodded toward a cluster of frames on his wall, portraits of his five sons. ‘Will you give it to them?’ He told me he had planned to give it to an institution, or several, but now he thinks that a family influence might be stabilising. ‘I just don’t want it to be controlled by some private equity firm that would milk it for near-term revenue,’ he said. ‘That would be terrible.’

‘We need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation. That’s the next step’

This fear, that the sacred mission of SpaceX could be compromised, resurfaced when I asked Musk if he would one day go to Mars himself. ‘I’d like to go, but if there is a high risk of death, I wouldn’t want to put the company in jeopardy,’ he told me. ‘I only want to go when I could be confident that my death wouldn’t result in the primary mission of the company falling away.’ It’s possible to read Musk as a Noah figure, a man obsessed with building a great vessel, one that will safeguard humankind against global catastrophe. But he seems to see himself as a Moses, someone who makes it possible to pass through the wilderness – the ‘empty wastes,’ as Kepler put it to Galileo – but never sets foot in the Promised Land.

Before I left SpaceX, I wanted to know how far Musk thought human exploration would go. When a man tells you that a million people will live on Mars within a century, you want to know his limits, if only for credibility’s sake. ‘Do you think we will go to the stars?’ I asked him.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘It’s pretty hard to get to another star system. Alpha Centauri is four light years away, so if you go at 10 per cent of the speed of light, it’s going to take you 40 years, and that’s assuming you can instantly reach that speed, which isn’t going to be the case. You have to accelerate. You have to build up to 20 or 30 per cent and then slow down, assuming you want to stay at Alpha Centauri and not go zipping past.’ To accentuate this last point, Musk made a high-pitched zooming noise, like kids make when playing with toy spaceships.

I pressed him about star travel a bit more, but he stayed tight. ‘It’s just hard,’ he said. ‘With current life spans, you need generational ships. You need antimatter drives, because that’s the most mass-efficient. It’s doable, but it’s super slow.’

‘So you’re skeptical,’ I said. He cracked then, but only a little.

‘I’m not saying I’m skeptical of the stars,’ he said. ‘I just wonder what humanity will even look like when we try to do that. If we can establish a Mars colony, we can almost certainly colonise the whole Solar System, because we’ll have created a strong economic forcing function for the improvement of space travel. We’ll go to the moons of Jupiter, at least some of the outer ones for sure, and probably Titan on Saturn, and the asteroids. Once we have that forcing function, and an Earth-to-Mars economy, we’ll cover the whole Solar System. But the key is that we have to make the Mars thing work. If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation. That’s the next step.’

You can see why NASA has given Musk a shot at human spaceflight. He makes a great rocket but, more than that, he has the old vision in him. He is a revivalist, for those of us who still buy into cosmic manifest destiny. And he can preach. He says we are doomed if we stay here. He says we will suffer fire and brimstone, and even extinction. He says we should go with him, to that darkest and most treacherous of shores. He promises a miracle.

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Elon Mask: Biography and Main Virtues Essay

Elon Musk is one of the smartest and wealthiest people on the planet. The engineer is considered the genius of the modern world. Musk achieved everything himself through hard work. Despite a difficult childhood, he stubbornly went forward and reached great heights. The primary mission of the Mask is to help humanity and improve all areas of life. His main virtues are his desire to work and create something new, listening to criticism, not being afraid of risks, and achieving great goals other people would not understand.

Elon Musk faced many difficulties on the way to his current status, but this did not stop him. He started working at an early age, and at the age of 12, he created his first video game. Currently, the engineer works about 80 hours a week and follows the development of his two companies, which is admirable. Musk believes that working harder than others is the most critical key to success because life is short, and a person must do everything possible for a successful existence (Fernholz 16). He maintains that the ability to work should be so high as to achieve what some take years to complete in months. However, Musk says that not everything depends on performance (Higgins 35). The most important is the organization of hard work to achieve results. Musk works hard and does things that are different from many others. He believes that his competition in the market is less this way, and his constant work pays off better (Higgins 35). The engineer focuses on creating innovative technologies with a small number of these products. Additionally, his ability to work depends on his passion for his work. If a person hates his job, he will never achieve high results and will quickly give up. Elon Musk entered the engineering industry with innovations initially not accepted by society (Musk 57). As a result, he almost went bankrupt but could avoid it through hard work. Thus, he listened to the criticism, understood his risks, and successfully coped with them.

Despite earning money from his first projects, Elon Musk wanted more recognition for his technologies. In this regard, he was not afraid to take risks and sell his first companies for the sake of the new SpaceX and Tesla, which subsequently entered the world market. However, Musk’s ideas were initially on the verge of collapse, and he understood his risk when entering the market with new products. His ability to take responsibility even in such difficult moments is admirable. Elon Musk did not give up because of the initial failure of the company and put all his savings into the cause. It was a significant risk, as the entrepreneur did not know if his investment would pay off. However, at the same time, he advises taking on such responsibility at a younger age, when a person does not have to feed his family. At an older age, risk should be calculated more carefully, and savings should be left in case of failure. This approach causes respect for a person and highlights positive qualities in him. Additionally, Elon Musk’s risks were justified because he constantly asked for criticism, which he listened to carefully. Even though many people, including entrepreneurs, want to hear praise, Musk chose a different way to reap the benefits. In his opinion, criticism helps a person see his weaknesses and develop them. The complaint can be why a person stops believing in himself; nevertheless, Elon Musk could process a negative assessment into a catalyst for new ideas and tasks. He asked friends and investors not about positive experiences with his products but the negative feedback (Muegge and Reid 9). In addition, Musk clarified all the feedback from his customers, which helped him improve the business. Thus, he always thinks about big goals, consisting of small feedback.

Elon Musk’s ambitions are extraordinarily high and admirable. His desire to colonize Mars is not only a dream, but he is working hard toward it. His plans include the first human landing on Mars within ten years. Even though many people ridicule him for ambitions that they cannot achieve, Musk continues his work. Even if his company fails to achieve this goal, it will progress more than similar organizations with smaller goals. Elon Musk believes that the more time a person has and the smaller his plan, the weaker progress he will achieve. This approach is admirable since the engineer does not buy time and justify his inaction. Thus, Musk continues to work, ignoring ridicule from the outside. At the same time, he always treats negative statements with respect and does not enter into controversy. As a result, Elon Musk achieved big goals, allowing him to become one of the wealthiest and most successful.

Musk is admired for the many positive traits he brings to his work. First of all, he works hard despite the difficulties he faces. He constantly creates something new to improve humankind’s life and contributes considerably to technical innovation. He is thriving and famous since he always steadfastly accepts criticism and listens to every negative review. Moreover, he takes responsibility for his actions and understands that every risk can lead to the collapse of both companies. One of their main features of Musk is a global goal, which he seeks to achieve by all available means.

Works Cited

Fernholz, Tim. Rocket billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the new space race . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.

Higgins, Tim. Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century . Doubleday, 2021.

Muegge, Steven, and Ewan Reid. “Elon Musk and SpaceX: A Case Study of Entrepreneuring as Emancipation.” Technology Innovation Management Review, vol. 9, no. 8, 2019. pp. 7-12.

