foreign billionaire Elon Musk is a Restless entrepreneur at 12 he did his first business deals selling the code for a video game at 32 he made around 180 million dollars when PayPal was sold to eBay before investing almost all of this in electric car maker Tesla and Rocket producer SpaceX SpaceX is trying to ensure the long-term survival of humanity with multiplayered species multiple companies followed including startup neurolink focused on merging the human brain with computers Elon Musk seems to be motivated by sort of big problems that require him personally to save the world whether it's
from climate change with electric cars or whether it's from the risk of human extinction and there's a sort of Messiah complex to the whole thing but where did this drive to save Humanity come from I did I did not have a sort of happy childhood to be frank but I read a lot of books I read lots and lots of books science fiction inspired musk's ambition to prolong the lifespan of humanity and his business Empire he's named several of his drone ships which his Rockets land on after some of the spaceships that appear in e
m Banks's novels musk was at University in the 1990s when there was a huge surge of interest in existential risk that was quite a formative influence it would seem on Elon Musk human civilization could come to an end for external reasons like giant meteor or super volcanoes this concern with existential risk kind of joins up with Elon musk's Messiah complex because by definition an existential risk is a big a big problem that needs to be solved so how do musk's achievements measure up to his Ambitions Tesla's impact on the core industry is really astonishing electric
cars had a reputation for being you know rather rubbish slow they didn't look cool they started off by making a very very fast sports car the Roadster which can out accelerator for Rory or Lamborghini or Maserati and suddenly that was a car people wanted to drive successively they've made more high volume and less expensive cars but the road to ramping up production has been Rocky people have declared Tesla you know about to go bust many many times even if Tesla went bus tomorrow it's very clear that it has accelerated the transition to electric vehicles by
2040 it's estimated there will be more than 700 million passenger electric vehicles on the road and about three quarters of all new car sales will be fully electric a big step in the right direction from musk's efforts to help save the environment three two one zero but what about musk's desire to save Humanity from extinction by seeking out A Brave New World would be happy if Humanity has a self-sustaining City on Mars because then the probable lifespan of humanity is much greater he sounded completely mad when he started talking about this 20 years ago but
he's slowly getting closer and closer to his goal dollars in space location company field [Music] musk is obviously a gambler and many many times he has put all of his money down and taken great risks many times he's come very very close to losing it all zero we're in stage one the fourth rocket succeeded and spacex's partly reusable Falcon 9 has slashed the cost of space launches a vital step in getting to Mars SpaceX absolutely dominates the business of launching stuff into orbit it's bigger than everybody else in the industry put together all the governments
everybody um it's it's phenomenal if you're enjoying this film and want to read more of our coverage why not take out a subscription to The Economist you'll receive daily and weekly analysis of global Affairs you can read us online in the app or listen to the audio Edition for the best offer click the link spacex's satellite internet service starlink has also allowed musk to play Savior in a new way it's been critical to Ukraine's Armed Forces [Music] they absolutely depend on it so that they can coordinate their their Communications of their troops they can do
things like use it to control drones and see what's going on on the battlefield so that in a strange way gives Elon Musk an enormous amount of power musk is also sort of setting rules and limits on what can and can't be done with this technology and thus what the Ukrainian Army can and can't do now he's taking on new Global challenges having song how to make space flight cheap and how to make electric cars sexy he's decided that he can solve anything and furthermore that those two big engineering problems are a good template for
how he can solve other problems take Free Speech musk bot Twitter now named X in 2022 for a 44 billion dollars having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization how you manage a social media platform that really isn't an engineering problem when you're trying to build an electric car or a rocket your adversary as it were is the laws of physics your adversary when it comes to managing a social media platform is human nature when he took over musk immediately fired half of the workforce
giving remaining staff a choice employees have until 5 pm today to commit to extremely hardcore work or leave the company the self-declared Free Speech absolutist has blocked tweets to prevent offense making it harder for accounts to impersonate big Brands when it was bad for profits and blocked critics of president erdogan during the Turkish elections he's had a sort of crash course in the history and the philosophy of free speech users voted for him to step down as CEO in December 2022 and he has now done so but he still owns and controls the company he
can boost one candidate over another decide who gets blocked decide who gets allowed to use Twitter and that's really control of a giant political megaphone now he's wading into geopolitics to try to be a peacemaker he tweeted a Russian friendly plan to end the war with Ukraine but musk's efforts in international diplomacy might not be as altruistic as they appear you have to remember when he when he talks about things like China Taiwan or U.S China politics that he has enormous vested interests in these things Tesla has a large Factory in China and is planning
on building another with the U.S and China were to go to war and China were to seize foreign assets within its borders that would all be very bad for Elon Musk Elon Musk has done very well out of his mission to save Humanity but perhaps sometimes he needs to remember that with great power comes great responsibility I don't think there's any doubt that Elon Musk is a figure of great you know World historical importance he's changed the trajectory of the car industry and of space flight and he may yet change the trajectory of other things
too on the other hand Elon Musk is one of these people who seems to wield an enormous amount of power and is extremely unpredictable he changes his mind about things very often that has serious consequences you know one of the big questions is will the good that Elon Musk does outweigh the bad I'm Tom standage Deputy editor at The Economist for more of our coverage of Technology click the link thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe foreign [Music]
