Elon Musk: Early life, Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink

Early life

17 Facts You Didn't Know About Elon Musk

Elon Musk was an engineer and his mother was a model and nutritionist.

In an entrepreneurial family, he is the oldest of three brothers. Kimbal Musk, his brother, is a venture capitalist and environmentalist at the moment. Tosca Musk, his girlfriend, is an award-winning producer and director.

Musk lived more with his father after his parents split when he was a child. A year early, Musk began education, attending the private Waterkloof House Preparatory School and graduating from Pretoria Boys High School later. He read voraciously and was an enthusiastic comic fan as well. He was humiliated in school and returned to his books at the detriment of his social life, self-described as a bookworm and something of a smart aleck.

With the Commodore VIC-20, Musk was added to machines at the age of 10. He learned to programme easily and sold a game called Blastar to Spectravideo for $500 at the age of 12.

Moving to Canada-

Musk relocated to Canada at 17 to stop participating in the South African military, whose primary task was to uphold apartheid in the late 1980s. Via his mother, he would later receive Canadian citizenship.

Musk studied at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, before emigrating to Canada. It was there that he met an ambitious blogger, Justine Wilson. Before divorcing in 2008, they married and had five sons, twins and triplets, together.

Musk’s Education in the U.S.-

Musk moved to the University of Pennsylvania after two years at Queen’s University. He took on two majors, but it wasn’t all work and no play in his day. He acquired a ten-bedroom fraternity house with a fellow undergraduate, which they used as an ad hoc nightclub.

Musk graduated from Wharton School with a Bachelor of Science in Physics, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Economics. The two majors refer to the path the profession of Musk would take later, but it was physics that made the strongest impact on his thought.

“(Physics is) a good thought system,” he would later say. “Boil stuff down to their simple realities and rationalise from there.”

When he moved to California to seek a doctorate in applied physics at Stanford University, Musk was 24 years old. Musk had entrepreneurial dreams floating in his head as the internet flourished and Silicon Valley boomed. After just two days, he quit the PhD programme.

Tesla

Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who funded the firm after the Series A round of financing, founded Tesla, Inc. (originally Tesla Motors) in July 2003. Prior to the intervention of Elon Musk, both men played important roles in the early growth of the company. In February 2004, Musk led the Series A investment round, joining Tesla’s board of directors as its chairman. All three, according to Musk, along with J. The earlier AC Propulsion tzero electric roadster concept inspired B. Straubel.

Musk played an active part within the company and directed the production of the Roadster vehicle at a comprehensive level, but was not deeply involved in day-to-day business operations. Eberhard was ousted from the group following the financial crisis in 2008 and after a string of escalating disagreements in 2007. In 2008, Musk took over the company’s leadership as CEO and product architect, roles he still holds today. Elon Musk is the longest tenured CEO of any car maker worldwide as of 2019.

As the co-founder and CEO of Tesla, Elon oversees both the company’s hybrid cars, battery devices and solar energy goods in product design , innovation and global manufacturing.

Tesla ‘s mission has been to drive the world’s transition to renewable energy since the company’s founding in 2003. The Roadster sports car, the first Tesla vehicle, debuted in 2008, followed by the Model S sedan, unveiled in 2012, and the Model X SUV, released in 2015. Model S won the Best Overall Car from Customer Reviews and was named Motor Trend ‘s Ultimate Car of the Year, while Model X was the first SUV ever to win 5-star safety ratings in each category and sub-category in the tests of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

In 2017, Tesla released Model 3 deliveries, a mass-market electric vehicle with a range of more than 320 miles, and unveiled Tesla Semi, intended to save buyers at least $200,000 over a million miles based solely on fuel prices. Tesla launched Cybertruck in 2019, which would have more utility and more efficiency than a conventional truck and a sports car, as well as the Model Y compact SUV, which started shipping to consumers in early 2020.

Space X

In 2001, in an effort to restore public interest in space exploration and lift NASA ‘s budget, Musk conceptualised “Mars Oasis,” a mission to land a miniature experimental greenhouse containing seeds with dehydrated gel on Mars to cultivate plants on Martian soil, “so this will be the farthest life has ever gone.” But Musk discovered that flying to Mars would be prohibitively costly without a revolutionary advancement in rocket science, even with a much greater space budget. In October 2001, with Jim Cantrell (an aerospace supplies fixer) and Adeo Ressi (his college best friend), Musk travelled to Moscow to buy refurbished ICBMs (Dnepr) that could carry the expected payloads into orbit.

