Elon Musk’s Ultimate Goal... Colonizing Mars

It is “on brand” for Elon Musk to build a big business from scratch just to create a stepping stone to an even bigger, better business. His first venture was PayPal which he sold for $1.5 billion.

That gave him a stepping stone into the emerging electric car business with Tesla.

Telsa is now a huge and highly profitable electric car company generating a lot of spare cash. Musk’s cars must be smart enough to operate unattended in the world and trusted to behave themselves around other cars and people. Therefore, Tesla had to become a world leader in artificial intelligence to succeed.

That gives him a stepping stone into an even more exciting business, robots.

Musk is planning to unveil his “Tesla Bot” on September 30th. It will be humanoid in configuration. He talks about AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, instead of just AI and wants the world to know that Tesla is not just an electric car company, but a serious leader in AI and, AGI and soon robots. Click here for a more description of Musk’s humanoid robot

All the cash Tesla throws off gave him a stepping stone into the space launch business, SpaceX.

SpaceX is another big winner. It focussed on making inexpensive rockets re-usable to allow getting things into orbit affordable. It launches payloads every week and already has launch dates for over 100 missions next year. SpaceX is a favored contractor to NASA for taking people back to the Moon.

That gives him his stepping stone for an even better business, high-speed global internet.

Musk’s StarLink satellites are launched regularly, forty or so at a time, as payloads on Musk’s own SpaceX rockets. 3000 are already in low-Earth-orbit and many, many more are planned. The constellation of satellites is engineered so that high-speed internet connections can be passed from any point of Earth to anywhere else providing they buy a small dish antenna and pay a subscription fee to StarLink.

That new, huge cash flow will give him a stepping stone for something even more spectacular.

Musk’s long-stated, personal goal is to make it possible to send people to colonize Mars.

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