Elon Musk is perhaps the most intriguing person on earth. Given his passion for making humanity a multiplanetary species and the fact that he is on the right track, Elon Musk could one day be the most intriguing person in all of the solar system.
O.K. these statements could be considered hyperbole. But Musk’s ability to turn hyperbole into reality is one of his superpowers. Through his intense focus on driving every problem down to the level of basic physics, he has already earned himself a spot in the pantheon of history’s great innovators.
These aren’t just digital concoctions he concocted in his garage or dorm. It involves designing and building physical products like cars, batteries, and rocketships, as America once was capable of doing.
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Tesla is not General Motors. It’s Tesla that drives the world towards electric cars. They are also self-driving.
Tesla Energy is a pioneer in the era decentralized and carbon-free generation of electricity with its solar roof tiles as well as battery walls.
SpaceX is enabling the United States to send humans into space for the first-time since NASA’s demise a decade ago.
Starlink is silently rebuilding the Internet from space with more than 1800 satellites.
Neuralink has created implants that link with the brain’s neurons, making this the next major leap in human-machine interfaces.
Boring Co. builds tunnels to combat the traffic scourge.
Starship is the world’s largest rocket and will eventually take us to Mars.
Musk’s input-output mechanisms can be unnerving. Musk displays an uncontrollable combination of semicalculated madness and manic wackiness that sometimes skitters. His ultracapacitor-like energy surges are a source of his obsession with creating dramas for strategic reasons. As a South African kid, he was subject to physical and psychological violence. He is able to use his greater mental abilities to understand the risks and to accept it.
Musk has many characteristics that are similar to those of early innovators. I am a biographer who covers the makers of technological revolutions. He is a Thomas Edison-like inventor who knows vision without execution can be hallucination. This weakness sometimes hampered Nikola Tesla. His time is spent on the technical aspects of his products, literally.
Henry Ford was a great example of how he understood the importance of both the products he designs and the factories that produce them. His gigafactories for cars and batteries—in the U.S., Germany and China—are showing that innovative methods for manufacturing a product are even more important than innovative products themselves.
Similar to Steve Jobs, he’s reinventing numerous industries through the strategic use reality-distortion areas. To get to the core principles of Physics, he questions all assumptions.
He is like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. His hardcore intensity can cause colleagues (and him) to nearly madness, but it also drives them to achieve impossible things.
Like Leonardo da Vinci or Benjamin Franklin, he is an obsessive and playful inquirer about the natural world that helps him spot patterns among disparate fields.
Musk, more than any other outstanding innovators is motivated by a deeper sense of mission. Musk has an intense desire to make this planet sustainable, transform humans into spacefaring species and ensure that artificial intelligent will benefit us all. His goals may be lofty, and they could fail. However, at this moment, he is still the key individual responsible for designing and deploying innovations that can bring us closer towards each of our aspirations.
