Category Archives: Elon Musk

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It was tweeted this week that Elon Musk's company, SpaceX, was at risk of bankruptcy according to a leaked email from Musk to his employees. On Tuesday, the businessman replied from his personal account on Twitter that although it is a very low possibility that he will go bankrupt, it is still possible.

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"We face a real risk of bankruptcy if next year we cannot achieve a Starship rate of at least one every two weeks," Musk wrote in the leaked email.

In the statement he mentions that the main cause of the problem is the shortage of production of the Raptor engines, which are those used in the Starship spacecraft. This is being built to send missions to the Moon and Mars. They have had several successful test flights so far, but they will need at least 39 of these engines for orbital launches.

"If a severe global recession depleted the availability of capital or liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions in Starlink and Starship, then bankruptcy, although still unlikely, would not be impossible," says the tweet with which Musk replied.

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Elon Musk responds to rumors of possible SpaceX bankruptcy

Image: Win McNamee (Getty Images)

SpaceX employees received a nightmare email over the holiday weekend from CEO Elon Musk, warning them of a brewing crisis with its Raptor engine production that, if unsolved, could result in the companys bankruptcy. The email, obtained by SpaceExplored, CNBC, and The Verge, urged employees to work over the weekend in a desperate attempt to increase production of the engine meant to power its next-generation Starship launch vehicle.

Unfortunately, the Raptor production crisis is much worse than it seemed a few weeks ago, Musk reportedly wrote. As we have dug into the issues following exiting prior senior management, they have unfortunately turned out to be far more severe than was reported. There is no way to sugarcoat this.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to Gizmodos request for comment but Musk did Tweet about the report Tuesday afternoon.

The magnitude of the Starship program is not widely appreciated Musk tweeted. It is designed to extend life to Mars (and the moon), which requires ~1000 times more payload to orbit than all current Earth rockets combined. Though Musk did not confirm or deny the emails veracity he spoke to its content saying that, while he did not believe bankruptcy was likely, it wasnt impossible either. The CEO went on to apparently quote Intel founder and former CEO Andrew Grove, writing only the paranoid survive.

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In his email, Musk advised workers to cut their holiday weekend short and called for an all hands on deck to recover from what is, quite frankly, a disaster. Summing up the problem, Musk warned the company could face bankruptcy if it could not get Starship flights running once every two weeks in 2022. If all of this sounds familiar, thats because Musk has previously spoken publicly about times where both SpaceX and Tesla were on the verge of bankruptcy in their early years. More recently Musk claimed Tesla came within single digits of bankruptcy as recent as 2018.

Raptors engine is a critical component of Starship, which SpaceX hopes will one-day transport cargo and people to the moon and Mars. Starships ability to meet these ambitious goals is critical to SpaceXs long-term success which is built upon Elon Musks promise of multi-planetary human exploration. According to Musks email, Starship will also play a critical role in launching Starlinks next-generation satellites into orbit.

Musks stressed-out email follows a tweet earlier this month where the CEO admitted the Raptor 2 would need a complete design overhaul to make multi-planetary life possible. Not long after that, two SpaceX vice presidents abruptly left the company according to CNBC. One of those executives, Will Heltsley, who had been at the company since 2009, was working on the Raptor project but was taken off due to a lack of progress.

The alarming news comes near the close of whats been an otherwise stellar year for SpaceX. In 11 months SpaceX managed to launch 25 successful Falcon 9 missions, sent a dozen astronauts to space and drew a roadmap to mass commercialization with its Starlink satellite internet service.

You can read the full email over at The Verge.

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Elon Musk Email Warns of Potential SpaceX Bankruptcy

Overview (3) Mini Bio (1) Family (4) Trivia (16)

CEO & Product Architect of Tesla Motors and CEO & CTO SpaceX.

Co-founder, PayPal.

Chairman, Solar City.

Inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 2014.

Inducted into the Entrepreneur Hall of Fame.

8 books that he credits to his success are: 1.Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down" by J.E. Gordon, 2. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life" by Walter Isaacson, 3. Einstein: His Life and Universe" by Walter Isaacson, 4. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" by Nick Bostrom, 5. Merchants of Doubt" by Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes, 6. Lord of the Flies" by William Golding, 7. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future" by Peter Thiel, 8. Foundation" trilogy by Isaac Asimov.

Read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica at age nine.

Read science fiction novels for more than 10 hours a day.

His SpaceX company made history, successfully completing the first commercial rocket launch from the NASA launch pad.[February 2017].

When asked if he believed religion and science could co-exist, Musk replied "Probably Not".

He does not pray or worship before rocket ship launch.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative.

I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I'm really good at email.

Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.

I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better.

The path to the CEO's office should not be through the CFO's office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.

When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.

I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better. I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

If you go back back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic - being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, 'Nah, what's wrong with a horse?' That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.

I've actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don't mean hybrid, I mean fully electric.

I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.

If you're trying to create a company, it's like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.

When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.

There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.

The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we're not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that externality remains unpriced.

Yeah, well I think anyone who likes fast cars will love the Tesla. And it has fantastic handling by the way. I mean this car will crush a Porsche on the track, just crush it. So if you like fast cars, you'll love this car. And then oh, by the way, it happens to be electric and it's twice the efficiency of a Prius.

I don't spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.

Patience is a virtue, and I'm learning patience. It's a tough lesson.

It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.

Life is too short for long-term grudges.

The fuel cell is just a fundamentally inferior way of delivering electrical energy to an electric motor than batteries.

My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment - my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.

I've actually not read any books on time management.

We're running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere... can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.

I do think there is a lot of potential if you have a compelling product and people are willing to pay a premium for that. I think that is what Apple has shown. You can buy a much cheaper cell phone or laptop, but Apple's product is so much better than the alternative, and people are willing to pay that premium.

Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

There are some important differences between me and Tony Stark, like I have five kids, so I spend more time going to Disneyland than parties.

I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems... It's got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.

I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.

Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure - the law firms, the real estate, all that - that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups.

It's obviously tricky to convert cellulose to a useful biofuel. I think actually the most efficient way to use cellulose is to burn it in a co-generation power plant. That will yield the most energy and that is something you can do today.

An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.

My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars - this is very important - so you don't have to carry the return fuel when you go there.

I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It's a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that's what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.

I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.

Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.

I feel very strongly that SpaceX would not have been able to get started, nor would we have made the progress that we have, without the help of NASA.

You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.

It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost. Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly if America has the will.

If humanity doesn't land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.

I would like to fly in space. Absolutely. That would be cool. I used to just do personally risky things, but now I've got kids and responsibilities, so I can't be my own test pilot. That wouldn't be a good idea. But I definitely want to fly as soon as it's a sensible thing to do.

Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.

The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it's the right thing to do. It's economics 101, elementary stuff.

America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.

The rumours of the demise of the U.S. manufacturing industry are greatly exaggerated.

It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don't think it's possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.

I think most of the important stuff on the Internet has been built. There will be continued innovation, for sure, but the great problems of the Internet have essentially been solved.

Automotive franchise laws were put in place decades ago to prevent a manufacturer from unfairly opening stores in direct competition with an existing franchise dealer that had already invested time, money and effort to open and promote their business.

I'm anti-tax, but I'm pro-carbon tax.

The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.

There's nothing - I've bought everything I want. I don't like yachts or anything; you know, I'm not a yacht person, and I've got pretty much the nicest plane I'd want to have.

For all the supporters of Tesla over the years, and it's been several years now and there have been some very tough times, I'd just like to say thank you very much. I deeply appreciate the support, particularly through the darkest times.

There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.

In the case of Apple, they did originally do production internally, but then along came unbelievably good outsourced manufacturing from companies like Foxconn. We don't have that in the rocket business. There's no Foxconn in the rocket business.

I was born in Africa. I came to California because it's really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don't see a viable competitor.

I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It's the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.

You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on... So it's a fixer-upper of a planet.

Some people don't like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.

The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it's going to become multiplanetary, or it's going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there's going to be an extinction event.

Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It's hard to break into a network once it's formed.

You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in the first place.

I just want to retire before I go senile because if I don't retire before I go senile, then I'll do more damage than good at that point.

People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.

I wouldn't say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I'd like my fear emotion to be less because it's very distracting and fries my nervous system.

If anyone thinks they'd rather be in a different part of history, they're probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You'd probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.

If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.

The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn't even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we'd never have had the light bulb.

I always invest my own money in the companies that I create. I don't believe in the whole thing of just using other people's money. I don't think that's right. I'm not going to ask other people to invest in something if I'm not prepared to do so myself.

I think there are more politicians in favor of electric cars than against. There are still some that are against, and I think the reasoning for that varies depending on the person, but in some cases, they just don't believe in climate change - they think oil will last forever.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far - the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We're obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket - half a million dollars. It can be done.

My opinion is it's a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.

If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.

In order for us to have a future that's exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we're a space-bearing civilization.

The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S.

As you heat the planet up, it's just like boiling a pot.

I've been to Disneyland, like, 10 times. I'm getting really tired of Disneyland.

I don't create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.

A Prius is not a true hybrid, really. The current Prius is, like, 2 percent electric. It's a gasoline car with slightly better mileage.

Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive.

Great companies are built on great products.

Mars is the only place in the solar system where it's possible for life to become multi-planetarian.

I think long term you can see Tesla establishing factories in Europe, in other parts of the U.S. and in Asia.

I'm personally a moderate and a registered independent, so I'm not strongly Democratic or strongly Republican.

In order to have your voice be heard in Washington, you have to make some little contribution.

I'm glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That's cool.

Selling an electric sports car creates an opportunity to fundamentally change the way America drives.

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Elon Musk - Biography - IMDb

Elon Musk

Elon Reeve Musk

Elon Reeve Musk FRS (born June 28, 1971) is a South African-Canadian-American businessman. He was born in South Africa. He moved to Canada and later became an American citizen. Musk is the current CEO & Chief Product Architect of Tesla, Inc., a company that makes electric vehicles. He is also the CEO of Solar City, a company that makes solar panels, and the CEO & CTO of SpaceX, an aerospace company. In August 2020, Bloomberg ranked Musk third among the richest people on the planet with net worth to be $198 billion.[4] In January 2021, Musk became the richest person in the world with a net worth of US$202.1 billion, passing Jeff Bezos.[5] who has 191.7 billion (as of 2021, 11th october as googled).

Elon Musk and his brother started Zip2, a software company, in 1995. In 1999 he sold it and became a millionaire. He then started X.com, which merged with the company Confinity to make PayPal. X.com was then renamed to PayPal, and he focused on growing that part of the company.[6][7] He then started SpaceX and became the CEO of Tesla.

He has Asperger syndrome.

Musk was born to a Canadian mother and a South African-Born British father in Pretoria, South Africa.[8] His parents divorced in 1980 and he mainly lived with his father in many different places in South Africa.[9] He went to Waterkloof House Preparatory School and graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. He then moved to Canada in 1988 when he was 17, after he obtained Canadian citizenship through his mother. He got it before his South African military service was to begin. He felt that it would be easier to immigrate to the United States from Canada than from South Africa.

