Tomorrow, SpaceX will launch two satellites to test internet for the entire planet. What was the hero of all the latest news, Elon Musk, like as a child and why is he launching the Internet, rockets, building electric cars and planning to colonize Mars?
Elon Musk won't succeed - that's what the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, said. But so far the name Mask is associated with the most innovative technologies: largest system online payments, a car company that challenged industry giants, the Internet for the whole Earth, and even the colonization of Mars.
Elon's ancestors were Swiss Germans
They moved to the States during the Revolutionary War and from there to Canada. In 1950, Musk's parents moved to South Africa. Elon was born and raised there.
He started programming and business as a child.
One of the most successful businessmen of our time was a typical nerd as a child: he read a lot and was reluctant to make contact with his peers. Plus he had a photographic memory like Sheldon Cooper. They didn’t like him at school, once the guy was beaten and broken nose.
When Elon was 10, his father gave him a computer. The boy taught himself to program and two years later, at the age of 12, he sold his own computer game for $500. Musk later invested in shares, and when he sold them, he was able to afford to move to Canada. There he lived with relatives until he entered Stanford University. True, he soon dropped out of school for business.
Even as a young man, Musk wanted to change the world
While studying in college, he decided that he would do what would most change the fate of humanity. Grandiose plans required money, and while Musk was launching his first company, Zip2, he lived in the office and went to the local stadium to shower. This saved money on rent and supported the startup.
PayPal has changed online payments
The company was created as a result of the merger of Musk's startup X.com and its competitor Confinity. The company appeared in the early 2000s, when business on the Internet was synonymous with technology, and the possibilities of non-cash payments were limited to bank cards.
Although the partners had different views for the management and development of the project, the cooperation was so productive that in 2002 the company bought it on eBay. Elon Musk used the proceeds to prepare for his main dream - a flight to Mars.
Tesla Motors challenges auto giants
Elon Musk was not the founder of the company, but it was he who made it successful and famous throughout the world. Musk believes that the world is too dependent on hydrocarbons and seeks to rid humanity of this dependence. From the very beginning, the company was conceived as the first serial manufacturer of electric vehicles and an alternative to oil energy.
Musk participated in the development of the company's first electric car, the Tesla Roadster, and when it turned out that due to miscalculations the model would be twice as expensive as planned, production costs and even fired the company's founders. To support the company financially, he had to sell his beloved McLaren F1 car. The investment of effort and money was not in vain: in 2010, Tesla held its first automobile IPO in the United States in 50 years.
Hyperloop: train at airplane speed
Another ambitious project by Musk. If flying is expensive and the train ride is long, you can fly by train. The speed of the new type of transport is already being tested , which is comparable to the fastest magnetic levitation trains. In future maximum speed will be about 1200 km/h.
Hyperloop is a pipe standing on supports with evacuated air to reduce drag. A sealed capsule with people inside is moving in the pipe. All necessary energy will be generated by solar panels installed along the route.
Musk will use the developments of his other projects in the Hyperloop: Tesla electronics, SolarCity solar panels and SpaceX durable alloys. Many of the solutions that will be used in Hyperloop are already used, for example, in magnetic levitation trains.
Twitter Bet: Musk Built a Giant Battery
Last year in Australia they announced emergency in the energy sector due to gas shortages and rising energy prices. Then Musk argued on Twitter with the Australian government that he could build a huge 100 MW battery, costing $390 million, in a hundred days, which could store and redirect electricity in case of power outages. If he doesn’t meet the deadlines, he promised, he will implement the project for free.
The battery was designed ahead of schedule, and at the end of December 2017 it was tested in action. After an accident at a local power plant, the battery lack of electricity.
SpaceX: reusable rockets and spacecraft
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. the main objective company - to make space flights cheap enough to colonize Mars. To do this, the company designed reusable Falcon launch vehicles and the Dragon spacecraft. The company uses components of its own design, which allows it to reduce prices and control quality.
The first three launches of Falcon rockets ended in failure. But in April 2016 Falcon rocket 9 landed on a floating platform for the first time. It opened new era in astronautics, because it made it possible to reuse rockets.
And on February 6 of this year, Falcon Heavy rockets capable of launching into orbit successfully landed (almost three times more than the shuttle).
