Elon Musk is a great man. His achievements to date are so great that future entrepreneurs will have a hard act to follow. Some people want to compare Elon with Steve Jobs. In my opinion, the comparison is meaningless. Steve Jobs wanted to bring great design to the masses. Elon wants to bring the human race to the stars. Which is the greater, more difficult to achieve, goal?

When I was growing up, I read a book called The Usborne Book of the Future (google it). It was actually a combined volume and one of the parts was called Future Cities. This part talked about cities on Earth as well as on the Moon and Mars. I always though it a great pity that the US abandoned the space race after the Apollo missions. Now, Elon Musk is showing the way to space and he's doing it on a shoestring budget. He has also managed to stimulate interest in space again and many countries are competing to send their rockets to the Moon and Mars. I'm anticipating another space race, this time between Elon's SpaceX and countries such as China and India. I always thought that the Moon landing hoax was extremely easy to prove or disprove. Just go back to the Moon, with the voyage documented all the way through video recording. Live streaming would be out though, because of the delay in transmission of signals.

The production of electric cars at Tesla is also an example of Elon's thinking and follow through. He had a plan from the start which mirrored the introduction of many other new products. When he was labouring hard at Tesla, there were many naysayers about how Tesla would fail badly and would be destroyed by big car companies like GM, Ford etc. The naysayers are now more subdued and Tesla has entered its growth spurt. Don't believe me? Go to youtube.com and search for "Tesla killers". There would be video presentations about some up and coming car company that will build yet another electric car that will be the "Tesla killer". Those companies are so pathetic. Elon basically had to build his car factory from the ground up because the equipment he needed was not available anywhere else. These wannabe car companies think that they could do the same things as Tesla without knowing about the technical challenges that Elon faced and solved. The same thing happened at SpaceX. Each of his early rockets was literally built from scratch. For anyone interested in more details of these stories, I recommend reading the book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance. There's also an audiobook version.

Many people have tried to label Elon Musk, as mentioned in the article. Most of the labels seem to be temporary, based on his current pet project. My own personal label for Elon Musk would be that he is the modern version of Tom Swift Junior (Jr.). Who's Tom Swift? Tom Swift is a character in a series of science fiction novels aimed at young readers. Search "Tom Swift" on en.wikipedia.org to learn more. He is an inventor and CEO of Swift Enterprises, a company founded by his father, Tom Swift Senior (Sr.), who makes occasional appearances in the novels. In the novel, Swift Enterprises is a technology company that regularly produces fantastic inventions such as a giant aircraft that functions as a laboratory (Tom Swift and his Flying Lab). In the third novel of the series, Tom Swift and his Rocketship, Tom invents a reusable rocketship called the Star Spear. As the series progresses, Swift Enterprises has its own rocket base on Fearing Island, guarded by robotic drone aircraft and regularly flies rockets to their own space station in orbit about Earth and to other places in space. These rockets were also reusable. In Tom Swift and his Atomic Earth Blaster, Tom invents an earth digger to drill into the Earth to access the molten iron located deep underneath the Earth. I wonder if some of Elon Musk's ideas, such as the Boring Company digger, came from the books he read as a child.

Elon Musk is still young (he's about the same age as me!) and he still has a way to go before he achieves his dream. I believe he will make it. Even if he fails in some way, he has still shown how one man, with a great dream and desire, can change the world. This is something that is lacking in today's society. We frequently read some post by some ignorant people who say that the age of the mad scientist working alone in his lab is over. These same people seem to suggest that all the possible knowledge has been found and all possible inventions have been made and further improvements would be incremental in nature. I say these people are wrong. There is still much more knowledge to be found, more worlds to be explored. I would encourage anyone interested in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths, so called STEM, to pursue their interests and, hopefully one day, change the world.