At this stage in the development of human society, the extent of our effect as a species on the natural environment has still yet to be fully understood, but with the massive losses in biodiversity and alarming increases in both climate change and global nitrogen levels, the future does not present the brightest of images. While many still choose to debate the legitimacy of environmentally-related claims, primarily right-wing politicians with supposedly serendipitous financial ties to the oil industry, there are some who have opted to respond to the collectively bleak predictions of our future environment with a seemingly naive sense of proactive optimism. Elon Musk is one of them.
After earning nearly $200 million from the sale of his first company, PayPal, Musk immediately began working on three new projects that have each had gargantuan impacts on their respective industries. His most commercially relevant venture, Tesla Motors, was a project whose sole purpose was to “accelerate the advent of sustainable transport” by ultimately producing an all-electric vehicle that was unquestionably superior to all other vehicles of its class, while maintaining a consumer-friendly price point. After the company’s first three products, the Tesla Roadster, Model S, and Model X, the firm has finally announced its fourth and most exciting product to date: the Model 3. With a base price of roughly $30,000 and a standard 250 mile range battery, Tesla has quite possibly achieved the most revolutionary feat in the automotive industry since the invention of the internal combustion engine.
As for his second venture, SolarCity, Musk’s intention was to provide sustainable energy to homes by creating a lease-based system that would allow individual households to lease the solar panels necessary to provide enough energy to satisfy all of their power needs, which would ultimately cost the household considerably less money than the average monthly electric bill. Additionally, the household would have the ability to store any surplus energy that their panels may produce, given that they now owned their own energy supply as opposed to the energy supplied by their previous electric company. SolarCity was largely a success, but due to recent financial struggles, Musk decided to purchase the company with his other firm Tesla to operate SolarCity as a wholly owned subsidiary of Tesla. Tesla shareholders, although initially skeptical of the financial viability of the acquisition, have now come together in full support of the purchase.
Lastly, Musk’s third venture, SpaceX, is an aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company whose defining mission is to enable the human race to become a multi-planetary civilization. As a result of the high levels of risk and exorbitant costs required to operate a private company within the largely government-funded space industry, Musk faced a considerable amount of scrutiny in response to his decision to start SpaceX. However, after years of intensive work with some of the world’s leading physicists and aerospace engineers, Musk has defied all odds as he has continued to successfully operate the company while narrowly avoiding the ever-present threat of bankruptcy. The company’s arguably most revolutionary contributions to space travel have been the recognition of and response to the fact that well over 90% of the cost of space travel lies in the loss of the rocket after each flight, considering that the cost of fuel pales in comparison to the cost of a rocket. By introducing the concept of reusable rocket technology, Musk has reduced the cost of space travel by nearly one hundred fold by engineering rockets that have the ability to take-off and then land safely back on the ground after a flight. According to his predictions, Musk speculates that by the year 2060 there will be one million humans living in a sustainable community on Mars, but it is still far to early to accurately predict when exactly we will be able to expand human civilization to another planet. Nevertheless, the same radical optimism that Musk seems to all-too-eagerly apply to his lofty predictions has led him to achieve the monumental success that he has thus far.
-Noe Hinojosa