Five years ago, Elon Musk wasn’t a name we knew. Apart from those well-informed tech-heads, or dedicated readers of newspaper’s science pages, the man-on-the-street would have struggled to name few, if any, of the pioneer’s projects and achievements.
But how times change. Over recent years, Musk has driven to the top of the electric car game with Tesla, run circles around his competition in with Hyperloop technology and made bold statements about space travel that have had Richard Branson and his entire Virgin Galactic team quaking in their spaceboots. The 46-year old has now made a name for himself on the global stage and, just last year, was named on Forbes’ list of The World’s Most Powerful People.
So if you’re still in the dark when it comes to Mr Musk, here’s a very brief guide to the innovations and inventions of the South African-born entrepreneur, investor, CEO and CTO who may just hold the keys to our future.
Having made millions upon millions from previous investments, and helping found online banking companies such as PayPal, Musk clearly believed his future was written in the stars when he founded SpaceX in 2002.
And, after proving over the course of a decade that his reusable rockets, designed to deliver payloads and astronauts to space, he made the giant leap to NASA in 2012 to become the first commercial craft to deliver a payload to the International Space Station.
But that’s only the half of it. Next came a Branson-echoing shout to the people of Musk’s very own space race. He claimed that he would send people not only to the moon, but also to Mars – and as soon as next year? Recently, Musk’s had to re-evaluate these plans after critics pointed out they lacked both depth, planning and clarity. But he’s sure got vision.
Although Musk didn’t build Tesla from the bottom up – the automaker was founded by an engineer and a computer scientist two years before the entrepreneur came on board – he certainly pushed the vehicles up a gear, and got them on the right track commercially. Today, Tesla is renowned as the foremost electric car maker and lithium iron producer in the world – and is helping kick the old fashioned internal combustion engine to the kerb.
Indeed, Bernard Shaw’s famous observation that “all progress relies on the unreasonable man” couldn’t be more true than when Elon Musk is in the room. Seemingly erratic and unerringly electric, the man in the driving seat of Tesla knows exactly where he’s going.
And, speaking of reaching your destination, Musk seems obsessed with the idea of speeding up every journey from your everyday commute to far flung space travel. Just last year, he helped propose the idea for The Boring Company, a group that plans to ease congestion in the city of Los Angeles by literally boring giant holes and tunnels for traffic to travel through below the existing roads.
But Hyperloop may be Musk’s most ambitious Earth-based transport solution to date. A train-like transport system that halved journey times by running on electric propulsion through a sealed, low-pressure tube, the initiative was initially intended to run from Los Angeles to San Francisco. However, after being open-sourced by Elon and his XPrize foundation to a development team to make his ambitions a reality, the first working prototype was on a significantly smaller scale. However, like many of Musk’s projects, Hyperloop rumbles on in the background, with a tentative completion date of 2021.
Weaning the world off atmosphere-destroying coal-fired power stations, Musk is also on a quest to charge up his Tesla Powerball using his Solar City and then use it to power the commercial electric utility grid – because of course he is.
The Powerball product, essentially the same lithium iron batteries that power Tesla cars, is intended to save the environment, lower your utility bills and ensure you live a cleaner life. It may not be as sexy as space travel, or as immediately helpful as the Hyperloop, but it’s another accolade that proves Musk is looking to the future.
And, even mentioning Musk’s endeavours from PayPal to Tesla, this still doesn’t touch on his many projects such as Neuralink, where he aims to use AI for medicinal purposes and alleviate people with chronic conditions such as epilepsy, and the Musk Electric Jet, a supersonic jet aircraft with electric fan propulsion.
But where does this inspiration come from? Just take a look at Musk’s reading list and it’s easy to see why the South African is such a visionary – for he enjoys the work of Isaac Asimov, the famed writer and professor of biochemistry, who once said: “No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.”
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