8 Industries Being Disrupted by Elon Musk and His Companies PDF

03/03/2020 8 Industries Being Disrupted By Elon Musk And His Companies
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From
30697
Energy To Transport To Healthcare, Here Are 8
Industries Being Disrupted By Elon Musk And His
Companies
Arti cial Intelligence Automotive Construction Tech E-sports & Gaming Energy
Hardware Tech Robotics Space Tech Telecommunications Travel United States
   
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.
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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 Privacy - Terms
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breathless reporters to write about him and his companies with little more than a concept drawing
and a tweet. CB Insights
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His main projects take on almost every major industry and global problem conceivable, and
imagine a disruptive fundamental rewiring of that space or sector.
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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.
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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:
1. Energy: Read on to learn about how, according to a utilities lobbying group, Musk’s efforts with
Tesla and SolarCity could “lay waste to US power utilities and burn the utility business model.”
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Transportation: We dig into how the Hyperloop, Musk’s proposed “ fth 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
5. 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.
6. Aerospace/Airlines: Find out how SpaceX plans to build a “freeway” to Mars by reducing the
cost of ying a space shuttle to a fraction of what it is today, and to harness rocket technology
for earth travel as well.
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7. AI: We investigate why Musk, who is certain that the race for AI superiority is the “most likely
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cause” of WWIII, is investing so much into building better AI.
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8. Healthcare: We dig into the high-bandwidth, minimally-invasive brain machine interfaces that
Neuralink is developing to create futuristic humans.
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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
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The Boring Company

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OpenAI
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Read on for a deep dive into how Elon Musk
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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 rst 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 nancial 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
The price of installing solar panels on roofs decreased as well — and has continued to do so in the
ensuing years.
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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.
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
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quarter in February 2016, its stock price dropped by a third.
“This is aCBcompany
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that I regard in a rst-class crisis that acts as
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if everything is ne,” TV anchor Jim Cramer said afterwards. “You
know I’m an a cionado of conference calls. You may have found

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the bottom. Yes, [this is] the worst conference call of 2016.”
TESLA BUYS SOLARCITY

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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.
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?
At a 2017 National Governors

Association meeting in Rhode
“Solar power and other distributed
Island, Elon Musk announced that
renewable energy technologies could — with solar technology from
lay waste to U.S. power utilities and SolarCity and battery technology
from Tesla Powerwall — a 100
burn the utility business model” – square mile patch of land could
Grist Magazine provide enough power to supply
the entire United States.
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The rst 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 rst
installations did take place — at the homes of a few Tesla employees.
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 rst non-employee installations began in Spring 2018.
The rst Solar Roof running
Early results suggest mixed success. Amanda Tobler’s Solar Roof was one of the rst 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 roo ng, 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
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residential electricity
 use of ~225 kWh/week. View
During this phase, her family used just 2.9kWh from the grid but gave back 101 kWh to other
Californians.
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Though the technology is promising, Tesla has not been able to roll out the tiles to many buyers. In
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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.
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-PayPal, 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 eet learning
7. Enable your car to make money for you when you aren’t using it
The plan began as promised, with the creation of an expensive, low volume sports car: the original
Tesla Roadster.
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Musk nanced the Roadster’s creation with money he made from starting PayPal. The Roadster
was the rst 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.
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Bloomberg’s growth forecast for electric vehicles over the next several decades.
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electric vehicle market begins to look a lot more like one day owning
the entire automobile industry.
Today, accordingRESEARCH
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
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The Tesla Semi will reportedly save drivers up to $200,000 a year on fuel costs.
Then there’s the AI component of Tesla EVs. In 2016, Tesla announced that it would out t 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.
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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 rst 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.
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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
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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 nally reached

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Model 3 hit 5,031. To help hit the 5,000 goal, Musk:
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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
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.
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Meanwhile, Musk has been on Twitter, announcing that Tesla would soon develop “intelligent
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windscreen wipers,”
 a “disco mode” for its interior lights, and a pickup truck. View
Some analysts have advised Musk to stop “over-promising and under-delivering.” But while Tesla’s
stock price hadn’t ourished amidst the Model 3’s production problems, it still nished 2017 about
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50% higher than it started. However, Musk’s recent tweets about taking the company private
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setting aside the Model 3’s problems, there is a chance that the Tesla machine
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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.
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.
3. Telecommunications
For all the talk of Musk’s innovation, his average project seems to revolve around a set formula —
nd 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 rst talked publicly about satellite internet in early 2015. In November 2016, SpaceX
led 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.
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SpaceX plans to deliver global broadband internet from orbit, creating a mesh network that could
cover the entire globe.
A few months later, SpaceX ew a used rocket into space for the rst 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 y one with Boeing or Lockheed — about $85-95 million compared to $420 million. Its rst
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.
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Most of the world still doesn’t have access even to a land-locked gigabit internet connection.
There have been a number of prominent satellite internet company ame-outs in the last few
decades — Iridium and Teledesic to name two. The Starlink project differs in some signi cant
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 signi cant improvement
SpaceX put the rst 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.
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SpaceX wasn’t the only company recently approved to build constellations by the FCC, but they
were by far the largest.
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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 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 rst to propose building tunnels underground
and shooting passengers through them pneumatically, in pods.
In 2012, Elon Musk was one of the rst to convince people that he might be able to bring that
vision to reality.
4. Transportation
Musk rst started talking publicly about the Hyperloop in 2012, at a PandoDaily event in Santa
Monica.
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This “ fthCBmode
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of transport” (after cars, planes, trains and
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boats) would be a “cross between a Concorde and a railgun and
an air hockey table.” Riders would travel in a low-pressure tube,

