What's Next for Elon Musk?
With his massive success at Tesla and the most exciting new rocket company what in the World, or out of this world, does Elon Musk attempt next?
Money and Fame…the most corrosive elements to a person’s character. So many people have succumbed to them over the ages. Either they blow all their money on stupidity or the fame turns them into ego maniacs. They surround themselves with the world’s rarest toys, the biggest of everything, the best of everything. There are army’s of servants taking care of the ultra wealthy right this second, enjoying the proximity to that money and fame much more than the low salary. They can literally think of themselves as God on earth it seems if you have ever been graced with a few words by one of these people. ‘The Queen’ even has a whole list of behaviors you are not allowed in her presence! Every country has these people, even the poorest countries.
And the world’s current second richest man sleeps on a sofa in a boardroom of his factory. Regularly…especially when travelling on business. Elon is just wired differently than most people I suspect.
Musk biographies are regularly printed in books now as his accomplishments have brought him fame and the second biggest fortune in the world. However unlike the vast majority of the ultra wealthy in this world Elon doesn’t own a giant yacht and is in the process of selling his homes and a significant portion of his possessions.
“Don’t need cash,” he wrote in a Tweet. “Devoting myself to Mars and Earth. Possession [sic] just weigh you down.”
This is an ultra rare move for one of the ultra rich of this world. Another amazingly refreshing ultra famous and rich person like this may be ‘The One’ who shut down the Matrix we all are plugged into, Keanu Reeves. The actor who’s roles have lit up theaters worldwide for years is reportedly worth about $360 million dollars. However that is only 0.2% of Musk’s recent valuation of $131.7 Billion with a B fortune. Sorry Keanu, your parents shouldn’t have let you try to be an actor I guess. Chuck Feeney took years to give away his billions but he finally has succeeded! Another amazing philanthropist that doesn’t get enough credit! Sadly they are few and far between.
Musk’s success is a book unto itself of course…something many writers chase along with the money that comes with it unlike myself. I will be satisfied with trying to figure out exactly where Elon might go next in his career. Given his world altering development of Tesla the question of what’s Elon Musk’s next big thing could actually be incredibly important to the world. If I could just see the future like the Oracle…see what the real ‘One’ would try to do next! Sadly my Matrix neural link doesn’t include that capability so I’ll have to play Agent Smith and try to anticipate ‘The Ones’ next move. Who knows, I might just become an Oracle in the process!
Elon’s a visionary type of person combined with an entrepreneurial spirit all wrapped up in an engineers body. So any challenge he might decide to take on will surely combine all of those elements. We’ll have to look at his past and see what he’s decided to take on previously before we take our best guess on his future. Musk helped develop Paypal but ended up selling his stake and looking for something else more interesting. He pivoted to electric cars, something completely outside of money or banking so my guess is he didn’t find Paypal a worthwhile vision. That excludes the most popular way to get rich in the modern world, banking.
Musk’s work at Tesla has literally changed the course of modern transportation on the entire planet. He’s developed an all electric car that crushes the performance and value simultaneously offered by any ICE car anywhere on Earth. For 150 years people have been developing internal combustion cars. Musk bought Tesla in 2004 and it’s cars now outperform not only comparably priced ICE cars but also much higher priced ICE cars as well. Soon battery prices will be reduced enough to make Tesla cars cheaper than gasoline cars. The battle is over, electric cars have already won. We just can’t produce enough of them to satisfy demand. But Elon’s vision for transportation isn’t accomplished quite yet. His development of full self driving has yet to become a complete reality. Amazing Youtube clips of Tesla’s driving themselves for long periods through cities all over the world currently rack up views and likes. Tesla’s are almost ready to fully drive themselves. This may happen in 2021 or 2022 but it will happen very soon indeed. At this point it seems Elon’s vision for the future of transportation will truly begin. It’s rumored that Tesla will stop selling cars and devote all production towards a robo taxi fleet. People will stop owning expensive cars and simply pay very low rates to ride in a robo taxi when they need to go anywhere. The same as people don’t currently buy trains or planes to go long distances today (well most of us anyway) in Elon’s transportation future we won’t buy cars either. Your electronic chauffeur is super cheap and drives better than you anyway. Why own a car that sits around doing nothing for 99% of most days anyway? This may actually begin in a few short years, something unimaginable to most people. As soon as full self driving works Tesla will without a doubt set aside enough cars to start a robo taxi fleet in some willing American city. After that initial trial irons out all the technical hurdles Tesla could stop selling cars and simply take over transportation in city after city around the world. Prices could be so low due to high utilization of cars and cheaper running costs than traditional ICE cars that new car sales would plummet in robo taxi cities. Welcome to the future…currently hiding right around the corner! Tesla will be at peak potential and Musk will Sell Sell Sell! Mission accomplished. In fact in a recent tweet Elon confirmed he approached Apple about selling Tesla during production hell of the new model 3. Tesla’s now valued 10x more so it was a bad move by Apple to not even sit down and talk about his offer let alone buy Tesla. Their loss, Musk’s gain. He’s clearly not adverse to selling Tesla however.