He spent two years at the Queen's School of Business in Kingston, Ontario. He then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania where he earned a bachelor's degree in economics from the Wharton School. He stayed a year to finish his second bachelor's degree in physics. Then he moved to California to attempt to get a PhD in applied physics at Stanford but he left the program after only two days because he wanted to pursue his entrepreneurial aspirations (start businesses) in the Internet, renewable energy and outer space.[10] He became an American citizen in 2002.[11]

At the end of 2016, Musk founded The Boring Company which focuses on tunnelling and infrastructure. He mentioned Los Angeles traffic as the reason for starting this company. In March 2017 Elon Musk announced he has started another company which aims to merge human brains and computers, it is called Neuralink.

As of April 2016, he was worth over $10 billion, making him the 37th most wealthy American.[12] Musk is also known for helping design and create the Falcon Heavy rocket, which successfully launched on February 6 of 2018.

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Elon Musk - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Neuralink's brain-machine interface technology sinks electrodes into the brain then uses a chip to communicate with computers outside your skull.

With a device surgically implanted into the skull of a pig named Gertrude, Elon Musk demonstrated his startup Neuralink's technology to build a digital link between brains and computers. A wireless link from the Neuralink computing device showed the pig's brain activity as it snuffled around a pen on stage Friday night.

The demonstration shows the technology to be significantly closer to delivering on Musk's radical ambitions than during a 2019 product debut, when Neuralink only showed photos of a rat with a Neuralink connected via a USB-C port. It's still far from reality, but Musk said the US Food and Drug Administration in July granted approval for "breakthrough device" testing.

Musk also showed a second-generation implant that's more compact and fits into a small cavity hollowed out of the skull. Tiny electrode "threads" penetrate the outer surface of the brain, detecting an electrical impulse from nerve cells that shows the brain is at work. In line with Neuralink's longer-term plans, the threads are designed to communicate back, with computer-generated signals of their own.

"It's like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires," Musk said of the device.

It communicates with brain cells with 1,024 thin electrodes that penetrate the outer layer of the brain. Then there's a Bluetooth link to an outside computing device, though the company is looking at other radio technology it can use to dramatically increase the number of data links.

Now playing: Watch this: Elon Musk's Neuralink demonstration in 14 minutes

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Though the pig demonstration showed neural activity being broadcast wirelessly to a computer, it didn't reveal any of Neuralink's long-term ambitions, like a computer usefully communicating back to a brain or a computer understanding what the spikes of neural activity actually mean.

Neuralink has a medical focus to start, like helping people deal with brain and spinal cord injuries or congenital defects. The technology could, for example, help paraplegics who've lost the ability to move or sense because of spinal cord injury, and the first human uses will aim to improve conditions like paraplegia or tetraplegia.

"If you can sense what people want to do with their limbs, you can do a second implant where the spinal injury occurred and create a neural shunt," Musk said. "I'm confident in the long term it'll be possible to restore somebody's full body motion."

From the lab to your inbox. Get the latest science stories from CNET every week.

But Musk's vision is far more radical, including ideas like "conceptual telepathy," where two people can communicate electronically by thinking at each other instead of writing or speaking. The long-term goal is to head off a future whereartificial intelligence vastly smarter than humans exterminates us.

Musk envisions people using Neuralink to connect to their own digital AI incarnations so "the future is controlled by the combined will of the people of Earth," Musk said. "It's going to be important from an existential threat perspective to achieve a good AI symbiosis."

"The future is going to be weird," Musk said, discussing sci-fi uses of Neuralink. "In the future you will be able to save and replay memories," he said. "You could basically store your memories as a backup and restore the memories. You could potentially download them into a new body or into a robot body."

He's aware some people are going to see trouble in Neuralink, too. "This is increasingly sounding like a Black Mirror episode," Musk said, referring to the dystopian TV series.

Musk also discussed seeing in infrared, ultraviolet or X-ray using digital camera data. "Over time we could give somebody super vision," Musk said.

Gertrude the Neuralink-enabled pig roots through straw during a demonstration of the brain-computer link technology. Brain activity shows as blue spikes.

Neuralink is building a robotic installer that ultimately is designed to handle the full surgical installation process. That includes opening up the scalp, removing a portion of the skull, inserting the hundreds of "thread" electrodes along with an accompanying computer chip, then closing the incision. The installer is designed to dodge blood vessels to avoid bleeding, Musk said.

As with Fitbit, Apple Watch and other wearable technology, Musk sees a health benefit for Neuralink besides direct brain-computer communications. Neuralink chips can measure temperature, pressure and movement, data that could warn you about a heart attack or stroke, Musk said.

Computers need power, and Neuralink's in-skull chip gets it by charging wirelessly through the skin, Musk said.

Since the Neuralink launch event last year, Musk and Neuralink have published one scientific paper, in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, in October. The paper described the development of their robotic device, an arm able to delicately insert hundreds of thin threads, about a tenth of the width of a human hair, into the brain. It's sometimes dubbed the "sewing machine" and is capable of inserting around six threads per minute, each one composed of flexible plastics and featuring 192 electrodes.

The company's early research focused on interfacing with the rodent brain. In the October paper, Musk and Neuralink detailed two Neuralink systems, A and B, tested on rats. The former can insert more than 1,500 electrodes and the latter, 3,000. The paper describes a free-moving rat attached to system B, with a USB-C slot sticking out of its head, but there's no clear indication of Neuralink having settled on the best place for electrodes.

In the paper, Musk and Neuralink acknowledge that "significant technological challenges must be addressed before a high-bandwidth device is suitable for clinical application."

This diagram shows Neuralink's Link v0.9, the device that can be embedded in a hole bored in a skull. At left are the "threads" that lead to electrodes in the brain.