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inside pod-like capsules supported by air and powered by a
“magnetic linear accelerator.”
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Musk’s original model of a Hyperloop pod from SpaceX’s 2013 whitepaper on the topic.
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
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faster and for less money than an airplane.

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That speed could alter where
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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.
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And it could revolutionize freight shipping. Almost half of all American import goods ow through
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rail yards all across Southern California, according to SCPR. They moveSIGN about
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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).
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 tra c outside LA, he tweeted out a complaint that became the
impetus for the company that would attack this problem head-on.
5. Infrastructure/Tunneling
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring

machine and just start digging...
40.7K 6:35 PM - Dec 17, 2016
14.8K people are talking about this
And so started The Boring Company.
Construction is a vital eld, 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.
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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 rst 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.
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. Privacy - Terms
The Boring Company can drill smaller tunnels because cars won’t drive through — for example, via
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an inner-city tunnel
 in LA to relieve the city’s tra c congestion. View
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
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from northern LA to LAX from 30-45 minutes to just six minutes.
The ultimate idea is that TeslaJOIN 600,000+

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head down into the tunnel. The company is also looking for ways to connect homes directly to
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the tunnel — in September 2018, the company got approval to build a test garage that links directly
with the tunnel system.
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.
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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 speci c electric vehicles in, these problems are negated.
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.
Boring Bricks
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 Privacy - Terms
downtown Baltimore, with the eventual goal of making it to NYC.

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
By tunneling, Technology
you can go speed the whole way. Coupling a Boring Company tunnel with aView
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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.
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The Boring Company has recently had a fourth project approved, providing mass transit from
downtown Chicago to O’HareJOIN 600,000+ CB Airport.
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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 rst 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 tra c congestion on the surface streets, transferring tra c underground. When the rst
tunnels hit capacity, the company plans to add more, creating a network of tunnels under each
city. Musk expects more tra c from autonomous, electric vehicles as driving costs plummet due
to cost sharing.
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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
e ciency 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.
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 ights in 2017 alone, even landing a rocket on a moving boat is now routine. But this
mission was different. It was the rst 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 rst stage had
previously own as part of CRS-11 in June. The Dragon capsule had rst own as part of CRS-6 in
2015. This was the rst time an entire spacecraft had used ying 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, Privacy
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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 sure re 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.
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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 rst 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.
Re ll 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
de nitely isn’t cost effective to take the fuel to get back as well. The rst 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.
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The SpaceX plan for creating essentially a space highway between Earth and Mars includes
nding a way to generate enough fuel to sustain a return trip on the Red Planet itself.
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 rst humans to see the moon up close since the
Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972.
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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 ight carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley plans to y in April
2019
Maezawa’s moon shot as early as 2023
Manned Mars trips from 2024 onward
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
nances 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 ight, 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.
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This is the kind of cost structure Musk wants to bring to space ight. 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.
A space ight route, even sub-orbital, around the globe could be signi cantly faster than a regular
ight. Musk contends that with such a ight trajectory, you can reach anywhere on earth in under
an hour. The economics then follow that of commercial ight — originally something only open to
the rich, as more people take advantage, the price will come down until a space ight trip from
London to Hong Kong is similarly priced to a regular ight.
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That question of our long-term future is one that Musk takes seriously. Between climate change,
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nuclear war, and
 various other types of man-made disaster, few threats loom larger in Musk’sView
imagination as a problem for the long-term viability of the human race than arti cial intelligence.
In September 2017, Musk announced that he believed AI and the competition for superiority would
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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
JOIN 600,000+ had just
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7. Arti cial 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.
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
OpenAI first ever to defeat world's best players in competitive

