First and foremost, this guy should be featured on the Dos Equis commercial. Fuck that dude with the organ-donor beard who is literally only well known for being in that string of commercials. Elon Musk is arguably the most interesting man in the world, and if you don’t agree with that then I challenge you to find somebody so high on the list of visionaries, innovators, hard workers, high-stakes gamblers, billionaires, and geniuses simultaneously. He’s definitely up there among the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, but there’s something else about him that is extremely compelling.

Boiled down to the essentials, he is heavily involved in three major companies: SpaceX (founder/CEO), Tesla (co-founder/CEO), and SolarCity (heavy investor/founded by his cousins). He also founded the company X.com, which merged with PayPal and was eventually bought out by eBay for $1.5 billion. That in itself is an impressive feat that pulled him up to millionaire status at the beginning of his career, but within the scope of his life’s work it pales in comparison.

In fact, he basically ended up losing all his profit from X.com in starting up SpaceX and Tesla. It’s not like either market was particularly lucrative; he delved headfirst into huge risks with what he determined to be a 10% chance of success. His closest friends even showed him video compilations of rockets exploding in an attempt to save his fortune. Commercializing electric cars had been put on the shelf for having virtually no foreseeable future in either the renewable energy or luxury car markets. It’s amazing that colonizing Mars and shifting away from our reliance on fossil fuels are now entirely possible, and peeking into Musk’s life reveals the foundation supporting his towering achievements.

Probably the characteristic most important to his success is the most boring one; he is an extremely hard worker that sets ambitious goals. Musk will easily rack up 80+ hours per week, which would probably amount to some form of torture for most people. As CEO of both SpaceX (headquartered in LA county) and Tesla (headquartered in the Bay Area), he travels up and down California constantly throughout the week to keep them going. In starting up X.com, he would work until he fell asleep on a bean bag near his desk and would start back up first thing the next morning. The sheer number of stressful decisions he needs to make to sustain his companies often leaves him exhausted with deep, shadowy caves instead of just bags under his eyes.  On top of raising a couple children and thinking up crazy ideas like his Boring Company, his work-life balance is heavily skewed in one direction and often to the detriment of his health.

In part, his ability to handle these extremes came from his childhood. Born and raised in the hypermasculine culture of the apartheid in South Africa, he was the subject of brutal bullying just because a gang of boys chose him as a target. They beat him up until he completely blacked out, and went so far as to beat his best friend until the child agreed to stop hanging out with Musk. His home life was not much better either; Musk talks about enduring a form of psychological torture from his intense father and refuses to tell stories for the sake of his children. At some point, willingly or not, he embraced suffering and gained extra reserves of strength and willpower as a result.

To compliment his work ethic, he is gifted with exceptional intellectual capabilities. Growing up, he had a heavy compulsion to read and would indulge in anything from science fiction to philosophy to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His photographic memory wasn’t great for making friends as a kid, but as the CEO of two companies on the frontiers of technological innovation he challenges his engineers using his extensive knowledge of physics and chemistry. Instead of acting as a head honcho that his employees never actually meet, he is heavily involved in the decision making on every level of development and thoroughly understands the inner workings of his products almost to a fault.

Setting facts aside (while staying the fuck away from “alternative-facts”), I’m interested in getting down to the motivations that make Musk tick. Even after reading this book it’s difficult to say with certainty what drives him, but given his presence in the economy and his track record of destroying the odds against him it’s definitely helpful to guess where he is headed and why. It seems like he isn’t too interested in monetary or material gain, given the fact that he willingly open sourced all of Tesla’s patents. Maybe it’s an egotistical desire for lasting fame, or power over his companies for its own sake that he truly wants.

For me, the answer that makes the most sense is his drive to make humans an interplanetary species. I think he sees humanity as limited and takes it upon himself to bring us into the future and away from self destruction through the development of technology. Colonizing Mars would ensure our survival in the face of some extinction event that may happen on Earth, and from a science fiction perspective it would allow us to continue evolving to a higher tier of civilization. It’s his inspiring call to break past our own limitations and make measurable progress toward a vision; it’s a purpose for himself in service of humanity. All three of his companies point toward a coherent vision for the future: alternative energy, transforming transportation, and expanding human civilization.

“I would like to die thinking that humanity has a bright future. If we can solve sustainable energy and be well on our way to becoming a multiplanetary species with a self-sustaining civilization on another planet – to cope with a worst-case scenario happening and extinguishing human consciousness – then… I think that would be really good.”

While I’m skeptical about technology’s ability to “save” humanity, I can jump on board with Musk’s vision. Imagine being part of a generation involved in the colonization of a new planet! It would be like building a new civilization literally from the ground up, with it’s political, cultural, and structural foundations open for creation in a new frontier. Whether or not it actually happens is for the future to determine, but as of now Elon Musk is quite a character to keep an eye on. He’s part of Trump’s advisory board, so hopefully we can look up to him as a spokesman for humanity. From what I can tell, he has a good head on his shoulders, albeit an insanely intense one.

Other stuff he is involved in:

• Open AI
• Hyperloop
• Musk Foundation (this is their actual website)