This is the first high-lift rocket capable of returning to Earth. Its launch costs $90 million - two and a half times cheaper than launching the shuttle.
Starlink: Internet for the whole Earth
The idea to provide the entire planet with Internet appeared in 2015. Musk plans to first launch 800 satellites that will cover the US territory, and bring their number to 4,425, combining them into a system called Starlink. It will provide access to the World Wide Web in places where the Internet was previously unavailable: in remote areas or in the mountains. In this case, the system will be able to redirect the signal to areas with heavy traffic.
The satellites will be in low-Earth orbit, lower than conventional geostationary satellites. This is necessary to speed up signal transmission: modern satellite providers have a delay of about 600 milliseconds, and Musk expects 25-35 ms and a speed of 1 Gbit/s.
Of course, the businessman is not doing all this out of pure philanthropy: if the Starlink project succeeds, it will bring the company $30 billion, which is twice as much as today’s high-speed Internet industry leader Comcast earns. Part of Musk's funds focus on its most ambitious project - the colonization of Mars.
What is this all for: populating Mars
In June 2017, the businessman announced that he was going to colonize Mars. In his opinion, necessary in order to protect us from possible global catastrophe. That is, the businessman decided to diversify risks as usual, but now across different planets: if something happens to one, people on the other will survive.
For this purpose, an Interplanetary Transport System with reusable ships will be created. Nowadays, most rockets are disposable. Imagine if for each new trip you would have to buy a new car.
The flight to Mars will be divided into two phases: first, a reusable launch vehicle will launch spaceships into low-Earth orbit. There will be about 100 people on board each of the thousand ships. There they will wait for the closest approach between Earth and Mars, which happens every 26 months, and then take off. The first man could land on Mars as early as 2024, and in 50-100 years the population of the Red Planet could reach 1 million people.
To prevent the flight to Mars from turning into a voluntary exile, they will establish movement in reverse side. For this they use Martian resources: they will produce fuel from methane. The ships can be refueled directly in orbit. Thanks to this and repeated use, the cost of the flight will be in the region .
Even his colleagues didn’t believe in his achievements
When Tesla began to compete with gasoline cars and challenged oil industry, representatives of the traditional auto business said that electric cars will forever remain a hobbyist fad.
Today, the largest auto giants produce electric cars and hybrids; at the end of last year, their number in the world exceeded , and by the end of this it will exceed 5 million. Already today, a third of the cars on the roads in China and Norway are electric cars.
Astronaut Neil Armstrong opposed commercial space flights, and famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson that SpaceX will not be able to make a flight to Mars, primarily due to lack of money: Musk necessary funds no, and the flight itself does not promise benefits for which investors would be interested in investing in the project.
Be that as it may, the recent launch and successful landing of two of the three super heavy rockets Falcon Heavy has already changed ideas about the cost of space flights, and has collapsed orders for Russian missiles"Proton".
How did he do it?
From early childhood, little Elon infuriated his parents with doubts in any of their words and arguments, trying to get to the bottom of things and asking endless questions. His education as a physicist and economist made him a techno-perfectionist with an entrepreneurial streak.
Musk is good at finding unusual solutions to problems and believes that people's habit of thinking in standard patterns is the main obstacle to innovation. When he needed a theodolite to level the rocket, he bought a used one on the Internet and saved $25 thousand. And he got the idea to build his own rockets when it turned out that it was very expensive to deliver cargo to Mars using existing spacecraft.
Elon Musk's recipe for success is as simple to define as it is difficult to follow. A good education. Ability to ask the right questions. Meticulousness and an unconventional view of the world. The ability to go ahead, despite criticism. And most importantly, a big dream that has become a goal.
Elon Reeve Musk is a Canadian-American billionaire, inventor and philanthropist. Born on June 28, 1971 in South Africa, he later moved to Canada and then to the USA.
This ideal embodiment seemed long lost American dream: Arriving in the US with a few dollars in his pocket, he became a billionaire.
Received higher education and a bachelor's degree in physics and economics.
He made his fortune by creating and developing many innovative companies (X.com, PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, etc.). He is engaged in active business and philanthropic activities, maintains a political lobby in the US Congress, reads a lot, acts in feature films (« iron Man 2”, “Machete Kills”, etc.).
He became the prototype for the character Tony Stark in the film Iron Man. Married twice, has five sons from his first marriage. Esquire magazine included Musk in its list of the 75 most influential people 21st century.
