Elon Musk : To infinity and beyond

Elon Musk : To infinity and beyond

When you think “Elon Musk” what words first come to mind? Billionaire? Electric cars? Tesla? SpaceX? Mars? How about boring? What? Yes – he also founded The Boring Company. Not the kind that puts you to sleep – the kind that actually bores through things. Combining tunnelling with an electric public transport system this makes fast, efficient long-distance travel a reality.

What Elon Musk is also making a reality is unleashing a dragon into space. Hardly boring. And definitely not part of a Game of Thrones script. In April 2020 Jim Bridenstine from NASA tweeted:

BREAKING: On May 27, @NASA will once again launch American astronauts on American rockets from American soil! With our @SpaceX partners, @Astro_Doug and @AstroBehnken will launch to the @Space_Station on the #CrewDragon spacecraft atop a Falcon 9 rocket. Let’s #LaunchAmerica

@Astro Doug and @Astro Behnken are Col. Doug Hurley, the pilot of the final Space Shuttle mission, and another Space Shuttle veteran Bob Behnken. Their Crew Dragon spacecraft on a Falcon 9 rocket is one of two crafts that NASA chose to launch American astronauts into space during May 2020 – a very large feather in Elon Musk’s already feather-filled cap.

Born in South Africa, Elon Musk is an engineer. As lead designer at SpaceX, he “oversees the development of rockets and spacecraft for missions to Earth orbit and ultimately to other planets” – Tesla.

Some of the SpaceX milestones include:

• 2008: Falcon 1, the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to go into orbit

• 2017: re-flying a Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft for the first time

• 2018: Falcon Heavy, the most powerful operational rocket in the world, completed its first flight

• 2019: crew-capable version of the Dragon spacecraft completed its first demonstration mission

“We [SpaceX] started off with just a few people who really didn’t know how to make rockets. And the reason that I ended up being the chief engineer or chief designer, was not because I want to, it’s because I couldn’t hire anyone. Nobody good would join. So I ended up being that by default. And I messed up the first three launches.” SpaceX CEO and Lead Designer Elon Musk, International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia, 2017 “ STARSHIP FAST FACTS - SPACEX

SUPER HEAVY

The first stage, or booster, has a gross lift-off mass of over 3 million kg and uses sub-cooled liquid methane and liquid oxygen (CH4/LOX) propellants. The booster will return to land at the launch site on its 6 legs.

Diameter: 9 m Height: 68 m Propellant Capacity: 3300 t Thrust: 72 MN

STARSHIP

Starship is the fully reusable second stage and has an integrated payload section. Starship serves as a large, long-duration spacecraft capable of carrying passengers or cargo to Earth orbit and planetary destinations.

Diameter: 9 m Height: 50 m Propellant Capacity: 1200 t Payload capacity: 100+ t

TESLA

In 2002, at the age of 31, Elon Musk became a millionaire when eBay bought PayPal for $1.5-billion – his share as co-founder was $180-million. Two years later in 2004 he invested $6.3-million in the electric motor, clean energy startup Tesla Motors, now known as Tesla. He became CEO in 2008, even though, according to his brother, Kimbal, in the Third Row Tesla podcast, this was a role he tried really hard not to get. Elon replied

“Yes. This will be misinterpreted as somehow I don’t love Tesla, which I do. It’s just like, I was trying not to go insane. I mean [the] pain level is extreme.”

Tesla went public in 2010, and then shares were $17 each. Ten years later in April 2020 they are going for $769 a pop.

So if you had bought a hundred shares in 2010 for an outlay of $1 700, today you would be sitting with a value of around $76 900 – not too shabby.

Tesla’s current market value is $143-billion (April 2020) and with shares sitting at an all-time high, the company’s 6-month average market cap reached around $97-million, which means a $750-million windfall for Elon Musk got just that bit closer?

How?

In terms of his 2018 compensation package, Musk will receive options to purchase shares – IF - Tesla reaches certain benchmarks. And this is the important one – one of the benchmarks includes market capitalisation averaging $100-billion for 6 months! Once the $100-billion market cap average is reached, he will have the option to buy about 1.7 million shares at $350.02 a share, and selling them at current prices will mean a profit of around $750-million.

Why?

Why has Tesla stock surged? One of the factors could be that they brought out the Model Y crossover in 2020 and during the COVID-19 linked-recession, legacy car manufacturers like General Motors are moving away from the petrol-driven towards battery-powered vehicles – and Tesla has the advantage of already being out of those blocks!

Joe Rogan Experience - SMOKING CANNABIS AND NASA

In 2018 on Joe Rogan’s show Elon Musk smoked cannabis – and broke the internet with more than 33 million views – and counting. Smoking weed on national television was not a great idea, not least because SpaceX is a contractor to the US military, who are not big fans of cannabis. So what did they do? They ordered SpaceX to conduct a $5-miilion audit to ensure “the companies are meeting NASA’s requirements for workplace safety, including the adherence to a drug-free environment.”

Other interesting glimpses into this one-of-a-kind thinker that we got from the YouTube clip were: “Wikipedia is wrong – I am not a business magnate – I am a business magnet – please can someone change that.” “I am an alien.”

“I do engineering 80% of my time – designing things – structural, mechanical, electrical, software, user interface – outer space engineering.” “A company is essentially a cybernetic collection of humans and machines.”

“My mind explodes with ideas all the time. When I was 5 or 6 I thought I was insane.”

His favourite philosopher? Richard Adams, author of Life, the Universe and Everything – and for him, it is getting the question right, not just the answer – which, if you are interested, is 42.

And his views on the future?

“I think fundamentally the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we're a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanet species than if we're not. You want to be inspired by things. You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great. And that's what being a spacefaring civilization is all about.” Elon Musk, International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia, SpaceX CEO and Lead Designer, 2017

ELON MUSK

Is planning to take a trip into space with Virgin Atlantic

Is the world’s #2 richest billionaire with an eye-watering 2021 net worth of $151-billion

His son’s name was changed from “X Æ A-12” to “X Æ A-Xii”

Says that Starship could LAND PEOPLE ON THE MOON IN 2024, and take them to Mars within the decade

Image by: BY TODD ANDERSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX. Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/ news/2018/02/elon-musk-greatest-showman-on-earth