Elon Musk—The most influential man on earth

Elon Musk is a businessman who tries to change the world and makes billions on the way. In 1995 he formed Zip2, an online city guide software providing directions. This was way before the GPS culture took place. In 1999, he tried to launch X.com an online bank from scratch, again an idea way head of its time.

The PayPal mafia: In 2000, X.com and online bank Confinity were merged. Confinity had a money transfer service called PayPal. So popular was it that the joint entity was named PayPal. When PayPal finally came out with an IPO and was taken over by eBay. That made a band of billionaires and millionaires which became the PayPal Mafia, the most influential Silicon Vally group.

Musk went on to launch many companies. Peter Thiel was the most famous conservative billionaire and known for Palantir and Y Combinator. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen & Jawed Karim founded YouTube. Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn. The list goes on.

Sexy superior electrical vehicles: In the pre-Musk era, electronic vehicles were ugly and woefully inadequate. Musk took over Tesla and for the first time electric cars were better than petrol cars. Soon almost every auto company in the world followed suit.

A recharging network: No-one thought of having a recharging network but that’s exactly what the Tesla Supercharger is. There are more 6500 charging stations with 60,000 connectors. That was unprecedented and Musk has forced auto companies and governments to look into this issue and not leave it just to the consumer.

Bigger, better batteries: If EVs and charging stations weren’t enough, then Musk started building better batteries, first through SolarCity and then Tesla Energy. The Powerwall can power an entire home with options to recharge via solar.

Low-cost ambitious space dreams: SpaceX has gone beyond NASA in a way, building bigger and better rockets that are helping in the ambition to go all the way to Mars. It is being done at the fraction of the cost previously. With agencies like SpaceX and ISRO, low-cost space travel is a real possibility.

Satellite Internet: In the pre-Starlink era, there were less than 10,000 satellites floating in space. Well Starlink has already launched 7000 satellites and tens of thousands of more are on the way. Satellite broadband is a great innovation for ensuring 100% coverage on planet Earth.

Human-machine interface: In theory man and machine seem destined to merge. Musk has already made this a reality with Neuralink. Noland Arbaugh is a quadriplegic and received the first brain implant. Today he can “control a computer cursor with his thoughts” and play computer games like chess and Civilization 6.

The political revolution

If that wasn’t enough, then in the last few years Musk has changed the very politics of the US. First, he took over the far-Left radical Twitter and turned it into a centrist X. That led to a change in discourse on social media where conservative and non-Liberal users finally got a loud voice. The user count and engagement increased as it in some ways became more powerful than the mainstream media. This was probably the biggest reason for the re-election of Donald Trump recently. Musk threw his full weight behind Trump and camped in Pennsylvania, a swing state. Among others, he got the anti-tech Amish community (how ironic!) on Trump’s side. They won Pennsylvania easily.

Now Musk is probably Trump’s chief advisor and will head DOGE or the Department of Government Efficiency, a play on Dogecoin, which is also supported by Trump. There are great hopes from the new Trump cabinet, and they may better use technology, something that is advocated by Musk.

It doesn’t end there. Musk is working on making X a super app. There’s Hyperloop, which could revolutionize travel. He was one of the founders of OpenAI, but he is totally disillusioned with Sam Altman and plans to go big with xAI. That’s quite a lot and we are sure there are many more ideas in his head which nobody else is aware of.