The rodent work is impressive, but what caught people's attention last year was Musk's assertion that a monkey had been "able to control a computer with his brain." No evidence was provided in the JMIR paper to support that assertion, and Musk didn't mention it Friday.

On Tuesday, medical industry news site Stat detailed turmoil at Neuralink, with five former employees coming forward to describe "a chaotic internal culture" and describing it as a "pressure cooker" environment.

The report also detailed accelerated timelines, noting that the push to move the technology forward resulted in failures in animal experiments. One former employee said Neuralink moved from rodent experiments into primates faster than expected in medical science.

Neuralink responded to Stat's assertions in the article, suggesting some of them were "either partially or completely false."

Neuralink's success will hinge on convincing us to install chips in our brains and tamper with the very nerve impulses that make us who we are. That's a hard sell -- particularly in view of Neuralink competitors who prefer noninvasive headsets.

"There's a segment of people who are enthusiastic about invasive BMI," including members of the Transhumanist movement, Max Newlon, CEO of BrainCo, said, referring to brain-machine interface. "Noninvasive BMI technology could be a bridge to the future that people will accept today."

"The safety and health risks of invasive implants are significant," added Sid Kouider, founder and CEO of NextMind, a Neuralink competitor. Problems include infection, inflammation and follow-up surgery to adjust electrode positioning, he said. He credits Neuralink for stimulating interest in neural interfaces, though.

In addition to leading Neuralink, Musk is chief executive of Tesla, which is ramping up a global electric vehicle business; SpaceX, which is launching spacecraft and piloting the launch rockets back to Earth for reuse; and the Boring Company, which aims to route vehicle traffic through tunnels.

Musk is stretched thin, but he's also delivered on key promises like producing compelling electric vehicles and lowering satellite launch costs. Musk has a knack for picking business problems that are difficult but attainable. To succeed, though, Neuralink will have to convince scientists and doctors along with the rest of us.

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Elon Musk shows Neuralink brain implant working in a pig ...

Its not hard to think of well-known, visionary leaders of the past few decades. Steve Jobs. Sheryl Sandberg. Bill Gates. Warren Buffett. Oprah Winfrey.

However, theres no denying that Elon Musk deserves a spot near the top of that list.

Hes founded some of the most innovative companies in the world, including X.com (which later became PayPal), SpaceX, and Tesla Motors. If that doesnt keep him busy enough, hes also founded lesser-known companies like Neuralink (a neurotechnology company) and The Boring Company (focused on infrastructure and tunnels for transportation).

With such a long list of businesses and achievements under his belt, its no wonder that Elon Musks leadership style has become an area of interest and fascination. He has a reputation as being equal parts genius and workaholic, and employees are quick to admit that working for him is simultaneously challenging and rewarding.

"He's highly intelligent. He's already 10 steps ahead of you," a former manager at Tesla told Business Insider. "You have to think 10 times more audacious than he does to be able to be successful."

"I feel like I'm 10 times smarter now than when I first joined," a different senior-level employee added.

So, like any leadership style, the Elon Musk leadership styleapproach comes with some distinct benefits and drawbacks. Were digging into the details of the leadership style of Elon Musk, and what you can learn from his groundbreaking career.

Lets get academic for a second. When you think about the defined leadership styles, Elon Musks style is best defined as transformational.

He believes theres a better way to do everything, and he sets his sights on constant improvement. He has big ideas and wants to unite his team around his (sometimes outrageous) vision and objectives.

From running an aerospace company that manufactures rockets and other spacecraft to disrupting the electric car market, it only makes sense that a core pillar of Musks approach involves out-of-the-box ideas.

Now that you have a high-level overview of how Musk prefers to run his teams and companies, lets dig into the details.

Were breaking down five of the most important elements of the Elon Muskleadership style, as well as how those relate to different Fingerprint for Success motivations.

Elon Musk quote: Other advice I would give is to not blindly follow trends. Question and challenge the status quo. Make sure you understand the fundamental principles of what youre trying to do before you get into the details, otherwise you could be building on faulty ground.

Relevant F4S motivations: alternatives, difference, evolution, future, indifference

He builds rockets, disrupts the automotive industry, and has his sights set on colonizing Mars. To say Musk is innovative would be an understatement.

Hes known for being bold with an eye to the future. And, he expects each and every one of his team members to innovate alongside him. Musks grandiose view and ambitious goals can be intimidating, but awe-inspiring all the same.

Most of us cant conceive these things working; he cant conceive it failing. Period, said Jim Cantrell, the first engineer at SpaceX.

Needless to say, when you work under Elon Musk, you wont rely on existing procedures and a weve always done it this way attitude. Youll be expected to think bigand quickly turn those ideas into action.

Elon Musk quote: The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. Youre encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who arent that smart, who arent that creative.

Relevant F4S motivations: internal reference, indifference, alternatives, low focus on procedures

Many former and current employees admit that working for Musk is rigorous and demanding, yet many point to it as a formative experience in their careers.

Theres a reason for that: Musk is a highly-inspiring leader. While some of his ideas are unattainable, he has the ability to get people excited about his ambitions, projects, and plans.

The thing that makes Elon Elon is his ability to make people believe in his vision, said Dolly Singh, the former HR head at SpaceX.

Musk is also said to have contagious enthusiasm and energy for his work, which means employees often share his commitment and passion for pursuing their next big idea or source of inspiration.

Elon Musk quote: Patience is a virtue, and Im learning patience. Its a tough lesson.

Relevant F4S motivations: activity, automatic, initiation

Another word thats often used to describe Musk? Erratic. Hes known for being opinionated and occasionally even short-tempered, and has gone off on his fair share of rants on Twitter.

His seeming lack of impulse control has gotten him into some hot water every now and then, but it also enables him to move quickly in his businessesto jump on ideas and nuggets of inspiration without stifling the flame with too much strategy and detail work.

