The single biggest problem that technological advancements face, is money. Money is what controls whether something remains an idea or becomes reality. Without immense resources being poured into an idea, it will take years to develop; unless you can find a way of doing it cheaply. Time magazine places Elon Musk in the top most influential people of our time. Elon Musk is the most influential tech genius alive due to the fact that he is able to find ways of manufacturing and developing technology cheaply that was previously thought of as impossible. Elon Musk is turning unimaginable technology into common place items in everyone’s lives.
Most people look at Elon Musk and see a nothing but a billionaire playboy doing drugs and wasting his life away on twitter. Elon Musk is worth $19.9 Billion dollars and like most billionaires he does stupid things, so this assumption isn’t entirely unjustified. But what most people don’t know is that when Elon Musk isn’t on twitter or doing drugs he is developing technology that normal people can only dream of.
Most of the technology that Elon is developing has existed for years, but he is making it affordable for everyone. Electric cars have existed since the 1870s but back then they cost millions to make and there was no way of mass producing them. Only in recent years have electric cars become common place. Elon Musk took the idea and found a way to produce them cheaply on a global scale, founding the company Tesla. There are an estimated 400,000 Tesla cars on the road all across the world meaning that Elon Musk’s influence in the tech world stretches across all across the globe. Tesla is also the leading company in environmentally friendly energy, with their giant solar power stations.
The cars that Tesla develops aren’t just luxury vehicles like many are lead to believe, they are the beginning of the end for fossil fuels and are pushing the world towards a greener future. As the CEO of Tesla, Elon could easily just take whatever car he wanted, but unlike other industry leaders Elon musk pays full price for the cars that his company develops. He does this because he wants to relate to the average everyday consumer and prove that the cars are aimed to be sold to anyone.
For NASA to launch a rocket into space the total cost is over 1 billion US dollars. Space X, another company founded by Elon Musk, has shrunk that cost by 94% to around 60 million per launch. Space X did this buy developing rockets that are cheap to manufacture and can be reused. This means that ideas such as public space travel and a colony on Mars are becoming more of a reality everyday. Cost is a huge issue when it comes to Space technology, and is what has been preventing us from further advancement. So the fact that Elon Musk and Space X have been able to develop technology that can be manufactured cheaply is an incredible feat.
Elon has envisioned the idea of the “Hyper loop” and has even started . The hyper loop is an incredibly high speed transportation system which Elon believes will change the world. The only problem stopping this from becoming common place around the world, is once again, not being able to construct it, without spending an unimaginable amount of money. If Elon is able to find a way of funding his Hyper loop project it would make him one of the most powerful people on the planet.
Most people who have made millions spend then money on pointless material things like fast cars, houses or yachts. Elon Musk chooses to invest his own money into developing technology that is changing people lives. Elon Musk is the most influential tech developer of today’s world. There is no one else alive who has been involved in, or developed as much technology as him. Even World renowned physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson stated that “He is the best thing we have had since Thomas Edison”. Needless to say, being compared to the person who invented the light bulb, is an immense deal. Elon has created technology that will help to end the worlds reliance on fossil fuels, and has turned hundreds of ideas into reality making him the most influential genius alive today.