From landing a rocket on the sea to creating an electric car that’s faster than a Ferrari, Elon Musk is truly an evolutionary and can live up to the popular comparison that he is the real-life equivalent of Ironman. Not only that but you can even argue that he has even surpassed Ironman in terms of feats. Most people know him as the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, where he stands out from other business leaders for his bold risk-taking, work ethic, vision for the future of humanity and infamously smoking weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Being the leader of two companies means he has one of the most demanding schedules in the business world, spending at least 40 hours a week at SpaceX and 40 hours a week at Tesla. That means on any given day he spends 16 hours working, 2 hours on his daily routines and meals, and 6 hours shit-posting on Twitter.
Haha actually true pic.twitter.com/VNB822fpPT
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 30, 2019
Growing up in South Africa Elon Musk stayed mostly to himself as a child reading and learning as much as he could about the world around him, while his mom described him as a typical nerd.
“I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark but then I sort of came to understand, okay, well darkness just means really the absence of photons in the visible wavelength of 400 to 700 nanometres then I thought well that’s really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons then I wasn’t afraid of darkness anymore.” – Elon Musk
Elon often read comic books, watched many sci-fi movies and always found a common trend among hyper-realistic future societies, almost all having vehicles that ran off of electricity rather than gasoline. With this vision of a society with totally electric-powered vehicles, Musk decided to fund Tesla, the leading company in electric as a well as self-driving cars. The most notable achievements of Tesla Inc. have been designing innovative electric cars that actually looked good and, more recently, the Tesla Roadster 2020 which is not only electric but has the fastest acceleration out of any supercar ever made.
Even while working on revolutionizing electric car, Musk’s brain continuously kept on thinking on the issues that he felt would affect mankind in the long term, eventually leading him to conceptualize the Mars Oasis, a plan to commercialize space travel and colonize Mars. Yeah, let that sink in for a moment. A plan to take mankind to Mars. Musk went on to found SpaceX with 100 million dollars of his own cash.
In February 2018 SpaceX successfully test-launched the most powerful operational rocket in the world, the Falcon Heavy and yes, the Falcon does take up its name from a certain ship known from a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
There, their main source of income is through contracts with organizations like NASA and privately launching satellites for corporations. The entire mission direction of the company is to establish a space colony on Mars in the next half-century. And while this might seem ambitious, one of the ways you know Elon’s ideas are so good is because his speeches aren’t. In fact, every time he’s on stage, it’s almost indistinguishable from a kindergartner holding their favourite hot-wheels. The only difference being instead of a plastic palm-sized car, it’s an actual car piloted by a dummy in a spacesuit that Musk has literally blasted to the International Space Station, just for the memes.
When he’s not launching electric sports cars into space, Musk is working on Hyperloop. A high-speed transit system reaching speeds of upto Mach 1 (1234.8 kmph). It shoots pods holding riders through a reduced-pressure tube and is expected to get people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than an hour which is, funnily enough, less time than it takes to drive from one side of LA to the other. To give you some perspective, that’s Mumbai to Goa, in under an hour. Aamir, Saif and Akshaye got very happy after hearing this.
While waiting through traffic in 2016, Musk got another ludicrous idea and tweeted the following
Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging...
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2016
To gain public attention The Boring Company randomly decided to sell a flamethrower on its website. Hearing about this, the US customs warned that a flamethrower would not clear international security and Musk responded by renaming the product “a temperature enhancement device.” I think at this point we’ve all decided to just let him do whatever he wants.
Besides his companies, Elon Musk is just as interesting as a person. In the start of college, he asked himself what were going to be the most important things for humanity in his lifetime. Which he decided were the internet, sustainable energy, and space exploration. Then instead of being distracted by girls in college and giving up on his dream like a normal person he was distracted by girls in college and made his dreams come true anyway.
In addition to running his companies and sliding into the DMs of synth-pop Canadians, Elon also works a little bit with OpenAI, SolarCity and NeuraLink.
Elon Musk has done so much in so little time leaving many to simply wonder why, just why is it that he is able to inexplicably do it all. Well as Musk himself preaches, he simply reads.
The way that anyone learns a new concept is through hours of tedious learning and that is exactly the way that Musk learns. Only he claims that going to school and getting a degree in a field is a waste of time when all the information you could possibly need is available to the public at any time. In this age, you can become an expert in practically any field by simply consuming the countless books and Internet resources available. Musk read books upon books on artificial intelligence, aerospace engineering, sustainable energy and more.
Now even after hearing this the majority of people still can’t comprehend how someone is not only able to become an expert but also innovate in so many fields by simply reading. I think a big reason for Musk being so innovative and confident is his method of thinking. Musk follows a method of thinking called “First Principle Thinking” which has a long history of usage with great thinkers and the thought process actually goes all the way back to Aristotle.
“First Principle Thinking” is basically reasoning by fundamental truths rather than by analogy. In layman’s terms, it means not delving on whether or not an idea is possible but rather exclusively focusing on what makes an idea reality. This concept takes facts that are already established by the world and uses them to make ideas that are currently considered implausible, plausible.
Musk uses this philosophy when creating companies that all seem impossibly fantastical yet not only succeed but become revolutionary billion-dollar companies
But what excites as well as terrifies me the most is his grand plan to bring everything that he’s doing together simultaneously. And unlike companies like Apple who will eventually have an iPhone implanted in your brain or Google that will literally be your brain, Elon is going for the monopoly on an entire planet.
Picture this for a second;
-SpaceX builds the rockets to take us to Mars and establishes the colonies.
-The Boring Company constructs tunnels to connect them all,
-Solar City powers everything with solar panels,
-Tesla Inc. makes the cars that run on the electricity
-The AI keeps law and order,
and then when it’s all ready, Elon takes 50% of the population to Mars on the snap of his fingers.
I’m a Savage. Pyaasa, Gamer, Average.