Musk, Elon. Elon Musk Biography . Advameg, Inc., 2021.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Elon Mask: Biography and Main Virtues." December 28, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/elon-mask-biography-and-main-virtues/.

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New Elon Musk essay: Tesla CEO’s current thoughts on technology and humanity

It’s been a while since Elon Musk published an extensive blog post outlining his stance on a specific topic. On the official Tesla website, his last blog post was on August 24, 2018, when he explained his decision to keep Tesla a publicly-traded company. Fortunately, a new Elon Musk essay has been posted in China, outlining the Tesla CEO’s thoughts on a number of topics — from sustainability, the Tesla Bot’s real-world use, Neuralink’s focus on the disabled, and SpaceX’s exploration aspirations .

The new Elon Musk essay was published in  China Cyberspace , the Cyberspace Administration of China’s (CAC) flagship magazine. A translation of the essay was posted by Yang Liu, a journalist from the state-owned news agency  Xinhua , on the  Beijing Channel blog. As could be seen in Liu’s post, Musk actually discussed a number of topics in detail. 

In a way, the publication of the new Elon Musk essay in the CAC’s flagship magazine is significant. As noted by  The Register , Musk’s essay suggests that Chinese authorities approve of the Tesla CEO’s positions on the topics he discussed . Only a few other foreign entrepreneurs would likely be given the same honor. 

Following is the full text of Elon Musk’s new essay. 

Believing in Technology for a Better Future

Thank you for the invitation from China Cyberspace magazine. I am pleased to share with my Chinese friends some of my thoughts on the vision of technology and humanity.

Posted by Elon Musk

As technology accelerates, it may one day surpass human understanding and control. Some are optimistic and some are pessimistic. But I believe that as long as we are not complacent and always maintain a sense of urgency, the future of humanity will be bright, driven by the power of technology. It is like a self-fulfilling prophecy: if humans want to make the future good, they should take action to make it good.

I want to do everything we can to maximize the use of technology to help achieve a better future for humanity. To that end, any area that contributes to a sustainable future is worthy of our investment. Whether it’s Tesla, Neuralink, or SpaceX, these companies were all founded with the ultimate goal of enhancing the future of human life and creating as much practical value for the world as possible—Tesla to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, Neuralink for medical rehabilitation, SpaceX for making interstellar connections possible.

Clean Energy: The Future of Sustainability

The starting point for my thinking about clean energy is how to create and store energy sustainably and for the long term, and how to provide a constant source of power for the future of productive life. In my view, the future of sustainable energy involves three components.

The generation of sustainable energy. The sun is like a giant fusion generator, from which mankind currently exploits a tiny amount of energy. In the long run, solar energy will become the main source of energy for human civilization. Of course, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear power are also useful energy supplements.

The storage of sustainable energy. Given the change of day and night and the change of weather, we need a lot of fixed battery banks to store solar and wind energy, because the sun does not shine all the time, and the wind does not blow all the time, energy needs to be stored in a large number of fixed battery banks.

Electrified transportation. Full electrification of transportation, including cars, planes, and ships. Electric rockets may be more difficult, but we may be able to manufacture the propellant used in rockets from sustainable energy sources. Eventually, the world economy will be run entirely by sustainable energy sources.

The world is on track for a sustainable energy transition, and humanity should continue to accelerate the process. The faster this transition is achieved, the less risk humanity poses to the environment and the more it will gain. When clean energy is available, carbon sequestration and desalination will be cheaper, climate change and water shortages will be solved, and when fossil fuels are out of the picture, the skies will be cleaner, the world will be quieter, the air will be fresher, and the future will be brighter. 

Solar power, battery packs, and electric vehicles paint a rosy picture. Next, we need to focus on the limiting factors. The electrification of cars has become a consensus among nations, but battery support on a terawatt-hour scale is needed to roll out pure electric vehicles around the globe. According to our estimates, the world needs about 300 TWh of battery storage to achieve a transition to sustainable energy. The biggest difficulty in advancing sustainable energy lies in the large-scale production of lithium battery cells. Specifically, from the mining and element refining to battery cells coming off of the production line and finally assembled into battery packs, this is a complex process that is restraining the rapid development of a sustainable energy economy.

As a pioneer and innovator focusing on energy innovation technology, Tesla was founded to solve the problem of energy innovation. On the one hand, we create integrated sustainable energy products from the three segments of energy production, storage and use; on the other hand, we are committed to redefining battery manufacturing by innovating and developing advanced battery technology to remove restrictions on battery capacity. I believe that the world will transition to a sustainable future through a combination of solar and wind energy plus battery storage and electric vehicles. I am pleased to see more and more companies joining this field. Chinese companies will be a force to be reckoned with in the cause of energy innovation.

Humanoid Robots: Doing What Humans Do

Today’s cars are increasingly like smart, web-connected robots on wheels. In fact, in addition to cars, humanoid robots are also becoming a reality, with Tesla launching a general-purpose humanoid robot (Tesla Bot) in 2021. The Tesla Bot is close to the height and weight of an adult, can carry or pick up heavy objects, walk fast in small steps, and the screen on its face is an interactive interface for communication with people. You may wonder why we designed this robot with legs. Because human society is based on the interaction of a bipedal humanoid with two arms and ten fingers. So if we want a robot to adapt to its environment and be able to do what humans do, it has to be roughly the same size, shape, and capabilities as a human.

Tesla Bots are initially positioned to replace people in repetitive, boring, and dangerous tasks. But the vision is for them to serve millions of households, such as cooking, mowing lawns, and caring for the elderly.

Achieving this goal requires that robots evolve to be smart enough and for us to have the ability to mass produce robots. Our “four-wheeled robots” – cars – have changed the way people travel and even live. One day when we solve the problem of self-driving cars (i.e., real-world artificial intelligence), we will be able to extend artificial intelligence technology to humanoid robots, which will have a much broader application than cars.

We plan to launch the first prototype of a humanoid robot this year and focus on improving the intelligence of that robot and solving the problem of large-scale production. Thereafter, humanoid robots’ usefulness will increase yearly as production scales up and costs fall. In the future, a home robot may be cheaper than a car. Perhaps in less than a decade, people will be able to buy a robot for their parents as a birthday gift.

It is foreseeable that with the power of robots, we will create an era of extreme abundance of goods and services, where everyone can live a life of abundance. Perhaps the only scarcity that will exist in the future is for us to create ourselves as humans.

Neuralink: Empowering the Disabled

Some of our Chinese friends may not be as familiar with Neuralink as with electric cars. These companies focus on developing computer-human brain fusion technologies, developing brain chips the size of coins, similar to wearable devices such as smartphones, except that they integrate more deeply with the user’s body—recording and stimulating brain activity through implants in the cerebral cortex.

At this stage, the technology is helping injured people on an individual level. We have received many saddening letters: a 25-year-old young man was in the prime of his life when he had a motorcycle accident that left him unable to eat on his own, which is a great grief for the individual and the family. In light of this, brain-machine interface technology will be focused on curing or alleviating brain injury and other related disorders in the years to come. For example, it could help restore sensory or motor function to limbs of those with spinal injuries and mental system disorders or allow quadriplegics to use their brains to easily operate computers or cell phones.

