From Energy

To Transport To
Healthcare, Here Are
8 Industries Being
Disrupted By Elon Musk
And His Companies
I
Elon Musk is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has
plans to colonize Mars, and thinks AI may turn
humans into its pets. But beyond the hype and
his enormous net worth and Twitter presence,
here’s how Musk’s companies are actually
taking on ... virtually every industry.
Elon Musk thinks and acts on a larger, more cosmic scale than
we’re accustomed to from entrepreneurs. Elon Musk has become
a household name synonymous with the future.

Whether he’s working on electric vehicles (Tesla) or sending

rockets into space (SpaceX), his larger-than-life reputation
attracts its fair share of hero-worship. Musk can get a hundred
breathless reporters to write about him and his companies
with little more than a concept drawing and a tweet.

II
His main projects take on almost every major industry
and global problem conceivable, and imagine a disruptive
fundamental rewiring of that space or sector.

Whether he can deliver on his vast promises is often beside the

point. And Musk himself is more than happy to feed into this
hype machine.

We’ve decided to take a different kind of look into the Musk ecosystem.

Rather than assess Elon Musk and his companies on promises

and hype, we wanted to look at the ways in which his companies
are or are not transforming the industries in which they live —
with numbers, hard evidence, and concrete demonstrations
of disruption.

To do this, we took a deep dive into 8 different industries where

Musk and his companies operate to understand how they have
begun to change.

III
 Table of 1 Energy: Read on to learn about how, according to a
utilities lobbying group, Musk’s efforts with Tesla and

Contents
SolarCity could “lay waste to US power utilities and
burn the utility business model.”

9 Automotive: Musk wants Teslas to not just be

affordable — he wants them to do something strange:
make money for their owners. They’d do this through
next-generation AI and self-driving technology. We
investigate how he’s making it happen.

16 Telecommunications: While few realize it, Musk’s

work in space could revolutionize how we get online,
and provide fast, affordable internet for the 4+ billion
without access today.

20 Transportation: We dig into how the Hyperloop, Musk’s

proposed “fifth mode of transportation” that’s a “cross
between a Concorde and an air hockey table,” plans
to cut down the 6-hour trip from DC to New York to
30 minutes.

23 Infrastructure/Tunneling: We look at how Musk’s

Boring Company is trying to cut costs in the
notoriously expensive tunneling industry, where a mile
of tunnel costs $1B to dig and each additional inch in
diameter costs millions more.

29 Aerospace/Airlines: Find out how SpaceX plans to

build a “freeway” to Mars by reducing the cost of flying
a space shuttle to a fraction of what it is today, and to
harness rocket technology for earth travel as well.

35 AI: We investigate why Musk, who is certain that the

race for AI superiority is the “most likely cause” of
WWIII, is investing so much into building better AI.
42 Healthcare: We dig into the high-bandwidth, minimally-
invasive brain machine interfaces that Neuralink is
developing to create futuristic humans.

IV
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we give companies the power to make better decisions, take
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V
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VI
“We use CB Insights to
find emerging trends and
interesting companies
that might signal a shift in
technology or require us
to reallocate resources.”
Beti Cung,
CORPORATE STRATEGY, MICROSOFT

T R U S T E D BY T H E W O R L D ’ S L E A D I N G C O M PA N I E S

VII
Elon Musk’s Companies
Elon Musk is the CEO, founder, inventor, or adviser for some of
the world’s most-hyped companies, including:

»» SpaceX
»» Tesla
»» SolarCity
»» Starlink
»» The Boring Company
»» Hyperloop
»» OpenAI
»» Future of Life Institute
»» Neuralink
Read on for a deep dive into how Elon Musk and his companies
are transforming vital industries.

VIII
1
Energy
First with SolarCity and now with Tesla, eliminating our
dependence on fossil fuels and instead drawing energy from the
“giant fusion reactor in the sky” (aka the sun) has been one of
Musk’s priorities for more than a decade.

SolarCity, his first attempt to make solar power mainstream and

ubiquitous, was at the forefront of the early 2000’s “solar gold
rush.” In some ways it was a failure, but it remains important
to understand its trajectory to understand how Musk and Tesla
plan to take renewable energy.

SolarCity grew to become the country’s largest provider of

residential solar, then suffered some very public financial
problems before being purchased Tesla for $2B.

That 2016 acquisition was controversial, with many observers

calling it a thinly veiled bailout. And yet Tesla’s continuation of
SolarCity’s work has helped make a stronger case for solar than
SolarCity was ever able to make on its own.

WHY SOLAR?
Elon Musk originally suggested the concept for the company that
became SolarCity to his cousins, Peter and Lyndon Rive, in 2004.

The concept for SolarCity emerged out of a simple realization:

the clock was running low on fossil fuels. The need for a
replacement was emerging fast. “If they started now,” as Men’s
Journal reports Musk telling Lyndon in 2004, “They might rule
the market.”

Evidence that other forms of energy production were vulnerable

was abundant in 2004.

Coal production had been in a plateau since the late 1990s,

as had electricity generation from nuclear. And while some
predicted a “nuclear renaissance” in the early 2000s, as of 2004,
that had not arrived either.

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Electricity generation from nuclear power has remained fairly steady since 2000 —
though growth has all but stopped.

As of 2004, a majority of the generators of nuclear and

coal-based power in the United States were also starting to
reach end-of-life status. They would soon need either expensive
upgrades or maintenance, or to be refashioned into generators
for alternate sources of energy.

The average nuclear or coal installation lasts about 40 years. Today, about 250 gigawatts of our total energy
consumption comes from generators that are in imminent need of upgrade or maintenance or replacement.

2
At the same time, solar was looking like an attractive alternative.
Prices on solar power had been dropping for decades, going from
$76.67/watt in 1977 to just a few dollars/watt in 2004.

The Swanson Effect observes that the price of building photo-voltaic cells for use in solar power generation
tends to fall by about 20% every time the volume of solar panels produced doubles.

3
The price of installing solar panels on roofs decreased as well —
and has continued to do so in the ensuing years.

A SHIFT IN STOCK
Musk and SolarCity took on the last-mile challenge of making
solar truly accessible and mainstream.

By 2013, it was the leading installer of solar systems in

residential buildings in the United States.

Its key innovation, though, was less on the technology side

and more on the accounting side. Before SolarCity, the cost for
getting a solar roof installed was between $30,000 and $50,000
upfront. SolarCity pioneered the “solar lease” strategy, which
allows homeowners to get their roofs installed for free and pay
back the installation costs over time. GTM Research reports that
solar leases made up 72% of new solar installations as of 2014.

