The ideas which used to be considered impossible around a decade and a half ago are not only being achieved continuously but also being improved upon on a weekly basis. Way back in 2003-2004 people would laugh at the possibility that the traditional oil guzzling vehicles would gradually begin to become a thing of the past. Experts and former astronauts would shoo away the proposition, even in the form of a notional idea, that a private corporation can take a leap in space travel in reusable rockets in third of a given time at one tenths of the cost. People would wonder the whether the kind of travel and transportation portrayed in the fictional galaxy far far away painted by Lucas in Star-Wars movie series would ever be possible. Then came ventures like Tesla, SpaceX, Hyperloop and others with two factors of commonality. First, that they are transforming the previously unthinkable figments of possibilities into realities and that they have one person in common who has been instrumental in bringing these corporations from the ideational stage to a materialization stage- Elon Musk.

Earlier prominent car manufacturers like Volkswagen and Ford used to consider that battery-based cars would remain as a fad at best and that to consider that they might take a major share of future personal vehicle market would be a phantasmagorical idea at best. These corporations were having a smooth ride and lo behold arrived the disruptor Tesla, which changed the vehicle market dynamics completely. Tesla was established in 2003 by Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard. Elon Musk came onboard as a co-founder and investor. He soon took over the role of CEO and chief technology officer for Tesla and brought in recognitions for designs of the vehicles produced in the company. Tesla became a major player in the electric vehicle by using vertical integration in the company. It means that the company itself controls the entire supply chain of the necessary components to make a fully functional electric vehicle. This posed a challenge to the other car makers as vertical integration allowed Tesla to synchronize its demands and supply of the vehicle, decrease the transaction costs and achieve overall cost advantage vis a vis its competitors.

Tesla has other products which are set to transform the clean energy market on an overall basis. Powerwall and Powerpack are two such products produced by Tesla, intended to bring clean energy closer to day to day life of people. These are batteries which essentially store energy from Sun which can be used in place of conventional grid supplied electricity. Powerwall is for domestic use and comes in generally two variants- 6.4 kWh and 13.5 kWh and is customized for daily cycling of charging and discharging (deep cycle every day). The powerpack is of higher power version and comes in three variants 100, 200 and 210 kWh. Powerpack is for industrial purpose and to store energy in microgrids. Tesla’s powerpacks are used in the USA electric grids as a mode to compensate during the times of high load usage. Generally, the batteries produced by Tesla are manufactured at their phenomenal Gigafactory facilities, of which three are there in Nevada and Buffalo in USA and Shanghai in China. Tesla is working on a fourth Gigafactory near Berlin in Germany and has hinted at a possible fifth one in Texas, USA to manufacture batteries for the popular Tesla product Cybertruck. The tremendous success of the products developed in the clean energy corporations of Elon Musk is their accurate understanding of the semiconductor chemistry used in their different lines of batteries. In the electric vehicles and the Powerpack batteries, Lithium Nickel Cobalt Aluminum (NCA) oxide is used. This NCA system has higher energy density which is needed in the case of electric vehicles. The batteries for the Powerwall which is for daily domestic use, Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt (NMC) oxide chemistry is used. The NMC oxide system is characterized by longer life cycle and lesser energy density. Tesla is also targeting to popularize its other products like Solar tiles and Solar bricks. The second product is interesting as it would function as rechargeable batteries as well as bricks to provide for a clean energy house. Another interesting aspect of Elon’s business is that it is inadvertently spreading its philosophy of zero carbon to its suppliers. The recent example is the case of a Nickel mining company in Canada which would be supplying Nickel for battery production at Gigafactory. This Canadian Nickel mining company has found a way to mine and process Nickel in a zero-carbon process.

