Some know him as Iron Man. This is because the director of the Iron Man movie, Jon Favreau, sent Robert Downey Jr. to the SpaceX Factory to base Musk for his character in the movie before filming began. The director stated in a tweet that Iron Man's inspiration was Elon Musk.
Who is Elon Musk
Elon Musk is a South African-born American industrial engineer, entrepreneur, who co-founded Paypal and founded aerospace transportation services company SpaceX. He is also one of the early investors in Tesla, an electric car company, and now the Chief Executive Officer of the firm as well.
Elon Reeve Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa. At the age of 12, he earned $500 by selling his own game called "Blastar". He completed his university education in the USA. After completing two undergraduate programs in physics and economics, he started a PhD program in Applied Physics and Materials Science at Stanford University. However, after a while, he left his doctorate unfinished and switched to business life by founding a company he named Zip2 to develop a system that enables news organizations to transition to internet broadcasting. In 1999, his first company, which he founded, was sold to computer manufacturer Compaq for $307 million. He became a partner in the PayPal project, which is the first company to enable the use of credit cards on the internet with the income he earned. After selling PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002; he started by establishing three separate companies in these sectors that will benefit humanity, including clean energy, transportation and space.
The most interesting field he works in is space travel. Elon Musk thinks that the human race should be able to live on many planets against a possible disaster in the future. Although scientific and technological developments paint a bright future picture, these developments also have a dark side.
For example; According to Michio Kaku, who made a significant contribution to string theory and is one of the most important physicists alive today, many bad scenarios that await people in the future may be possible. Kaku, thanks to the advent of 3D printers and the unbelievable rapid development and cheapness of technology, later produced at home the DNA of the Spanish flu virus (which killed more people in a 1918 pandemic than World War I). He says we are likely to encounter children or people attempting to enrich uranium in his backyard. In addition to such dangers, there are also threats that may come from outside the world, such as the impact of a large asteroid on the earth.
Elon Musk believes that humanity should start spreading into space, taking into account the disaster scenarios, and tries to produce reusable rockets for this. If a colony were to be established on Mars one day, and a rocket was to be sacrificed for each journey, the cost of the work could reach unbearable proportions. SpaceX, founded by Musk, worked to produce reusable rockets in order to provide a solution to this problem, and it succeeded. Grasshopper, the first rocket capable of vertical take-off and landing developed by mankind in history, successfully took off and landed at 744 meters.
Musk thinks of humans as computers. A person's equipment, body and brain; software can be thought of as a way of learning to think, a value system, habits and personality. In this context, Musk defines learning simply as "downloading data and algorithms to the brain". For this reason alone, he defines classical classroom education as "low-speed data downloading" and underlines that he learned everything he had learned so far by reading.
His explanations about the solution of long-term technical difficulties about the colonization program of Mars and permanent human settlement on Mars can be watched on SpaceX's Youtube channel.
Elon Musk is no ordinary entrepreneur. However, the most interesting feature that distinguishes him from other entrepreneurs is that although his education is in physics, materials science and economics, he can enter challenging fields that require extensive engineering knowledge and vision. Musk is probably already in the pages of history as one of the bright examples of the next generation of entrepreneurs.
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