February 2014 was SolarCity’s stock price peak. But cancellation

rates on SolarCity contracts soon spiked to 45% or more,
according to Fast Company.

Some critics pointed to SolarCity’s aggressive sales tactics

as the culprit. SolarCity salespeople would book installations
using savings promises that critics say “bent the truth” on the
numbers. Customers, once they realized they wouldn’t be saving
as much as they had been promised, cancelled their installations
in droves.

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All the while, the SolarCity sales team was growing by
hundreds of people a week, and they were incentivized to book
installations. Revenue, however, was not increasing at nearly the
same rate.

Towards the end of 2015, SolarCity promised investors it would

right the ship — by reducing its growth rate. Wall Street wearied.
After SolarCity announced a particularly bad quarter in February
2016, its stock price dropped by a third.

“This is a company that I regard in a

first-class crisis that acts as if every-
thing is fine,” TV anchor Jim Cramer
said afterwards. “You know I’m an
aficionado of conference calls. You may
have found the bottom. Yes, [this is] the
worst conference call of 2016.”

TESLA BUYS SOLARCITY

In February 2016, Musk proposed that Tesla buy SolarCity. Tesla
was developing the technology to help people charge their Teslas
at home and on the road. These so-called Powerwall batteries
were being installed in homes and connected to solar generators
by third parties. After the deal was approved, SolarCity’s
business became organized under the Tesla “Solar Roof” product
offering — allowing Tesla to provide end-to-end residential solar
energy rather than just the battery.

With a one-story ranch house in California, it’s estimated that

Solar Roof customers would save $41,800 over the course of
thirty years. That doesn’t factor in state and local tax credits and
other types of subsidies and incentives, or the potential property
value increase from having a Solar Roof installed.

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The Solar Roof, in many instances, saves consumers a net amount of money over time, paying itself back
in full and more.

If customers can install systems which make them virtually

self-reliant when it comes to energy, what is the role of
utilities companies?

“Solar power and other distributed

renewable energy technologies could
lay waste to U.S. power utilities and
burn the utility business model”
– GRIST MAGAZINE

At a 2017 National Governors Association meeting in Rhode

Island, Elon Musk announced that — with solar technology from
SolarCity and battery technology from Tesla Powerwall — a 100
square mile patch of land could provide enough power to supply
the entire United States.

The first Solar Roof preorders took place in May 2017. They
almost immediately sold out “well into 2018” and Tesla
announced it would begin installations in the summer. In August,
the first installations did take place — at the homes of a few
Tesla employees.

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Tesla’s factory in Buffalo, “Gigafactory 2,” has had numerous
production delays getting the Solar Roofs out to their preordering
customers. Tesla brought Panasonic in to help make up some
of the shortfall, which in December announced that it’s “getting
ready” to start producing the cells needed for the Solar Roof.

The first non-employee installations began in Spring 2018.

The first Solar Roof running

Early results suggest mixed success. Amanda Tobler’s Solar

Roof was one of the first to get hooked up to a local energy
provider and to start producing electricity for her family. The full
roof cost about $50K (including federal tax credits) for about 2K
square feet of roofing, of which 40% were solar tiles.

In the summer, the solar panels started producing higher

amounts of electricity, getting to the point where, even with A/C
use and two electric vehicles charging, Tobler was pumping
electricity back into the grid, according to her Twitter account.

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In just one week, the solar roof produced 394 kWh of electricity, far more than
the average US residential electricity use of ~225 kWh/week.

During this phase, her family used just 2.9kWh from the grid but
gave back 101 kWh to other Californians.

Though the technology is promising, Tesla has not been able

to roll out the tiles to many buyers. In Tesla’s Q2’18 earnings
call, Musk stated that the company “now [had] several hundred
homes with the Solar Roof on them,” though the company later
clarified that he included roofs that are scheduled for installment
or partially installed. However, in May’18, only 12 roofs had been
installed and connected to the grid, according to Reuters.

The Tesla Solar Roof has not been the only product to see roll-out
struggles, slowdowns, and production problems — so has the
Tesla Model 3.

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2
Automotive
The Model 3’s troubles are just the latest chapter in the Tesla
roller coaster ride.

First started in 2003, Tesla was Musk’s second project post-Pay-

Pal, and still one of his most ambitious.

Tesla is a car company working to make the traditional car

company a thing of the past. It envisions a future of self-driving
cars, where the majority of people travel by autonomous Tesla
vehicles. It’s also a future where car owners frictionlessly rent
out their vehicles to serve as self-driving cabs while they’re not
using them.

Production problems have plagued the California-based

company, however, causing delivery delays and concerning
many Tesla shareholders. The enormity of the hype around
Tesla has made the company an attractive target for short
sellers, though short sellers were punished more in 2017 than
for any other company when they lost $3.7 billion betting against
the carmaker.

But Musk’s antics may be catching up with him. In 2018 YTD

(as of 9/24/18), Tesla’s stock price has declined about 6%. Even
so, many believe that Musk can deliver on his vision, or at least
a hefty fraction of it, despite the “production hell” the Model 3
has experienced recently. Musk articulated his vision in a 2016
“Master Plan” post on the Tesla blog:

1 Create a low volume car, which would necessarily be expensive

2 Use that money to develop a medium volume car at a
lower price
3 Use that money to create an affordable, high volume car
4 Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated
battery storage
5 Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all
major segments
6 Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than
manual via massive fleet learning
7 Enable your car to make money for you when you aren’t
using it

9
The plan began as promised, with the creation of an expensive,
low volume sports car: the original Tesla Roadster.

Musk financed the Roadster’s creation with money he made from

starting PayPal. The Roadster was the first domino of the Master
Plan, a “catalyst to accelerate the day of electric vehicles.”

Then came the Tesla Model S. It won 2013 “Car of the Year”
awards from both Motor Trend and Automobile Magazine. In
2015, it won “Car of the Century” from Car & Driver. It went on to
become the best-selling electric vehicle worldwide in both 2015
and 2016 (among models that plug in). But at about $70,000, it
still wasn’t the affordable mass market car Musk wanted to build.

Betting on electric vehicles becoming mass market always

made sense. Great Britain and France voted to ban diesel and
gasoline auto sales starting in the year 2040. China has made it
a point that 20% of cars sold in the country should run on some
alternative source of fuel by 2025. GM plans to have 20 electric
vehicle models on the road by 2023. Volvo has decided to get rid
of traditional fuel-powered cars entirely by 2019.

10
Bloomberg’s growth forecast for electric vehicles over the next several decades.

In this landscape, owning the electric vehicle market begins to

look a lot more like one day owning the entire automobile industry.