This technology can also improve a wider range of brain injury problems, whether these disorders are congenital or accidental, or caused by age and external stressors, including severe depression, morbid obesity, sleep problems, and underlying schizophrenia, all of which are expected to be alleviated by human-computer devices.

With the development of brain-machine interface technology, in the long term, this connection is expected to expand the channels of communication between the outside world and the human brain, “accessing” more brain regions and new neural data. This technology could allow humans to effectively integrate with artificial intelligence and ultimately expand new ways for humans to interact with the world, themselves and others. Even if the goal of human-machine integration is difficult to achieve, brain-machine interface technology could be of great value in the field of medical rehabilitation.

Space Exploration: The Possibility of Cross-Planet Habitats

Finally, my greatest hope is that humans create a self-sustaining city on Mars. Many people ask me why I want to explore outer space and turn humans into multi-planetary creatures. In the vast universe, human civilization is like a faint little candle, like a little shimmering light in the void. When the sun expands one day and the Earth is no longer habitable, we can fly to a new home in a spaceship. If humans can inhabit other planets, it means that they have passed one of the conditions of the great screening of the universe, then we will become interplanetary citizens, and human civilization will be able to continue.

The first step toward interplanetary habitat is to reduce the cost of travel, which is what SpaceX was founded to do – first by building recoverable rockets and then by building reusable mega-ships with ever-increasing carrying capacity. As of earlier this year, SpaceX had successfully reused 79 rockets to deliver cargo to the space station and send ordinary people into space. We have also designed and built the largest launch vehicle in history, the Starship, which can carry 100 passengers and supplies at a time. In the future, we plan to build at least 1,000 Starships to send groups of pioneers to Mars to build a self-sustaining city.

As technology continues to change lives at an accelerating pace and the world evolves, life is more than simply solving one problem after another. We all want to wake up in the morning full of anticipation for the future and rejoice in what is to come. I hope more people will join us in our fight to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. I also welcome more like-minded Chinese partners to join us in exploring clean energy, artificial intelligence, human-machine collaboration, and space exploration to create a future worth waiting for. 

Don’t hesitate to contact us with news tips. Just send a message to simon @teslarati.com  to give us a heads up.

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Elon Musk Leadership

How it works

• 1 Introduction
• 3 Problem Management and Decision Making
• 4 Consensus Building and Negotiation
• 5 Application of Analysis to Leadership Roles and Responsibilities
• 6 References

Introduction

In the previous paper I mentioned about the Communication and Leadership qualities of Elon Musk and also how did he implement all these qualities in his organizational culture and climate. All those qualities are highly essential for being an efficient leader. The world we are living is always changing. The nature of the business world today is very different than it was decades ago. Change is inexorable. This is because, people always look for better choices to live their life.

Therefore, the people come up with new technologies to meet this need. Musk always had to be on his toes and have to think spontaneously and creatively at the same time. As quoted in Lussier & Achua’s book in Leadership Theory and skill development, “leadership is the process of influencing leaders and followers to achieve organizational objectives through change.” Therefore, it is essential for leaders to have the capabilities and qualities to lead, implement and manage change.

According to me one of the crucial reasons for the success of Musk was suggesting and inviting the changes needed in the present but also thinks for the future. For an Organization to be successful, it is the combined efforts of the team members. It is also always important not only keep up with the changing times, but also think about the future according to the present scenario. Some of the important lessons of Elon Musk’s leadership are:

• Lead by Example: If you are the CEO or the Founder of any Organization you need to do all the chores that you may not want to do. The success of any organization is based on how dedicated we are for our work.
• Lead with Purpose: Everyone must have a very compelling goal for their organization. Without any proper goal, one can’t run any work. Musk explained that he started SpaceX just to put his mark on the world.
• Be Creative: “The problem is that at a lot of big companies, the process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.”- Elon Musk. He believes that innovation should take place because a lot of substitute is available in the market and the market is growing very rapidly.
• Encourage Innovation: As per Elon Musk “Failure is an option, if things are not failing, we are not innovating enough”. Musk always enables and pushes his employees to innovate new ideas and concepts.
• Be comfortable with change: As per Musk we should always look for the new technologies and should be ready to cope up with the new changes. Successful leader generally adapts in any situation and always pushes forward their team goals.
• Hire Carefully: This is the most crucial lesson for any organization. Musk never hires any person just for the sake of filling any position rather he believes in the talent and he always hires the right person at the right time.
• Put the right people in the right role: “If you’re trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.”- Elon Musk. We should always choose our employees according to their specialization. If we try to turn our employees into something they are not, we will lose the talent.

(Lahey, ‘Top 10 in Leadership from Elon Musk’, 2019)

As mentioned in the book ‘Leadership Theory Application and skill development (Lussier, R. N., & Achua, P-443), Effective Leaders are role model for change. A leader must embody the change that he or she wants to see in the followers. Gandhi put it best when he said, “We must become the change that we want to see”. Also, the effective change agent should also be a good listener. Listening helps a leader have a better understanding of the root causes of resistance. Implementing a huge change in the organization was not easy for Musk. The most important value promoted by Musk is the tendency and vision to help others.

Problem Management and Decision Making

Problem management and decision-making are important skills for any business or Organization. They are generally interlinked with each other. Problem-management generally involves decision-making, and decision-making is especially important for management and leadership. There are different processes and techniques to improve decision making. With reference to the book ‘Leadership Theory Application and skill development (Lussier, R.N, & Achua, P-316), there are three major models for decision making: Team centered decision-making model, Leader centered decision-making model, Normative decision-making model.

The first model is generally focused with the teams. The team-centered decision-making model is preferred when a relevant information and expertise are scattered among different people and participation is needed to obtain necessary commitment. (Lussier & Achua, Leadership: theory, application, et kill development, 2016). The role of the leaders in the team centered decision-making model is to serve as a mentor or consultant.

The second model is the Leader-centered decision making model. In this type of model, Leader exercises their power in managing and instructing their team members.

The final model is the Normative decision-making model. The normative leadership model has a time-driven and development-driven decision tree that enables the user to select one of five leadership styles (decide, consult individually, consult group, facilitate, and delegate) appropriate for the situation to maximize decision outcomes. Each of the five leadership styles affects the level of participation in the decision by followers. (Ref-Lussier & Achua, Leadership: theory, application, et kill developmenz, 2016).

There is generally greater appreciation for team centered decision-making model because it is more effective rather compared to other two decision-making model. Many of the leaders find out that the leader centered decision-making model does not fit well with the organization who is more focused with the team. Musk always believes in working as a team, and it seems like Musk always believes in the team-decision making model in solving any types of problems. According to him one can’t get succeed without a good team. In an interview, he said that he always interacts with his team member and he also make sure that any of the employer in his organization can easily coordinate with him. He also tries to share the same ideas with respect to their team members. These shows that Elon Musk have the qualities which a leader in a team decision-making model had including his ability to listen carefully and also to encourage the team members. After implementing team centered decision-making model, Musk was able to improve the decision making and to increase the commitment by team members.

Consensus Building and Negotiation

The term Consensus building refers to variety of approaches. Generally, it is a voluntary mechanism in which the different participants come to a mutual consent regardless of their differences. Elon Musk is also known to be a great negotiator. He has also been remarkably successful in negotiating and securing nearly $5 billion in state tax credits. One of the major factors in his negotiation is how he uses the title Power to his advantage while negotiating. There are different power level that Musk uses during the process of negotiation. One of the main traits that he uses is communication skills. As we all know that Musk is a very good speaker and so he uses his communication skills in consensus building and negotiation. Musk have a charismatic power, the power to influence people with personality.

