Today at the Italian Tech Week is Elon Musk’s day. The most eagerly awaited appointment of a full program of big names is at 12; the CEO of Tesla and Space X will connect live to talk about Space, the future and new projects. At the end of the conversation with the president of Stellantis John Elkann, moderated by the director of Repubblica, Maurizio Molinari, Musk will also answer some questions posed by the audience.
“I am Elon Musk, billionaire, I founded PayPal and X.Com. I sold X.Com to Compaq for $ 165 million in cash and I could spend the rest of my life on a beach drinking Mai Tai, but I have decided that the ‘humanity must become a multiplanetary species to survive and I want to use my money to prove that it is possible. ”It is the spring of 2001 when this bizarre call comes to Jim Cantrell, entrepreneur, mechanical engineer, pilot, rocket expert. accepts the invitation and starts working for Musk; the following year Space Exploration Technologies Corporation is born.
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No one would have bet on SpaceX, and instead, twenty years later, it is a success. For how it has challenged the traditional procedure of building rockets, making them at a fraction of the cost, because it was the first private company to launch space carriers and return them to Earth; because today it supplies the International Space Station with food and instrumentation, and will soon carry astronauts back and forth.
But from the beginning SpaceX was born for another, more grandiose and idealistic purpose: to colonize Mars. According to Musk, the reasons that push him are two, one personal, the challenge itself, another collective, the long-term survival of mankind. If a calamity destroys life on Earth, the species could continue to exist from a human colony established elsewhere.
There is a method, in this that seems crazy: Musk is trying to save humanity from itself. Also with his other companies, from Tesla to Solar City, from Neuralink to Open AI, from The Boring Company to Hyperloop. For example Tesla, the company he is most famous for: Martin Eberhard and Mark Tarpenning founded it in 2003, but the funds are not enough, so they turn to Musk, who invests a few million dollars and some of his time. In four years the company has a working prototype, Elon Musk becomes CEO and in interviews he explains: “Tesla’s aim is to accelerate the advent of electric vehicles and sustainable transport. We are trying to help the environment, we think it is the most serious problem that humanity has to face ”.
In Tesla as in SpaceX, Musk is not only CEO but personally involved in product development. And in 2008 he faces a difficult time: three successive launches of the Falcon have failed, while Tesla, which has already cost him about $ 70 million, is on the verge of failure. But the latest launch succeeds and SpaceX wins a $ 1.6 billion contract with NASA; Tesla’s fourth round of funding closes on Christmas Eve and the company is safe.
Over the years the new models arrive: S (2012), X (2015), 3 (2017), Y (2020). On the website the order is different: S3XY, sexy, one of the many nerdy games that dot Musk’s businesses. The Cybertruck pickup, announced in 2019 and expected for this year, is postponed to the next one, but Tesla is finally in profit and today it is the car company with the highest quotation in the world, without however giving up the initial spirit. In 2014, the company’s patents become open source: “We want to make our technology public, in the hope that it can help others make the electric car better”. Once again, the South African entrepreneur goes against all rules, including those of common sense.
From the work on Tesla comes the intuition of Powerwalls, batteries used as domestic accumulators, while Solar Roof is the company (also from Musk) that builds solar roofs to produce electricity. And in the future, maybe we will really see Tesla Bots, announced last month: robots for use in and out of factories.
But mobility goes beyond the car, so Hyperloop and The Boring Company are born. The first is a superfast train which is supposed to replace the plane; this is also open source, and several companies are starting trials around the world.
The Boring company (another pun: “the company that makes holes” or “the boring company”) works on a system of underground tunnels to reduce traffic in large cities.
From Space X comes Starlink, a constellation of thousands of small artificial satellites to bring fast internet with minimum latency to every part of the globe.
Meanwhile, with Open AI, Musk aims to make artificial intelligence research publicly available, led essentially by private companies like Facebook and Google, while Neuralink is an ambitious attempt to establish a direct connection between the human brain and the computer. The idea is always the same: to give humanity another chance, in case this world and this technology should lead to a catastrophe.
We must save the Earth by destroying the enemy, in short: as in Blastar, the video game invented by Elon Musk at the age of 12. Halfway between Space Invaders and Asteroid, it is bought for $ 500 by a computer magazine that publishes it as a giveaway for readers.
Thus begins the story of a visionary and controversial entrepreneur, who does not slow down after successes and learns from defeats: “Failure is a possibility”, observes Musk, who turned fifty just a few months ago. “If things don’t fail, then you aren’t innovating enough.”
ITW
All the speakers of the Italian Tech Week
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