Today, according to the Department of Labor, Americans pay

something like $2,000 a year in gasoline and “motor oil expenses”
alone. Freight companies pay as much as $200,000 a year to fuel
up each semi. Electric vehicles, though still relying on the grid for
energy, could help to reduce that economic burden.

The Tesla Semi will reportedly save drivers up to $200,000 a year on fuel costs.

11
Then there’s the AI component of Tesla EVs. In 2016, Tesla
announced that it would outfit Tesla vehicles with the constituent
elements of a machine learning self-driving car program:

»» Eight cameras
»» Twelve ultrasonic sensors
»» A forward-facing radar
»» A computer
As car owners drive their Teslas around, these sensors work
together to create a lifelike model of the surrounding environment.
Those models are uploaded to Tesla, where they’re studied and
compared with millions of hours of footage compiled from other
Tesla vehicles.

The resulting “Autopilot” technology has already been rolled out

to Tesla vehicles, though a driver can’t fall asleep while their
Tesla drives for them — yet. Musk anticipates that functionality
will be ready around 2019.

12
This self-driving functionality also includes the ability to control
the car via smartphone, as in this example below. A user has his
car pick him up under an overhang during a rainstorm through
his iPhone.

Autopilot and the summoning technology are available in all

three Tesla Model (S, X, and 3).

Within 48 hours of announcing the Model 3 in March 2016, the

car — Tesla’s first true mass market electric vehicle — had almost
a 250K preorders. That amounted to over $10 billion in potential
sales. But production problems would plague the roll out.

Musk promised 1,500 Model 3 units in the third quarter of 2017,

up to 20,000 per month by December.

In reality, only 260 units were produced in the third quarter.

In November 2017, the date for hitting 5,000 Model 3 units a

week in production was moved from December to March 2018.
Production issues for the Model 3 have continued to plague
Tesla throughout 2018. By the end of Q2’18, the total number of
Model 3s produced stood at 41,030.

The goal of 5,000 cars/week was finally reached in the last week
of June, when production for the Model 3 hit 5,031. To help hit
the 5,000 goal, Musk:

»» Had the team build a tent in two weeks to house an entirely

new assembly line
»» Was at the facility “24/7” and working 120-hour work weeks
to help solve production bottlenecks
»» Called employees from other business functions to try and
speed up production

13
Inside the Tesla tent

The goal of 5,000 new Model 3 units/week was hit once, though
Bloomberg predicts production has now fallen to 3,000 cars/
week with about 90K total units produced by September 2018.

Meanwhile, Musk has been on Twitter, announcing that Tesla

would soon develop “intelligent windscreen wipers,” a “disco
mode” for its interior lights, and a pickup truck.

Some analysts have advised Musk to stop “over-promising and

under-delivering.” But while Tesla’s stock price hadn’t flourished
amidst the Model 3’s production problems, it still finished 2017
about 50% higher than it started. However, Musk’s recent tweets
about taking the company private among other poor publicity
have caused the stock to drop about 20% since highs in August.

Even setting aside the Model 3’s problems, there is a chance that
the Tesla machine learning program won’t be successful. There’s
a chance the auto dealer lobby will be able to legislate Tesla out
of business (Tesla bypasses traditional dealer networks that are
supported by legislation in some areas), or that Tesla’s factories
will never produce at required levels.

And another existential threat which Musk is already addressing

head-on — data.

14
Every Tesla car on the road communicates back to the company
via the AT&T LTE network. Each one sends and receives several
gigabytes of data every month, from software updates to driver
data. Usually, Musk pursues the “full-stack” approach — such
reliance on another company is a danger to the company.

That’s a big part of the thinking behind Starlink, his plan to

leverage SpaceX into providing cheap, fast internet for all.

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3
Telecommunications
For all the talk of Musk’s innovation, his average project seems
to revolve around a set formula — find an old idea that failed
because of lackluster technology, and attack it with some of the
world’s best engineers.

That’s exactly how Musk and SpaceX are going after the satellite
internet industry.

The idea of beaming the internet down from satellites is an old

one. Teledesic was founded in the early ’90s to build a constellation
of satellites that could provide a wide network of broadband
internet. It, and a few other similar companies, failed and went
bankrupt given the logistical challenge of getting so many
satellites into space and maintaining low latency connections.

Elon Musk first talked publicly about satellite internet in early

2015. In November 2016, SpaceX filed an application with the
FCC requesting to launch more than 11,000 broadband satellites
over the course of six years and “provide robust broadband
services on a full and continuous global basis.”

By the mid-2020s, this new satellite-driven internet service,

Starlink, has the potential to become the world’s largest
telecommunications provider on Earth — potentially a $1
trillion prize.

SpaceX plans to deliver global broadband internet from orbit, creating a mesh network that
could cover the entire globe.

16
A few months later, SpaceX flew a used rocket into space for the
first time. It was a big step in the SpaceX “Master Plan,” part of
which is to reuse rockets so that a spacecraft can land and go
back into space within hours of releasing its payloads.

It is a technology which, when combined with SpaceX’s

broadband aspirations, has the potential to massively disrupt the
way telecommunications companies do business.

SpaceX has already brought the cost of a satellite launch down

to ~$300 million under what it costs to fly one with Boeing or
Lockheed — about $85-95 million compared to $420 million. Its
first reusable rocket launch, the Falcon 9, cost less than half of
its original launch. There are still various pieces of the puzzle
that SpaceX is working on to make rockets fully reusable, a
project which Musk projects will be done by late 2018. There’s
only one aspect of launching that can’t be reused — the fuel —
which costs about $250,000 per mission.

A unit cost of under a million dollars per mission would make

it possible to launch thousands of internet satellites with
ease. And those satellites, once in space, would blanket the
entire Earth — including areas without internet currently — with
persistent gigabit, low latency broadband.

There have been a number of prominent satellite internet

company flame-outs in the last few decades — Iridium and
Teledesic to name two. The Starlink project differs in some

Most of the world still doesn’t have access even to a land-locked gigabit internet connection.

17
significant ways:

»» Cost: As discussed above, SpaceX has brought (and continues

to bring) the cost of launching a satellite down to a fraction
of what it once was
»» Speed: Traditional satellite internet caps out at about 25
Mbps, while SpaceX’s could reach 1 Gigabit
»» Latency: The amount of time it takes for a data packet to
travel between Earth and a satellite — current providers post
about 600+ milliseconds (ms) latency, while SpaceX is
aiming at about 30ms, a significant improvement
SpaceX put the first two Starlink satellites — Tintin A and
B — into orbit on February 2018. As the company drives down
the cost of launch, and launches more of its satellites into space,
SpaceX has a higher chance of winning versus the current
system of land-based broadband networks.