Elon oversees the production of rockets and spacecraft as lead designer at SpaceX for flights to Earth orbit and eventually to other planets. The SpaceX Falcon 1 was the first private liquid fuel rocket to enter orbit in 2008, and SpaceX made more history in 2017 by for the first time re-flying both a Falcon 9 rocket and a Dragon spacecraft. Soon after, Falcon Large, by a factor of two, the world’s most powerful operating missile, performed its first flight in 2018. The crew-capable variant of the Dragon spacecraft from SpaceX performed its first test flight in 2019, and the corporation will first carry NASA astronauts to the International Space Station in 2020.

Adding on these successes, SpaceX is designing Starship, a totally reusable transport system that will carry crew and freight to the Moon , Mars and beyond, and Starlink, which will offer high-speed wireless internet to regions where connectivity has been unstable, costly, or entirely inaccessible. SpaceX is following the long-term goal of making humanity a multi-planet civilization and building a self-sustaining city on Mars and designing reusable rockets.

Goals-

Musk claimed that one of his aims were to boost the quality and durability of transportation to space, potentially by a factor of ten. In 2004, the company’s plans called for “production of a heavy lift product and even a super-heavy one, if consumer demand persists,” with each size increase resulting in a substantial reduction in cost per pound to orbit. “Musk said:” I think it is really realistic to make $500 a pound ($1,100 / kg) or less.

A big priority of SpaceX has been to build a launch system that can be replicated easily. As of March 2013, including a low-altitude, low-speed Grasshopper vertical takeoff test programme, vertical landing (VTVL) technology demonstrator rocket and a high-altitude, high-speed Falcon 9 post-mission booster return test campaign, each first stage will be instrumented and fitted as a controlled descent test vehicle beginning in mid-2013 with the sixth overall Falcon 9 flight.

At the Singapore Satellite Industry Forum in summer 2013, SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell said, “If we get this [reusable technology] right, and we’re working really hard to get this right, we’re looking at launches that are in the range of US$ 5 to 7 million, which will really radically change things.”

In a 2011 interview, Musk claimed that he aims to bring humans to the surface of Mars within 10-20 years. In 2010, he was persuaded by Musk ‘s estimates that colonisation of Mars was feasible. Musk used the Mars Colonial Transporter descriptor in June 2013 to apply to a privately funded research effort to build and build a rocket engine, launch vehicle and space capsule spaceflight device to carry humans to Mars and return to Earth. COO Gwynne Shotwell said in March 2014 that until the Falcon Heavy and Dragon 2 crew models are flying, the company’s technical staff will work on improving the equipment required for Mars missions to support the transport system.

Achievements-

  • The first privately funded, liquid-fueled rocket (Falcon 1) to reach orbit (28 September 2008)
  • The first privately funded company to successfully launch (by Falcon 9), orbit and recover a spacecraft (Dragon) (9 December 2010)
  • The first private company to send a spacecraft (Dragon) to the International Space Station (25 May 2012)
  • The first private company to send a satellite into geosynchronous orbit (SES-8, 3 December 2013)
  • The first private company to send a probe beyond Earth orbit (Deep Space Climate Observatory, 11 February 2015)
  • The first landing of a first stage orbital capable rocket (Falcon 9, Flight 20) (22 December 2015 1:39 UTC)
  • The first water landing of a first stage orbital capable rocket (Falcon 9) (8 April 2016 20:53 UTC)
  • The development of the most powerful operational rocket as of 2020 (Falcon Heavy, first flight 6 February 2018)
  • The first private company to send humans into orbit (Crew Dragon Demo-2, 30 May 2020)

The Boring Company

The Boring Company (also known as TBC) was founded by Elon Musk in December 2016 and is an American infrastructure and tunnel construction services company.

As his early inspiration for the initiative, Musk cited problems with Los Angeles traffic and deficiencies with the new two-dimensional transport network. In December 2016, the Boring Corporation was originally established as a SpaceX affiliate, becoming a separate and completely independent corporation in 2018. As of December 2018, Musk owns 90 percent of the shares, with 6 percent retained by SpaceX after the company’s initial startup as a return for the use of SpaceX capital. Outside transactions have altered the equity break during 2019.

The existence of The Boring Company was announced by Elon Musk in December 2016. By February 2017 , the company had started digging a 30-foot-wide (9 m), 50-foot-long, and 15-foot-deep test trench on the premises of the Hawthorne offices of SpaceX, as no permits will be needed for construction on its property. When told by workers on a Friday afternoon that it would take at least two weeks to shift workers vehicles in the parking lot to start digging the first hole for the TBC tunnelling machine, Musk replied, “Let’s get started today and see what’s the largest hole we can dig between now and Sunday afternoon, working 24 hours a day.” Later that day, the vehicles were gone and there was a hole in the earth. The Dull afternoon.