Negotiation process can be easily understood with the following four-stage process (Ref-Lussier & Achua, Leadership: theory, application, et kill developmenz, 2016, P- 165).

• Preparation and Planning: In every business in which Musk is associated with, he bought a vision of doing the things in a unique way. He always tries to think out of the box by implementing new ideas and creating new goals.
• Definition of ground rules: Musk always tries to establish different rules and procedures for the planned negotiation. He believes more on facts and figure instead of any random statistics.
• Clarification and Justification: After implementing the ground rules, Musk focuses on the clarification and justification. Musk always tries to use his all logical points in convincing the negotiators.
• Problem Solving: With reference to the book Leadership application & skill development, the collaborating conflict style user assertively attempts to jointly resolve the conflict with the best solution agreeable to all parties. It is also called the problem-solving style. Musk always remains concerned about other needs as well and he always tried to find the best solution that is satisfactory to all the organization.
• Implementation: Musk tries to create the link between different organization and tries to persuade parties to develop agreements. This type of skills is very important in every aspect of organizational life.

Elon Musk is also known as one of the few people who are inventive negotiators. Some of the people who are known as inventive negotiators are Tim Cook (CEO of Apple), Nikola Tesla. From what he has achieved we can say that Elon Musk has been highly successful in building consensus with the people all around the world.

Application of Analysis to Leadership Roles and Responsibilities

For a proposed change or decision, it is always essential to think why the change is needed and how to deal with the change. There are lots of key aspects that I am willing to apply to my carrier from the discussed Leadership Roles and Responsibilities of Elon Musk:

• I will mainly focus on developing the skills for decision making. Musk decision making capabilities and strategies reflects the perfect example of a good decision maker. As my Company is the global leaders of HVAC products, so the motive of my company is to improve the productivity and the team culture. so, I think my company needs the employer who is good in decision making.
• My company also has good bargaining skills so I will try to use the Elon musk’s negotiation skills. Without a proper negotiation skill, we cannot accomplish the goal of any organization.
• A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK® guide). (2004). Sydney, NSW: SAI Global.
• Lussier, R. N., & Achua, C. F. (2016). Leadership: Theory, application, et kill developmenz. Australia: Cengage Learning.
• Lahey, K. (2019, February 01). Top 10 in Leadership from Elon Musk. Retrieved from https://www.predictivesuccess.com/blog/elon-musk-top-10-leadership-lessons/
• Claiborne, M. (2017, July 11). How Elon Musk Secured Billions From One Investor We All Have Access To. Retrieved from https://www.inc.com/monique-claiborne/how-elon-musk-secured-billions-from-one-investor-w.html
• Worley, C. G., & Vick, Y. H. (2017, October 29). Leading and Managing Change – A Peer-Reviewed Academic Articles: GBR. Retrieved from https://gbr.pepperdine.edu/2010/08/leading-and-managing-change/

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Elon Musk`s Leadership Style

Table of Contents

Elon Musk is one of the planet’s most renowned business strategists and a leader in innovation over the past three decades. Musk’s most notable accomplishments stem from his investments in technically and financially viable ventures despite overwhelming obstacles (Shaw, 2020). He has essentially etched his name on every firm he has been a part of, and he has largely been a big success. Most significantly, Musk has always been fascinated with bold business concepts that are difficult but also extremely lucrative. Over the years, Musk has learned that coming up with the right question is the key to unlocking various dimensions of success within the private and public business domains. Arguably, Musk is a transformational leader inspired by his unconventional upbringing and personal motivation to inspire positive change within his spheres of influence.

Background and Leadership Style

According to Abatecola and Cristofaro (2019), in the modern workplace typified by uncertainties and change, there are growing concerns about how leaders can gain success despite the complex choices and concessions they are forced to make. No one knows the ramifications of such decisions than Elon Musk, whose choices have worked towards enabling him and his projects to influence humanity. While his business career is only likely to move upward, his often-overlooked leadership skills will be equally important in his future success. In particular, he has won praise worldwide because of his audacity, boldness, foresight, and fantastic leadership skills.

Elon Musk’s leadership qualities can be traced back to his upbringing in a fragmented family. Following his parent’s divorce, he had to stay with his father for several years in South Africa. As a result, he was compelled to adapt to the fast-changing community, school, and family demands, which made him comfortable in tense business situations. Over the years, he developed into a visionary person with exceptional resolve, courage, and coping ability, traits that allowed him to transform into a skilled leader. In his various roles, Musk was guided by the belief that conviction, proficiency, motivation, and a sense of direction are the key to individual success. According to Lang et al. (2018), Musk exemplifies the characteristics of transformational leaders, identifying potential and working to develop it. In particular, Musk regularly engages his followers and inspires them to go past their duties. For example, in 2014, he mentioned that Tesla Motors would make some of its intellectual property open-source to enable other automakers to learn about his electric car revolution to drive the industry forward.

Additionally, his leadership efficiency stems from his dedication to his goals, which motivates others. Given his past accomplishments and popularity in the businesses he is interested in, he is also a highly regarded figure who inspires those he works with. Notably, he makes considerable investments in the corporations he manages, and far from being a wealthy venture capitalist, he takes a hands-on approach to run his businesses. As such, his colleagues and employees do not view him as just another billionaire but rather as someone knowledgeable and passionate about everything he touches (Vance, 2015). Besides, instead of being profit-motivated, Musk embraces a goal because he feels it will result in success. By doing this, Musk ensures his staff concentrate on the main goals rather than the financial benefits of their work.

Leadership Theory

The transformation theory of leadership clearly captures Musk’s own. Musk shows his desire for success in his executive roles by taking informed risks, which most people often avoid. He trusts his instincts and always listens to his assistants’ counsel before settling on a decision he believes will have the best outcome (Lord et al., 2017). Thanks to his audacious adoption of technology advancements for the future, Musk, a transformational leader, is also considered the most inventive and impactful person of the contemporary era. Additionally, he is known for being the most outspoken supporter of the use of sustainable energy and for introducing the idea to the auto sector. The move, evidenced by Tesla Motors that led to the debut of electric vehicles, serves as an example of the trend (Nawaz & Khan, 2016)). Many people credit his transformative leadership approach with these successes.

Elon Musk is a revolutionary and inspiring figure who thrives in extremely ambiguous situations with scant precedents. His leadership prowess is attributable to his foresight, dedication, hard work, and endless optimism. These traits have been critical in his growth as a global icon, with influence traversing different fields and industries. Other than founding some of the world’s most exciting firms, Musk is the epitome of a successful and effective leader. What is more, Musk is one of the unique transformational leaders driving progress in several domains, and his leadership and impact extend past the automotive and energy industries. He also has a strong sense of direction and a flexible leadership style and is highly ambitious. Constructive verbal interactions motivate his perseverance and brilliance in the workplace, and principles have given him the ability to put together Tesla, one of the most radical businesses that the world has ever known. He agrees that communication is crucial for every company and is the main factor in ultimate prosperity.

