Already know Richard Branson? Meet Elon Musk

image: youtube.com

Meet the man who has the ambition of colonizing planet Mars. Of placing 80,000 people on the Mars.

If you are a big fan of Richard Branson and his crazy business adventures, then you would love Elon Musk. I consider him crazier than Richard Branson. None of his business ventures is a regular one. He co-founded Paypal, something extremely revolutionary they had to pay people to use it because it was basically creating an entirely new industry. Everyone said their business model was unsustainable and that they will fail. At a point, they were losing $10 million a month. Just bleeding cash. And that's the kind of businesses Elon Musk builds, businesses that everyone thinks will fail. 

He took his  $165 million share of the booty from the sale of Paypal to Ebay and started another crazy venture, a space exploration technology company called SpaceX. And here is his crazy motivation for trying to make it easy for people to go on space vacation: 
"An asteroid or a super volcano could destroy us, and we face risks the dinosaurs never saw: an engineered virus, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, catastrophic global warming or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us. Humankind evolved over millions of years, but in the last sixty years atomic weaponry created the potential to extinguish ourselves. Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond this green and blue ball—or go extinct."

He says his ultimate goal is to enable human exploration and settlement of Mars. Crazy, right?

But he is not stopping there. He is also spending his money and other people's money on building the world's most advanced electric cars. He is currently spending $5 billion on building a gigafactory for electric car batteries. Even people in the US think he is nuts. But when you consider his other ambitions, like colonizing the mars then you'll realize that he was born nuts.

Finally, he is trying to fund another crazy venture -- a conceptual subsonic air travel machine called Hyperloop. It is theoretically a magnetic levitating train suspended in a vacuum and can travel at speeds up to 1,220 km/h. Even some transportation engineers think it's not feasible. But he is planning on spending $6 billion on it. A crazy guy.

He is also a workaholic, he works about 100 hours a week. As the CEO of Tesla he earns $1 per year as his salary. And he is frequently compared to Tony Stark of the Iron Man movie series.