Visualization of Elon Musk’s Companies Ecosystem
Most people around me know Elon Musk only as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, so they might not see how things fit together with his other companies which are not that well-known in public, and that there is a good reason behind each one of them. That was the reason for writing this story and making a visualization that shows how they are connected together.
If you came here just to see my visualization, please scroll down to the bottom of the page, but I do believe it's worth spending a few minutes and read about the mission, products, and connections of companies in the subject, so you can understand how important are those companies in the whole ecosystem.
Tesla’s Mission
Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy and Tesla believes the faster the world stops relying on fossil fuels and moves towards a zero-emission future, the better. (Tesla.com)
So the ultimate goal is to decrease emissions, eliminate dependency on fossil fuels and fossil power plants by storing solar energy from our solar roof tiles in batteries. Energy stored in there can be used to power our homes, cars, and other vehicles without dependency on the power grid.
The next important mission is the development of fully autonomous vehicles so transport will be safer, faster and your car can act as a robotaxi service when you don't need to use your Tesla, which can be another form of income for Tesla owners. Your car is anyway parked 95% of the time.
This will also change the way people feel about the car ownership and works well within the not-too-far predicted future when most of us will not own a car. When we will need a car, we will simply order the one we need (sedan, minivan, truck, ..) by an app, and the car will arrive without a driver.
Primary Tesla products
- Electric Cars / Vehicles
** Model S, 3, X, Y (=>SEXY)
** Roadster, Semi (semi-trailer truck), Cybertruck (my favorite), Cyberquad (quad bike) - Autonomous Driving
** Tesla Autopilot — driver-assist, available in all cars released after September 2014
** Full Self-Driving — available soon in all cars released after October 2016 (for an extra cost) - Solar Energy
** Solar Roof / Tiles — invisible roof solar cells turning sunlight into electricity - Energy Storage
** Powerwall — integrates with Solar Roof and collect energy in the battery, turning your home into a personal utility
How Tesla fits in?
Sun -> Solar Panels -> Batteries -> Power for your Home / Electric vehicles
=> low emissions, no dependency on fossil fuels, safer and faster transport, enablement of robotaxi service
The Boring Company’s Mission
To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D, which means either flying cars or tunnels are needed. Unlike flying cars, tunnels are weatherproof, out of sight, and won’t fall on your head. A large network of tunnels many levels deep would help alleviate congestion in any city. No matter how large a city grows, more levels can always be added. (BoringCompany.com)
Works hand in hand with Tesla vehicles. The ultimate idea is not only to have fully autonomous cars but also to reduce traffic on the streets and allow faster transport by tunnels. It might be risky to let people drive 150 mph (240 km/h) inside a tunnel so I assume only fully autonomous cars will be allowed to drive in.
Alternatively, your car will drive into a “car skate” which will be transporting your vehicle inside the tunnel. Something you might remember from many Sci-fi movies, but without this company, we would just keep on dreaming.
Passengers in the Hyperloop transportation system might be able to travel at the speed of 760 mph (1,200 km/h)!
Car Skate
The vision of underground Public Transport
Hyperloop concept
The Boring Company Primary Products
- Tunnels
** unlimited capacity; minimal land and surface impact; decreasing transport traffic - TBMs (Tunnel Boring Machines)
** continuous mining; high tunneling speed; cost reduction - Loop
** underground public transportation system - Hyperloop
** initial Tesla/SpaceX concept incorporated reduced-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules ride on air bearings driven by linear induction motors
** other companies are cooperating on this concept as well (e.g. Virgin)
How The Boring Company fits in?
Underground tunnels -> vehicle & public transportation system -> high speeds / short travel time -> moving traffic off streets
OpenAI’s Mission
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) — by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work — benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome. (OpenAI.com)
Is a human-like autonomous system possible? Artificial General Intelligence (AGI or Superintelligence) which should outperform humans in any intellectual task can bring many benefits to all of humanity and solve problems that we were unable to solve till now, like:
- Climate change
- Large scale conflict
- Income gap
- Poverty
- Transparency / Corruption / Deep Fake
- Pandemic threat
- …Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything…
The big goal of OpenAI is not only the development of the best neural models, AGI, sharing all information from their research and collaboration with other teams/companies, but assuring that AGI will not identify as the root cause of all problems humanity itself and take necessary steps to eliminate the problem. We are not there yet, but we need to consider this now so we can be prepared and do our best to assure that AGI will be “friendly AI” because AGI will not be limited by biological evolution so it can evolve continuously and in a fast manner (exponentially?).
