"It's very difficult to start companies and quite painful, and that's important to bear in mind. That's probably not encouraging. Let me put it this way: If you need inspiring words, don't do it."
-- Elon Musk
Elon Musk is a visionary that has repeatedly taken advantage of voids present in multiple markets, often in suprising ways. First it was Zip2 (a precursor to Yelp and Google Maps), and later, co-founding Paypal.com (formerly X.com) whiched ushered in the era of online banking.
Despite early successes with Internet services, he has since moved on. While many of this generation's smartest minds brew new ways for people to click on ads, Musk is instead creating new companies in various other industries, and though appearing an amateur to newfound competitors, his businesses are thriving today.
Many of his companies are in unrelated fields but are united by a drive to usher humanity along to advancement and sustainability. Given Musk's net worth at $13.9 billion, it might seem strange that some of his major projects are so successful yet still have a strong conservationist focus.
Rather than coincidence, it is more likely that Musk has a knack for spotting the interesection between design, technology, and business, allowing him to take profitable risks while still achieving humanitarian aims. As a result, quite a few people are starting to turn their heads.
ONGOING PROJECTS:
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SpaceX is a private company that designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft with the ultimate goal of reducing space transporation costs and enabling people to live on other planets.
After failing to purchase affordable rockets in the early 2000s, Musk realized that, taking into acccount factors like the cost of raw materials, it would actually be cheaper to produce most launch hardware in-house to build the cost-effective rockets he needed.
A major goal of the company is the developement of a rapidly resuable launch system whose individual stages can be retrieved (via propulsion systems) instead of being thrown away, as in the case of the space shuttle.
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Mission: To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.
Tesla, Inc. is an American automaker, energy storage company, and solar panel manufacturer, famous for their production of zero-emission electric cars on a commercial scale.
Tesla electric cars can be charged at home, so there is no need for a gas station. For traveling long distance, Tesla's supercharger network provides access to high-speed charging along popular routes in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
Additionally, these superchargers are completely free to use, which compensates for the initial cost of buying a car.
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Mission: To build safe AGI (artificial general intelligence), and ensure AGI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible.
OpenAI is a non-profit AI research company whose mission to democratize the power of AI is meant to protect humanity from any future existential risks due to AI by communicating its research and publicly sharing it's open-source software tools.