Can you image a visionary-genius being silly, rude and funny? Now that is a ridiculous combination but that is also what makes Elon Musk what he is. It is apt to call him our real-life Tony Stark, except for the playboy part. His growth has been incredible especially during the pandemic. Recently, he was announced by the prestigious Time Magazine’s as its ‘Time Person of the Year 2021’.
Like his innovations, his net worth too is sky-rocketing all the way to 300+ Billion USD, making his rivals appear tinnier. For a decade, Musk has been the undisputed wizard of road and air transportation.
His company Space-X developed a set of new technologies for an orbital launch system that may be reused many times. In other words, it is like reusable rocket technology. He successfully demonstrated it in December 2015, and the first re-flight of a landed first stage occurred in March 2017.
What was a startup in 2002 quickly started giving companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin a hard time. In April 2021, Space-x was awarded a contract by NASA for $2.9 billion to use Starship to take astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon, beating other longtime players.
Musk’s e-car company Tesla Inc., controls two-thirds of the multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle market, and very recently, Musk tweeted that SpaceX is starting a program to take CO2 out of atmosphere & turn it into rocket fuel. His latest project- the Starlink program, is about launching as many as 42,000 satellites to provide Internet service to the world.
It is true that his ideas are out of this world, and they work better in reality. Maybe that’s why, though he is a hard taskmaster, his company wins. “He was raised in a tough environment and born with a very special brain,” says Antonio Gracias, Musk’s close friend of two decades. “Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of people in that situation don’t come out of it. Some small percentage come out of it with the ability he has to make great decisions under extraordinary pressure and the never-ending drive to change the course of humanity,” he adds.
Musk is also a different sort of a philanthropist. In the first four months of 2021, he committed almost $150 million directly to charities, according to Recode reporting and public announcements.
“He is a humanist—not in the sense of being a nice person, because he isn’t,” says Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society. “He wants eternal glory for doing great deeds, and he is an asset to the human race because he defines a great deed as something that is great for humanity. He is greedy for glory. Money to him is a means, not an end. Who today evaluates Thomas Edison on the basis of which of his inventions turned a profit?”
Musk and the 100 Million competition!
Musk XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition. It is aimed at tackling the biggest threat facing humanity – fighting climate change and rebalancing Earth’s carbon cycle. Funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation, this $100M competition is the largest incentive prize in history, an extraordinary milestone.
To win the grand prize, teams must demonstrate a working solution at a scale of at least 1000 tonnes removed per year; model their costs at a scale of 1 million tonnes per year; and show a pathway to achieving a scale of gigatonnes per year in future.
Any carbon negative solution is eligible: nature-based, direct air capture, oceans, mineralization, or anything else that achieves net negative emissions, sequesters CO2 durably, and show a sustainable path to achieving low cost at gigatonne scale.