From the editor: amazing person. While preparing his biography, we encountered many conflicting opinions: for some, he is a genius, for others, a PR man who devours budget money. Doesn't leave you indifferent. A dreamer who makes bold and, for most, impossible dreams come true. Amazing man.
Main achievements
Elon Musk is best known as successful businessman and innovator. Almost all of his projects are highly profitable and have brought him significant income and wide popularity.
His first company was Zip2, which he founded with his brother with money from his father ($20 thousand). The company was developing the Internet for the media industry, entered into contracts with the popular newspapers The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, and after 4 years it was sold for a huge amount of about 350 million dollars, from which Musk received about 22 million.
Literally a month later, Musk became a co-founder of the online payment company X.COM. A year later, his company merges with Confinity and takes the name. In 2002, the company will be sold at a price of one and a half billion dollars, and Musk's share was about 170 million dollars.
There is a legend that after the sale PayPal Musk came to Russia in order to finance the creation of a private space company based on Russian developments. But not a single official considered his idea serious. Tests in Moscow for several days, he bought several books by Tsialkovsky and decided that he could create a rocket on his own. The principles are known. I don’t know if this legend is true, but...
In 2001, Musk entered the space industry with the concept of an “Oasis on Mars,” a settlement on Mars that would grow food on the “Red Planet” and provide for its own needs. According to him, this was done in order to attract public attention to the study of outer space.
In 2002, he founded the company Space Exploration Technologies or Space X, investing one hundred million dollars in it. The company was engaged in the development and production of rocket launch vehicles, and for seven years developed the Falcon family of rocket launch vehicles, creating the Dragon spacecraft.
In September 2009, the Falcon 1 rocket became the first private launch vehicle to launch a satellite into Earth orbit. In 2006, Space X signed a $1.6 billion contract with NASA and also received significant government orders.
In 2011, Musk said he hoped to send people to colonize Mars in 10-20 years and create the first colony there.
In 2004, Musk also invested in Tesla Motors, which develops and produces electric vehicles. The businessman joined the board of directors, becoming chairman of the board. He took an active part in the development of the company’s product, the Roaster sports car, which gained wide popularity, and Musk himself was awarded the prestigious “Global Green” green award for the development of an environmentally friendly car.
Musk's financial flexibility and perseverance, and his subsequent investments in the project, allowed the company to survive the financial crisis of 2008, while adding new products to the company's lineup successful models(Model S, Model X, etc.). The company's profits are growing day by day, amounting to many tens of millions of dollars a year.
Musk also invested in the SolarCity company (the production of private power plants for households and organizations), and also invested in the Hyperloop project, which, according to his plan, could become the basis for the transport system of the future. Hyperloop will allow passenger capsules to reach speeds of more than a thousand kilometers per hour, over a distance of up to one and a half thousand kilometers.
Secrets of Elon Musk's success
Musk believes that the reason for his success is his critical mind, escape from stereotypes and stereotypes of thinking, endless enthusiasm and energy. “I have always been critical of what my parents told me. Never took them at their word and always asked “why?” Then I tried to understand the meaning and logic of their answer."
Also, according to the entrepreneur, you need to be completely immersed in the business, without any distractions. Only complete dedication, seven days a week without breaks, complete concentration on the task - it is this kind of perfectionism that is one of the roots of personal success.
The main obstacle in innovation activity Musk sees people's penchant for analogies as a problem. Therefore, instead of doing something qualitatively new, people try to improve the old. The businessman calls for throwing away all restrictions and stereotypes, and starting to build concepts and projects from scratch, from the very basics. This is the only way to create exceptional and first-class things.
Opinion: The secret of Musk’s success lies in the material and technical base of the United States and in the enormous resources that the government provides him. There are no miracles. Innovation is very expensive. We need personnel, not only engineers, but also managers, lawyers, and financiers. Look at attempts in other countries to create innovative products, for example electric cars: where there is no base, this idea fails.
Quotes from Elon Musk
- I would like to die with the thought that humanity has a bright future
- I think that people today are somehow too carried away with all the Internet, finance and law. This is one of the reasons why we have little innovation.
- Maybe I read too many comics as a kid. They're always trying to save the world. Everything there looked like everyone should try to improve this world; it simply couldn’t be any other way.
