Elon Musk: The Iron Man of the 21st Century

Captain America: “Big man in a suit of armour. Take that away and what are you?”
Tony Stark: “Genius, billionaire, philanthropist.” (Basically Elon Musk!)

As a resident of the 21st century, what age would you attribute to this century? The digital age? The age of technology? The age of transportation? The age of commerce? The space age? The age of AI? All of the above? What if I told you there’s a person who has had a big hand in fueling not one but all of these ages? The answer, no surprises here, is in the title of this article.

What Was His Childhood Like? Must Have Been a Genius Boy!

You know as they say, geniuses are both born and made. You can have an IQ of 155 but without putting in enough effort and hardwork, you will never excel. Elon was born in a middle-class family in South Africa in 1971. He loved reading books, mostly Sci-Fi and computer stuff. In fact, he learned programming in BASIC on his own by reading a manual and even created a video-game which he sold to PC for $500. He was 12 then! At this age, all I did in my free time was play games like Need for Speed, Age of Empires and Project IGI. He was lucky; there were less distractions when he was young (let’s go with this reasoning for why it took me 4 more years than him just to write “Hello World” in C).

You may be thinking that it’s only an upward journey from there but that is far from the truth. As it is for many successful folks, life is hard and challenging in the early days. Elon’s parents divorced when he was just 9 and he started living with his father who, according to him, was the evilest man you could probably think of. But emotional abuse at home was not the only cause of his worries. Elon was heavily bullied at school. In fact, one time, he was thrown down a flight of stairs by his classmates and ended up in the hospital. The fact that he had such a traumatic childhood and yet was able to overcome and not lose the willpower to pursue his ambitions is an inspiration for me. Never lose sight of your north star, no matter how bad the situation gets.

So What Did He Do after His Schooling?

Elon got into a Bachelor’s programme in Economics and Physics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. The people from the 80s reading this article would perhaps recall this time to be the early start of the internet boom. Around 1995, Elon understood the future impact and implications of the still nascent internet revolution and jumped on the internet bandwagon early on by founding a company called Zip2, an online city-guide software. Remember that he was still pursuing his degree as well. Apart from the rented office space for Zip2, he had no place to call home and slept on the couch of his office. They had only one computer in the office and guess who made the entire software by coding seven days a week? As a software developer, this is another quality that I like about him that sets him apart from many other entrepreneurs: he knows his sh*t! Zip2 sold for over $300 million and Elon could have easily enjoyed his life with the money he got from the sale instead of opening another venture, and another one after that, and another one after that…

PayPal

I’m sure you know what PayPal is! Even today, it is still one of the most popular online payments system in the world and yes, Elon Musk had a hand in that. Post the sale of Zip2, Elon moved on to revolutionize the banking sector by opening an online financial services firm called X.com in the exact same year! “Never Settle” is another motto that we can learn from him. X.com later merged with PayPal and Elon held his seat in the board of directors as the largest shareholder in the company.

SpaceX

The Iron Man analogy is really kicking off now isn’t it! Space is one field that was assumed to be the responsibility of countries as a whole and not private companies because of the sheer amount of resources and capital it took. Even today, the idea of opening a space startup sounds ridiculous (I can hear the angel investors laughing already!). But there is no doubt that space exploration will directly correlate to the advancement of the human colony. It’s just that the process is very slow due to the limitations of the current technology. But that doesn’t mean we should stop at the very first step and give up. In 2002, Elon did the impossible. He started a space startup with the goal to lessen the cost and improve access to space. The world was shaken by SpaceX in December 2015 (13 years after the company started) when they did the impossible, landed a rocket used by an orbital spaceflight vertically back on earth (Falcon 9). This was a milestone not just by the company but for the entire human race. Of course, this didn’t happen in a single try. Millions of dollars were burnt to achieve this milestone. Musk was criticized hundreds of times by the people and even folks at NASA. You know what he didn’t do? Quit. He didn’t quit and here we are now. SpaceX has done dozens of vertical landings since 2015, some even in the middle of the ocean on drone ships. Other than that, SpaceX has flown many missions to the ISS and are currently in the process of revolutionizing the internet by making a low-earth orbit constellation of internet satellites called Starlink which can provide internet to every corner of the planet. By the way, Elon is not just the CEO of SpaceX, but also the lead designer. Remember the talk about knowing the stuff you’re into? That is still being followed.

Tesla

Coming back to earth, here’s another company that Elon co-founded (2003) and is also a CEO of. Just about a decade ago, the perspective of electric vehicles were pretty poor in people’s minds because the tech was totally meh. Electric vehicles were slow, had this annoying sound and were pretty small in size and ugly looking. Tesla spent a ton of money and resources on R&D in multiple domains like batteries, motors and even sensors and AI. Tesla’s cars are extremely modern looking filled with all sorts of smart features like AI autopilot, have top-class speed and acceleration (0–100 in less than 5s) and a battery tech that can last for 300km on a full charge. Needless to say, Tesla revolutionized the automotive industry the day that first Tesla car, Tesla Model S was launched in 2012. Other manufacturers had to change their plans in the direction paved by Tesla and now we have an entire market filled with non-polluting electric vehicles. One thing that really gave me those pride-filled goosebumps were when Elon announced that in order to fight climate change, no lawsuit will be filed against those who use Tesla’s patents.

Hyperloop

Well, cars were there even before Tesla jumped in to change the course of the industry. What was not there was an idea for a 5th mode of transportation, something that can surpass the speeds and reliability of commercial flights as well. It was in 2013 that he revealed his idea and designs of a high-speed transportation system that uses near-vacuum tubes with pressurized capsules driven by air cushion to the world. Since then, many companies including Richard Branson’s Virgin Group have taken initiative to make hyperloop a reality.

OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research lab founded by Elon Musk in 2015 with a goal to develop and promote AI such that it benefits the whole of humanity. The company has made some revolutionary strides in the field of AI, especially with its generative pre-training (GPT) models. Everyone in the field of tech is excited about the release of GPT-3 which apparently succeeds at certain meta-learning tasks as well!

Neuralink

As if the above fields weren’t enough, Elon jumped to capture the field of neurotechnology as well because of course, why not. If you watch a lot of Sci-Fi movies, I’m sure you would have come across some ideas and implementations of a tech that can be controlled by humans just by thinking. This is exactly what this company is after: make a brain-computer interface with AI capabilities. Neuralink was founded in 2016 so the research work is still in progress but knowing Musk, I’m sure something revolutionary will come out of it.

Phew, that was a lot to process wasn’t it? How can one guy do so much? I’m not sure about you but as an engineer, Elon Musk is my role-model. By the way, now do you agree with the title of this article? What type of company do you think Elon Musk will open next? Comment below!