If you want to know more about the Revolution of AI and you don't speak in mathematical formulas, please read the great series on Wait But Why. For the latest news in this area, you can read everything from Jesus Rodrigues or follow Towards Data Science publication here on Medium.com
OpenAI Primary Products
- Reinforcement Learning
** Gym, RoboSumo, Debate Game, Dactyl - Generative Models
** GPT-3 — unsupervised Transformer (NLP) language model
** JukeBox — can generate songs and vocals - Video Game bots
** OpenAI Five — a trained model using reinforcement learning (trial and error). In April 2019 defeated OG, the reigning world champions of the Dota 2 game at the time
How OpenAI fits in?
AI -> innovations in Deep Learning -> “friendly AI” -> AGI -> a solving key to (all?) humanity problems and much more
Neuralink’s Mission
Neuralink is building a fully integrated brain machine interface (BMI) system. BMIs are technologies that enable a computer or other digital device to communicate directly with the brain. For example a person with paralysis can control a computer mouse or to restore the sense of touch. Our goal is to build a system with at least two orders of magnitude more communication channels (electrodes) than current clinically-approved devices. (Neuralink.com)
Neuralink is actually a bridge to transhumanism 🤞
Transhumanism is a philosophical movement that advocates for the transformation of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies able to greatly modify or enhance human intellect and physiology. (Wikipedia.com)
Primary goals are to create a brain-machine interface to help people with brain disorders or after accidents and use the same mechanism for brain enhancement and symbiosis with artificial intelligence. Here we have a direct link to OpenAI.
Try to imagine the possibilities. You don't need any mouse or keyboard to interact with computers, you might have immediate access to all information available in electronic form (Wikipedia, Medium.com, Research Papers, …) and offload computationally intensive operations to your computer, cloud, or AI just by thought. Bright feature ahead!
Obviously, there are associated risks that need to be solved first as with any new innovation. Speaking about brain I/O communication, some might be quite serious. Being a cybersecurity architect, the term brain hacking will be completely changed from the current meaning. Ghost in the Shell cyberpunk series is showing potential consequences quite well.
Neuralink Primary Products
- BMI / BCI
** The Link — the first neural implant that will let you control a computer or mobile device anywhere you go - Automated Neurosurgery
** A part of the Link — a robotic system which neurosurgeon can use to reliably and efficiently insert neural threads exactly where they need to be - Neuralink App
** Neuralink app would allow you to control your iOS device directly with the activity of your brain, just by thinking about it
How Neuralink fits in?
As mentioned it fits the best with OpenAI, but ultimately it will help people with brain disorders or after accidents and to whole humanity thanks to direct communication with computers and in the future with AGI.
Starlink’s Mission
SpaceX / Starlink is developing a low latency, broadband internet system to meet the needs of consumers across the globe. With performance that far surpasses that of traditional satellite internet, and a global network unbounded by ground infrastructure limitations, Starlink will deliver high speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable, expensive, or completely unavailable. (SpaceX.com)
Thousands of small mass-produced satellites in low Earth orbit will provide broadband internet access from any place on Earth. Delivering internet speeds of 100 Mbps or more with low latency.
You might have seen Starlink satellites in the evening because the first generations are visible to the naked eye if you're lucky. The newer generation of Starlink satellites (model 1130 / DarkSat) has an experimental coating to reduce light reflection and visors to block sunlight reflecting from parts of the satellite.
First pilot users already received antenna and other equipment to connect and test the network. So far they were able to achieve 150+ Mbps download speed and ~25 Mbps upload speed. Three times better than what my internet provider can offer me in town which is a few kilometers away from Prague 😐
Primary Starlink products
- Global (“Any place on Earth”) Broadband Internet Access
- Mass-produced small satellites
- HW for connection to satellites
** User terminals / Antennas with self-adjustment to optimal sky view angle
How Starlink fits in?