His fast-acting nature offers some benefits in terms of business growth and innovation, but they can also serve as a point of frustration for his team.

As Fast Company reported, An engineer might spend nine months working 100 hours a week on something because Musk has pushed him to, and then out of nowhere Musk will change his mind and scrap the project.

Elon Musk quote: I always have optimism, but Im realistic. It was not with the expectation of great success that I started Tesla or SpaceX. Its just that I thought they were important enough to do anyway.

Relevant F4S motivations: achievement, goal orientation, future, present

You dont become a billionaire without a hefty dose of drive and ambition, and Musk is no exception. Hes known for setting aggressiveand sometimes even seemingly impossiblegoals for his teams and employees.

When Elon says something, you have to pause and not blurt out, Well, thats impossible. You zip it, you think about it, and you find ways to get it done, said Gwynne Shotwell, the President and Chief Operating Officer of SpaceX. Ive always felt like my job was to take these ideas and turn them into company goals, to make them achievable.

While Musk sets a high bar, he also recognizes that his team needs a high degree of psychological safety in order to pursue those stretch goals. Failure is an option here, hes quoted as saying. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

Elon Musk quote: Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40-hour workweeks and youre putting in 100-hour workweeks, then even if youre doing the same thing, you know that you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve.

Relevant F4S motivations: depth, doing, internal reference, activity, use, place

There are plenty of legends and tall tales about Musks obsessive personality and workaholic tendencies. Hes been said to sleep on a couch in the Tesla factory and work 80 to 90 hours each week (sometimes even more).

I have OCD on product-related issues, he said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. I always see whats...wrong. Would you want that? When I see a car or a rocket or spacecraft, I only see whats wrong. I never see whats right. Its not a recipe for happiness.

That means he can be a bit of a micromanageror even a nanomanager as Musk described himself in that same conversation with the Wall Street Journal.

Elon Musk is a complex person, and his leadership style has its intricacies too. In many ways, hes exhilarating and motivating. In other ways, hes demanding and intimidating.

Like any other leader, his approach has its upsides and downsidesand theres plenty to be learned from the way he leads the charge for his employees and numerous companies, including the following lessons:

Elon Musk is by no means a perfect leader, and really, theres no such thing.

But, with numerous successful companies on his resume and a reputation for developing some of the most groundbreaking products and technologies on the market today, hes definitely a leader worth examiningbut not necessarily emulating.

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What is the Elon Musk leadership style (and should you use ...

Elon Musk full name and date of birth:

Elon Reeve Musk, born 28 June 1971

His first son, Nevada Alexander Musk, was born in 2002. Tragically, Nevada passed away aged 10 weeks, also in 2002.

Elon and wife Justine then welcomed twin sons Griffin Musk and Xavier Musk, born in 2004, via IVF.

Their triplet sons Kai Musk, Saxon Musk and Damian Musk, were born in 2006, also via IVF.

In May 2020 Elon then announced the birth of his son on Twitter, who he welcomed with current girlfriend, singer Grimes.

Pic: @elonmusk/Twitter

The couple initally announced that theyd named their new baby boy as X A-12 Musk, inspired by the name of Grimes album 4M.

Elon told podcast host Joe Rogan, First of all, my partner is the one that, actually, mostly, came up with the name, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO said. Yeah, shes great at names.

When asked how to pronounce his babys name, he explained, I mean its just X, the letter X. And then, the is, like, pronounced Ash and then, A-12, A-12 is my contribution.

Howver, on Grimes Instagram page, one fan claimed that Grimes pronounced it differently, saying the artist had replied to another comment explaining you say the part as A.I. as in the letters A and I.

On May 24, Grimes announced on Instagram that she and Elon had changed part of their babys name. Rather than X A-12, their sons name is now X A-Xii. She then responded to an Instagram comment asking if the change was due to a Californian law that states that a babys name must only contain letters from the English alphabet. (Although this doesnt explain how is still acceptable). However, Grimes seemed to quash that rumour, instead replying,Roman numerals. Looks better tbh.

According to reports, following the name change, the babys first name on the birth certificate is X, its middle name is X A-Xii and its surname is Musk.

Elon Musk is a tech CEO best known as the co-founder of PayPal, Tesla, Inc, and Neualink, as well as the founder of SpaceX. Hes worth a reported $19.8 billion, as of October 2018.

He was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and currently lives in the US. Hes also a citizen of Canada.

Hes a fan of Twitter, not always successfully. He was fined a reported $40 million for one tweet which mislead investors, and was filmed smoking marijuana during a live interview, which saw Tesla shares crash as a result. In the lockdown he tweeted Tesla stock price is too high, imo promptly causing $14 billion to be knocked off the share value.

Justine Wilson met Elon at university in Ontario, Canada. Elon pursued her for dates, and after the pair graduated, met up again. Justine described the early days of their relationship in an essay for Marie Claire US, writing:

After graduation, hed moved to Silicon Valley.I soon flew out for the first of many visits. One night, over dinner, he asked me how many kids I wanted to have. One or 2, I said immediately, although if I could afford nannies, Id like to have 4.

Thats the difference between you and me, he said. I just assume that there will be nannies. He made a rocking motion with his arms and said, happily, Baby.

Elon and Justine married in 2000.

In 2002, Justine gave birth to a baby boy, named Nevada Alexander Musk.

Tragically, the infant passed away later in the same year. At 10 weeks old, Nevada died of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).

Justine detailed the experience of her grief in the same Marie Claire piece: We moved to Los Angeles and had our first child, a boy named Nevada Alexander.

The same week that Elons net worth went to well over $100 million [following the sale of PayPal], Nevada went down for a nap, placed on his back as always, and stopped breathing.

