Zero to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds doesn’t sound possible for an electric car, but maybe you haven’t heard of the Tesla Roadster.
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk is the man behind the new electric cars, and he may challenge the might of Big Oil and the Big Three Automakers.
The self-proclaimed real-life Tony Stark is the mastermind behind three new companies which may change the way we live in the near future.
During these dragging years of recovery, it’s hard to find a success story for students to look to. Musk is one of the few entrepreneurs whose companies are growing as fast as Facebook. Musk’s net worth has climbed north of $8 billion — more than Donald Trump and Oprah Winfrey combined.
While some pundits focus on the bankruptcy and failure of alternative energy firms like Solyndra, there are success stories which need to be recognized. There is still hope for graduating students in our alluring economy.
Musk’s first major venture was founding PayPal with Peter Thiel, a future angel investor of Facebook, and Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn. PayPal was a huge success, and after selling it to eBay, Musk turned to his passion: 21st century tech.
This is evident in Tesla Motors, which paid off its government loan eight years in advance, and sent its stock price soaring. Since it went public in 2010, the company’s value has increased 880 percent. So if a student had put $10,000 on Tesla Motors back at its IPO, he or she would have $88,000 today. That’s a better stock performance than Facebook.
His next project with Tesla Motors is to create an affordable, fully electric car that will change transportation forever. These are fully electric cars — not hybrids — which eliminate the use of gasoline completely.
Another of Musk’s companies, SolarCity, is the largest provider of solar power in the United States. As technology progresses exponentially, SolarCity might become the Exxon of the solar industry.
One project Musk has thrown his weight behind is the idea of a Hyperloop transport system from Los Angeles to San Francisco. This will be a “fifth mode of transportation” which is calculated to turn a 350 mile trek into a 35 minute ride through a series of vacuum tubes. This project is projected to cost $6 billion, and is a look into a new world of national and continental travel.
Another company that put Musk in the spotlight is SpaceX. When NASA ended its space shuttle program because of cuts in the federal government’s spending, SpaceX took over the space shuttle’s role in resupplying the International Space Station.
Another space venture Musk will be starting is asteroid mining for minerals and resources. This is an entirely new era of space exploration and excavation.
The influence and newfound power of this entrepreneur has been recognized by Forbes Magazine, which has put him on the list of the World’s Most Powerful People. His level of dominance in the space age can now be compared to Vanderbilt’s years in the railroads and Rockefeller’s years in the oil refinery industry.
His ambitions are out of this world, and his ideas and successes have attracted many engineers and technicians to make his vision a reality. At this rate, his goal of retiring on Mars may become a real option for him and maybe all of us.

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