From: julianlzb87@gmail.com   
      
   LAST week Elon Musk announced that within 30 months Space X would be   
   launching orbital AI data centres in space. Within a decade he plans to   
   send starships every two days to a city he will build on the moon. A few   
   years ago predictions such as these would have been laughed out of   
   court. Not any longer. After a string of outlandish business successes   
   across a raft of technologies from electric cars to spaceships, today   
   the world’s biggest investors are prepared to back almost any new idea   
   that comes out of Musk’s hyperactive brain. The result is that Musk is   
   singlehandedly building companies that will change the very nature of   
   human existence.   
      
   Musk’s ambitions for humanity are seemingly limitless. For Tesla, the   
   world’s first and only profitable mass market EV company, the aim is ‘to   
   accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy’. Space X has   
   ‘the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets’; X   
   Corp’s (formerly Twitter) mission ‘is to be the town square of the   
   internet’. For xAI, his 2023 startup, the aim is to ‘understand the true   
   nature of the universe’. Neuralink, Musk’s bioelectronics company, is   
   creating a generalised brain interface ‘to restore autonomy to those   
   with unmet medical needs today and unlock human potential tomorrow’; and   
   the Boring Company, whose Prufrock 4 can tunnel at one mile per week,   
   aims ‘to solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic’.   
      
   So, what are Musk’s overarching goals in life? First, he believes that   
   planet Earth faces existential risks. Transport needs to move away from   
   fossil fuels. But he is not a swivel-eyed fanatic. He rejects the idea   
   that there is an imminent climate catastrophe. Of much greater concern   
   to Musk is global ‘de-population’ as the world falls below replacement   
   fertility levels. Musk seems to be single-handedly trying to solve the   
   problem. As hyperactive in his private life as business life, he has had   
   an estimated 14 children by four women.   
      
   In the short term, Musk believes that both fossil fuels and nuclear   
   power have a role to play in Earth’s insatiable need for energy, but   
   ‘once you understand the Kardashev Scale (the measure of human usage of   
   available solar energy) it becomes utterly obvious that essentially all   
   energy generation will be solar’. Apart from EVs, his main contribution   
   to global energy is solving the problem of solar energy’s intermittency.   
   Over the last three years, Tesla has become the world’s largest supplier   
   of utility-scale batteries systems for renewable energy storage.   
      
   Second, Musk wants to avert civilisational collapse. In a recent   
   conversation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he opined that ‘we   
   need to do everything possible to ensure that the light of consciousness   
   is not extinguished’. If Earth fails, his colonies on the moon and Mars   
   will keep the flicker of human consciousness alive.   
      
   Third, Musk believes that, through technological advance, particularly   
   in AI and robotics, the world can achieve ‘superabundance’. In a recent   
   Moonshots podcast interview with Peter Diamandis, Musk advised: ‘Don’t   
   worry about squirrelling away for retirement in ten or 20 years. It   
   won’t matter . . . [there will be a] universal   
   you-can-have-whatever-you-want income.’   
      
   In the fields of AI and robotics, most technology experts, including   
   Jensen Huang of Nvidia, believe that Musk is the market leader. The fact   
   that institutional investors are willing to hold Tesla stock, which is   
   on a forward P/E ratio of over 200 compared to an average of 25-35 for   
   the other ‘Magnificent Seven’ US tech stocks (such as Apple and Amazon),   
   suggests high confidence that Musk’s robots, four-wheeled and humanoid,   
   both driven by vision-only neural network training, will be fabulously   
   profitable.   
      
   Tesla’s Freemont, California, factory is being converted to produce   
   humanoids at a rate of 500,000 per annum by 2027 and 10million per annum   
   by 2030; meanwhile Tesla’s Gigafactory in Texas is expected to hit a   
   similar run rate of Musk’s ground-breaking two-seater robotic cybercars   
   over the next 18 months. Robotic Full Self Driving (FSD), operating in   
   Tesla taxis in Austen and San Francisco, is now ‘a solved problem’.   
      
   These are ambitious targets. But he proved doubters wrong with EVs and   
   the market is betting that he will prove his critics wrong again. As   
   Huang has observed: ‘Elon is singular in his understanding of   
   engineering and construction and large systems and marshalling   
   resources. It’s just unbelievable.’   
      
   In 2024, xAI, using 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs (graphics processing   
   units), built the world’s largest supercomputer, Colossus, for   
   development of its Large Language Model (LLM) Grok in just 122 days – a   
   task that would have taken other companies two or three years. Recently   
   xAI launched Grokipedia to compete with the increasingly ‘woke’   
   Wikipedia. (Two years ago, Wikipedia removed my own entry). Colossus II,   
   using a million of Nvidia’s latest B200 GPUs, started operation on   
   January 17.   
      
   xAI, which in March 2025 merged with X Corp, the social media platform   
   whose fortunes Musk resuscitated, has now been acquired by Space X. The   
   merged company is expected to go public later this year at a valuation   
   of $1.5billion (£1.1billion) – about the same as Tesla’s current market   
   capitalisation. Will Tesla and Space X merge to create a broadly based   
   technological behemoth? Maybe.   
      
   Space X dominates its industry, operating 70 per cent of all satellites   
   in low earth orbit. Last year the company accounted for 85 per cent of   
   all tonnage launched into space. Later this year its Starship, the   
   largest spacecraft ever built and reusable to boot, is expected to go   
   into commercial operation. The Gigabay spaceship factory, built at   
   Musk’s newly established city of Starbase in southern Texas, will have   
   an annual manufacturing capacity of 1,000 Starships.   
      
   With a payload of more than 100 tons, Starship will be able to carry   
   50-70 of its powerful new V3 satellites into orbit; Space X’s Starlink,   
   a satellite-based broadband and telephone service, which has grown its   
   customer base to 10million since launch in 2022, is expected to double   
   this year. Soon the more powerful V3 will link directly to mobile   
   phones. Apple should watch out.   
      
   With $850billion (£632billion), Musk is by far the richest man in the   
   world. His net worth is more than double that of Mark Zuckerberg   
   (Facebook) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) combined. So what drives Musk to work   
   17 hours a day, seven days a week? Neurologically, Musk is just   
      
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