He was 10 weeks old, the age when male infants are most susceptible to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).

By the time the paramedics resuscitated him, he had been deprived of oxygen for so long that he was brain-dead. He spent 3 days on life support in a hospital in Orange County before we made the decision to take him off it.

I held him in my arms when he died.

We can only imagine the impact of this sort of loss on both mum and dad. What we do know is that the couple made the decision to try and get pregnant again.

I buried my feelings, coping with Nevadas death by making my first visit to an IVF clinic less than 2 months later. Elon and I planned to get pregnant again as swiftly as possible, Justine wrote in her essay.

Within the next 5 years, I gave birth to twins, then triplets, and I sold 3 novels to Penguin and Simon & Schuster.

The twins were born in 2004, and the triplets in 2006.

Justine and Elon divorced in 2008 quite a difficult divorce, with both parties writing pieces sharing their side of the story. Hers in her Marie Claire article (among others), and Elons is on Business Insider.

We dont know too much about Elons life as a dad, to be honest. He notoriously doesnt like talking about his personal life, telling Business Insider hed rather stick a fork in my hand.

We do know that Justine and Elon split custody of their 5 kids. Justine wrote in Marie Claire that all their contact about the children happens via Elons assistant.

As of 2010, it was thought that she lived in the couples former family home, in Bel Air, with the children.

Elon confirmed this in his Business Insider essay also calling his kids his true love: Custody of our 5 children is split evenly. Almost all of my non-work waking hours are spent with my boys, and they are the love of my life.

Naturally, Elons hectic work schedule doesnt leave much time for a personal life, however a book by Ashlee Vance which features interviews with Elon reveals that his sons often visit his factories in California, and that they also embark on an annual camping trip together.

Im a pretty good dad, Musk said in an interview for the book, according to QZ. I have the kids for slightly more than half the week and spend a fair bit of time with them. I also take them with me when I go out of town.

He also added in his Business Insider piece: I almost never take vacations, apart from kid-related travel.

Hes also said that hes raising 5 boys with great difficulty in a previous live video interview.

Finally, it does appear all 5 boys go to school together. Fortune magazine reported they all attend a non-traditional school invented and funded by Elon, called Ad Astra.

Elon married British actress Talulah Riley in 2010. They divorced in 2012, but remarried in 2013, only to divorce again in 2016.

Talulah shared some tidbits about her life as a stepmum and Elon as a dad while speaking to Ashlee Vance for his book.

Vance wrote, According to Riley, Elon is kind of cheeky and funny. He is very loving. He is devoted to his children. He tries to come home early for family dinners with me and the kids and maybe play some computer games with the boys.

On the weekends, were travelling. The kids are good travellers. There were billions of nannies before. There was even a nanny manager. Things are a bit more normal now. We try and do stuff just as a family when we can.

We have the kids 4 days a week. I like to say that I am the disciplinarian. I want them to have the sense of an ordinary life, but they live a very odd life.

They go to the rocket factory and are like, Oh no, not again. Its not cool if your dad does it. Theyre used to it.

After their split, Elon then dated actress Amber Heard.

Elons latest baby is with Claire Boucher, best known to many as the indie musician Grimes.

Not much is known about Grimes relationship with the boys though her relationship with Elon is highly publicised.

In January 2020 the singer posted an image of herself with a pregnancy bump on her Instagram account.

Although the couple didnt make an official statement about her pregnancy, in May 2020 Elon announced the birth of his newborn son on Twitter.

Image: Getty Images

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Highly opinionated Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, who also runs the SpaceX rocket company, offered his take on Thursday abouta political topic.

What Happened: Musk said in a tweet there has to be an age limit for people running for political office and he suggested an upper ceiling of 70 years old.

The tweet did not specify which political office in particular Musk was referring to. The statement, however, comes at a time U.S. President Joe Biden's fitness has come under scrutiny. Biden, aged 79 years and the oldest U.S. president when he was inaugurated, had to very briefly transfer power to Vice President Kamala Harris last month when he took off to undergo a routine colonoscopy.

The President's approval ratinghit an all-time low of 36%, according to the results of the Quinnipiac University Poll released in mid-November. Survey results published by conservative media outlet Fox News found that a majority of Americans believe Biden's age is interfering with his ability to perform his duties. Even on this side of the political fence, things don't look that promising:Former President Donald Trump, who is nurturing ambitions to run for office again in 2024, would be 78 then.

Related Link: Tesla Gets A New Street-High Price Target; 'EV Maker Now Looks More Scaled Up Than Most OEMs'

Although Musk had said in the past he prefers staying out of politics, he had given political donations, evenly split across both parties, CNBC said.

The Tesla chief has had run-ins with the Biden administration in recent times. He has not taken kindly to the fact that the current government does not recognize Tesla's role in revolutionizing the EV industry, and instead credited General Motors Corporation(NYSE: GM) for the same. Tesla was not invitedby the White House for an electric vehiclesummit held in early August, and in response, Musk said the Biden administration is not the "friendliest" and seems to be controlled by the Unions.

Musk also did not mince words in showing hisdispleasureregarding the billionaire tax ideaproposed by a section of lawmakers.

Musk's Take Elicits Mixed Responses: As usual, Musk's hordeof Twitter Inc (NYSE: TWTR)followers had varied responses to his opinion.

One of them suggested 60 should be logical, reasoning that if you are too old to get a regular job, you should not be able to run a country. Another called for the removal of the minimum voting age so that the voices of young people can be heard. One follower offered a tangential view. He suggested that no single person should be allowed to earn more than $250,000 per year, and over and above that should be given to the needy.