• Abatecola, G., & Cristofaro, M. (2019). Ingredients of sustainable CEO behaviour: Theory and practice.  Sustainability ,  11 (7), 1950. https://www.mdpi.com/438368
• Lang, D., Handley, M., & Jablokow, K. (2018). The competencies of innovation leaders. Innovation Leadership , 15-28. Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315178219-2/competencies-innovation-leaders-dena-lang-meg-handley-kathryn-jablokow
• Lord, R. G., Day, D. V., Zaccaro, S. J., Avolio, B. J., & Eagly, A. H. (2017). Leadership in applied psychology: Three waves of theory and research.  Journal of Applied Psychology ,  102 (3), 434. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-03593-001
• Nawaz, Z., & Khan, I. (2016). Leadership theories and styles: A literature review.  Leadership ,  16 (1), 1-7. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Allah-Nawaz-2/publication/293885908_LT1Kqob5UDEML61gCyjnAcfMXgkdP3wGcg45erature_Review/links/56bcd3ad08ae9ca20a4cdea2/Leadership-Theories-and-Styles-A-Literature-Review.pdf
• Shaw, R. B. (2020).  All in: How obsessive leaders achieve the extraordinary . HarperCollins Leadership. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/all-in-robert-bruce-shaw/1134978558
• Vance, A. (2015).  Elon Musk: How the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is shaping our future . Random House. https://books.google.com/books/about/Elon_Musk.html?id=16qRjgEACAAJ
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SpaceX's giant Starship will be 500 feet tall for Mars missions, Elon Musk says (video)

Starship reached orbital speed during its 3rd launch in March.

SpaceX's Starship, the largest rocket in the world, will get even bigger as the company continues to target Mars missions in the future.

Elon Musk , the billionaire founder of SpaceX , told employees on April 4 that Starship will eventually be as tall as 500 feet (150 meters), roughly 20% higher than the massive system aboard the Super Heavy rocket right now. 

What's more, advances in reusability will have each launch cost roughly $3 million each, Musk predicted; that's less than a third of what a (much smaller) Falcon 1 rocket launch cost in 2004 when inflation is taken into account. (The figure two decades ago was $5.9 million, according to NBC , which is roughly $9.5 million in 2024 dollars.) 

"These are sort of unthinkable numbers," Musk said in the Starship update, released publicly April 6, roughly one month after the third and last test flight to date . "Nobody ever thought that this was possible, but we're not breaking any physics to achieve this. So this is within the bounds, without breaking physics. We can do this."

Related: SpaceX fires up huge Super Heavy booster ahead of 4th Starship test flight (photos, video)

Musk tends to deliver Starship updates at least once a year to highlight progress the company is making toward its long-term plans of settling Mars . Indeed, the last year has seen three Starship launches, so there has been progress made recently. Musk didn't, however, address delays in launching Starship that have contributed to pushing back the launch date for the first moon landing under the NASA-led Artemis program .

SpaceX was named the vendor for the Artemis 3 landing mission that, until recently, was set for 2025. In January, NASA elected to hold the launch date another year, to 2026, due to a range of technical issues . Aside from Starship not being ready — the agency wants many successful launches before approving it for astronaut flights — Artemis 3 was also delayed due to slow progress on spacesuits and problems with the mission's Orion spacecraft , among other factors.

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However, Musk's words about Artemis, to employees, focused on Starship's future capabilities: orbiting the Earth and refilling its tanks, both of which have yet to be proven on its three test flights.

"This will ... be very important for the Artemis program for the NASA to get back to the moon," Musk said of those capabilities. He also envisions a "Moon Base Alpha" that would include ships "specialized for going to and from the moon", meaning there would be no heat shield or flaps due to the lack of atmosphere.

Related: NASA celebrates SpaceX Starship's 3rd test flight, but more work needed ahead of Artemis moon missions

Musk's 45-minute speech touched on the usual themes for his Red Planet updates, focusing on how to send a lot of cargo out there for eventual settlers. He noted that would take thousands of launches to do; for perspective, Musk said the company has completed 327 successful Falcon series launches and about 80 percent of those had reused boosters (a key factor in reducing cost.)

SpaceX is by far the most active launching entity on Earth, and Musk forecasts the company will send roughly 90 percent of orbital mass aloft this year compared to China's 6 percent (the second-largest entity.) 

Starship's next and fourth spaceflight attempt, expected to take place in May, aims to have the first stage of Super Heavy land "on essentially a virtual tower" in the Gulf of Mexico, Musk said. Once the company safely gets that done, they will consider using the launching area at Starbase, in south Texas, for future landings as soon as Flight 5. (Musk pegged the chances of success on Flight 4 at 80% or 90%.)

Musk also wants to perform two splashdowns of the upper stage of Starship in a row, in a controlled fashion, before sending it to Starbase on a future flight. "We do not want to rain debris over Mexico or the U.S.," he said. "My guess is probably next year when we will be able to reuse Starship."

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Overall, Musk plans for multiple Starship launches to take place this year, and suggests SpaceX will build an additional six spacecraft by the end of 2024. A new rocket factory for the company should be available in 2025, which would make production even faster. 

Future versions of Starship will include a "Starship 2" to send 100 tons of payload to low-Earth orbit and the 500-foot "Starship 3" for 200 or more tons. Bigger vehicles, Musk stressed, will mean fewer (four or five) refueling missions in low Earth orbit to get a Starship ready for the journey to Mars someday. 

Of these milestones, Musk said it would be "very much a success-oriented schedule." His speech did not mention the Federal Aviation Administration, which must approve each one of the launches, nor ongoing criticism of the environmental impact of Starship on the ecologically sensitive area near Starbase.

That impact may continue to grow, as Musk said it would take roughly 10 launches a day to send hundreds of vehicles to Mars every two years (when the planet is closest) to make a long-term settlement feasible. As for the number of Mars-bound people, that would be roughly a million folks, he said — that matches predictions he made at least as far back as 2017 . Musk also says he wants to get the settlement going "in 20 years." He said the same thing in 2011 .

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022 covering diversity, education and gaming as well. She was contributing writer for Space.com for 10 years before joining full-time. Elizabeth's reporting includes multiple exclusives with the White House and Office of the Vice-President of the United States, an exclusive conversation with aspiring space tourist (and NSYNC bassist) Lance Bass, speaking several times with the International Space Station, witnessing five human spaceflight launches on two continents, flying parabolic, working inside a spacesuit, and participating in a simulated Mars mission. Her latest book, " Why Am I Taller ?", is co-written with astronaut Dave Williams. Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Space Studies from the University of North Dakota, a Bachelor of Journalism from Canada's Carleton University and a Bachelor of History from Canada's Athabasca University. Elizabeth is also a post-secondary instructor in communications and science at several institutions since 2015; her experience includes developing and teaching an astronomy course at Canada's Algonquin College (with Indigenous content as well) to more than 1,000 students since 2020. Elizabeth first got interested in space after watching the movie Apollo 13 in 1996, and still wants to be an astronaut someday. Mastodon: https://qoto.org/@howellspace