Now, let us further broaden the horizon of our discussion where we would tour through the giant steps taken by another corporation of Musk. After selling off his first work Paypal at around 165 million USD, Elon Musk invested 100 million USD in SpaceX which he founded in 2002. Humans have been to moon in 1969-72 and it is absurd that till now we do not even have a moon base or habitat. This is a frustrating aspect of the progress in the Space technology if one looks at it from the perspective of Elon Musk. The beginnings of SpaceX were in 2001 when Musk put forth an idea of Mars Oasis, which was a demonstrative greenhouse to show the growth of food crops on Martian regolith (loose superficial soil). Subsequently, Elon Musk along with Adeo Ressi (best buddy) and Jim Cantrell (associated with aerospace industry) went to Russia to get Dneper ICBM (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile) which could be used to launch payloads into space. This visit ended in as a failure when they were laughed out of the Russian Space organization. In the next visit to Russia, the three were accompanied by Griffin, a maker of spacecraft and satellites, who had worked for a venture capital firm associated with CIA, In-Q-Tel as well as in NASA Jet propulsion lab.  In this round of negotiation, the group was offered a rocket at a price of around eight million dollars, which was considered too high by the team especially Musk. After they returned to USA, Elon Musk, after some calculations, found out that they could build a rocket by getting the raw materials at 3 % the selling price of a rocket. This was the genesis moment for the corporation SpaceX. In its early days, the corporation saw many failures and faced tons of criticisms. Prominent public figures like former astronaut late Gene Cernan criticized the private space ventures like SpaceX. The corporation planned to make reusable rockets a reality which was considered not plausible till the early 2000s. Main advantage which SpaceX achieved with respect to government space agencies is that they chose same kind of engine design for various stages of the rocket which helped them in first order cost cutting. One of the basic mantras of SpaceX, is to break the larger problem to simplest possible chunks and to work out the solution from that level. Reliability and low cost are enabled by simplicity. Using three to four kinds of boosters including the strap on rockets may help in getting better functionality, but it comes at a higher price, which in turn affects the factory costs and overheads. Hence, SpaceX went to factor in commonality in their engine design. Initially for the Falcon and Dragon engines, they had not planned to go for complete in-house production. They were made to do so due to the higher price demanded by the vendors. In one of the most decisive cases, when SpaceX called a vendor for an estimate of the price of an engine valve, they got the price in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars and were given a time of around one year. People from SpaceX negotiating on the valve deal stressed that they needed the valve sooner and at a lesser price. The vendor shut them out by a smirk and a cold reply -Good luck with that. Then Musk’s team decided to make the valve in-house. After few months, the same vendor called them regarding the valve, to which the SpaceX team replied that they had already developed it and qualified it for use of cryogenic propellants. The vendor’s team on the other side the call was flummoxed and went dead silent by this reply. SpaceX passionately avoids space vendors after this incident. This made them achieve historic milestones like the launch of the Falcon heavy with Merlin engines in 2018 with reusable rockets. In the next step, SpaceX has recently tested its Starship SN5 (with just one raptor engine for the test phase) which is meant to take humans to Mars. In the final Starship six raptor engines would be there to provide greater thrust. SpaceX also became the first private Space corporation to take NASA astronauts to the International Space Station in the landmark launch of Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX also has a plan of beaming internet from space using its constellation of Starlink satellites of which numerous have already been put into the orbits. It is currently producing 1200 such satellites per month.

Electric vehicle, renewable energy and Space travel are not the only domains where Elon has been taking giant strides.  He has been working on the Neuralink project to integrate the human brain with BCI-chip (brain computer interface) which will blur the boundary between humans and machines. OpenAI is an AI research lab with investment from Musk. One of its recent developments is the language AI GPT-3, an unsupervised learner. This AI model cannot only respond to lines fed into it, but also can separate the thought put into a textual line from the meaning of the line. It means that this AI can probably detect the intent behind any text and its context.

This technocrat has proved that it is the idea and the drive that matters. He has kept almost all his works at Tesla and SpaceX in open source, so that others can take the ideas and develop over them. It is because he truly believes that just the seminars, conventions and meetings will not save the planet from the dire results of climate change. Large scale disruptive actions are needed, and to phase out the gasoline-based vehicles from market can be a visible step in that direction. One needs to have just the correct set of people onboard for a world changing idea. This protects the idea from the nihilistic criticisms by all the self-proclaimed experts and turns the critics into fans. Best example is the case of the astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson in the context of SpaceX. In 2013, in a Business Insider video he had claimed that Elon’s SpaceX will never be able to put humans on Mars. In 2018, the same person was discussing about the possibility of space business expansion under the aegis of Elon Musk. Just a period of a little more than five years, millions of dollars of works, research and development, repeated failures and a Falcon heavy launch later the critic became a fan. These developments and progress by the various corporations and labs under the guidance and driving force of Musk bears testimony to the fact that any idea which is laughable today can be realized by a group of driven persons in the coming decades. No idea or vision is far fetched if it has some amount of utility for the planet and humanity.