SpaceX received the go-ahead from the FCC in March 2018 to

launch 4,425 broadband satellites.

SpaceX wasn’t the only company recently approved to build

constellations by the FCC, but they were by far the largest.

The approval does come with two new challenges for SpaceX:

1 The FCC requires that half of the satellites be launched within

six years, by March 2024 — SpaceX had only planned on

18
 launching one-third, or 1,600, by that time. Since the FCC is
reserving a band of telecommunications spectrum for the
Starlink system, it wants SpaceX to fully deploy the satellites
as soon as possible.
2 SpaceX also has to provide an updated “de-orbit plan.” This
shows how SpaceX is going to deal with all of the space
debris from more than 4,000 satellites once they start to
deteriorate. With more than 500,000 pieces of space debris
already in orbit around the earth as of 2013, the FCC wants to
make sure SpaceX isn’t contributing further.
If Starlink took hold, it would revamp satellite internet, which has
been relatively stagnant for decades. And it’s not the only “old
idea” that Musk and his companies are working on restoring.

One of the oldest ideas in transportation, for example, is

transportation by vacuum tube. In 1812, an Englishman
named George Medhurst was the first to propose building
tunnels underground and shooting passengers through them
pneumatically, in pods.

In 2012, Elon Musk was one of the first to convince people that
he might be able to bring that vision to reality.

19
4
Transportation
Musk first started talking publicly about the Hyperloop in 2012,
at a PandoDaily event in Santa Monica.

This “fifth mode of transport” (after

cars, planes, trains and boats) would
be a “cross between a Concorde and a
railgun and an air hockey table.” Riders
would travel in a low-pressure tube,
inside pod-like capsules supported by
air and powered by a “magnetic linear
accelerator.”

Musk’s original model of a Hyperloop pod from SpaceX’s 2013 whitepaper on the topic.

20
In a whitepaper, he worked with the SpaceX and Tesla teams to
test the idea’s feasibility and understand its economics. They
found that a “pod” would be able to travel a distance of 30 miles
in just 2.5 minutes, cutting a six hour trip to just 30 minutes.
And it would only need to cost about $20 USD each way to
sustain itself.

It would be cheaper than the high-speed rail California was

planning to implement at the time.

Combine pressurized pods with a depressurized tunnel, and you

get a form of transportation that’s much faster than any mode
conceived before.

As far as speed, the Hyperloop would be the fastest mode of

transportation in existence, on average. Commercial airlines
are second, traveling at an average speed of 575 mph. The
Hyperloop would travel at about 600 mph, or about 3x as fast as
the Shinkansen (bullet) train in Japan.

The Hyperloop could have a major impact on a few different

industries. For one, the $660B airline industry. With the exception
of travel over oceans, the Hyperloop could transport passengers
faster and for less money than an airplane.

That speed could alter where and how Americans live,

dramatically changing both residential and commercial real
estate. One could easily work in Manhattan and live a six-hour
drive away, in Burlington, Vermont — with a 30-minute
Hyperloop commute.

And it could revolutionize freight shipping. Almost half of all

American import goods flow through the ports at Los Angeles
and Long Beach. 14,000 truck drivers bring those goods to
warehouses and rail yards all across Southern California,
according to SCPR. They move about 11,000 containers a day and
burn about 68 million gallons of fuel every year, according to PWC.

While you would still need trucks and their human drivers for
last-mile delivery, a Hyperloop-like system could transport
goods an order of magnitude faster at much lower expense (with
far less pollution).

21
Of course, the Hyperloop has its critics. One major criticism —
where will the train go? Achieving the right-of-way necessary
to build a train above-ground and the cost of construction has
doomed high-speed rail projects for decades. And tunneling
technology isn’t there yet.

One day, when Musk was sitting in traffic outside LA, he tweeted
out a complaint that became the impetus for the company that
would attack this problem head-on.

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5
Infrastructure/Tunneling

And so started The Boring Company.

Construction is a vital field, one that the US is currently not a

world leader in. When it comes to spending on construction projects,
in 2012, the US only just outspent Greece as a proportion of GDP.
It ranked #143 in construction spending, or 13% of GDP, one of
the lowest globally. When you look at the largest infrastructure
projects currently running, Asia and Europe are the big spenders.

US construction development has plateaued. With The Boring

Company, Musk wants to improve the tech behind tunnels and
bringing infrastructure capabilities back to the US.

The Boring Company has four active projects. The first is the test
tunnel at SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, built solely for R&D.

The problem with tunneling is cost.

The cost of tunneling is approximately $1B/mile. Musk considers

that this needs to fall by an order of magnitude to $100M/mile
for tunneling to be economically viable.

Reducing cost comes down to two things: size and speed.

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The cost of a tunnel is proportional to the cross-sectional area
of the tunnel. The wider the tunnel you want, the more you have
to pay for it. The NYC Second Avenue Subway tunnel is 23.5 feet
wide. A one-lane road tunnel has to be 28 feet. The two-lane
A-86 West tunnel in Paris, completed in 2011, is 38 feet wide.

The Boring Company intends to build tunnels of just 14 feet. This

is half the diameter of the current required road tunnel, and leads
to approximately one-fourth of the cross-sectional area.

Doubling the diameter quadruples the cross-sectional area and

quadruples the cost. Reducing the diameter can save millions
of dollars.

The Boring Company can drill smaller tunnels because cars

won’t drive through — for example, via an inner-city tunnel in LA
to relieve the city’s traffic congestion.

Each car in the tunnel will be transported on an electric skate,

catapulting it through the tunnel network at 125 mph, rather
than driving through it. Musk believes that you could cut the
travel time from northern LA to LAX from 30-45 minutes to just
six minutes.

The ultimate idea is that Tesla owners can drive around on the
surface, find an entrance elevator, and head down into the tunnel.
The company is also looking for ways to connect homes directly
to the tunnel — in September 2018, the company got approval to
build a test garage that links directly with the tunnel system.

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The Tesla plan for a garage-to-tunnel car elevator.

The tunnels can be much smaller than traditional tunnels

as these will be electric cars on electric skates. No internal
combustion engines on site. If you look at the cross-section of
the A-86 West tunnel, you can see why this makes a difference.

With all the fumes from the combustion engines, the majority
of the space in the tunnel is needed for ventilation. Additionally,
tunnels add extra space for larger vehicles and emergency
vehicles. By only allowing specific electric vehicles in, these
problems are negated.