- The only thing that should be done is to contribute to the general enlightenment of mankind.
- I do like computer games, but if I create the coolest games, how will this affect earthly affairs, the world as a whole?
- I like to bring to life technologies that I believe are important for the future and bring some benefit.
- While we are throwing away rockets and ships, we are not truly mastering space.
- I'm like a samurai - I'd rather die than give up.
Elon Musk's ideas and goals
Musk: wants to save the human race from voluntary or accidental destruction.
The idea of making humanity an interplanetary species originated with Musk a long time ago. And first of all we're talking about about the settlement of Mars. At the entrance to the SpaceX headquarters, there is an inspiring picture with two states of Mars - current and planned:
And if you pay attention, all of his current projects are subordinated to this goal. To get to Mars, you need to make space flights an order of magnitude cheaper than they cost now - this is being successfully implemented by SpaceX. There is no suitable fuel on Mars, so electric cars that will be charged from solar panels will be useful there (and there are already hundreds of such stations where any owner of a Tesla car can charge their car for free throughout the United States).
And this isn't a waste of money - all three companies are profitable, commercially successful and at the cutting edge of technology.
About an outstanding figure modern technologies and achievements are not spoken only by the lazy. Elon Musk is a modern genius. His quotes have become popular, his incredible dreams are becoming reality, and his achievements are benefiting people today.
What kind of education are you thinking about? Quite often, when people hear this word, they think about university. Elon Musk's education began much earlier. At the age of 3-4 he said: “Where does the world end and begin?” Not every child thinks about such global issues.
His self-education began quite early - at the age of 8 he read all the books in the library, after which he began studying Britannica, the oldest English-language universal encyclopedia. It’s hard to imagine how one can devote 10 hours a day to reading, but this was Elon’s favorite hobby. His amazing photographic memory allowed him to remember a lot of new information.
After his parents' divorce, Elon stayed with his father. The boy spent the first years of his life in South Africa. He was an introverted and peculiar boy; for example, Elon Musk acted as if he were deaf as a child, although he was not. At school he could not stand up for himself, he was beaten. One day, Elon was thrown down the stairs and his nose was broken. His relationships with his peers never went well. Probably, the divorce affected the boy, who was immersed in his hobby and did not like to communicate.
Elon was given his first computer, a Commodore VIC-20, when he was 10 years old. He used it for programming. He completed the BASIC course, designed for 6 months, in 3 days. The habit of learning new things and understanding them came in handy in this matter. This is probably why Elon Musk wrote the game Blaster at the age of 12, which he sold for $500.
Elon Musk. New stage
At the age of 14, Elon is struck by an existential crisis and reads The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, deciding that his mission is to save humanity. Trying to avoid being drafted into the South African army and dreaming with all his heart about Canada, Elon and his brother emigrate to Canada. No one was waiting for him in the country, so for the first year he was constantly looking for work. Elon Musk even worked in a sawmill in his youth for low pay - $18 an hour. He had to crawl through a narrow tunnel that he could barely fit into, then throw hot coals, sand and dirt through it. It is impossible to go somewhere. It is noteworthy that by the end of the week, out of 30 people working there, only 3 remained, including Musk himself. He took on any job, even one completely unrelated to his area of interest.
Elon Musk and the universities where he studied
For the last six months spent in South Africa, Elon studied physics at the University of Pretoria. The thirst for knowledge did not subside. While he was in Canada, in Kingston, he decided to study at Queen's University. After that, having left for the USA, he entered the University of Pennsylvania, where he received two bachelor's degrees at once: in physics from the School of Arts and Sciences and in economics from the Wharton Business School. Elon later studied at Stanford, where he planned to get a PhD, but dropped out. At that time, Internet fever was gaining momentum, he decided that the future was global network, and not for scientific degrees.
Elon Musk. Quotes
Elon Musk’s expressions have already become popular. Young people strive to imitate him; his apt phrases inspire: “I didn’t expect that I could earn money. It was enough for me to earn enough to cover the rent and buy some food.” Through his example, he shows that our dreams can be much deeper than it seems at first glance. One cannot but agree with the simplicity of his thoughts, which motivates. For example, “It’s okay to make mistakes. The main thing is to make mistakes in something new every time.”
Another quote for inspiration:
“I can either watch it happen or be a part of it.”
