With Elon Musk, the sky’s not even the limit – Mars is!

We’ve got a bit of an ‘in your face’ cover for this issue. Taking a cue from the styling direction being followed by most manufacturers today, subtlety – it seems – is an attribute that’s a little too discreet in this age of distraction. 

And if the lead cover shot doesn’t get you, the image of the man of the moment in the automotive industry certainly will – Elon Musk. Courtesy of our international partners, Quattroruote, in this issue we’ve carried what can only be termed as a fairly critical piece on the man behind Tesla. Admittedly, I was in two minds about carrying the article. After all, he’s known as the real-life Tony Stark – and who doesn’t want to be Iron Man?

Before the age of 30, he had become a millionaire many times over – thanks in large part to sale of PayPal, which he founded immediately after the sale of his first software company, Zip2. Now, I would probably have retired to a beach by then – but not Musk. He put everything on the line to found SpaceX – which wants to set up a human colony on Mars, and is the only private company to ever return a spacecraft from low-Earth orbit. Currently, it makes routine round-trips to the International Space Station. With ‘The Boring Company,’ he wants to build networks of tunnels under cities to alleviate traffic congestion. With ‘Hyperloop,’ he wants to build sealed tubes that transport pods long distances at ‘hyper’ speed, free of air resistance and friction. And all of this simply scratches at the surface of the revolutionary ideas that he’s working on.
 
I bow to the power of his vision, and the courage of his convictions. At the same time, it’s not surprising that the automotive world is sceptical of Musk and his vision for the future of the automobile. After all, it upends the industry as we know it today! So, you could say that the auto industry, and the traditional automotive media, is biased against him.
 
But you simply can’t ignore the sheer hype that’s propelled Tesla to a valuation of almost 60 billion dollars today. That’s not very far behind GM’s market cap of $61.5 billion. Keep in mind that, in 2016, GM produced 7.8 million vehicles – Tesla made just under 84,000 cars. And the GM of today generates bucket loads of cash for its shareholders, while Telsa has a cash burn rate of 8,000 dollars a minute according to Bloomberg – that’s almost half a million dollars an hour. 
 
So, how long before the hype fizzles out? Well, with Elon Musk it’s anyone’s guess. And that’s part of what makes him such an enigmatic figure. With Elon, anything’s possible. The sky’s not even the limit. Mars is!