In a hilarious take Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE) bull Matt Wallace joined in, saying only people who own the meme currency should be allowed to run for political office.

TSLA Price Action: Tesla shares were up 0.11% at $1,096.21 Thursday afternoon at publication.

Related Link: Here's How Long Tesla Took To Reach $1 Trillion Valuation

Photo: Musk:Daniel Oberhausvia Flickr;Biden:David Lienemann via the White House

2021 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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Elon Musk Takes A Dig At Biden? 'Age Limit For Running For ...

Elon Musk has sold another round of Tesla shares to meet his tax obligations related to the exercise of options to buy 2.1 million shares.

Musk tweeted out a meme depicting Twitter's new CEO Parag Agrawal as Stalin and his predecessor, Jack Dorsey, as Nikolay Yezhov, a Stalin associate who was assassinated under his direction.

Tesla officially moves its headquarters from Californias Silicon Valley to Texas.

Tesla has moved its corporate headquarters from California to Texas, as promised by Elon Musk during the company's shareholder meeting this year.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has warned that while a potential bankruptcy for the aerospace company in the event of a severe global recession is "unlikely," it is "not impossible."

Tesla launched a Cybertruck-style $50 Cyberwhistle on Tuesday that is sold out.

Elon Musk will be on Tesla's earnings call in January to provide an update to the automaker's product roadmap. Musk earlier this year said he would no longer take part in the calls unless he had something "really important to say."

Elon Musk said that exports of the Tesla Model S Plaid to China "probably" will start around March of next year.

Strategic Wealth Partners Chief Market Strategist Shana Sissel weighs in on Elon Musks Twitter feud with Bernie Sanders.

Elon Musk says SpaceX hopes Starship's first orbital flight will happen in January

Tesla founder Elon Musk noted Tuesday the electric car maker would contribute a massive sum in federal tax revenue in the coming years amid an ongoing dispute over a Democrat-led push to increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

A California driver has reported the first alleged crash involving Tesla's Full Self-Driving feature to NHTSA. The agency is investigating the claim, which says the car turned into the wrong lane.

Investor Michael Burry, made famous in the 2015 movie "The Big Short," took to Twitter Sunday to theorize why Teslas Elon Musk decided to sell so many Tesla shares, and then deleted his Twitter account a short time later.

The United Nations World Food Program executive director David Beasley challenged Elon Musk on Monday to donate a total of $6.6 billion to address a global hunger crisis after the agency responded to Musks request for a breakdown of how the money would be spent.

Slatestone Wealth chief market strategist Kenny Polcari on Rivian stock, whether he owns electric vehicle makers and Elon Musks tweets over Tesla stock.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk hit back at Sen. Bernie Sanders with a devastating response to his demands that the wealthy pay their fair share."

Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk slammed the companys co-founder Martin Eberhard on Twitter Friday calling him the worst person hes ever worked with and accusing him of almost killing Tesla.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold another significant chunk of his stock in the electric car maker, according to regulatory filings published on Friday.

Despite Rivian's blockbuster IPO, Elon Musk has warned that the "true test" for the electric vehicle maker and Tesla competitor's success will be to achieve high production and breakeven cash flow.

Four astronauts safely returned on Monday from a record six-month NASA science mission aboard the International Space Station, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico after a daylong flight home.

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Elon Musk | Category | Fox Business

Elon Musk is an entrepreneur who is best known in space circles for launching SpaceX, a private aerospace design and manufacturing company. His company became the first private one to ship cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2012. Among SpaceX's many accomplishments is its development of a self-landing version of their Falcon 9 rocket, a heavy-lift rocket called the Falcon Heavy, and the Crew Dragon, a crewed spaceship that became the first private, crewed spacecraft to reach the ISS in 2020.

A long-time advocate of Mars exploration, Musk has publicly talked about ventures such as building a greenhouse on the Red Planet and, more ambitiously, establishing a Mars colony. He also is rethinking transportation concepts through ideas such as the Hyperloop, a proposed high-speed system that would run between major cities.

The South African-born businessman describes himself as "an engineer and entrepreneur who builds and operates companies to solve environmental, social and economic challenges."

Musk is also the founder of electric car company Tesla Motors, after he contributed $30 million to start the company. Teslas main goal was to produce sustainable, electric cars. Musk helped to develop the companys first car in 2006, called the Roadster. Later, in 2018, the Tesla Roadster was sent to space with a mannequin driver named 'Starman'. Since, Tesla has branched out from cars and started focusing on clean energy solutions such as solar panels.

Musk grew up in Pretoria, South Africa, and earned degrees in physics and business from the University of Pennsylvania. His first venture after school was co-founding Zip2 Corp., an Internet company that provided software and services for businesses.

"Things were pretty tough in the early going. I didn't have any money in fact I had negative money [because] I had huge student debts," Musk recalled in a 2003 Stanford lecture.

He showered at a local YMCA and lived in his office, managing to keep expenses very low despite his low revenue stream. "So when we went to VCs [venture capitalists], we could say we had positive cash flow," he said.

After Compaq bought Zip2 for more than $300 million in 1999, Musk turned his attention to online bill payments. That company, later known as PayPal, was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.

Musk now had a fortune in hand, and at the tender age of 30 was looking to put his energies into something new. He began SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies) in 2002 with ambitious plans to launch a viable, privately funded space company. In the face of naysayers, he doubled down and worked on a business plan.

Musk has repeatedly said that humans must be an interplanetary species to combat the threat of asteroids and potential human catastrophes, such as nuclear war and engineered viruses.

What is blocking us from doing that, Musk wrote in a 2008 Esquire piece, is "the ridiculously recalcitrant problem of big, reusable, reliable rockets."