25
Musk is also looking to further reduce the impacts of The Boring
Company through one of its main assets: dirt.

Boring Bricks will reuse the dirt from tunneling — each one will
cost 10 cents or will be free for affordable housing projects.

Recycling waste into building materials could reduce emissions derived from traditional concrete builds,
furthering Musk’s vision for a cleaner planet.

The other factor in the high cost of building tunnels is speed.

Tunnel boring machines (TBMs), used to drill holes for tunnels,
are excruciatingly slow. The Boring Company has a pet snail,
Gary, who can currently outpace its machines, moving 14X faster.
“Victory is beating the snail,” says Musk. However, the company
believes that TBM power can be increased without damaging
the equipment, and power output could be tripled with the right
power source and thermal management.

The third Boring Company project is a tunnel from Washington,

D.C. to NYC. This is a journey that currently takes over four
hours to drive. The company is currently planning to go as far as
downtown Baltimore, with the eventual goal of making it to NYC.

By tunneling, you can go high speed the whole way. Coupling a

Boring Company tunnel with a Hyperloop train, Musk thinks this
journey to NY could be made in just 29 minutes. This turns the
entire mid-Atlantic region into a massive metropolis.

26
The Boring Company has recently had a fourth project approved,
providing mass transit from downtown Chicago to O’Hare
International Airport. Currently, if someone wants to get from
downtown to the airport, there are two options — the “L” train
(40 minutes), or driving (50-60 minutes).

With the proposed Boring Company tunnel, this travel time will
allegedly shorten to 12 minutes. Since The Boring Company will
pay for the entire project, Chicago has approved the project. In
return, TBC will get all transit and advertisement fees. Unlike
the LA project, this tunnel will not transport individual cars, but
instead use EV shuttles. Each vehicle will hold 16 people and will
depart downtown every 30 seconds. In theory, that is over 46,000
people per day.

For Musk, The Boring Company is little more than a hobby, taking
just “2-3 percent” of his time. He bought the TBMs secondhand,
and staffs the company with interns. But that shouldn’t downplay
the importance of The Boring Company to his other projects.

The first is Tesla. The cost projections for the inner city tunnels
are low because they will be exclusively for electric vehicles,
reducing the need for ventilation and boosting speed. This will
alleviate traffic congestion on the surface streets, transferring
traffic underground. When the first tunnels hit capacity, the
company plans to add more, creating a network of tunnels under
each city. Musk expects more traffic from autonomous, electric
vehicles as driving costs plummet due to cost sharing.

27
The second is also obvious: Hyperloop. These tunnels will have
to be larger, but with the advancements learned through the
smaller tunneling projects, The Boring Company can increase
efficiency in these tunnels as well.

The third is a bit less obvious: SpaceX.

Musk aims to put 1M people on Mars, and tunnels are central to

this vision. With a harsh atmosphere, humans may need to live
underground. If Musk is going to build a colony on Mars, building
a network of tunnels is essential.

28
6
Aerospace/Airlines
On December 15, 2017, SpaceX CRS-13 launched from Cape
Canaveral on a resupply mission to the International Space
Station. This was the 13th resupply mission on SpaceX’s NASA
contract, and the 45th launch of a Falcon 9 rocket to date.

With 18 flights in 2017 alone, even landing a rocket on a moving

boat is now routine. But this mission was different. It was the
first to exemplify the core feature of SpaceX and how it plans
to get us to Mars — it was an entirely reused rocket. The Falcon
9 Full Thrust first stage had previously flown as part of CRS-11
in June. The Dragon capsule had first flown as part of CRS-6 in
2015. This was the first time an entire spacecraft had used
flying components.

For Elon Musk, this is the only way space travel makes sense. If
rockets become reusable, then space can become the next air
travel — a way to span great distances, open to all.

It comes down to the cost-to-weight ratio. The cheaper it is to

put tons of equipment into space, the easier it is to launch. If
you have to build an entirely new spacecraft each time, however,
costs stay sky-high.

29
At the top end of the price spectrum are the “expendable launch
systems,” such as Arianespace’s Vega launcher and Boeing/
Lockheed Martin Atlas V (manufactured by United Launch
Alliance, a joint venture between the two companies). These are
big rockets that can put a lot into orbit, but cannot be reused.
The Space Shuttle (NASA) sits in the middle of the cost range.
The shuttle was designed to be cheap and reusable, but the
cost of the solid rocket boosters and main fuel tank that were
expendable added to the cost and ultimately restricted the value
of the program.

At the bottom of the spectrum sit SpaceX’s Falcon rockets, which

have already shown a 3X-5X decrease in cost for getting a
spacecraft into the sky. Even so, it needs to get lower.

Musk wants SpaceX to put 1M people on Mars. To do that, he

says we need to “improve cost per ton by 5M percent.”

From Musk’s perspective, leaving humanity as a single planet

species is crazy, a surefire path to extinction. The further we
explore and get away from Earth, the more anti-fragile we
become and the less susceptible we are to superhuman AI or the
destruction of Earth’s natural resources.

Mars isn’t exactly hospitable, but it is the best of the local options.

The atmosphere and freezing cold temperatures that exist on Mars will be a hurdle, but otherwise the two planets
have a lot that makes them similar.

30
The Martian day is similar in length, the temperature range is
roughly the same, and the amount of land is almost identical.
There is water under the surface and an abundance of important
elements in the land and air.

Getting to that “5 million percent” cost improvement requires not

just reusable rockets. That is just the first of four components that
are needed to get to Mars economically:

»» Reuse of all rocket technology. This is what SpaceX has

been focused on so far. CRS-13 shows that this is already
a reality.
»» Refill the rockets in orbit. So much fuel will be needed for
a trip to Mars, the rockets will likely need to refuel in orbit.
»» The ability to produce propellant on Mars. If we can’t even
launch with the fuel to get there, it definitely isn’t cost
effective to take the fuel to get back as well. The first thing
the new colonists will need to do is build a gas station.
»» The ability to produce the right propellant. All of this is
predicated on being able to make the right fuel on Mars.
The SpaceX vehicles will use Methalox, a combination of methane
and oxygen. To make the methane, SpaceX will collect CO2 from
Mars atmosphere (96% of the atmosphere is CO2) and mine water
from the surface. Through this, the company can produce all the
fuel its needs for the return trip.

The SpaceX plan for creating essentially a space highway between Earth and Mars includes finding a way to
generate enough fuel to sustain a return trip on the Red Planet itself.

31
The vehicle won’t be the Falcon/Dragon combination currently
in use. Instead, SpaceX is developing the BFR — the Big Falcon
Rocket. Whereas the Falcon 9 can take 22,900 kg to lower earth
orbit (LEO), the BFR will be capable of taking 500,000 kgs to LEO.
With the Raptor engines the company is currently building, the
trip to Mars will take just 80 days.

