E lon Musk : Bonkers or genius?
The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is a controversial character – is he a bit bonkers, a genuine boffin or a bit of both? Nicole Kobie assesses five of his most intriguing projects
The founder of Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink, Elon Musk inspires admiration and adulation – tweet something negative about the tech founder and you’ll quickly hear from his fans why you’re wrong. But there’s also plenty to criticise: underground tunnels to whip cars out of traffic, sending a Tesla into space to become interstellar garbage and colonising Mars are all rather out there.
As successful as Musk is, it’s easy to bet against a man who tweets about stock prices while stoned, subsequently getting in trouble with the SEC, or names his child X Æ A-Xii, or spends time and energy creating and selling a flamethrower – and as weird as that last one is, he did sell $10 million worth of the big blow torches. When he’s not bewildering, he’s also helped drive forward electric cars via Tesla, launch reusable rockets into space with SpaceX and backed GPT-3 ( see p40), arguably the best AI natural language processor we’ve seen yet, with OpenAI.
Whether you think Musk is an eccentric genius who will shape the future or a wealthy idiot who employs excellent engineers, there’s no question he has more money than you, and that tunnels, driverless cars, and mind-reading is how he chooses to spend his riches. If nothing else, it’s more interesting than billionaires buying yachts or football teams. Here are five of his oddest ideas – and how likely they are to happen.
Truly driverless cars
PC Pro readers will be used to hearing about the limitations of driverless cars, but against all odds Musk is pushing onward with Autopilot mode in Tesla cars. Some owners have been given access to a more advanced beta mode, while others simply have plenty of faith in the basic version, prompting online videos showing people putting their lives in the hands of the software by letting the car drive with them in the backseat.
On one hand, the cars are capable of navigating a motorway. On the other, multiple fatal crashes have happened – including one horrific incident in which a Tesla slammed into an overturned lorry on a Californian motorway, injuring a good Samaritan who had gone to help the first driver. The Tesla driver died, but investigations remain to unpick the actual causes and Tesla disputes that Autopilot was engaged at the time. Naturally, it’s caught the eye of US regulators.
And that means that while Musk has said Tesla will have full selfdriving next year, the company had to correct that assessment with the California Department for Motor Vehicles (DMV). Driverless cars are assessed across six levels, with Level 5 considered truly automated without any need for human interaction. Embarrassingly, Tesla had to admit that Autopilot was only Level 2, which means a human driver is