Which device does not require an internet connection today? Global Internet access can be used by any device/vehicle you have got, by all companies, and from any place on Earth. SpaceX even partners with Microsoft to connect satellites directly to the Azure Cloud network and to Azure Modular Datacenters, which is a “complete” Cloud computing Data Center in a semi-trailer sized box, which you can park anywhere.
SpaceX’s Mission
“You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great — and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.”
-Elon Musk
So using my own words, the ultimate goal of SpaceX is the colonization of Mars as the first step in making humans interplanetary species, and after that interstellar species able to travel even outside of our planetary system. The closest foreign circumstellar habitable zone is in the Centaurus constellation where Proxima Centaury is a star and habitable exoplanet Proxima Centaury b (Proxima b), so probably it will be our next destination. Proxima b is located 4.2 light-years (4x10^13 km OR ~5000x length of our solar system) from Earth while the second-closest exoplanet (Luyten b) is already 12.36 light-years far, far away in the galaxy.
On this challenging mission, they obviously need to solve a few challenges. Many challenges.
Cost reduction is the big one because space programs and space transportation costs are enormous in every country. Among other things, they achieved that by reusable launch systems like the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket (as pictured on left) which can land back on Earth, so today, not every space rocket must burn in the atmosphere. Even before that, they reduced an enormous amount of money and resources just because they were doing everything effectively other than their competitors where every change (process, technology, material, …) does require years of paperwork. Radical changes and innovations happened in the manufacturing and assembly process where the current industry leaders have long profited from cost-plus contracts from the government. SpaceX invested in a reusable, modular, and simple design which allows them to reduce costs by 75% 👏
Primary SpaceX Products
- Launch vehicles / rockets
** Falcon 1 — a small rocket capable of placing several hundred kilograms into low Earth orbit
** Falcon 9 — a medium-lift vehicle capable of delivering up to 22,800 kilograms to orbit (50,265 lb)
** Falcon Heavy — a heavy-lift rocket configured using a cluster of three Falcon 9 first stage cores with a total of 27 Merlin 1D engines - Rocket Engines
** Kestrel (retired) and Merlin (most used) — for Falcon
** Draco and SuperDraco — control thrusters for Dragon - Dragon Spacecraft
** blunt-cone ballistic capsule that is capable of carrying cargo or up to seven astronauts into orbit and beyond - Reusable Launch System
** As mentioned the system returns the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket to a landing site using only its own propulsion systems - Starship
** our ticket to mars colonization and beyond
** fully reusable second stage rocket aimed at Mars transit and interplanetary uses
How SpaceX fits in?
Everything fits SpaceX.
Tesla, The Boring Company, Starlink, OpenAI, and Neuralink are here to solve current key problems, so we will even have a chance to survive till the moment when we can become interstellar species. All those companies are playing a key role and are here mainly to help us, protect us and buy more time for us.
The problem is that many things can go wrong till that moment, let it be a (~100km big) asteroid hitting Earth, serious pandemic threat, nuclear/biological/cyber-war, climate changes, poverty, un-friendly AGI, … you name it.
Keep your fingers crossed 🤞and thumbs up 👍 to all those companies.
Visualization
The long-awaited visualization showing at a high-level what was described above, but in a more visual way.
You can also download a PDF version from my site.
In case you were reading a book about Elon Musk written by Ashlee Vance, you might remember that one of the first questions Elon Musk gave him was “Do you think I’m insane?”. I do believe he is an insanely crazy innovator, but that’s a big compliment in my opinion. Thanks to him, what we have seen in Sci-fi movies is really going to happen 😘
This is my first story on Medium.com, I hope you like it.
Thank you
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Credits time: The majority of images were used from the official sites or Wikipedia, if not stated otherwise. Unfortunately, unsplash.com has close to zero images (astronauts?) related to companies in the subject.
Lawyer's time: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer or anyone else.