The Tintin-inspired BFR will be 118 meters tall — Falcon Heavy

stands at 70 meters — and will have a diameter of 9 meters.
Before it takes anyone to Mars, it plans to bring Japanese
billionaire Yusaku Maezawa close to the moon. In September
2018, Musk announced that the Japanese billionaire and his 6-8
artist guests will be the first humans to see the moon up close
since the Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972.

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa paid an undisclosed sum

to go to the moon in the BFR.

Initially slated for 2019, SpaceX has pushed back the trip to
concentrate on developing the more powerful BFR, with a new
launch schedule:

»» An unmanned Crew Dragon test will take place in December

2018
»» A manned flight carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and
Doug Hurley plans to fly in April 2019
»» Maezawa’s moon shot as early as 2023
»» Manned Mars trips from 2024 onward

32
Before BFR is built, the other Falcon rockets are still operating.
This is part of Musk’s overall strategy that you see throughout
his companies: build something really helpful to use now that
finances the crazy stuff of the future.

Switching to reusable rockets reduces the cost of bringing

objects into LEO. It is also opening up space exploration to
commercial realities. A great point of comparison for the
commercial feasibility of SpaceX’s plans is air travel. If Boeing
had to write off each 737 after just one flight, a trip from LA
to Las Vegas would cost something like $500,000 per person.
Because we don’t crash or trash every plane after it’s been used
once, Boeing can charge just $43.

This is the kind of cost structure Musk wants to bring to space

flight. It’s not going to cost $43 to get to Mars, but it is planned
to go from impossible to $300-500K. Expensive, but doable.

When we start to lower the cost of orbital spacecraft, the

company comes into the economic reality of not just inter-planetary
travel, but intra-planetary travel. As well as using BFR to get from
Earth to Mars, Musk also sees a viable business in using BFR
to travel from Sydney to Singapore a lot quicker than traditional
aircraft.

33
A space flight route, even sub-orbital, around the globe could be
significantly faster than a regular flight. Musk contends that with
such a flight trajectory, you can reach anywhere on earth in under
an hour. The economics then follow that of commercial flight —
originally something only open to the rich, as more people take
advantage, the price will come down until a spaceflight trip from
London to Hong Kong is similarly priced to a regular flight.

That question of our long-term future is one that Musk takes

seriously. Between climate change, nuclear war, and various
other types of man-made disaster, few threats loom larger in
Musk’s imagination as a problem for the long-term viability of
the human race than artificial intelligence.

In September 2017, Musk announced that he believed AI and

the competition for superiority would be the most likely cause of
World War III. Of all the people to doomsay about AI, of course,
Musk has strong credibility — his company OpenAI had just
accomplished, one month prior, something no other AI company
had ever done before.

34
7
Artificial Intelligence
In August 2017, during Valve’s Dota 2 tournament, a new top
player emerged in the world of online gaming. Over the course
of a week, this player beat a string of other top players, including
world champions, in one of the toughest online games. And the
player had only been playing for six months.

This tweet paints Musk and his non-profit AI research company,

OpenAI, as following in the footsteps of Google with AlphaGo and
Facebook’s DarkForest. But for Musk and OpenAI, this isn’t about
playing games. As far as he sees it, if AI research continues
down its current path, humanity has no future.

AI is now a core component of tech. It is prevalent not only in the

obvious places — Siri’s natural language processing, Google’s
RankBrain— but in almost all tech sectors.

35
AI research is progressing at a significant rate, and Musk sees
this as an existential threat to humanity. Google, Facebook,
Amazon, Apple, and all the companies in our AI 100 (featured
above) are each contributing to the upside of AI: higher efficiency,
higher productivity, less work for humans, and, ideally, a higher
quality of life for humans.

But the race for these upsides is also a race towards a massive
potential downside — a super-intelligent general artificial
intelligence that is vastly smarter than humans and sees no use
in keeping them around.

The purpose of OpenAI is to strengthen AI research. The above

companies working on AI are naturally secretive. There is a
commercial imperative: though you can read research papers
from the DeepMind or Google Brain teams, the work is behind
closed doors.

OpenAI wants to not only perform research, but also “occupy

the meta level, such as platforms and infrastructure that enable
faster research for everyone.” To accomplish this, the company
has two core components:

»» Research: The foundation has attracted some of the best

researchers in the field, promising them the opportunity to
work on some of the biggest problems in AI. The group regu-
larly publishes its own research into AI and machine learning.
In addition, the team publishes broader ideas on its own site.
»» Systems: The team is building platforms to help other AI
researchers understand the machines it is building bet-
ter. For example, the team has built an AI Gym, “a toolkit
for developing and comparing reinforcement learning
algorithms.”
The overall concept of OpenAI is to bring high-quality AI research
into the open with no commercial restraints. As the company
says in its introductory blog post, “Since our research is free
from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive
human impact.”

Is a super-intelligent AI a real problem? It sounds too sci-fi, even

for Musk. Imagining colonies on Mars or self-driving cars is
fairly easy. Imagining an AI-induced apocalypse isn’t. Machine
learning leader Andrew Ng said, “worrying about superhuman AI
is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars”.

36
But that is kind of Musk’s point. No one is thinking about this.
Instead, they are all too focused on the commercial possibilities
of AI. They can’t see the potential problems.

Those problems are two-fold:

1 An AI will unintentionally do harmful things

2 An AI will intentionally do harmful things
The first could be a problem even with current narrow AI. Say we
build an AI cleaning bot. All this bot wants to do is make sure the
world is as clean as can be. If the bot just wants to make sure
everything is clean, it has a few options. The first option is to
clean up all the mess. This is the outcome we want and that the
AI developer is expecting.

But that isn’t the only option. Another possibility is that it will try
and stop the mess occurring in the first place. Humans cause
mess. “If there are no humans, there is no mess, so let’s get rid of
all humans” increases the AI’s utility function and is a perfectly
legitimate solution to the AI’s problem.

This AI safety research is the main focus of OpenAI. In 2016, the

company co-authored a research paper into these issues titled
Concrete Problems in AI Safety. The paper identified five areas
of research that AI researchers need to strongly consider as they
push forward with any type of AI:

»» Avoid negative side effects. How can we make sure that the
AI won’t follow its programming too exactly, so that it will do
anything to perform its function? For the cleaning robot, this
could be destroying the room in an effort to clean faster.
»» Avoid reward hacking. If the AI uses a reward function to
determine the right course of action, how can we make sure
it doesn’t just try and maximize that reward function without
performing the action? For the cleaning AI, this could include
switching off its visual system so it can’t see the mess.
»» Scalable oversight. How can we make sure than an AI can
train safely even when training examples are infrequent?
The cleaning robot would know that it has to clean up coffee
cups, but how does it learn not to “clean up” the cellphone
that’s been left overnight on the desk?