He proves by personal example that The best way change the world - start with yourself. He also has a humorous phrase with deep meaning: “I would like to die on Mars, but without crashing on its surface.”
The biography of this person is unique and at the same time interesting. It is impossible to remain silent about him. He breaks stereotypes and makes breakthroughs. Read Elon Musk's Twitter and be the first to know about his achievements and breakthroughs
Take a look at the main episodes of Elon Musk's biography:
Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa.
“Elon has always been an introvert. Where most people would go to a great party, Elon would rather spend time in the library reading. For him they were entertainment. Once, at the age of 3-4 years, he asked a question: “Where does the whole world begin and end?". Questions like these made me understand that he thinks in a special way,” — Elon’s father Errol Musk shared his memories in an interview.
Elon's mother, Maye Musk, is a Canadian-born professional model whose face has appeared on cereal packages. Special K and magazine cover Time.
In 1979, parents Errol and Maye Musk divorced. 9-year-old Elon and his younger brother Kimbal decided to stay with their father.
In 1983, at the age of 12, Elon sold his first written game to a computer magazine called Blastar for 500 dollars. Musk himself considered that game trivial.
The young researcher's school years were not the best. In the book by Ashley Vance "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and a quest into a fantastic future" tells the story of how Musk was hospitalized when a group of bullies at school pulled him down the stairs and beat him unconscious.
After graduation, Elon, along with his mother Maye, sister Tosca and brother Kimbal, moved to. He spent the next 2 years studying at Queens University in the city of Kingston in the Canadian province of Ontario.
However, Elon began to continue his studies at, where he received degrees in physics and economics.
While studying in Pennsylvania, Elon and his university friend Adeo Ressi rented a 10-room house, which they sometimes turned into a real nightclub. This was an early entrepreneurial experiment for both students.
After graduating from the university, Elon decided to continue his studies to obtain an academic degree. PhD(PhD) in , but ultimately gave up this idea and decided to test his luck in the beginning Internet fever. Elon Musk will never remember studying at Stanford again.
Elon and his brother Kimbal (pictured below) took $28,000 from their father's budget to start the company Zip2— a web startup that provided city travel guides to such newspapers as New York Times And Chicago Tribune .
According to Musk, while the company Zip2 got back on his feet, he literally lived in the office and showered at the local branch of a youth volunteer organization YMCA . All these efforts will be richly rewarded when the company Compaq will acquire Zip2 behind $ 341 000 000 .
Photo: Noah Berger | REUTERS Elon Musk’s own budget after the deal will be $22 million, half of which in 1999 the young entrepreneur will spend on founding another company in the field of online banking - X.com. A year later the project will merge with a startup Confinity, which by that time had been founded by Peter Thiel. This union will create new company which will be called PayPal.
Elon Musk was appointed to the post of CEO of the newly created company PayPal. But after some time, serious quarrels would arise within the project: Elon insisted on switching the company’s servers from a free operating system Unix on the product, which the chief technical director did not agree with PayPal Max Levchin (pictured).
Photo: Getty | Drew Anger In 2000, Musk took his first vacation in a long time. While Elon was there, the board of directors PayPal decided to fire him and made Peter Thiel the new CEO.
“That’s the problem with holidays.”, - Elon will joke later in one of his interviews.
However, Musk will remain one of the largest shareholders PayPal, which would bring him $165 million of the $1.5 billion he would pay for it in 2002 PayPal company eBay.
Even before the sale PayPal A sci-fi buff, Musk has already toyed with the idea of sending mice or plants to Mars. He even tried to acquire decommissioned Soviet missiles for these purposes. But a Russian seller wanted more than $8 million for the rocket, prompting Musk to consider building his own cheaper version.
In 2002, Elon Musk founded a company known as Space Exploration Technologies or simply SpaceX. Musk's goal will be to develop processes that will help make space flights more accessible.
Photo: Mario Anzuoni | Reuters The first devices SpaceX will become Falcon 1, named after the spaceship Millennium Falcon from the movie "Star Wars"..
..and the ship SpaceX Dragon, named after the song "Puff the Magic Dragon". With this name, Elon Musk wanted to answer all the skeptics who claimed that SpaceX will never be able to launch a spacecraft.
