Meet Billionaire, Engineer, Innovator, Philanthropist; Elon Musk

Author: Ogor Anumbor

The first captions that ever caught my attention of this fellow was when I read an article on Wikipedia some years ago of four people that had sent rocket to outer space; It captioned Russia, US, China and Elon Musk.

This article is a 10-minute read.

Elon, 44, a clean-shaven, and soft-spoken engineer, is a father of five boys, and is an entrepreneur passionate about robotics, rocket engine design, artificial intelligence, alternative energy sources. 

His 3D image lab in one of his tech companies, SpaceX, used for complex shuttle engine designs has already featured in the Marvel’s iron man trilogy movies. Elon also having a cameo guest appearance in the movie Transcendence with Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Caribbean), he also played the role as a Pilot of his own real jet (1994 Dassault Falcon 900 aircraft) in the film - Thank You for Smoking, and other Hollywood movies. In the iron-man-2 he was in a scene with Tony stark where he was seen to verbally propose an electric jet design to Tony stark played by Robert Downey Jr.

The Iron-man-2 movie in its closing credits dedicated the movie to Elon as present day

Tony stark/iron man character. BTW, Tony Stark is a fictitious genius, playboy, inventor, billionaire, portrayed in the movies with narcissist personality disorder, and doubles as a superhero film character who wields the Iron-man prosthetic suit.

Elon Reeves Musk, is South African born, Canadian-American business mogul and with his brother Kimbal received their first fund of $28,000 from their Father (Errol Musk) which they used to startup a new web software company, Zip2, and closed their first million-dollars deal when they sold the company to Alta-Vista for $307 million in 1999. Musk had benefited largely from the internet boom in the early 1990’s.

In 1999, he started another company X.com which handled then electronic payment systems which was later merged with another competitor company and was renamed as PayPal, and he became the chairman and CEO. Musk led the company on successful campaigns that brought in a lot of customers.

In 2002, Musk and his group sold PayPal for a whopping $1.8 billion and he received $180 million from shares in PayPal which served as enough funds to pursue his space engineering and renewable energy ambitions.

Elon describes himself as “nauseatingly pro-American” and describes further as in between socially liberal and fiscally conservative. He is known to work 80 – 100 hours a week, and is a critical thinker.

Forbes states Musk wealth as self-made and estimates his real-time net-worth standing at $13.8 billion and ranks him sixty-eight richest persons in the US.

SpaceX

Musk founded Space Exploration Corp. or also known as SpaceX in June 2002 with an initial investment of $100 million, mostly fortune made from PayPal deal. At SpaceX, where he is CEO and CTO (Chief Technology Officer) he's trying to revolutionize space tech to enable people to live on other planets. According to Wikipedia, SpaceX develops and manufactures space launch vehicles with a focus on advancing the state of rocket technology. 

The company's first two launch vehicles are the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets, and its first spacecraft is the Dragon. In seven years, SpaceX designed the family of Falcon launch vehicles and the Dragon multipurpose spacecraft. In September 2009, SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket became the first privately funded liquid-fueled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth orbit.

According to AirSpaceMag.com, SpaceX is both the largest private producer of rocket motors in the world, and holder of the record for highest thrust-to-weight ratio for any known rocket motor. Although, he was moved to start SpaceX company after a deal went sour in purchasing a rocket of about $8 million dollars from a Russian company which Elon complained was too expensive.

SpaceX faced a massive setback in June 2015 when one of its Falcon 9 rockets exploded two minutes after launch, according to Forbes. That has not in any way deterred the company as they have successfully launched more rockets into deep space orbits in several missions since then.

Musk is a revolutionary and he is on his way to replace internal combustion engines with electric cars, which Musk believes would in less than two decades lead to less oil dependence - leading to reduction in global warming and permanently ease Geo-political tensions.

Tesla Motors

Forbes describes Musk two companies as “moonshot tech companies”, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, and describes him at Tesla trying to bring fully-electric vehicles to the mass market.

It began in 2004, with an investment of about $70 million when he ascended as chairman of the board of directors and became CEO of Tesla Motors in December 2008.

The recent launch of Tesla X, a SUV, is an environment friendly electric car, tagged by Tesla Motors as the most secure car in history. Musk stated that when the HEPA filter operates at a maximum performance no pollen, bacteria or viruses could be detected in the cabin.

Furthermore, Tesla motors just launched their driver-assisted auto-lane maneuver system for their Tesla motors which could easily be upgraded on all their customer electric cars software.