At this point Elon Musk will likely need a new career challenge as Tesla will have revolutionized transportation. 5 years from now at a wild guess based on nothing but pure rampant internet speculation surrounding Tesla in Elon time. By this time Musk’s side gig, SpaceX, will have matured quite nicely into his other visionary project. His new rocket, Starship and Super Heavy, should long ago have finished development and been flying around the inner solar system already. It probably has already landed on the moon. Human flight testing should have begun as well assuming the rocket doesn’t blow up too many times after it’s development is completed. His Falcon 9 rocket has performed admirably so this is a fair prediction despite how difficult rocket science really is. Elon will be itching to put a Starship on Mars. Actually he wants to put a lot of Starships on that planet but Mars wasn’t built in a day so to speak. It’s at this moment Elon Musk runs up against the slowest moving force humanity has ever created. Government.
NASA has never been about speed even though they build rockets. They are about government money getting spread all over the country. About big announcements and dreams hitting reality and never ending plan changes. A new administration takes over government and changes NASA’s focus more often than not nowadays. They are literally the opposite of an entrepreneur like Elon Musk. They like slow and careful, tried and true, years of development leading to a few minutes of success. Musk’s SpaceX is about how fast can we blow up the next prototype, about building it in the parking lot, about engineering improvements constantly and testing relentlessly to decide what needs improving fast. NASA’s Artemis project, the return of humanity to the moon, isn’t even big enough to actually build a permanent base! It is yet more exploration, more extremely small landers and an orbiting support platform. Artemis I, an uncrewed capsule, is already a year behind schedule in orbiting around the moon, now scheduled for late 2021. Artemis II, a crewed orbit of the moon is scheduled for 2022 but with I being a year late that will be pushed back to 2023. The return of humans to the lunar surface is scheduled for 2024 but again, likely delays will see that pushed to at least 2025 and possibly later. Musk plans to orbit his Starship around Earth in late 2021…let’s say 2022 because we don’t live on Elon time. Well very soon after that he plans to send a Japanese Billionaire and some artists on an orbit around the moon…currently planned in 2022! He also wants to launch a cargo Starship to Mars in the small 2022 Mars launch window. As soon as Musk’s fancy new Starship rocket becomes human rated (after 100’s of non-human flights) he and SpaceX are planning in 2024 to send humans to Mars. Let’s delay that to the next Mars launch window in 2026…again because we don’t live in Elon time. You just know he’ll do it! He already sent a Tesla car into space as a joke so who knows what he’ll try and land on Mars. Eventually there will be some crazy people willing to go to Mars knowing they will never return to Earth. I hope they have internet access to read my articles because I’m not going with them. So NASA will be landing a few tons of payload on the Moon in 2025 and Musk will have ALEADY landed 100 tons on Mars a year earlier in 2024 and will be planning to send humans to Mars a year after in 2026. And believe me, the betting odds on which team, NASA or Musk, will have longer delays are massively against NASA. Musk might land a Cybertruck on the moon before NASA’s astronauts arrive as a promotional joke just so they have something to drive around!
