Elon Musk is one of the world’s leading entrepreneurs. He is the co-founder and CEO of the world’s top technology companies, such as Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, etc. According to Forbes, Elon Musk is the 40th richest person in the world, having a net of $ 20 billion.
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The List of Elon Musk’s Projects
Zip2
Zip2 was an online city guide software to newspapers founded by Elon and Kimbal Musk. The company was creating and issuing city guides for newspaper agencies. It also was helping advertisers and print mass media to communicate with each other. Elon Musk managed to establish a contract with the world’s leading newspaper agencies, such as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. In 1999, Compaq Computer purchased Zip2. By that time, the company’s worth was $ 307M. Elon Musk had a 7 % share and received $ 22M after the deal.
X.com
In 1999 Elon Musk and Greg Kouri launched another project called X.com. It was the first online bank that was providing an email payment system. X.com had a partnership with Barclays, a British investment bank. In 2000, the company merged with Confinity, another online banking enterprise and the fiercest competitor of X.com. Confinity had an online payment registration system called PayPal. When two competitors merged, they named a united company after this payment system. In 2002, the company was purchased by eBay for $1.5 billion. Elon Musk received about $ 154M as he owned 11.7% of PayPal’s shares.
SpaceX
SpaceX stands for Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, a large scale business founded and launched by Elon Musk. The history of the company started with a concept of Mars landing and building there an “oasis”. When Musk published his concept, he headed to Moscow along with Jim Cantrel and Adeo Ressi. He aimed to buy refurbished Dnepr rockets, but negotiations failed. The first rockets launched by the company were called Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 (a reference to Star Wars). The first spacecraft created by the company was called Dragon. In 2012, the Dragon successfully reached the International Space Station. It marked SpaceX as the first-ever known commercial flight company that reached space.
Tesla
In 2004, Elon Musk joined the Tesla company as its chairman. He became its CEO only in 2008. In the same year, Tesla released Roadster, the company’s first electric sports car. They sold more than 2500 automobiles in more than 30 countries. This year Tesla acquired a world level recognition. The corporation aims to produce affordable, electrically powered vehicles. Following this mission, Tesla produced Model 3 that costs 35,000 USD. As for 2018, Tesla Inc.’s market value is more than $600M, making it one of the biggest automobile companies in the world.
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SolarCity
SolarCity is a division of Tesla Corporation. The company’s main specialization is solar energy services. By 2013, the company became the second largest provider of solar electricity systems in the US. Elon Musk claims that he purchased SolarCity to contribute to the environment. Global warming is one of the hottest eco issues in Musk’s opinion. In 2014, Musk said that the company would launch a solar power plant that would be 3 times larger than the biggest solar power station in the United States. Beside producing solar power systems, SolarCity manufactures electric vehicle chargers and storing electric power using their resources. Moreover, the company participates in a governmental project initiative called the SunShot, making the solar energy affordable for everyone.
Hyperloop
Hyperloop is a concept of a transportation system for passengers or cargo. The trains will move in the tubes with reduced air pressure using the linear induction motors and the air compressors as the acceleration source. The first Hyperloop route is proposed to be located between the Greater Los Angeles Area and the Bay of San Francisco. Elon Musk claims that Hyperloop will be a cheaper mean of transport. In 2017, he announced that he had a verbal agreement with the government to launch a Hyperloop between Washington D. C. and New York City. However, no one of the state agencies that are responsible for travel maintenance between those cities confirmed that it is true.
OpenAI
In 2015, Elon Musk founded a non-profit organization OpenAI. Its mission is to create an open-source artificial intelligence that would be accessible to everyone. OpenAI aims to produce artificial intelligence systems that would be harmless to humans and society in common. OpenAI has released the Universe, an open-source platform that allows users to master their machine learning algorithms on the specialized datasets. The company’s endowment reached about $1 billion in 2018. Musk believes that the future of humankind depends on the future of artificial intelligence.
Neuralink
Musk regards Neuralink and OpenAI as two enterprises that have one mission – producing technologies that can positively impact humankind. While OpenAI is mostly associated with the software, Neuralink aims to produce microcomputers and other systems that will be used by specialists. The company’s website states that the company is in the process of developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces and looking for top-notch engineers that would like to work on the project.
Other projects
Elon Musk has lots of other real and potential projects. Boring Company is an enterprise that provides the world’s cheapest tunnel boring services. Elon Musk got an idea of its foundation while being stuck in a traffic jam several years ago. Thud is a potential comic media venture. The pravduh.com is a website that aims to become a platform where people would be able to rate the news according to their trustworthiness. As it is widely known, Elon Musk tends to make claims that are not based on facts and are not supported by the referred sources. However, Musk also tends to generate ideas and create projects spontaneously and almost instantly.