Elon Musk is an entrepreneur from South Africa with an estimated worth of over $20 billion. He is the founder and CEO of SpaceX, a company which I cover quite often in my posts regarding space launches, co-founder and CEO of Tesla Inc, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. He is also co-chairman of OpenAI, and was also instrumental in the creation of PayPal, as he was the original founder of X.com, which merged with Confinity to form it.

Now those are great achievements, but that is not the reason I like the man. To me, he's not an inspiration because he is rich, but because he uses his wealth to develop cheaper and better technologies. He's a good role model because he is a visionary, not content on amassing wealth, but forming platforms to generate wealth for others as well.

To this end, he made X.com, which eventually gave rise to PayPal a money-transferring service, which, at the time at least, reduced costs and improved accessibility of moving value. He poured money into Tesla to revolutionize the auto industry, and make electric cars much more than a hipster's toy, but an actually great, cheap car. He made SpaceX in the hope of finally colonizing Mars, and making space travel, in general, much cheaper. He raised concerns on AI, which more and more dominate our lives, so to this effect he is part of OpenAI, in the hope of creating AI that is open-source and non-profit.

Not only does he provide cheaper and better services than rivals that have dominated their respective industries for decades, but he also share the knowledge gained from the research funded by him with others. Obviously, he can't share the rocket technology, but when it comes to Tesla, all patents are free for all to use. To this end, he has this memo on the official company website, granting licence. I love the nice touch with the ancient meme in there :)

Besides granting access to his company's research, he is also cooperating with AI specialists around the world in the development of OpenAI. I wrote this post a while back about that project's astonishing achievements at the time. This aims to address his fears that AI will eventually control our lives. Thus, realizing that dangerous developments in such technologies is inevitable (see the practices of most major social media companies), he decided that opposing it is a fruitless endeavor, so influencing it to suit humanity's needs is the correct course of action. So, OpenAI was born, which has a development philosophy similar to how Linux grew, or how cryptocurrencies operate.

On top of this, he is part of The Giving Pledge, which is a campaign that he and other billionaires rallied behind, which encourages them to donate a large chunk of their wealth to charities and aiding humans around the world. On top of this, he has donated multiple times to disaster reliefs and aided areas affected with solar technology to aid in power production when it is needed. He also aims to bring free, or at least cheap, Wi-Fi internet to most of the world, and plans on launching a major satellite constellation to this effect.

But what really settles my love (no homo :p) for this mad genius, is that he is not just a somber, serious, kinda boring intellectual, he is also a massive troll, hence my writing of this post. First up, he sets up The Boring Company which aims to decrease the cost of digging tunnels by a factor of ten, because he got bored in traffic.

So what does this company do in 2018, right out of the blue? Start selling cool looking flamethrowers... Obviously! And apparently people were so hyped about this announcement that they preordered the $500 product in droves, generating a total of over $4 million for the company. Obviously, some panicking people started freaking out that this is a bad idea, so what does he do? Well, unlike most companies, who apologize for every insignificant outrage he posted what you see below, and this video on Instagram... Absolute mad man!