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If you have not heard or read about Elon Musk until now, you must have been living under a rock. But, now that you’ve climbed out from under your rock, here’s a quick biography of Elon Musk, and why I believe he is the world’s greatest innovator.

Elon Musk’s success began when he and his brother first started Zip2, a software company, in 1995. It was sold to Compaq in 1999 for $307 million, in addition to stock options. From the money generated by this sale, Musk co-founded X.com, an e-payment company. Eventually, X.com merged with another online money company to become what we know of today as PayPal. In 2002, PayPal was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. Although his time at PayPal was highly lucrative and successful, the company’s board of directors demoted Musk from his position as CEO of the company he helped form, all over some disagreements.

The profits generated from the sale of PayPal were what allowed Musk to become the entrepreneur we know today. In 2002, Musk took an enormous risk by using the majority of the money he made from the PayPal sale ($100 million) to start Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX). In 2003, Musk began to develop Tesla Motors, a fleet of all-electric vehicles designed to fundamentally change our means of travelling. Although it teetered through the financial recession of 2008, it solidified as a company in 2011. In 2006, he, along with his cousins, founded SolarCity, a manufacturer of solar panels, to combat global warming (ambitious, I know). Since 2013, Musk has also been working to develop a Hyperloop technology, an ultra-high speed rail transportation system which would allow passengers to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 35 minutes at an average speed of 600 miles per hour. Finally, as if he hadn’t already tried hard enough to change the world, Elon Musk founded OpenAI in 2015 to research and develop better artificial intelligence systems that would benefit humanity. If you lost count, that’s 8 different companies worth billions of dollars that were founded by Elon Musk.

The great appeal of all the work Elon Musk has done comes through his two greatest achievements: SpaceX and Tesla Motors. A few days ago, SpaceX managed to do this. That was the single greatest feat in space flight since man landed on the moon in 1969. In 2006, NASA awarded SpaceX with a contract to deliver cargo to the International Space Station, making SpaceX the first private company to even enter space. Its Falcon rockets and Dragon spacecraft have become the first privately-owned company used by NASA to transport astronauts and cargo to space after the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011. As ambitious as it sounds, Elon Musk’s eventual goal for SpaceX is to be able to reduce the cost of spaceflight 10 times and to send humans to Mars in 10 years’ time. The way SpaceX will accomplish this is by reusing space rockets. Currently, space travel would be analogous to taking a flight from New York to Miami, but once you arrive in Miami, the plane has to be destroyed and a new place has to be made to take you back home. Not only would this be inefficient, it would also cause the price of flight tickets to increase by thousands of dollars. Therefore, by landing rockets on the ground after they release their cargo in space will dramatically reduce the costs of space travel, thus one day allowing normal citizens to buy tickets to travel to space. (Here’s a video which explains landing on a barge vs. on solid ground).

Elon Musk is also changing the way we travel through Tesla Motors, a company which makes all-electric cars. Its first model was the Tesla Roadster, but the company is perhaps best known for the Model S. Recently, the company has launched two new cars: the Model X and the Model 3 (starting at approximately $35,000). The Model 3 was launched last week and within 24 hours of the car’s unveiling, Tesla received at least 100,000 pre-orders (a deposit of $1000 to reserve the chance to buy a Model 3)! The next morning, the company’s stock increased by nearly 4%. Not to be outdone, the Model X’s unveiling was quite spectacular as well. Yes, the car has a bioweapon defense system and doors that open automatically as you approach the car.

I don’t believe writing a blog about Elon Musk can truly convey all the work he had done in an effort to save and benefit humanity. Here’s a recent documentary about Elon Musk which I think does more justice. I cannot wait to see what other ideas Musk comes up with and somehow finds a way to make them a reality. I really do believe that he will singlehandedly change the world.