37
 »» Safe exploration. Can the AI explore possible outcomes and
train without serious repercussions — say, learning how to
mop the floor without trying to mop an electrical outlet?
»» Robustness to distributional shift. As the data or environment
changes, can the AI continue to perform optimally, or at least
define its ambiguity and “fail gracefully”? Can the cleaning AI
try to clean a factory floor if it learned to clean in an office?
There are already attacks to test the limits of AI. Robustness is
a particular concern for narrow AI. How well do they work when
you test them outside of their comfort zone. As of today, not well.
Image recognition machine learning algorithms often misclassify
adversarial examples — images that have specific noise injected
into them.

This is a benign example. It’s not hard to imagine a malicious

implementation of this kind of hack, however. Imagine an
adversarial attack on the AI in your self-driving car that changes
“stop sign” into “green light” in its programming. Not only would it
be potentially more deadly than something like cutting the brake
lines in someone’s car, it would be a virtual attack and therefore
(hypothetically) highly scalable.

The core problem with AI safety comes down to one simple

question: How can we make sure the AI wants what we want?
OpenAI is trying to lead research in this field, and it is not working
alone. The concrete problems paper included researchers from
Google Brain, Stanford, and UC Berkeley alongside OpenAI.

But with the non-concrete problems of a super-intelligent

general artificial intelligence, OpenAI is on its own.

The core behind this worry is the learning rate for AI. The bot that
won Dota2 is a prime example of this. From when it was switched
on in April, it steadily increased its ability with each iteration.

38
This graph measures OpenAI’s best bot’s TrueSkill rating — similar to an ELO rating in chess —
which is a summary of the bot’s win ratios against the other OpenAI bots it trained against.

What took humans years took an AI months. DeepMind’s recent

success with its AlphaZero chess AI took this a step further. It
learned how to beat the best chess computers in hours.

Starting from random play, and given

no domain knowledge except the game
rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24
hours a superhuman level of play in the
games of chess and shogi (Japanese
chess) as well as Go, and convincingly
defeated a world-champion program in
each case.

AI learns through reinforcement. The AI plays thousands of

games, learning incrementally from each one. AlphaZero ran
simultaneously on 5,000 tensor processing units, specially-built
processing units designed to run machine learning algorithms
using Google’s TensorFlow framework. The learnings from each
are combined to produce “a superhuman level of play.”

These are still narrow AI implementations. But an artificial

general intelligence, an AGI, could use these techniques to
bootstrap itself.

AI is already learning to develop itself.

39
“A few months ago, we introduced
our AutoML project, an approach
that automates the design of
machine learning models. … [we]
found that AutoML can design small
neural networks that perform on par
with neural networks designed by
human experts.”
-GOOGLE RESEARCH BLOG

An AGI could test millions of newer, better AGIs, picking the best
parameters from each, combining them and immediately becoming
smarter. That smarter AGI then starts the process anew. This is
the law of accelerating returns. The future is approaching quicker.
AI that learns quicker is being developed quicker.

Musk’s point is that we are the emperor at the chessboard. We

won’t realize our mistake until it’s over. Within seconds, the AI
vastly transcends our abilities.

However, in a Dota 2 rematch in August 2018, it was the humans

who came out victorious. In a best-of-three match, “OpenAI Five”
lost two games against the top rated human players.

AI outclassed by two human teams

40
These teams — paiN and Chinese Superstar Team — were supe-
rior to other teams the AI had played previously and highlighted
some of the limitations of AI. In the analysis of the games, there
were two opportunities for better strategy by the AI:

»» More risky play. During the game, the commentators pointed

out that OpenAI preferred “to win by 1 point with 90%
certainty, than win by 50 points with a 51% certainty.”
These programs make moves that will result in a steady
aggregation of points, but sometimes they miss the opportunity
for a move that a human will take.
»» Long-term strategy. OpenAI Five played well in the initial
minutes of the games but then started to fail. Long-term
memory is something that AI programs have yet to master.
These two fundamental problems fight against each other. AI
can’t take risks to win quickly but can’t think long-term enough
to win slowly. These aren’t just issues with AI gaming — they
are the fundamental problems of AI overall. Humans can take
an action now knowing the reward is hours, months, even years
away, while AI can’t (yet).

With OpenAI, the plan is to make the public sufficiently aware of

the threat that AI could represent so that it will be regulated and
controlled proactively. OpenAI isn’t, however, the only iron Elon
has in this fire. He’s also investing in a hedge against the bet that
humanity will save itself from AI in time.

It’s called Neuralink — and the idea is to digitally augment

humans before we get replaced.

41
8
Healthcare
Most of Musk’s endeavors exist on a big scale: spaceships
to Mars, tunnels from DC to New York, electric car-producing
factories all across the globe.

Neuralink is an utterly different beast. It’s about the microscopic

rather than macroscopic, and the mental rather than the physical
world. But because of that, it has to rank as the most challenging,
and thus most exciting, of Musk’s current companies.

Neuralink was also unveiled without the fanfare of many of

Musk’s other companies. The project was announced in an
article in the Wall Street Journal in March of 2017.

“Building a mass-market electric vehicle

and colonizing Mars aren’t ambitious
enough for Elon Musk. The billionaire
entrepreneur now wants to merge
computers with human brains to help
people keep up with machines.“

Neuralink is Musk’s project to build a brain-machine interface

(BMI) that will link human brains directly to computers. BMIs
have existed in research for decades. But even though human
trials have started, two big problems still exist with current BMIs:

»» The bandwidth of the systems is low. We have billions of

neurons but BMIs only record a few neurons at any given
time. This makes using them for any high-fidelity system
difficult. You could move a cursor across a screen with your
brain, but you couldn’t play the violin with your mind.
»» The invasiveness of the interface is high. The implant
requires neurosurgery and a constant, hardwired link into
the brain. This means that it is restricted to people with a
live-saving need, as the hardwired link increases the chance
of brain infection.

42
These are the two problems Neuralink is setting out to solve in
the short-term. The company wants to build a high-bandwidth,
minimally-invasive BMI that will be FDA approved so it can start
to use in real-life patients within a few years, and everyone else
soon after. Musk sees this as the only way the human race will
survive given the ongoing encroachment of AI.