eSports. Vastly more complex than traditional board games like
chess & Go.
36.5K 5:45 AM - Aug 12, 2017
11.4K people are talking about this
This tweet paints Musk and his non-pro t 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.
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AI research is progressing at a signi cant 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 e ciency, 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 arti cial 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 eld, promising
them the opportunity to work on some of the biggest problems in AI. The group regularly
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 better. For example, the team has built an AI Gym, “a toolkit for developing and
comparing reinforcement learning algorithms.” Privacy - Terms
The overall concept of OpenAI is to bring high-quality AI research into the open with no
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commercial restraints.
 As the company says in its introductory blog post, “Since our researchView
is
free from nancial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.”
Is a super-intelligent AI a real problem? It sounds too sci- , even for Musk. Imagining colonies on
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Mars or self-driving cars is fairly easy. Imagining an AI-induced apocalypse isn’t. Machine learning
leader Andrew Ng said, “worrying about superhuman
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Mars”.
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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 rst 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 rst 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 rst 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 identi ed ve 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?
Safe exploration. Can the AI explore possible outcomes and train without serious repercussions
— say, learning how to mop the oor 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 de ne its ambiguity and “fail gracefully”? Can the cleaning AI try to
clean a factory oor if it learned to clean in an o ce?
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.
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Image recognition machine learning algorithms often misclassify adversarial examples — images

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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 eld, 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 arti cial 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.
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. Privacy - Terms
Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge

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except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a
superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi

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(Japanese chess) as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a
world-champion program in each case.
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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 arti cial general intelligence, an AGI, could use
these techniques to bootstrap itself.
AI is already learning to develop itself.
“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.
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These teams — paiN and Chinese Superstar Team — were superior 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:
1. 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.
2. 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 ght 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 su ciently 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 re. 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.
8. Healthcare
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Most of Musk’s endeavors exist on a big scale: spaceships to Mars, tunnels from DC to New York,
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electric car-producing
 factories all across the globe. View
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,
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and thus most exciting, of Musk’s current companies.
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Neuralink was also unveiled without CB INSIGHTS
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“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- delity system di cult. 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.
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 arti cial 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 arti cial 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.
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Between here and there, Neuralink has the potential to help people suffering from stroke,
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neurodegeneration,
 cancer, spinal cord injuries, amputations, and dozens of other healthcare View
issues. These conditions a ict 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
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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
rolesEmail SIGN UP and software
that need to be lled at the company, including machinists, electrical engineers,
engineers.
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.
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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 re, 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.
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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.
Substantial progress was made, with human trials starting and patients capable of both
controlling and sensing robotic arms:
Thought control of robotic arms using the BrainGat…

BrainGat…
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Providing a Sense of Touch through a Brain-Machin…
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The problems Neuralink need to solve include bandwidth and invasiveness. The bandwidth
problem can be easily visualized through this graph:
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There are about 85B neurons in the human brain. Up to 2013, the record for the most neurons
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recorded simultaneously
 from an animal brain was approximately 500. About 2,000 are possible
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over time from a single implant.
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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 signi cantly 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 uid. 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.
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 signi cant power. Privacy - Terms
How do you dissipate heat from the device? Chips, radios, and batteries all produce heat. The
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brain can only heat up by a degree of two before damage occurs.
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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
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rendering them useless.
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These are all the issues that BMI 600,000+ CB INSIGHTS NEWSLETTER
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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.
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
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bene ciaries 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
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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
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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 speci c 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.
This report was created with data from CB Insights’ emerging technology insights platform, which
offers clarity into emerging tech and new business strategies through tools like:
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03/03/2020 8 Industries Being Disrupted By Elon Musk And His Companies

Elon Musk is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has plans to colonize

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RESEARCHGET THE FREE 48-PAGE REPORT

Elon Musk’s Companies

The Boring Company

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Towards the end of 2015, SolarCity promised investors it would right the ship —

know I’m an a cionado of conference calls. You may have found

TESLA BUYS SOLARCITY

At a 2017 National Governors

The rst non-employee installations began in Spring 2018.

The rst Solar Roof running

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

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

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The goal of 5,000 cars/week was nally reached

Inside the Tesla tent

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The approval does come with two new challenges for SpaceX:

an air hockey table.” Riders would travel in a low-pressure tube,

faster and for less money than an airplane.

Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring

14.8K people are talking about this

And so started The Boring Company.

The problem with tunneling is cost.

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

The ultimate idea is that TeslaJOIN 600,000+

downtown Baltimore, with the eventual goal of making it to NYC.

The third is a bit less obvious: SpaceX.

An unmanned Crew Dragon test will take place in December 2018

7. Arti cial Intelligence

OpenAI first ever to defeat world's best players in competitive

11.4K people are talking about this

Those problems are two-fold:

1. An AI will unintentionally do harmful things

Image recognition machine learning algorithms often misclassify adversarial examples — images

Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge

superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi

AI is already learning to develop itself.

“A few months ago, we introduced our AutoML project, an

“Building a mass-market electric vehicle and colonizing Mars

Thought control of robotic arms using the BrainGat…

“I think we’ll have something interesting to announce in a few

scenario,CBwe effectively merge with AI.”

For now, the main RESEARCH

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

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