In the long term the goal SpaceX is the colonization of Mars. In an interview, Musk noted that he would not withdraw shares SpaceX for an IPO (initial public offering) until the Colonial Transporter to Mars makes regular flights.
At the same time, Elon Musk still has quite a few tasks on Earth. In 2004, he made his first investment of $70 million in Tesla Motors- a production company that he co-founded with one of the most experienced executive managers, Martin Eberhard.
Elon Musk took an active role in working on the company's products and also took over as chairman. He also helped develop the first electric car - Tesla Roadster, the release of the first version of which began in 2006.
Photo: Scott Olson | Getty Images Since this was not enough, in 2006 Musk implemented the idea SolarCity- a production company whose products were supposed to help in the fight against. To develop the company, Elon Musk recruited his cousins Peter and Lyndon Rive.
Getting back to business Tesla, everything did not go quite as Elon himself expected. Under the leadership of Eberhard Tesla burned more financial resources than it was able to bring in. In 2007, at Musk’s initiative, Eberhard was removed from further work at one of the board meetings.
In 2008, with the advent of the global financial crisis, Musk had to invest $40 million in Tesla and borrow another $40 million to avoid bankruptcy of the company. In the same year, Musk became CEO Tesla, which, of course, is not accidental.
That year the company SpaceX, Tesla And SolarCity completely ruined Musk. He describes 2008 as the worst year of his life, as Tesla still continued to lose money, and SpaceX encountered problems launching the rocket Falcon 1. By 2009, Elon was surviving only on personal loans.
Photo: Bobby Yip | REUTERS Around the same time, Elon Musk was going through a divorce from his first wife Justine Musk, a Canadian writer who gave him 6 sons.
2008 brings two good news to Elon: SpaceX receives a $1.5 billion contract with NASA for space flights, and for business Tesla finally there are external investors.
By 2010, the situation was changing seriously again: in June of that year Tesla valued at $226 million at IPO, becoming the first to go public since Ford in 1956. At this point, Elon sells $15 million worth of company shares in order to return his financial condition to normal.
Photo: Brendan McDermid | REUTERS Elon Musk's extraordinary career has become visible in other circles as well. Tony Stark's image from "Iron Man" was partially based on the real life of Elon. Moreover, in the second part of the film, Musk himself appears in the frame.
All this time, Elon’s personal life was filled with a series of different events. In 2008, he began dating actress Talulah Riley. They will get married in 2010 and divorce in 2012. By July 2013, they will get married again, but in December 2014, Elon Musk will file for divorce again, although he will take the documents back later. Riley will file for divorce in March 2016.
Photo: Pascal Le Segretain | Getty Images Things will go well with work during that period. By the end of 2015 SpaceX will make 24 successful launches to the International Space Station, doing a lot of research in the process. Some time later Falcon 9 will make the first successful landing of a reusable orbital rocket on a water platform.
Ideas still never stop coming to Elon Musk. Despite the movement towards the development of solar energy, electric vehicles and the colonization of Mars, Musk began developing a new project called Hyperloop— a transport system capable of moving passengers over significant distances at speeds of more than 1000 km/h.
Elon Musk is convinced that in the near future humanity may face the threat of losing control over artificial intelligence, and therefore at the end of 2015 the entrepreneur presented another - OpenAI , the purpose of which will be development monitoring.
Photo: jurvetson | Flickr At the beginning of 2016, it became known about another incredible project of Elon Musk - for the production of lithium-ion batteries, the area of which will be more than 300,000 square meters. The Gigafactory is expected to be able to produce more batteries than all similar factories around the world combined. The launch of the project is scheduled for 2020.
In June 2016, Elon Musk presented his , with the goal of combining its two largest energy projects “under one roof.” The $2.6 billion deal was later confirmed in August.
In December 2016, Elon Musk founded another business - THE BORING COMPANY— a drilling and construction company whose tasks will be the creation of underground infrastructure in busy cities, thanks to which residents and motorists will be able to avoid traffic jams, as well as assistance in the development of high-speed train projects Hyperloop.
Engineer extraordinaire Elon Musk has brought each of us a few steps closer to the very future that science fiction writers wrote about.
So when will apple trees bloom on Mars, and trains will travel along the earth at supersonic speed?