As Musk sees it, AI advancement is driven by capitalism.

Companies like Amazon need to invest millions into developing
its AI because if it doesn’t, Google and Microsoft and Facebook
will, and so on. The question is not if this will lead to the creation
of an artificial intelligence that can leave regular humans in the
dust, the question is when.

“Even in the [most] benign scenario,” Musk says, “We would

be pets.” The worst-case scenario would be the complete end
of mankind.

One of Musk’s approaches to this problem is OpenAI — working

to make sure we proactively regulate artificial intelligence.

With Neuralink, he’s coming at AI from a different angle. The goal

is to augment the human level of intelligence and preemptively
mesh us with the digital world so we can build ourselves up
before an AI can surpass us.

Between here and there, Neuralink has the potential to help

people suffering from stroke, neurodegeneration, cancer, spinal
cord injuries, amputations, and dozens of other healthcare
issues. These conditions afflict millions of people every year
and costs the healthcare industry millions to treat. And if the
Neuralink project is successful, years of expensive treatment and
therapy (and in many cases risky surgeries) could be replaced
with a simple microscopic brain implant.

18 months after launch, the company’s website still only consists

of a single page highlighting the roles that need to be filled at
the company, including machinists, electrical engineers, and
software engineers.

43
The eclectic team the company is trying to build gives a brief
glimpse into this multidisciplinary effort needed to understand
the brain and engineer a patch for it.

BMIs are brain implants, usually a chip of electrodes a few

millimeters square, that are surgically implanted directly into
the brain.

44
The electrodes pick up the electrical activity from brain cells,
neurons, and transmit them to a computer. While the brain
activity is being recorded, the animal (or human) performs a task
such as moving a joystick to guide a cursor around on the screen.

The scientists can then use algorithms to correlate the brain

activity to the movement, teaching a computer that when certain
neurons fire, the cursor should move left. Then you can turn the
joystick off and move the cursor purely through the brain activity.
Then you have a BMI.

The driving force behind BMIs in the past decade has been
the military. As the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs)
became widespread in Afghanistan and Iraq, limb loss became
more common among soldiers. Body armor improved, meaning
soldiers were less likely to die in the blast, but extremities weren’t
protected. From 2000 to 2015, approximately 1,600 soldiers had
amputations.

Helping these soldiers was the goal of DARPA’s Revolutionizing

Prosthetics program. Funding was given to research groups
around the US with specialties in neuroscience, biomedical
engineering, and robotics to develop new implants, new
prosthetics, and new understandings of how to control the latter
with the former.

45
Substantial progress was made, with human trials starting and
patients capable of both controlling and sensing robotic arms.

The problems Neuralink need to solve include bandwidth and

invasiveness. The bandwidth problem can be easily visualized
through this graph:

There are about 85B neurons in the human brain. Up to 2013, the
record for the most neurons recorded simultaneously from an
animal brain was approximately 500. About 2,000 are possible
over time from a single implant.

46
Only a fraction of all possible information is extracted by current
BMIs. Millions of neurons are involved in the decision and
movement when you move your arm to pick up a cup of coffee.
To allow an amputee with a prosthetic limb the same degree of
control as they had with their original limb requires the ability to
record from significantly more neurons at one time.

Once a human is hooked up to a BMI, a learning phase starts.

The person learns how to control the robotic arm with the limited
bandwidth. The algorithms learn which neurons are signals and
which are noise and get better at processing the information.
The two symbiotically adjust until the person incorporates their
new “arm.”

The second problem has more variables. The brain is usually

cocooned away from the world in a sheath of meninges and
sterile fluid. It does not like invasion. Non-invasive BMIs exist,
but they have even lower bandwidth as they can’t discern the
individual neuronal activity needed for close robotic control.

47
The Neuralink team is looking for ways to minimize the invasiveness
of its BMI while still having high bandwidth. Wireless is an
obvious choice, but presents its own problems:

»» How do you get power to the device? Wireless radios are

power-hungry and processing and sending high-bandwidth
information will also require significant power.
»» How do you dissipate heat from the device? Chips, radios,
and batteries all produce heat. The brain can only heat up by
a degree of two before damage occurs.
Additionally, the electrodes themselves cause damage as they
are inserted. The brain’s natural defenses literally encapsulate
them over time, cutting them off from the rest of the brain and
rendering them useless.

These are all the issues that BMI researchers have faced over
the past two decades. But the team assembled by Musk at
Neuralink includes people who have completely novel ideas to
overcome these issues. DJ Seo has developed “neural dust,” tiny
silicon sensor nodes that could be spread throughout the cortex.
Elsewhere, researchers are developing a “neural mesh” that can
be injected into veins and travel up to the brain and record neural
activity through blood vessel walls.

48
Musk himself calls these implants “neural lace” and imagines a
mesh sitting over your cortex, acting as a digital layer above your
animal limbic system and your human cortical system.

Neuralink is by far the most secretive of Musk’s companies so far.

From the single page website to the lack of news, the company
is operating like a stealth startup. But during his now infamous
podcast with Joe Rogan in September 2018, Musk said:

“I think we’ll have something interesting

to announce in a few months … that’s
better than anyone thinks is possible.
Best case scenario, we effectively merge
with AI.”

Yikes.

For now, the main beneficiaries of Neuralink could be the

300K people in the US living with spinal cord injuries, the 5.5M
Americans living with Alzheimer’s, and the 2.5M with stroke or
traumatic brain injuries. Each could be treated with an implant
that restores motor, memory, or other cognitive functions.

49
Make it Better
Each of Elon Musk’s companies is formulated on an existential
bet on our future:

»» Tesla: Fossil fuel-powered cars will soon be a relic of

the past and electric vehicles will reign supreme — and
alternative power will be cheap and accessible
»» SpaceX: Being a multi-planetary civilization will be highly
preferable to being a single-planet civilization
»» OpenAI: A super-intelligent AI would likely be the end of all
life on Earth, and we might not even realize we’re building it
until it’s too late — so it’s better that we prevent it now
These are some of the biggest bets that anyone can make, let
alone an entrepreneur. That’s important to remember when you
look at the various industries that Musk and his companies
are disrupting.

These companies represent huge possible disruptions, some

sized in the trillions of dollars, because their potential payoff is
much more than winning a specific vertical or market — its the
future of humanity itself.

And yet behind those high stakes and innovations is a relatively

“boring” fundamental strategy: rather than invent something
entirely new, take something old and make it better.

Across industries, Musk and his companies aren’t disrupting the

state of play by inventing new things out of whole cloth — they’re
taking ideas that failed, and bringing them back to life.

50