The next Steve Jobs of Automotive & Space?
Automotive
On April-1 2010 the last car, a red Toyota Corolla, rolled off the assembly line of the New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI) in Fremont CA. General Motors withdrew from the partnership with Toyota that created Nummi in 1984 whose objectives was for Toyota to learn how to build cars in the US utilizing a GM plant, while in the process, GM learns how to build reliable small cars the Toyota way.
It didn't take long for Toyota to find a new partner in Tesla Motors for the second rebirth of the NUMMI plant and a rebirth of the electric car that ironically GM scrapped with their EV1
Space
After 30 years the space shuttle program was retired this year with Endeavor the next-to-last space shuttle flight and Discovery's final voyage. What will replace the space shuttle? In December 2010, SpaceX became the first privately funded company to successfully launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft with Dragon. SpaceX operates from Hawthrone, California with over 1000 employees and broke ground last month on their own launch site, located at Vandenberg Air Force Base.
Who is behind SpaceX and Tesla Motors?
Elon Musk is a 39-year-old engineer and serial entrepreneur with a clear life focus in three areas he believes will change the world:
- Internet
- Sustainable energy
- Space exploration
Born in South Africa in 1971, Born in South Africa in 1971, Musk bought his first computer at age 10 and taught himself how to program, by the age of 12 he sold his first commercial software for about $500, a space game called Blastar. He moved to Canada at age 17, and then to the U.S., where he studied both business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania on a full scholarship. Musk then founded and sold a number of hugely successful internet businesses. Zip2, sold for $305 million toCompaq; PayPal, sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. Musk then considered three areas he wanted to get into that were "important problems that would most affect the future of humanity", as he said later, "One was the Internet, one was clean energy, and one was space". He has been putting his time, energy and money in Tesla Motos, Solar City and SpaceX.
Then entered the space industry with his company SpaceX, followed by his automotive debut with Tesla Motors. As a engineer, visioneer and innovator with big dreams Elon Musk can shift the future of the automotive and space industries in the same way Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore did with his bold prediction, popularly known as Moore's Law. Wich states that the number of transistors on a chip will double approximately every two years. Describes the driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
TIME 10 Questions: 10 Questions for Elon Musk
We have to wait and see if Elon Musk can shift two major industries and drive continuous innovation and execution to develop the next generation of reliable, low cost cars and rockets in the same way Steve Jobs did with Apple for music and the phone industry.
SpaceXLaunch Manifest Tesla Motors Innovations-Technology
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3 References | in Business | tagged Automotive, Elon Musk, GM, NUMMI, Space, Space Shuttle, SpaceX, Steve Jobs, Tesla, Toyota Permalink Print Article
Reader Comments (2)
Great post. Maybe the next guy to change the automotive industry.