Tesla electric car
Musk became the person who was able to make such a car an object of desire for millions of drivers around the world. He simply has an animal instinct for everything high-tech and advanced. That is why engineer Martin Eberhard (the founding father of the Tesla Motors concern and the author of the business idea) turned to him for help in implementing a project to create an environmentally friendly and stylish car of the future. I turned, I must say, to the right person!
Photo: pixabay.com Elon Musk invested a lot of money in the creation of the concern, proceeds from the sale of PayPal - he was just looking for some interesting project for investment.
PayPal is the world's most popular international payment system. Elon Musk managed to combine his own similar project X.com and PayPal. PayPal is currently the safest electronically payment for purchases on the Internet - all personal data of the user is protected even from the most sophisticated hackers.
In 2002, Musk earned almost $200 million after the famous online auction site eBay acquired the service.
Everything instantly started spinning, spinning, and literally a few years later the Tesla Model S became a breakthrough in the automotive industry. A huge panoramic roof, almost 500 kilometers of autonomous travel, crazy speed from the start and, of course, environmental friendliness.
At the end of July this year, the presentation of the new creation of the Tesla Model 3 took place. There are no knobs, buttons or switches - only an incredible size touch screen and steering wheel. Just a spaceship, not a car. Experts are confident that the popularization of electric cars and their displacement of cars with internal combustion engines from the roads will “improve” the ecology of our planet. Fresh air will become commonplace again.
Reusable launch vehicles and the colonization of Mars
Even 15 years ago, Musk began to make his childhood dreams come true - he began to design and build spaceships. His company SpaceX has become a symbol of a new era in space exploration. Just last year, Elon’s brainchild, the Falcon 9 rocket, returned from low-Earth orbit back to Earth and landed on a robotic platform in the ocean. An unprecedented event!
In general, when reusable rockets become commonplace, space flights will become much cheaper, and this means only one thing - we will be able to thoroughly study all the planets of the solar system.
The Dragon space truck created by SpaceX is capable of returning to Earth with several tons of cargo on board. In the near future, Musk plans to use this ship, as well as the Dragon V2 manned module and the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle, during the first expedition to Mars in human history. Already now, the inventor is seriously working on designing residential modules, space suits, life support devices and other units that will help people live and work on the Red Planet.
Last year, Elon Musk during his speech at the next congress International Federation astronautics in Mexico said that he and his colleagues are able to save the Earth from overpopulation. He suggests that the first colonizers could appear on Mars within 50 years. Musk has even come up with a special rocket fuel, the ingredients for which can be extracted from the depths of the planet that has been attracting people for so many years. In general, his entire project is based on the principles of reusability and the possibility of refueling ships in space.
Super train Hyperloop
Well, now from heaven to Earth: it is quite possible that soon we will be rushing around in futuristic vacuum trains invented by Elon Musk. In general, it is difficult to call this type of transport a train - a capsule with passengers, according to the inventor’s idea, will “fly” inside a special vacuum tube. Or maybe there will be powerful magnets there - exact solution has not yet been accepted, but the first tests of the project, which is called Hyperloop, are already underway in the American Nevada desert.
The acceleration engine of the capsule will be electric. The most interesting thing is that the “train” will not so much consume as generate electricity. It can be sold, and the proceeds can be spent on the construction of new sections of the vacuum pipeline.
So far, it has not been possible to accelerate the capsule prototype to the 1,200 km/h promised by Musk, but the inventor’s associates are working tirelessly to bring this project to life in the near future.
The cost of building the first section of the bullet train pipeline is $60 billion. The first “trains,” as planned by the creators, will connect Los Angeles and San Francisco. Musk himself will not be able to afford such a sum - he is relying on progressive investors. By the way, according to preliminary forecasts, the project should pay off within 20 years.
Home battery
Elon Musk is literally one step away from solving the problem of electricity shortages. Tesla Motors has already released a revolutionary battery to solve the issue of autonomous power supply for a home or apartment. The unit was called Powerwall.
During the day it is charged from solar panels, and at night it supplies energy to the refrigerator, split-system and other household appliances that operate around the clock. Happy owners of Powerwall are absolutely not afraid of power outages. It weighs a hundred pounds, but it looks very beautiful.
Musk is generally “focused” on the topic of energy saving: he literally covered thousands of buildings in California with solar panels, which are produced by another of his company Solarcity. The world will never be the same again after a man like Elon Reeve Musk came into it.
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