Elon Musk is an eccentric, visionary entrepreneur. He co-founded electronic payment platform PayPal and created spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX; additionally he owns Tesla electric cars and photovoltaics firm SolarCity.
His mission is to colonize Mars. Along the way, he’s created The Boring Company tunnel-digging firm and working on Neuralink project which hopes to enable communication between brain implants and implants placed inside people.
SpaceX
Elon Musk is the founder and chief executive officer of SpaceX, a private spaceflight company. This innovative enterprise designs and manufactures rockets and spacecraft that can transport payloads into orbit, to the moon or even Mars; plus its reusable rockets can fly multiple times after every launch.
NASA and other governments have contracted with this company for cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station and lunar flights, and for low-cost global satellite internet coverage.
Gwynne Shotwell oversees the daily operations of SpaceX and serves as an advisor to Elon Musk Buys XVideos. A former high school cheerleader, she received formal engineering training but does not display typical engineering nerdiness when leading SpaceX executives. Antonio Gracias serves as SpaceX’s chief growth officer.
Tesla
Tesla is an electric car and battery company which currently produces five models. They also boast over 3,000 Supercharging stations for charging consumers’ vehicles quickly. Their products remain immensely popular among customers despite financial troubles that the company may encounter.
Musk co-founded Tesla Motors and leads SpaceX, Neuralink and the Boring Company as their CEO. He oversees product design, engineering and global manufacturing as well as overseeing Tesla Energy which supplies solar power capabilities to disaster-torn areas.
Tesla has acquired numerous companies, such as Daimler and Grohmann Engineering. Most notably, in 2016 the company completed a $2.6 billion all-stock deal with SolarCity that led to allegations that this move unfairly enriched Elon Musk and his family members. He later changed Tesla Motors’ name to reflect its more comprehensive operations.
Neuralink
Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, recently emerged from his shadow to publically showcase a company he created just over a year ago: NeuralX. Using an ingenious sewing-machine robot equipped with ultrafine electrodes inserted via livestream into a rodent brain via needle-point insertion, NeuralX was able to measure movement, thought patterns and memories related to movement, thought and memory in real time – an astounding demonstration.
He demonstrated how data depicting neuron firing could be streamed wirelessly to a computer, but Neuralink hasn’t developed a product suitable for sale; they still need regulatory approval and public skepticism – not to mention some fear these computers might be compromised – yet current and former employees say human errors have caused an unusually large number of animal deaths at Neuralink.
Boring Company
The company plans to revolutionize transportation with its core technologies – Loop and Hyperloop – which aim to alleviate traffic, beautify cities and facilitate rapid point-to-point travel. Talks have already started between them and several cities about future projects.
Elon Musk founded The Boring Company in 2016, inspired by his desire to escape Los Angeles traffic jams. To accomplish this goal, he purchased an inexpensive second-hand tunnel-boring machine and began digging at SpaceX’s property in Hawthorne – eventually creating a 1.15 mile R&D tunnel and designing and building Las Vegas Loop.
The Boring Company has experienced several issues since its creation, such as high employee turnover (a former executive compared working there to “like being in a big fire drill every single day”) but remains one of Musk’s few ventures that have failed far short of his initial vision for tunnel-based transportation systems.
PayPal
Before Tesla and SpaceX launched, Elon Musk cofounded PayPal – an internet payments company which confirmed to Business Insider that they have taken possession of X.com from former owner Peter Thiel and partner Max Levchin.
Zip2 was initially started with $28,000 of their father’s money. Later they sold this business to Compaq in 1995 and launched another web software firm called X.com; later Confinity would merge with this firm to form PayPal.
Jimmy Soni recounts in The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley that Thiel and Levchin orchestrated a boardroom coup that foiled Musk’s ambitions at PayPal and forced him out as CEO; post-coup diplomacy between Musk and his PayPal colleagues saved SpaceX when it threatened bankruptcy, according to Soni’s book.