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• Laz excessive superlatives; starship as it stands is problematic with the physical forces during launch,: it destroys it's own launch pad, scattering debris far and wide, the noise is harmful and damaging, and what about the carbon emissions ? a few test launches (failures) to develop the program....at what cost ? Do we need this ? What do we need to go to Mars for ? colonization ? go colonize Antarctica instead- it's far closer and far more habitable in comparison. Reply
• billslugg What you need to do is to become a "credentialed investor", go over the counter and buy some SpaceX stock, then float a stockholder proposal at the next annual meeting. Keep us appraised. Reply
• orsobubu The goal of 2026 for the year of the return (or, according to some, the conquest) of the moon, already postponed many times, seems unrealistic to me; still having to demonstrate the permanence in orbit, the refilling, the recovery of the first stage, the functionality of the starship capture mechanism upon re-entry, plus countless other critical issues... while 2025 is indicated as the year in which a few solutions will be carried out for the first time. Nasa also declares that it intends to see many missions completed successfully before starting artemis 3 (which is still a bit strange, given the vaunted success of the first attempts of many key apollo technologies on the moon, moreover 55 years ago), and this adds a whole series of problems of validating mind-boggling new systems in such a hostile environment. Nasa itself has postponed its objectives countless times - albeit much more limited - in view of artemis 3, such as the suits, the insertion of orion and starliner into orbit, etc. Reply

Laz said: excessive superlatives; starship as it stands is problematic with the physical forces during launch,: it destroys it's own launch pad, scattering debris far and wide, the noise is harmful and damaging, and what about the carbon emissions ? a few test launches (failures) to develop the program....at what cost ? Do we need this ? What do we need to go to Mars for ? colonization ? go colonize Antarctica instead- it's far closer and far more habitable in comparison.

• Unclear Engineer If humans don't manage to kill ourselves off by the time Antarctica has melted enough to be colonized, I am sure it will happen. Greenland much sooner. Reply
• HobartStinsonian There are huge problems to overcome before landing any long-term presence on Mars, or on the moon. Basic engineering: how much weight can the soil support? No idea? You can’t rely on any ship remaining level, not sinking down, until you get this figured out to high reliability. Second issue, what will the effect be of spilling fluids onto the soil to its compressive strength? Consider the soils have been dessicated for billions of years. Then a small spill of water or oil soaks in next to a structural support that sits on that soil. No idea? I bet the impact will be huge and devestating. Will Elon experiment with soils before they land a 500-ft Starship on that soil? The first equipment on moon & Mars needs to be heavy soil-excavating, and heavy mobile cranes. We’ll need to know how to make concrete-like foundations. And how deep do they need to be. Reply
• View All 7 Comments

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Elon Musk’s Next Billion-Dollar Venture Is in Motion Right Now

While Musk’s vision of turning X into a super app is ambitious, it’s also doable

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Key Takeaways:

• Elon Musk is working on his next potential multi-billion-dollar project, one that could be even bigger than PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla combined.
• In an internal X meeting just a few months ago, Musk said: “We’re rapidly transforming the company from what it was, Twitter 1.0, to the everything app.”
• We’re confident he has the tools, technologies, and resources necessary to create a super app worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Elon Musk is one of the richest men in the world. And of course, that didn’t happen by accident. 

He amassed his $185 billion fortune by starting, running, and growing successful businesses. Musk helped transform both PayPal ( PYPL ) and Tesla ( TSLA ) into the multi-billion-dollar firms they are today. He founded SpaceX and turned it into a multi-billion-dollar space exploration empire. 

And now he is working on his next potential multi-billion-dollar project…

One that could be even bigger than PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla combined… A next-gen “ super app. ”

Envisioning a Super App

Back in late 2022, Musk bought the popular social media app Twitter for $44 billion. Since then, he has rebranded it as “X” and executed a plethora of modifications. 

He’s changed the business’ organizational structure, created a new business model, launched new features and introduced new tools. 

Of course, the big questions here are: Why did Musk buy Twitter in the first place? And why is he changing it so radically? 

Well, it’s because Musk wants to turn X into the super app that replaces Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest ( PINS ), Snapchat ( SNAP ), Netflix ( NFLX ), Amazon ( AMZN ), and others.  

In an internal X meeting just a few months ago, Musk said: “We’re rapidly transforming the company from what it was, Twitter 1.0, to the everything app.”

He wants to turn X into a “single application that encompasses everything.”

Elon Musk Aims to Dethrone Incumbent Champions

Now, details on this plan are scant. But we do know that Musk wants to integrate payments into X so users can directly link their bank accounts to send money and buy things from each other. 

Of course, that sounds a lot like eBay ( EBAY ) or Amazon… except it would be built right on top of one of the world’s most popular social media platforms – one that a lot of us already spend a lot of time on every day. 

Such a platform could dethrone eBay or Amazon and become the world’s top online shopping destination. 

And the potential feels near-limitless. X could get into short videos, shows, maybe even movies, making it a threat to Netflix. Musk could incorporate AI to create content, recommend products, etc. 

In fact, Musk has started his own AI startup, xAI, which many think has the potential to rival ChatGPT. And since X has access to a ton of social data, any integrated AI would likely be very good.

So, yes, while Musk’s vision of turning X into a super app is ambitious, it’s also doable. 

We’re confident he has the tools, technologies, and resources necessary to create a super app worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

The Final Word on the Elon Musk Super App

After all, this is Elon Musk we’re talking about…

The same man who helped to grow the world’s largest digital payments platform at a time when everyone thought internet money was a mere fantasy… 

He created the world’s largest space enterprise while everyone was satisfied with NASA. 

And he guided Tesla to become a leading EV maker when there hadn’t really been a successful new auto business in 100 years. 

That’s exactly why we think X could be the next super app.  

But, alas, how can you invest in X’s transcendence? 

You can’t… directly, at least… because Elon Musk took X private when he acquired the company.

But you can invest in a tiny project… trading for less than $1… that could be a big part of X’s transition to super app.

In fact, this sub-$1 project could be the very currency that powers Musk’s new venture. 

Now, there are no guarantees – though our research suggests it is a real possibility. 

And, of course, if that happens… this sub-$1 project will absolutely soar. 

Invest in this explosive penny trade before it takes off.

On the date of publication, Luke Lango did not have (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article.

P.S. You can stay up to speed with Luke’s latest market analysis by reading our Daily Notes! Check out the latest issue on your  Innovation Investor  or  Early Stage Investor  subscriber site.

Meet Luke Lango

By uncovering early investments in hypergrowth industries, Luke Lango puts you on the ground-floor of world-changing megatrends.

Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/hypergrowthinvesting/2024/04/elon-musks-next-billion-dollar-venture-is-in-motion-right-now/.

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What Solar Eclipse-Gazing Has Looked Like for the Past 2 Centuries

Millions of people on Monday will continue the tradition of experiencing and capturing solar eclipses, a pursuit that has spawned a lot of unusual gear.

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By Sarah Eckinger

• April 8, 2024

For centuries, people have been clamoring to glimpse solar eclipses. From astronomers with custom-built photographic equipment to groups huddled together with special glasses, this spectacle has captivated the human imagination.

Creating a Permanent Record

In 1860, Warren de la Rue captured what many sources describe as the first photograph of a total solar eclipse . He took it in Rivabellosa, Spain, with an instrument known as the Kew Photoheliograph . This combination of a telescope and camera was specifically built to photograph the sun.