And this is where my prediction for what Musk will do next comes. He will succeed with Tesla earning himself untold Billions. He’ll have built a rocket that can go to Mars and eventually return after the in situ refueling systems are in place. However Musk will run into the very slow moving government agency called NASA who will be decades away from wanting to devote resources to building a Mars colony. They will be busy building up a Moon colony and simply not have the funding to do both. They will have some of the technology developed however. The plans for electric nuclear power generators, the building technology, the suits, the rovers. This is when Musk puts his vast fortune on the line. He doubles down yet again and commits to building a sustainable Mars colony himself. He’ll partner with NASA using some of their developed tech. SpaceX and it’s army of engineers will get busy and prepare the multitude of technological gadgets required to not only build a Mars outpost but a full on colony. The engineering task will be the largest mankind has ever attempted, private or government directed. The goal won’t be to put 10 people on Mars, it will be to put thousands and thousands on Mars.
How will the second richest man on Earth pay to build a human colony on Mars? Well he’s got the seed money already if he sells his Tesla stock but he’s also got a huge new cash cow coming ‘online’ so to speak. Starlink. One of the most profitable industries around the world right now is providing internet access. Telecoms have monopolized the business for decades generating huge profits and funding their dominant positions in the cellular service business as well. Elon’s business model beats them all however…and worldwide. It’s an astounding accomplishment to be frank. Starlink will offer internet access everywhere on the planet and steal customers everywhere they go. They are already getting 150 Mb/s download speeds, better than many over subscribed fiber optic connections currently give, and expect better with thousands more satellites. Telecoms can’t compete as laying down more fiber optic cables to boost speed is costly and risky given the new competition uses lasers to transmit data faster than optic cables. Starlink’s infrastructure is useful almost everywhere on planet Earth! Starlink is already beta testing and in 2 years should be fully functioning. That means customers worldwide signing up and funding Elon’s next visionary plan. I would pity telecoms if they didn’t gouge so many customers for so many years, lobbying governments to maintain the near monopolies while profits continued to increase.
If my prediction is correct the first sign will be Musk beginning to sell off his Tesla stock. He’ll need to file a plan with the SEC due to the volumes he’ll be selling and it will have to be staggered over a few years. I’m not talking a bit of profit taking…I’m saying he’ll schedule to sell off every Tesla share he has and become a salaried board member. Probably starting around the time full self driving is announced but definitely when robo taxis are starting to take over there first city. He will also need to buy some specialized companies that work on equipment designed for the space station. These life support type systems will be necessary for a Mars colony at the start while many entirely new systems will have to be designed from scratch. This has to happen a couple years prior to the start of colonization, so if he realistically plans to send humans in the 2026 Mars launch window he’ll need to ramp up engineering and design in 2024 at the latest. MDA Space division? MD robotics division??? A part of Boeing? Something to hit the ground running in colony equipment production. If he doesn’t want a legacy company then you would see SpaceX itself hiring a huge number of engineers. Triple what it already does. A world wide brain drain. Well he’ll need to hire another army of engineers into SpaceX or any purchased company to support Mars colony development either way. Interestingly Musk will also have to engage the US government in negotiations for the legal status of any new Mars colony. At first this would be ultra secret of course but the government leaks secrets like a pasta strainer leaks water so we’ll hear about this pretty fast. Musk will want full autonomy while the government will likely demand some form of oversight. Musk could bypass the government and launch exclusively off shore or launch from a more accommodating country but that would be prohibitively expensive or politically explosive so he’ll have to compromise. Something akin to the US Virgin Islands but hopefully with a time limit leading to full self independence. This compromise will also provide the vast experience and resources that NASA has to offer and will likely be critical to success.
Pretty big vision you say! Well when you become the world’s second richest person expectations placed on you get pretty crazy. However for his finale Musk will set his Mars colony free. When Elon dies SpaceX will renounce all it’s property rights to everything on Mars and divide it up among the brave people who went there to build the colony with their own two hands. Elon’s family and his descendants will be honorary Mars ambassadors. An epic ending to a career that not only changed the world but also changed humanity. “Pretty cool” Elon might say. I agree.
Thanks for reading! Have a great day, a wonderful Christmas and remember to share with your friends!