The magnificent Elon Musk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

I am afraid this information is already known by most of the visitors of my blog, but nevertheless I’ll write about that.

Elon Musk is an American multi-millionaire, who was the cofounder of PayPal. Now he has a lot of projects important for the entire world: in particular, he is the founder of SpaceX, a company which constructs space rockets. It has developed the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 launch vehicles, which have already supplied a lot of cargo into the orbit. Now Musk tries to create a reusable version of Falcon (Falcon-9R), whose first stage will perform a soft landing. It is presumed that if Musk succeeds, this technology will render the cost of space flights 5-10 times cheaper (at the moment, reusable rockets like Shuttle are less efficient than the disposable ones).

The final goal of Musk is the colonization of Mars by humans; he writes (and I fully agree with him) that the colonization of space is needed to secure the humanity against extinction (if a global catastrophe happens on Earth, caused by any unexpected reasons related to technological progress, the humanity will survive outside our planet and draw its conclusions).

As far as I know, Musk has spent approximately 800 million dollars for the development of his rockets, while the Russian government spent about 5.5 billions for the Angara rocket family, and NASA spent about 30 billions for their new multi-usable rockets (not finished yet).

Another project of Musk is Tesla Motors: a company which produces efficient electric cars. The car Tesla S has won several awards and is very popular, in particular due to the battery swapping technology.

Musk has made open the Tesla patents, so probably soon his competitors will create their clones of Tesla cars.

Besides that, Musk is the chairman of SolarCity, a company which produces solar batteries and charging stations. Musk has developed the Powerwall, a new solar battery for home use. I suppose, it is possible that this technology will change the world to no lesser extent than the shale gas. My main hope is that such technologies will end the era or petrocracies like Russia and Iran.

It is written that Musk was once near a bankruptcy, but at the moment his companies are thriving.

Musk is one of the US “technocrats”, i.e. people who have earned billions of dollars with the Internet. Among these people are Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, et al. Some of these people have political activity – in particular, Zuckerberg and Musk once took part in the FWD.us lobbying group which has a goal of immigration reform (this reform would fight illegal migration, favoring migration into the US for talented people). In 2013 Musk left the group because of some conflicts.

I think, if a man has earned a billion of dollars, he must be quite motivated to make the world better. It is even strange that usually this rule do not work (maybe, the reason is that the financial aristocracy in the US is involved in collective responsibility). Nevertheless, it seems for me that such people as Elon Musk are really able to make the world better, and these people have already become more important than such people as Barack Obama. Such people as men belonging to the Rockefeller or Rothschild families have more money and power, but unlike the “technocrats” they are not popular. This is my personal view of the situation, and I am sorry if I misunderstand important things.