He's our 2014 commencement speaker. He's the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, and the founder of PayPal. Elon Musk is doing big things.
The native South African taught himself computer programming at age 12 and sold his first video game for $500. He successfully sold his email payment service PayPal for $1.5 billion to Ebay. He founded a space exploration company and solely funded its early stages with $100 million of his own fortune. He turned around Tesla Motors, which is the only electric car company that has had much success, even after ten years of losses on its financial statements.
Why should we care?
SpaceX: Elon Musk wants to take people to space, more people than ever before. He is nicknamed the "poster child of the commercial space travel revolution". With government affiliated agencies like NASA contracting most of their work out now because of funding cuts, private companies are now potentially very lucrative. Musk stated that he wanted to reduce the cost of space travel by a factor of 10, eventually leading to the colonization to Mars. Musk is a forward thinker and in many interviews states the risks of living in a modern world where anything can go wrong, and creating an "escape" on another planet will prove very useful:
"An asteroid or a super volcano could destroy us, and we face risks the dinosaurs never saw: an engineered virus, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, catastrophic global warming or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us. Humankind evolved over millions of years, but in the last sixty years atomic weaponry created the potential to extinguish ourselves. Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond this green and blue ball—or go extinct."Tesla: We see them around sometimes and its always cool to point them out! Tesla is making 550 cars per week, but selling them like hot cakes. There is a wait time of up to 6 months for the Tesla Model S. They are even set to come out with a minivan version in the next year or two, as well as dramatically increasing the amount of supercharger stations across the globe. This all seems great but Tesla is running into some major roadblocks. The selling of Tesla is now banned in 5 states because of automobile dealers lobbying in state legislatures to halt the direct-to-customer approach that Tesla uses. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Even though Tesla is loses 5 states worth of sales, I think it makes the brand more exclusive and desirable. People who want the car, and have the money to buy it, still cannot buy it easily!
Hyperloop: Elon Musk is currently working on a plan to create a aerodynamically absurd transportation system that would theoretically get people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes! The project is estimated to cost $6 billion, and would only use solar power. Just imagine the possibilities...
Elon Musk, you've done it all by the time you reached 42, and there is still a lot more to look forward to.
He truly is an amazing guy. I think the main thing about Musk is his desire to push the human race forward. He seems to be thinking one step ahead of what we are doing now, and I think innovators like him are so important to our society. We need people like Musk to come up with the outside the lines ideas. While his Hyperloop and space travel seem silly now, they won't in a few decades. When we are suffering from even more extreme pollution or when something catastrophic happens to our planet, we need to have a plan. Luckily, it seems like that plan is already invented and just needs to be implemented.
ReplyDeleteI think Elon Musk encompasses the title of your blog. He does business for the right reasons. What is most impressive about him is the fact that he is so driven to change the world with technology and truly believes that he can better the state of all human life by improving technology. That is extremely inspiring in a day in age where many people are skeptical of the rich and of big business.
ReplyDeleteElon Musk is an enigma to our society. He is always coming out with these seemingly outlandish ideas that turn out to be brilliant. Not only is he one step ahead of other innovators at a time, but he also tries to avoid the spotlight. He seems to be a very humble man, which just adds to his intelligence in my opinion. Hopefully Elon Musk has more creations in the works to keep adding sustainability and improving the performance of our lives. He is a modern day Superman in my eyes.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, we do need more Elon Musks in the world. So often people are paralyzed by the fear of something new that they fail to act on any new thoughts or ideas they may have. The thing with Elon is he knows that these ideas are outlandish but he realizes it all has to begin somewhere and he doesnt mind being that guy leading the charge. He expects businesses like Tesla, SpaceX, and Hyperloop to take a loss, but he is primarily motivated by moving the needle forward. It's always difficult to be the first one to attempt something and in this sense you are right that we need more people like Elon Musk.
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