Despite his frequent publicity stunts and numerous high-profile ventures, billionaire inventor and entrepreneur Elon Musk remains something of an enigma to the wider world. A new CNBC video takes a two-minute dive into the world of Musk to get a closer look.
The South African-born inventor’s net worth is estimated at around $20 billion. He made his first fortune in the early 1990s selling a web software company called Zip2 for $22 million. He later went on to co-found PayPal, which eBay bought in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
The notoriously prolific entrepreneur also has his hands in a number of smaller ventures and side projects, including Hyperloop tunnel-boring operation The Boring Company, a brain-computer interface venture called Neuralink, and the nonprofit artificial intelligence project OpenAI.
Investors are watching closely to see if Tesla — which has its headquarters in Palo Alto and a huge automobile manufacturing facility in Fremont — can deliver its moderately priced Model 3 en masse and successfully become a mainstream carmaker. Among the first of those vehicles debuted at its Palo Alto showroom last month.
Not content to simply bring electric cars to consumers, Musk is also looking to upend the diesel trucking industry with Tesla’s all-electric Semi slated to debut next year.
SpaceX has made headlines with its reusable rockets, which hold the promise of drastically reducing the cost — and waste — associated with space travel. The company landed a major milestone last month when it shot the world's biggest operational rocket, the Falcon Heavy, into space with Musk’s cherry red Tesla Roadster and a dummy named "Spaceman" onboard.
Though it has been less than a month since SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy into space, astronomers have already been plotting the possible course for the rocket’s payload, Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster. While there’s definitely no chance of Musk getting his car back, scientists say there’s a (slim) possibility of it one day crashing into Earth — eventually.
A paper published on ArXiv on February 13, superbly titled “The random walk of cars and their collision probabilities with planets,” details “the fate” of the Roadster and its captain. According to the researchers’ calculations, over the course of the next million years, the Tesla has only a six percent chance of smashing into our planet. So even if Elon Musk develops a cryogenic chamber suit to selfishly keep himself alive for millions of years, he still won’t get to give his car another spin.
While a space car crash landing would certainly make for one hell of a homecoming, the reality is, none of us will be around to see it. That’s because we’ll all be dead and long forgotten — our memories lost to the void.
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