He is the real life tony stark and is not doing silly things with power suits, but changing the world.

2013-03-19: When will the valley produce more entrepreneurs like this?

2015-11-07: More on the secret sauce

The dude is a steel-bending industrial giant in America in a time when there aren’t supposed to be steel-bending industrial giants in America, igniting revolutions in huge, old industries that aren’t supposed to be revolutionable. After emerging from the 1990s dotcom party with $180m, instead of sitting back in his investor chair listening to pitches from groveling young entrepreneurs, he decided to start a brawl with a group of 400 kg sumo wrestlers—the auto industry, the oil industry, the aerospace industry, the military-industrial complex, the energy utilities—and he might actually be winning. And all of this, it really seems, for the purpose of giving our species a better future.

Pretty Kool-Aid worthy. But someone being exceptionally rad isn’t Kool-Aid worthy enough to warrant 90k words over a string of months on a blog that’s supposed to be about a wide range of topics.

During the first post, I laid out the 2 objectives for the series:

1) To understand why Musk is doing what he’s doing.
2) To understand why Musk is able to do what he’s doing.

2017-04-30: An interview for TED

2017-05-03: Plus a later TED talk, nice summary of the Musk master plan.

2017-09-03: Accelerate or die

Technological disruptors like Elon Musk, Google and Amazon will force industries and companies to accelerate or die. Companies will have to accelerate innovation and move to bolder innovation and attempt to shift to technological leapfrogging and shoot for far more aggressive productivity gains.

2019-10-01: Forget sunk costs

Elon reiterated that he changed to steel construction for the rocket when carbon fiber was taking too long. Carbon fiber was a standard in the rocket industry.

SpaceX Falcon Heavy use of composites for the fairing (payload nosecone cover). The interstage, which connects the upper and lower stages of the rockets, is a composite structure with an aluminum honeycomb core and carbon fiber face sheets.

In December 2018, 9 months after starting construction of some parts of the first test article carbon composite Starship low-altitude test vehicle, Musk announced a “counterintuitive new design approach” would be taken by the company. SpaceX switched to stainless steel construction.

2021-02-02: This is quite good, done by Sandy Munroe

2023-04-04: Master Plan 3.0, sustainable global energy economy

A sustainable energy economy is technically feasible and requires less investment and less material extraction than continuing today’s unsustainable energy economy. While many prior studies have come to a similar conclusion, this study seeks to push the thinking forward related to material intensity, manufacturing capacity, and manufacturing investment required for a transition across all energy sectors worldwide.

240TWh Storage
$10T Manufacturing Investment
0.21% Land Area Required
ZERO Insurmountable Resource Challenges
30TW Renewable Power
50% The Energy Required
10% 2022 World GDP