The Significance of Elon Musk
If you haven’t heard of Elon Musk, you must have well have hidden under a giant rock, and then sealed the gaps with industrial-grade cement. In case that has been your lifestyle for the past decade, this is the blog post for you. Alternatively, if you do know about him, this should give you a little more insight into just how important he is (and could be) for humanity’s future.
Early life
Some believe that Musk was born into wealth, which he certainly was not. Musk’s mother has often spoken about the difficulties they used to have. One of her tweets explains how Elon, his cousin, and his brother used to ‘take turns sleeping on the bed, couch and carpet.’
Furthermore, he was described as an “awkward and introverted” child and was bullied severely throughout his childhood. Supposedly, he was once hospitalised after a group of bullies threw him down a flight of stairs. To think he is now the richest person in the world, with a net worth of ~ $250 billion, is almost unbelievable.
So, what has he done to make him so successful? He founded his first company with his brother: Zip2. The purpose of the company was to provide maps and business directories to online newspapers. You probably think you don’t know Zip2, but I can almost guarantee you do know it by a different name… PayPal. That’s right, Zip2 eventually transformed into PayPal, making Musk the real foundation of the multi-billion-dollar online payment system. Not bad for your first company. When PayPal was sold to eBay, it made Musk a handsome $165 million. 99% of people would have settled with this amount and gone off to live their dream life, but not Musk. This was just the beginning for him. I personally think the fact that he founded such a huge company and most people don’t even know him for it, says a lot about the character of Elon.
Tesla
In the early 2000s, people said ‘there would not be a decent electric car for over 50 years’. Despite this claim, Musk founded Tesla with the belief that he could change this. Many believed he was delusional, and yet within 10 years he had released the Model S, which is often described as ‘the perfect electric car’. Not only is it outstanding as an electric vehicle, but it’s truly amazing for any vehicle of its kind. Despite being a standard sedan, and not priced too extortionately, it has a 0–60 time of 2.07 seconds, and the new “plaid” model is claimed to be the first production car to break the 0–60 2.0 second barrier, at 1.99 seconds! It’s no understatement to say that Elon Musk and Tesla revolutionised the automobile industry. The thing I find most remarkable is Tesla’s market cap. The graph below shows the market capitalisation of the top 8 automobile giants. Tesla is almost two and a half times as rich as second place, Toyota. Bear in mind this a year and a half ago too!
Tesla is not slowing down at all either. In addition to their more traditional lineup of four (3, S, X, Y), they are releasing a pick-up truck (the ‘Cybertruck’) and also produce supercars (Roadster V1 and V2). They’re expanding their already 25,000 supercharger stalls around the world, and are currently developing a semi-truck! Again, to any normal billionaire CEO (let alone a normal person), this would be as much as they could handle. And yet Musk is doing so much more…
SpaceX
If I asked you whether you thought it was possible to found a space company, and win a contract with NASA to deliver a payload to space, all within 6 years, and then go on to revolutionise the space industry within the next 10 years… I wouldn’t be surprised if you said no. But that’s exactly what Elon Musk has achieved with SpaceX. Musk believes that humanity needs a way to ensure its unconditional continuation, and that’s exactly the goal of SpaceX. He believes humans should continue to do what they’ve always done: expand and colonise. Humans started off in Africa, and they slowly but surely spread out across the entire planet. Now we’ve colonised all of Earth, we have nowhere else to go, and we’re really beginning to see the problems setting in. Global warming, overpopulation, pollution, running out of fossil fuels, the list goes on. Musk believes these are all a direct consequence of the fact that we have stopped expanding. So, if we can’t expand to anywhere else on Earth, we’ve got to look beyond Earth. He believes that place is Mars. He has built SpaceX so that it can be the forefront of Mars colonisation, and he’s done an incredible job so far. They’ve developed several rockets such as the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy and were the first private company to send humans to the ISS (this was the first time American’s had gone there not using Russian rockets since the space shuttle was abandoned in 2011). They’ve also developed reusable rockets for the first time, a truly impressive feat. In addition, they’ve recently developed their so-called “starship”, which is a reusable rocket that will transport humans to Mars, and they plan to build a fleet of 1,000 of them.
What else?
Musk’s entrepreneurship doesn’t end there. He’s the founder of many other groundbreaking companies. SolarCity is providing innovative techniques to seamlessly incorporate solar panels into houses, promoting the use of renewable energy. Starlink aims to provide cheap, high-speed internet globally, by launching thousands of satellites into low-earth orbit. As of January 2022, they’ve already launched more than 2,000 satellites! And possibly my favourite: Neuralink. This company is developing miniature computer chips which can be placed inside people’s brains to fix previously incurable problems like blindness and deafness. Most of this sounds like science-fiction, but Musk is making it a reality…
Hi, I’m Will! I’m a sixth form student at Sherborne School. This October I’ll be going to Oxford to study physics, and so, in my quest to learn more about this fascinating subject… I’m writing this blog! View all posts by Will Fahie
Originally published at http://thephysicsfootprint.com on February 18, 2022.
