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Elon Musk: A man with dreams turning to reality



Elon Musk; a billionaire, inventor, and philanthropist, has taken the 21st-century world by a storm. Musk was born and raised in Pretoria, South Africa.

He briefly attended the University of Pretoria before moving to Canada aged 17 to attend Queen's University. He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania two years later, where he received dual bachelor's degrees in economics and physics. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University but decided instead to pursue a business career, co-founding the web software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. 

Musk co-founded an online bank X.com that same year, which merged with Confinity in 2000 to form the company PayPal and was subsequently bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX, an aerospace manufacturer, and space transport services company, of which he is CEO, CTO, and lead designer. In 2004, he joined electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.) as chairman and product architect, becoming its CEO in 2008. In 2006, he helped create SolarCity, a solar energy services company and current Tesla subsidiary.

In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit research company that promotes friendly artificial intelligence. In 2016, he co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology company focused on developing brain-computer interfaces, and founded The Boring Company, a tunnel construction company. Musk has also proposed the Hyperloop, a high-speed vacuum transportation system.

Be it technological or biological advancements; Musk has dedicated his life towards making the world a better place to live in. Not a day goes by when we aren’t eager to hear about rockets going off to the sky by SpaceX or seeing the brand new Tesla updates. 

So today I’ve researched and gathered the best of all inventions and discoveries by Elon Musk. And here they are:

1. Tesla: 



It’s impossible to think of Musk and not think of Tesla: conspicuously, one of his most well-known innovations, Tesla is an electric-car company bringing fully-electric vehicles to consumers. It's Model 3 car retails for a starting price of $35,000. There’s a huge demand for Tesla cars because of their environmental benefits.


2. Space X:




Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is an American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company headquartered in Hawthorne, California. It was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk to reduce space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars.


3. PayPal:



Founded in the year 1999, Musk kick-started an organization called X.com, which focused on financial services and email payments. A year into their operations, they merged with Confinity and adopted their best-selling product PayPal. Just imagine the kind of revolution and ease in transactions it has bought.


 

4. Hyperloop:


High-speed travel in pods inside a partial-vacuum tube is the brainchild of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who open-sourced the basic design in 2013 in the form of a white paper. The transportation system, which was introduced in 2013 aims to reduce the travel time from hours to minutes. It will be 4 times faster than a commercial flight.


 










5. SolarCity:



SolarCity Corporation is a subsidiary of Tesla, Inc. that develops and sells solar panels and solar roof tiles. It is headquartered in Fremont, California. After its acquisition in 2016, effectively all products and services are sold through Tesla's website. SolarCity is a project that aims at providing solar-power systems in the US and is the second largest in its field with revenues of $102.8 million recently.


6. The Boring Company(TBC): 





The Boring Company was initially formed as a subsidiary of SpaceX, becoming a separate and fully independent company in 2018. TBC’s current and proposed projects are designed for loop intra-city transit systems. It has completed one tunnel for testing Hyperloop and Loop in Los Angeles County, and it has another tunnel under construction in Las Vegas. Two further tunnels are pending permitting, with one connecting Washington D.C. to Baltimore designed for both Loop and Hyperloop, and another tunnel connecting Dodger Stadium to the rest of Los Angeles. 


7. Neuralink:

                            

Co-founded by Tesla Inc and SpaceX CEO Musk in 2016, Neuralink aims to implant wireless brain-computer interfaces in the brain to help cure neurological conditions like Alzheimer's, dementia, and spinal cord injuries and ultimately fuse humankind with artificial intelligence. Neuralink unveiled a pig named Gertrude that has had a coin-sized computer chip in its brain for two months late Friday, showing off an early step toward the goal of curing human diseases with the same type of implant. Musk did not provide a timeline for those treatments, appearing to retreat from earlier statements that human trials would begin by the end of this year. "An implantable device can solve these problems," Musk said on a webcast Friday, mentioning ailments such as memory loss, hearing loss, depression, and insomnia.


8. OpenAI: 



The goal of Open AI is to be the first to create an AGI (Artificial general intelligence); a machine with the learning and reasoning powers of a human mind. The purpose is not world domination rather, the lab wants to ensure that the technology is developed safely and its benefits distributed evenly to the world.


9.  Tesla Cybertruck:

            

The goal of Tesla in developing the Cybertruck is to provide a sustainable energy substitute for the roughly 6,500 fossil-fuel-powered trucks sold per day in the United States. The Tesla Cybertruck is an all-electric, battery-powered, light-duty truck announced by Tesla, Inc. Three models have been announced with range estimates of 250–500 miles and an estimated 0–60 mph time of 2.9–6.5 seconds, depending on the model. The price of the rear-wheel-drive (RWD) model of the vehicle was announced to be US$39,900, with all-wheel drive (AWD) models starting at US$49,900. As of November 2019, the dual-motor AWD and tri-motor AWD Cybertruck production were slated to begin in late 2021, with the RWD model being added.

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