The Martian: And it’s not Matt Damon

Consider the following sequence of tweets:

These four tweets are both enough and not enough to describe the man in question here.

Elon Musk.

Some even doubt if he is a man, an earthly creature. A parallel is often drawn with the fictional Dr. Harrison Wells, pioneering scientist, researcher and inventor from the famous comic The Flash, who turned out to actually be a time traveler working to enable himself to travel in time to return to his century of being.

People, interestingly, wonder if Elon Musk is a Martian stuck on Earth, building his way through Earth’s primitive technology to finally reach his home, the red planet, planet Mars.

That, or he is a God among mortals.

What else could possibly explain his freak-streak of successful ventures in the space of technology that gets humanity closer to the future imagined by science fiction and his subsequent, more than exponential rise in fame and wealth.

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This article, the first in a four-part series, does not aim to God-ify Elon Musk or sing praises of the man and his ventures, but what we’re going to do here is take a look at the most successful of his ventures, and analyze them from an opportunity, operation and market point of view to try and understand what made them work.

The one thing common between all ventures in question here is the presence of Musk at the helm of affairs. So, it is quite natural for us to start digging at the man himself.

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The World of Ones and Zeros

Musk’s journey into the world of technology started in his childhood, when he taught himself to code on a computer bought using savings from his pocket allowance. He sold his first video game for $500 back in South Africa. He later moved to Canada and subsequently the US, where he famously deferred attendance at Stanford to found his first company Zip2, an online directory of listings and maps, which helped a few famous magazines to foray into the world of digital by getting them online. The profits from the exit from Zip2 went into the development of financial services company PayPal, the leading payments services solution, only to be later acquired by eBay.

Transportation on Earth

Having solved important problems in the digital world, Musk turned his focus on changing the transportation both on and off-Earth. With Tesla and the later acquired SolarCity he aims to electrify transportation and reduce the dependence and usage of conventional energy systems. Tesla so far has been doing pretty good, having started dabbling with home delivery, building a new production facility in China while also getting closer to Full Self-Drive with each and every software update.

While such highly successful ventures are well thought out and planned and structured, some companies seem almost straight from his whims and fancies. Literally.

The Boring Company, thought of in a tweet when Musk was sitting bored stuck in traffic, is touted to be the next big thing in the transformation of urban development and hopes to render flying cars useless. It essentially is a digging company that deals in development of tunnels for various purposes, including supporting the Loop and Hyperloop transportation systems, again, a Musk vision.

Then there is Teslaquila, which really came out of an April Fools tweet by Musk. It was thought of as a luxurious offering of Tequila to complement Tesla's range of vehicles, but a trademark application was rejected basis objections by Mexico, the traditional producers of Tequila.

"I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary."

Conquering the Final Frontier

Along with Tesla, he also invested in and developed SpaceX, the private company that is making newer strides into making space travel affordable enough to make it available commercially and ultimately colonize Mars. The most recent news from SpaceX might be on plans of StarLink, Musk’s envisioned worldwide, high-speed, single internet system beamed direct to homes from satellites.

Investments in Artificial Intelligence

He has also been a great proponent of further development of Artificial Intelligence, hence investing a huge sum in OpenAI, a project to make AI development universal and open source, and Neuralink, a company that aims to help humans communicate with computers using just their thoughts. However, he has made his fears of AI one day getting out of control of humanity due to some actors that might knowingly or unknowingly make something the world would have been better off without. He has been involved in debates with Mark Zukerberg and Jack Ma on separate occasions, and says he invests in AI so that he can know what research is being done and exercise some control over it.

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Public Life

While Musk is so successful, he has also been marred in controversy from time to time lately. Litigations have often come his way and the guy has not shied away from admitting where he was wrong publicly.

He famously had to apologize for using derogatory slang on a UK Cave Diver during the Thai cave rescue of last year, where Musk provided a child size submarine to help in the rescue mission and subsequently received the Member of the Order of the Direkgunabhorn award by king of Thailand in March 2019 for his and his team’s efforts in the rescue mission.

He has also been marred in controversy for alleged substance abuse and insensitive promotion of SolarCity products during blackouts to prevent wildfires.

His StarLink project has also come under heavy criticism from astronomers. They argue that the StarLink fleet satellites, due to their sheer number (42000), white design, low-orbit and high-beam internet transfer causes obstruction in their field of view and issues arise with exposure on telescopes and cameras. To set context, the total number of satellites from all countries in space till date stands at a mere 6000.

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The timeless debate: Tesla v/s Edison?

It is no doubt that Elon Musk is today a very successful technocrat and entrepreneur. He is certainly a role-model to millions across the world. But everyone has a role-model, and even he does. When questioned on whom he’d consider a better role-model out of Tesla and Edison, two scientists without whom humanity would never have been as we see it right now, it is interesting to see what he has to say.

Musk says that Tesla, being the one who developed the alternating current system and invented the AC Motor “a little more play than he gets in current society”, but continuing to add that "I'm a bigger fan of Edison than Tesla." Why? Because "Edison brought his stuff to market and made those inventions accessible to the world." The shunned Serbian-Croatian inventor Tesla "didn't really do that," points out Musk.

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Well, in the coming parts of this series, we’ll analyse how has Musk tried to conjure up his inner Edison and bring his products to the masses, and why have those products almost always worked.