Forty years later, Nevil Maskelyne, a magician and an astronomy enthusiast, filmed a total solar eclipse in North Carolina. The footage was lost, however, and only released in 2019 after it was rediscovered in the Royal Astronomical Society’s archives.

Telescopic Vision

For scientists and astronomers, eclipses provide an opportunity not only to view the moon’s umbra and gaze at the sun’s corona, but also to make observations that further their studies. Many observatories, or friendly neighbors with a telescope, also make their instruments available to the public during eclipses.

Fredrik Hjalmar Johansen, Fridtjof Nansen and Sigurd Scott Hansen observing a solar eclipse while on a polar expedition in 1894 .

Women from Wellesley College in Massachusetts and their professor tested out equipment ahead of their eclipse trip (to “catch old Sol in the act,” as the original New York Times article phrased it) to New London, Conn., in 1922.

A group from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania traveled to Yerbaniz, Mexico, in 1923, with telescopes and a 65-foot camera to observe the sun’s corona .

Dr. J.J. Nassau, director of the Warner and Swasey Observatory at Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, prepared to head to Douglas Hill, Maine, to study an eclipse in 1932. An entire freight car was required to transport the institution’s equipment.

Visitors viewed a solar eclipse at an observatory in Berlin in the mid-1930s.

A family set up two telescopes in Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1963. The two children placed stones on the base to help steady them.

An astronomer examined equipment for an eclipse in a desert in Mauritania in June 1973. We credit the hot climate for his choice in outfit.

Indirect Light

If you see people on Monday sprinting to your local park clutching pieces of paper, or with a cardboard box of their head, they are probably planning to reflect or project images of the solar eclipse onto a surface.

Cynthia Goulakos demonstrated a safe way to view a solar eclipse , with two pieces of cardboard to create a reflection of the shadowed sun, in Lowell, Mass., in 1970.

Another popular option is to create a pinhole camera. This woman did so in Central Park in 1963 by using a paper cup with a small hole in the bottom and a twin-lens reflex camera.

Amateur astronomers viewed a partial eclipse, projected from a telescope onto a screen, from atop the Empire State Building in 1967 .

Back in Central Park, in 1970, Irving Schwartz and his wife reflected an eclipse onto a piece of paper by holding binoculars on the edge of a garbage basket.

Children in Denver in 1979 used cardboard viewing boxes and pieces of paper with small pinholes to view projections of a partial eclipse.

A crowd gathered around a basin of water dyed with dark ink, waiting for the reflection of a solar eclipse to appear, in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 1995.

Staring at the Sun (or, How Not to Burn Your Retinas)

Eclipse-gazers have used different methods to protect their eyes throughout the years, some safer than others .

In 1927, women gathered at a window in a building in London to watch a total eclipse through smoked glass. This was popularized in France in the 1700s , but fell out of favor when physicians began writing papers on children whose vision was damaged.

Another trend was to use a strip of exposed photographic film, as seen below in Sydney, Australia, in 1948 and in Turkana, Kenya, in 1963. This method, which was even suggested by The Times in 1979 , has since been declared unsafe.

Solar eclipse glasses are a popular and safe way to view the event ( if you use models compliant with international safety standards ). Over the years there have been various styles, including these large hand-held options found in West Palm Beach, Fla., in 1979.

Parents and children watched a partial eclipse through their eclipse glasses in Tokyo in 1981.

Slimmer, more colorful options were used in Nabusimake, Colombia, in 1998.

In France in 1999.

And in Iran and England in 1999.

And the best way to see the eclipse? With family and friends at a watch party, like this one in Isalo National Park in Madagascar in 2001.

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Read the memo Elon Musk sent Tesla staff announcing that the company is laying off more than 10% of the workforce

• Oops! Something went wrong. Please try again later. More content below

Elon Musk announced in an internal memo that Tesla plans to cut over 10% of its global workforce.

The Tesla CEO said that as the EV maker grew rapidly, there's been some "duplication" of roles.

He added that the cuts will help it become "lean, innovative and hungry for the next growth phase."

Elon Musk sent Tesla employees a memo on Sunday announcing that the EV maker would be laying off more than 10% of its workforce globally. The internal email was sent close to midnight PT, per a timestamp seen by Business Insider.

In the memo, obtained by BI, the Tesla CEO said that there has been a "duplication of roles and job functions in certain areas" as the company has grown rapidly.

On Sunday night, workers who were impacted by the layoffs received an email to their personal accounts, informing them their roles had been eliminated.

"Effective now, you will not need to perform any further work and therefore will no longer have access to Tesla systems and physical locations," the email read. Tesla's share price was down by 1.2% in premarket trading on Monday on the back of the job cuts news.

Over the weekend, Tesla workers had speculated that layoffs were on the horizon , as rumors that some managers had been told to provide upper management with a list of names spread throughout the company. Separately, Tesla started instructing managers in February to identify which roles at the company were business-critical and had temporarily delayed performance reviews. It's the company's first large-scale layoffs since it laid off some workers at its plant in Buffalo, New York, in February 2023.

At the time, the Workers United union said in a complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board that Tesla unlawfully laid off some of the staff and that the workers were terminated possibly "in retaliation for union activity and to discourage union activity."  Tesla denied this  and said the employees were laid off due to poor performance.  The job cuts come as Tesla is grappling with slower demand for its EVs and its stock is down over 31% year-to-date. The company will post its next earnings report on April 23.

Read the full memo Elon Musk sent Tesla employees below:

Over the years, we have grown rapidly with multiple factories scaling around the globe. With this rapid growth there has been duplication of roles and job functions in certain areas. As we prepare the company for our next phase of growth, it is extremely important to look at every aspect of the company for cost reductions and increasing productivity. As part of this effort, we have done a thorough review of the organization and made the difficult decision to reduce our headcount by more than 10% globally. There is nothing I hate more, but it must be done. This will enable us to be lean, innovative and hungry for the next growth phase cycle. I would like to thank everyone who is departing Tesla for their hard work over the years. I'm deeply grateful for your many contributions to our mission and we wish you well in your future opportunities. It is very difficult to say goodbye. For those remaining, I would like to thank you in advance for the difficult job that remains ahead. We are developing some of the most revolutionary technologies in auto, energy and artificial intelligence. As we prepare the company for the next phase of growth, your resolve will make a huge difference in getting us there. Thanks, Elon

Do you work for Tesla or have insights to share? Reach out to the reporter from a non-work email and device at [email protected]

Read the original article on Business Insider

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Too many models

Other large language models like LLaMa or OLMo --  though they technically share a basic architecture -- don't actually fill the same role. There's some deliberate confusion about these two things, because the models' developers want to borrow a little of the fanfare associated with major AI platform releases, like your GPT-4V or Gemini Ultra.

Stock market today: Tech stocks smoked, Nvidia tumbles 10% to cap worst week of the year

A measure of calm was returning after Israel's retaliatory strike on Iran spooked the market and spurred a rush to safe havens such as gold.

Elon Musk and Dogecoin: A Timeline of Tweets and Turbulence

Dogecoin, abbreviated as DOGE and symbolized by Ð, is a cryptocurrency that originated on December 6, 2013, as a light-hearted parody of the then-booming crypto market. Conceived by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, Dogecoin featured the iconic Shiba Inu dog from the popular "doge" meme as its mascot. Initially created as a joke, Dogecoin quickly gained traction and developed its own vibrant online community.

