Elon Musk – SpaceX and Teslar Cars

Elon Musk was recently in the news around the world when on May 30th , his company SpaceX successfully launched astronauts in a Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft on the Demo-2 mission to the International Space Station, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida.


He really is an interesting guy, born in Pretoria, South Africa on June 28th 1971, he’s an engineer, industrial designer, technology entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is a citizen of South Africa, Canada and the United States, but it’s his business acumen that he’s most noted for. Amongst many interests he’s the founder CEO and chief engineer/designer of SpaceX, early investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc, which ironically he is the longest tenured CEO of any automotive manufacturer globally.

Oh, and by the way Elon Musk is a self-made billionaire, and listed by Forbes as the 31st richest person in the world as of June 2020 with a net worth estimated at $38.8 billion.

In the wake of the SpaceX launch, I received this link which is an interesting insight into Elon Musk – a quintessential nerdy genius whose tenacity has to be marveled.

Rocket Man – The Elon Musk story

One should also note that for this project to be a total success, after spending 110 days orbiting the earth in the International Space Station, the astronauts do have to return to earth safely with a splash down off the coast of Florida, and according to Musk – “The return is more dangerous in some ways than the ascent, so we don’t want to declare victory yet,”

Also this month in Famous Last Words, I mentioned the arrival of Porsche’s new electric car, the Taycan, which some suggest will now see a real surge of performance electric vehicles on the world market. But one can’t forget that it was Elon Musk’s company Tesla that was the first manufacturer to mass produce a genuine, broad appeal electric car.

This link is a fascinating insight into how Tesla produce their vehicles, and as to be expected, it’s almost a case of ‘spot the human’!

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