"Somehow we have to ... reduce the cost of human spaceflight by a factor of 100," he added. "That's why I started SpaceX. By no means did I think victory was certain. On the contrary, I thought the chances of success were tiny, but that the goal was important enough to try anyway."

The first successful rocket SpaceX flew, the Falcon 1, took four tries to get off the ground before a successful test flight in September 2008.

Musk funded SpaceX through his own money at first, and then gained enough experience to attract millions of dollars from NASA to develop his rockets and spacecraft, and to bring cargo to the ISS.

The company's track record was a factor in NASA awarding it money to develop the Dragon spacecraft for cargo runs to the ISS. Dragon won multiple rounds of funding under NASA's Commercial Crew program and is now sending regular shipments of cargo to the station.

Related: Every SpaceX Starship explosion and what Elon Musk and team learned from them (video)

SpaceXs human-rated version of Dragon, called Crew Dragon, carried astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the ISS on May 30, 2020. At the same time that Musk was working on the Crew Dragon capsule, Boeing were also in the final stages of testing for carrying humans into space. In completing the mission before Boeing, the Crew Dragon became the first crewed vehicle to fly from the U.S. since the space shuttle in 2011. Dragon is hefted using a rocket called the Falcon 9.

In March 2018, SpaceX successfully flew a heavier rocket, the Falcon Heavy, which carried the Roadster car on its maiden flight. The rocket blasted its cargo to low Earth orbit, and then an upper stage fired to carry the car somewhere toward Mars and the asteroid belt.

Although its two side boosters landed successfully on twin pads at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, its center rocket core crashed and burned. All three rockets returned to Earth successfully after Falcon Heavy's second launch, on April 11, 2019, although the central core stage did not survive the journey back to shore from its ocean drone-ship landing pad, due to high sea swells. Falcon Heavy successfully completed its first night launch about two months later, on June 25, landing both side boosters successfully but narrowly missing a soft touchdown with the center rocket core.

Musk believes in making space travel accessible to everyone. On September 15, 2021, SpaceX's first all-civilian spaceflight was launched. Inspiration4 was the first mission with no professional astronauts on board the Crew Dragon. Instead, the mission was privately funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman, who was accompanied by three other crewmembers.

In a teleconference announcing Inspiration4, Musk said "at first, things are very expensive, and it's only through missions like this that we're able to bring the costs down over time"

SpaceX is also building a large Internet constellation of satellites called Starlink; the first 60 of these vehicles launched successfully into space on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, naturally in May 2019. Earlier that month, Musk told reporters that if everything goes well with the constellation, Starlink will generate $30 billion to $50 billion each year for SpaceX.

Musk is busy with projects in several other companies, and has even ventured into artificial intelligence. In July 2019, Microsoft funnelled $1 billion into an artificial intelligence project co-founded by Elon Musk, called OpenAI. This technology has led to products such as DALL-E, a computer which can generate images from text.

Musk is a frequent user of social media and received the Stephen Hawking Communication Prize in 2019 for his work. Sometimes Musk discusses ideas that are early design thoughts, or philosophical musings (such as the time he said we may all be trapped in a simulation).

Occasionally, however, Musk has attracted negative attention for his remarks. In 2018, Musk made critical comments about a rescuer trying to help Thai boys trapped in a cave. He later apologized for the comments about the rescuer amid worldwide criticism.

That same year, NASA carried out a safety review of SpaceX (as well as Boeing) after Musk appeared to smoke weed on comedian Joe Rogan's podcast in September. Also, Musk paid a fine after the Security and Exchange Commission examined tweets about another of his companies, Tesla. The tweet was deemed misleading, as he claimed that Tesla would produce 500,000 cars in 2019. In 2020, the company nearly reached this target.

Musk has said that around 2002, he looked up the schedule for when NASA was supposed to send astronauts to Mars, and was shocked to see there was no timeline. (Today, NASA says it hopes to land astronauts on the Red Planet in the 2030s). That's when he says he came up with an idea to do a simple Mars mission "to spur the national will," Wired reported.

Musk envisioned a revolutionary greenhouse on Mars, but he eventually scratched the idea because of financial concerns.

In 2012, he sketched out plans to establish a Mars colony, with 80,000 people living on the Red Planet. Musk later tweeted that he meant to say 80,000 people would make the journey per year.

Musk has continued to discuss and revise his plans several times over the years. He unveiled an Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) in 2016 that is intended to take humans to Mars with SpaceX technology. At the time, the ITS booster (a huge rocket not yet built) was expected to carry up to 100 people at a time to low Earth orbit and then send people to Mars in as little as 80 days, as long as Earth and Mars remain close to each other, Musk said. He also warned that some of the first Mars settlers would likely die during the journey.

Since then, he's revised the ITS concept to say that the colonists would use a rocket called the BFR also known as the Big Falcon Rocket. Then in November 2018, Musk rebranded BFR and announced new names for the spaceship or upper stage (now known as Starship) and the rocket booster (now known as Super Heavy).

SpaceX's latest prototype of the Starship spaceship called SN20 has not yet gone into orbit but performed its first static fire test on October 22, 2021. The main purpose of Musk's Starship is to carry people and cargo to the moon, Mars and potentially other distant destinations.

The fully reusable spacecraft will eventually be launched with the Super Heavy rocket booster. This is the world's most powerful rocket, which Musk said in a tweet, "is needed to escape Earth's deep gravity well (not needed for other planets or moons)."

While Musk is focused on Mars, he has said that he would also willingly participate in a moon base; He even unveiled conceptual designs of a "Moon Base Alpha(along with a Mars base, of course). In 2018, Musk suggested that the first SpaceX Mars base could be on the Red Planet by 2028.

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Elon Musk: Revolutionary private space entrepreneur | Space