Don't Put Off Until Tomorrow

It's hard to understand whether Elon Musk is Hank Skorpio, Willy Wonka, or the monorail salesman from The Simpsons. He seems as capable as he is a charlatan. He's determined to be the new Henry Ford, to build the future and sell it. He's always announcing a "revolutionary" technology. He wants to fix traffic, global warming, and colonize Mars. Tomorrow, or if possible, today.

Musk constantly promises to shrink the gap between reality and science fiction. Tesla is his flagship brand: the first electric car factory, which will launch its third model this year, fittingly named "Model 3," with which he hopes to win over the mainstream public. And despite producing only 80,000 units a year, the company is worth 60 billion dollars, surpassing the market value of Ford, General Motors, and BMW.

The Model 3 already has 400,000 pre-sold units. Just to meet the battery demand of its production chain, he's building the largest battery plant on the planet: Gigafactory, which he expects to complete by 2020. On its own, that plant would have more capacity than all the existing battery factories in the world combined. Everything in the Musk universe is massive.

And for the conquest of space, he has SpaceX, which started as a NASA subcontractor for suborbital flights and supplying the International Space Station. In March, for the first time, he managed to get his reusable rocket, the Falcon 9, to make its second trip. Musk's philosophy is to bring down the costs of space travel so they become as common as airplane trips. But SpaceX is also the spearhead of his most controversial project: the colonization of Mars.

Lastly, Hyperloop. An idea that generated a lot of buzz when it came out and then faded into the sea of information. Launching vehicle-capsules through vacuum tubes as a means of transportation, at speeds between 200 and 960 kilometers per hour. Musk confirmed this year that he received verbal approval from the U.S. government for his company The Boring Company to dig a tunnel between New York and Washington.

And so, the future of Humanity seems to be, once again, in the hands of an eccentric millionaire. Only in this case, Musk is the reverse of Ford: he sells the future first and builds it later.

This article was originally published in Pagina/12 on October 26, 2017.