Elon goes further to say that the new auto-lane maneuver system would improve driver confidence only that drivers are advised to still put their hands on the steering while car is maneuvering.

All was not always rosy at Tesla, because at some point in 2013, Tesla Motors was in trouble and was going to be sold to Google but tables turned again in favour of Elon who had aces and with some SOS fund injections, the company was able to recover, and also from being sold to Google.

Although in the last two months, indicators have shown from several financial quarters that Tesla Motors and Solar City (another company owned by Musk) stocks have plunged alarmingly and investors have been advised and discouraged from buying their stocks.

Hyperloop

Another transportation concept Musk introduced is the Hyperloop. According to SpaceX, The Hyperloop is a conceptual high-speed transportation system originally put forward by entrepreneur Elon Musk, incorporating reduced-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules ride on an air cushion driven by linear induction motors and air compressors.

According to Wikipedia, Hyperloop technology has been explicitly open-sourced by Musk and SpaceX, and others have been encouraged to take the ideas and further develop them. To that end, several companies have been formed, and dozens of interdisciplinary student-led teams are working to advance the technology. Designs for test tracks and capsules are currently being developed, with construction of a full-scale prototype 5-mile (8 km) track scheduled to start in 2016.

Philanthropy

Musk foundation is an organization which channels its philanthropic efforts by making available solar-power energy systems to areas affected by natural disasters. In 2011, the organization donated $250,000 to a city in Japan that was devastated by a tsunami. Musk who chairs the philanthropic organization donated $10 million dollars to Future of Life Institute, an organization tasked to run a global research program aimed at keeping Artificial Intelligence (AI) to benefit humanity.

Open AI

Musk is known to crash at his friends crib (Sergey Brin and Larry Page), both Google Co-founders and CEO’s at their Palto-Alto Carlifornia residence, because He does not have a home around there and he does not like to lodge in Hotels.

Although good buddies, Elon is campaigning against his friends company Google in their latest bid of creating robot armies, what many internet commenter’s call “Giant Killer Robots.” A lot of observers are vying for a ban of Google’s giant robots.

One commenter posits that having rogue Artificial Intelligence (AI) on your phone might not be harmful bodily but to have AI in giant machines like the video of Google’s Boston Dynamics horse-looking robot navigating and marching through terrains, and it is but pending doom for the human race if things go sour with AI in those robots.

In 2014, at a Centennial symposium in MIT, responding to a question from a member of audience on AI raised concerns for Elon as he likened rogue AI to summoning demons. Musk has compared AI to nuclear warfare fretting that one day rogue AI might threaten the human race and he has actively been in open debates and discussions about possibilities where AI goes rogue in the near future and man now becoming slaves or subjects to machines, and inevitably leading to human-race extinction.

Rogue AI has already featured in movies we have seen; Terminator, Robocop, Matrix, Transcendence, Avenger’s: Age of Ultron, Ex-Machina, Eagle-Eye, I-Robot, etcetera.

Part of Mr. Musk effort as well as partnership with Sam Altman, CEO of Y Combinator, to curb rogue AI is the founding of a billion-dollar not-for-profit Artificial Intelligence (AI) research company, Open AI.

Hiring best brains on Deep Learning to develop AI in a way that is safe and beneficial to man-kind. This move has triggered responses from both corporations, Facebook and Google, open-sourcing their Big Sur Sever AI hardware system and Tensor-Flow AI software engine, respectively.

Deep Learning is a form of AI that tries to mimic the functioning of layers of neuron in the human brain.

For example, this technology has already been used in Google’s AI software engine for recognizing spoken words, identifying images, language translation and processing, of which they open-sourced some it’s AI services last November.

Open AI would however make AI available to everyone, and serve to counter large companies who may gain too much power by owning super-intelligence systems devoted to profits, as well as governments which may use AI to gain power and even oppress their citizenry according to Levy Steven (Medium.com/Backchannel).

We have already seen Israel/US Iron Dome, an autonomous military AI weapon system that detects and shoots down incoming rockets, used in conflicts last year where thousands of people lost their lives. Other countries like the US also have the MADSS - a 1,400 pound rover with a Gatling gun, the Protector, the Phalanx CIWS system used in US naval combat ships.

Elon is not alone in this campaign against unsupervised AI researches. Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak (Co-founder of Apple), and Demis Hassabis (CEO, Google DeepMind) are allies at different levels in the crusade for regulatory measures against unguided AI researches.