In January 2019, Musk addressed an Australian MP’s inquiry about a tunnel west of Sydney through the Blue Mountains, indicating costs of $24 million / mi ($15 million / km) or $750 million for the 31-mile (50 km) tunnel, plus $50 million per station. He reported a few days later that the Director of CERN had been asked to build the tunnels for its 62-mile-circumference (100 km) Potential Circular Collider and that The Boring Firm could save several billion euros for CERN.


The Dull Corporation secured a $48.7 million bid in May 2019 to shuttle individuals beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center.
In July 2019, after raising US$ 113 million in non-outside funding during 2018, The Boring Company approved the first foreign acquisition, selling $120 million in stock to a variety of venture capital firms.


By November 2019, after leading boring efforts for Musk since 2016, Steve Davis had become the president of The Boring Group.Davis was one of SpaceX’s first recruits (in 2003) and has two Master’s degrees in particle physics and aerospace engineering. As he was running the SpaceX Washington DC branch, he started working on a PhD in economics from George Mason University. He published his thesis on US currency debasement in 2010, and opened a bar that “became one of Washington’s first restaurants to welcome Bitcoin.”

Boring machines-

The first three boring machines used by The Boring Company are:

  • Godot, a conventional tunnel boring machine made by Canadian company Lovat which is used for research purposes.
  • Line-storm, a highly modified conventional boring machine. In February 2019, Elon Musk estimated in a tweet that Line-storm would be active “in a month or so”.
  • Prufrock is a “fully-Boring-Company-designed machine”and was under development by May 2018. By late 2018, TBC completed the design and ordered the long lead time parts. TBC began to assemble the machine in 2019. It is slated to support a 15x improvement in tunnelling speed over the existing state of the art in 2017. Prufrock is named after “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot. It has the same diameter as a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft (3.7 metres (12 ft)) In February 2020, Prufrock was shown assembled in a Twitter post with the text: “Prufrock is alive.

Nuralink

Neuralink Corporation, founded by Elon Musk and others, is an American neurotechnology company designing implantable brain-machine interfaces (BMIs). The headquarters of the company is in San Francisco;[6] it was launched in 2016 and first published publicly in March 2017.

According to Bloomberg, the organisation has recruited many high-profile neuroscientists from different universities since it was created. It had earned $158 million in funding by July 2019 (of which $100 million came from Musk) and hired 90 employees. At that time, Neuralink revealed that it was operating on a “sewing machine-like” computer capable of implanting very thin (4 to 6 μm in width threads) into the brain and demonstrated a system that reads information through 1,500 electrodes from a laboratory rat, expecting very thin (4 to 6 μm in width threads) into the brain.

Elon Musk, Ben Rapoport, Dongjin Seo, Max Hodak, Paul Merolla, Philip Sabes, Tim Gardner, Tim Hanson, and Vanessa Tolosa formed Euralink in 2016.

In April 2017, the Wait But Why blog announced that the corporation planned to produce technology in the short term to combat severe brain illnesses, with the end purpose of human improvement, often referred to as transhumanism. In The Community, a collection of 10 novels by Iain M. Banks, Musk said his interest in the idea partially originated from the science fiction concept of ‘neural lace’ in the futuristic universe.

Musk described the neural lace as a “digital layer above the cortex” that does not inherently mean substantial surgical penetration, but preferably an implant into a vein or artery. Musk clarified that the long-term aim is to create “artificial intelligence symbiosis,” which if it goes unregulated, he perceives as an imminent danger to mankind.

Some neuroprosthetics can read brain impulses as of 2017 and allow people with disabilities to operate their prosthetic arms and legs. Musk spoke of aiming to connect the technology to implants that can communicate with other forms of external devices and gadgets at broadband speed[failed verification] instead of actuating motion.

As of 2020, Neuralink has its headquarters in the Mission District of San Francisco, sharing the former Pioneer Trunk Factory building with OpenAI, another Musk-co-founded venture. As of September 2018, Musk was Neuralink’s majority owner, but did not hold an executive position. In 2018, Jared Birchall was listed as CEO , CFO and president of Neuralink; his job was described as formal. A tweet from August 2020 reported recent rumours that the new CEO is Musk. In January 2017, the trademark “Neuralink” was acquired by its former owners.

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