The history of Dogecoin is marked by significant events, from its inception to its involvement in various charitable initiatives and its rollercoaster ride in terms of valuation. One notable aspect of Dogecoin's journey is its association with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose tweets often have a significant impact on its price movements.

Musk's involvement with Dogecoin began in December 2020 when he tweeted "One Word: Doge," causing a 20% surge in its value. Subsequent tweets from Musk, such as "Dogecoin is the people's crypto" and "no highs, no lows, only Doge," further fueled Dogecoin's rise, with its value increasing by approximately 40%.

One of the most memorable instances of Musk's influence on Dogecoin occurred on April 15, 2021, when he tweeted an image of Joan Miró's Dog Barking at the Moon painting with the caption "Doge Barking at the Moon." This tweet led to a more than 100% increase in Dogecoin's price, showcasing Musk's ability to move markets with his social media presence.

However, Musk's relationship with Dogecoin has not been without controversy. Critics have accused him of market manipulation due to the significant price fluctuations that often follow his tweets about the cryptocurrency. In June 2022, Musk was named in a complaint seeking damages of $258 billion for allegedly artificially inflating Dogecoin's price through his social influence.

Despite the criticisms, Musk's impact on Dogecoin remains undeniable. His tweets continue to shape its trajectory, with each mention causing fluctuations in its value. Whether Dogecoin will transcend its origins as a meme coin and establish itself as a serious player in the crypto market remains to be seen. However, one thing is certain: Elon Musk's tweets will likely continue to play a significant role in its journey.

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Elon Musk’s $56 billion pay package saga ensnares Tesla chair Robyn Denholm, the woman who was supposed to rein him in

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Judges from the New York Court of Appeals could revisit Harvey Weinstein’s previous convictions, funding for women-led health startups spiked more than 2,000% in 2023, and a Delaware judge’s decision striking down Elon Musk’s pay package puts Tesla chair Robyn Denholm in the spotlight . Have a restful weekend. – Pay package. Late last month, a Delaware court struck down Elon Musk’s $55.8 billion Tesla pay package in response to a shareholder lawsuit that claimed the proposal breached fiduciary duty to investors. Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick’s decision enraged the Tesla CEO, who has said he plans to reincorporate Tesla in Texas rather than stay in Delaware.

But McCormick’s decision didn’t only target Musk. Another figure in her 200-page document is Robyn Denholm , Tesla’s board chair. Denholm, an Australian former telecom exec who is also a partner at Canva investor Blackbird, became chair of Tesla’s board in 2018 after Musk was forced to step down from the role as part of an SEC settlement. At the time, the SEC said Musk’s removal as chairman—and the appointment of an independent successor—was “intended to prevent further market disruption and harm to Tesla’s shareholders.” Denholm has served on Tesla’s board since 2014.

McCormick struck down Musk’s pay package because she determined the process that led to its approval was deeply flawed, pinning most of that blame on the board and its compensation committee. Musk’s pay was the largest ever proposed for an executive at a publicly traded company, she found. She argued that several decision-makers were “beholden to Musk” because of personal relationships and sky-high compensation.

Denholm, in particular, is called out for earning $280 million from sales of Tesla options in 2021 and 2022. McCormick repeatedly cites Denholm’s testimony that the money was “life-changing” compared to the $3 million a year she earned beforehand.

Tesla and Denholm haven’t respond to requests for comment.

McCormick’s decision prompted all kinds of reactions—Musk’s fury, Denholm’s silence so far, and others’ defense of the chair. ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood, a major Tesla investor, defended Denholm after the ruling as a “professional of unquestionable integrity.” 

Two weeks after the decision, shareholders and others are still waiting to find out what it will mean for them. In the meantime, the situation provides a fascinating look at one of the trickiest jobs in corporate America.

When Musk was forced to step down as Tesla’s chair, some questioned whether any incoming chair would be able to effectively oversee one of the world’s richest men. Denholm was cast as a kind of “ adult in the room ,” a role that women in Silicon Valley—starting with Sheryl Sandberg—have often been slotted into. (It’s a dynamic Musk seems to seek out —see: Linda Yaccarino at X and Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX.)

And governing Musk—a CEO who this week posted , “boobs just rock, it’s a fact”—is arguably a challenge levels beyond overseeing another eccentric CEO.

As recently as 2022, Denholm was praised by another judge as an “independent, powerful and positive force” in a lawsuit over Tesla’s 2016 acquisition of SolarCity . So what changed?

During the SolarCity acquisition, Denholm was only a director—not chair. In the years since, Musk has become even more of a wildcard, with his attention diverted to his purchase of Twitter. And the spotlight on Denholm’s decision-making has grown brighter.

Charles Elson, a retired professor at the University of Delaware who specializes in corporate governance, argues that directors should never sell stock. He believes the recent court decision damages the reputations of Tesla’s directors and says the board will need to be “refreshed.” “No one should have taken that kind of money,” he says of the board’s compensation. “At that point, it begins to compromise your independence.”

And, he tells me, this episode provides some insight for other boards overseeing headstrong CEOs. “Stand your ground,” he advises. “You have to represent the investors.”

Emma Hinchliffe [email protected] @_emmahinchliffe

The Broadsheet is Fortune’ s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Joseph Abrams. Subscribe here .

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- Funding spike. Funding for health care startups led by women increased by more than 2,000% to $52 million in 2023, according to a new report by Salient Advisory that was sponsored by the Gates Foundation. Women-led health startups in Egypt, Kenya, and Nigeria drew the largest sums, with companies like Kasha, a Kenya-based pharmaceuticals and women's health products provider, emerging as a frontrunner. Bloomberg

- Health care holdouts. Democrats and Republicans across almost every state have passed laws guaranteeing a full year of postpartum Medicaid coverage in an effort to bring down maternal morbidity numbers. Four states are holding out: Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Axios

- Just a call away. A new paper in Nature Medicine reports that prescribing abortion pills over the phone and distributing them through the mail is just as safe as receiving the pill at an in-person clinic. The study found that nearly all of 6,000 patients questioned didn’t need any medical care after taking the pill or have any adverse reactions to it, undercutting an argument in an upcoming Supreme Court case challenging telehealth access to the pill. Forbes

- ‘Weird and wonderful.’ Pam Chan left her job as global head of direct private opportunities at BlackRock to open the New York office of Lingotto, a new asset manager backed by the billionaire Agnelli family of Italy. Chan, an early investor in music rights, says the new job will tap into her true passion: hunting for “weird and wonderful” investment opportunities. Wall Street Journal

MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Instacart COO Asha Sharma will depart March 1 and will not be replaced. Quartet health announced Karen Mitchell as chief growth officer.

ON MY RADAR

The tangled fates of Fani Willis and her biggest case The New Yorker

She was denied an abortion after Roe fell. This is a year in her family’s life ProPublica

What do women designers want?  Elle

PARTING WORDS

"You all knew I was going to shoot a logo-3 for the record. C’mon now."

—Iowa's Caitlin Clark, after becoming the NCAA's leading scorer for women's basketball . She broke the record with a 3-pointer near mid-court. 

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