When PayPal sold out to eBay in 2002 for a nice tidy sum of $1.5 billion, Elon Musk was not a big player in Silicon Valley. He was just another player who created a startup tech firm and sold it for a huge profit a few years down the line to one of the big boys. Yes, not many were aware that Elon Musk was a major stock holder in PayPal by the time of the acquisition by eBay. His route to the PayPal billion dollar pay off was through X.Com; one of the world’s first online banks he created back in 1999. He later merged his company with Peter Thiel’s Confinity (a company best known for developing security softwares for handhelds) to form PayPal in 2000. Peter Thiel was the face of PayPal. Many people then referred to Thiel as the founder of PayPal. But PayPal had Elon Musk’s fingerprints all over it. After Musk hit the jackpot with the sale of PayPal, the normal ordinary man would have taken his loot and retired to a Caribbean Island of warm sunny days and beautiful beaches. But Musk is not normal like the rest of us. He had a vision which he intended to turn into reality. Elon Musk today These days, Elon Musk is regularly in the news: some of them good and some not so good. To understand why he is such a draw for news outlets, one needs to look at his investments since the days of PayPal SpaceX The SpaceX (full name: Space Exploration Technologies Corporation) idea gives a peep into how the mind of Musk works. It was founded in 2002 with its corporate headquarters in California. The goal is very ambitious: to make space travel cheaper and promote the colonization of Mars. This company is usually not a company that makes a dent on the consciousness of the most of the world. It sounded like something a rich kid would do because he had the money and the ideas keeping him awake at night. However, the rockets developed by SpaceX suddenly became a thing everybody was interested in. One of the rockets exploded during a prep test. The test was preparation for the launch of a satellite into space. The satellite to be launched was partly owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and his Internet.org company which was created to provide cheap high-speed Internet access for poor people around the world. Suddenly, Elon Musk forced himself onto the radar of the world’s disenfranchised. Think about it, his rocket could have been the vehicle to take an important satellite into space. A satellite the world’s poor would have really benefitted from. Unfortunately, the explosion also destroyed the satellite. However, Elon Musk was not going to close shop because of one explosion. After all, against all odds, SpaceX won the very lucrative $1.6 billion NASA contract in 2008. That money provides a stream of steady cash for SpaceX and Musk. Tesla Motors Here is the thing about Tesla motors: the electric cars the company manufactures is for the rich. Again, not something the vast majority of the citizens of the world would consider important to their survival The car is just like the Lamborghinis and Ferraris of this world: exclusive luxury cars only a fraction of the world population would bother with. Here is another thing about Tesla cars: more units are being sold each year. This is because, with research and development, the technology involved is getting cheaper every year thereby bringing down the cost of each car. Tesla has sold almost 200, 000 units of the cars since the first one in 2008. Nobody is betting against Tesla being the number one automaker in the world in the nearest future. The tipping point for that to happen would come when the technology fully catches up with the idea of electric cars. This brings us nicely to solar power and the utilization of solar energy. Elon Musk’s solar energy fixation Solar energy is been touted as one of the most important sources of alternative energy. This idea has been with the world for a long time. It is only recently that technology has found a means of harnessing it optimally. The key components of effectively making use of solar energy are solar panels and rechargeable batteries. It is around these two components that Elon Musk’s most important ventures to date are based on. What makes them important is the simple fact; all things been equal, the products of this venture into solar energy would have an impact on almost everybody in the world. SolarCity SolarCity was founded by two brothers, Peter and Lyndon Rive. But since its inception, it had always had a ‘Musky’ feel about it. That is not surprising as the idea for the company was mooted by Musk. Being cousins with the two brothers would have given Musk the confidence to help start the company and be a non-executive chairman. The company has now grown to become the second largest solar installation company in the US. But Musk is not really interested in being the best solar installer. The first part of the plan was to completely acquire SolarCity. This happened last year when Tesla Motor formally submitted the paperworks to acquire SolarCity for about $3 billion. The Rive brothers though retained their positions on the board of the company. SolarCity as the name implies deals in all things solar and related technologies. With the acquisition of SolarCity, Musk’s plan became a matter of simple integration of SolarCity with Tesla Motors and SpaceX. Energy-wise, this makes a lot of sense. This sound like the culmination of Musk’s dreams all these years; to be able to head a tech firm that affects all aspects of our lives.

Solar roofs Solar roofs were the real first shot fired by Musk into the mass market. In an elaborate event in a Hollywood studio last year, he unveiled the Tesla Powerwall 2. This is a complete solar energy solution for homes. Basically, the house is built and designed to utilize solar energy instead of conventional electricity from the public grid. SolarCity is the vanguard of this innovation. The new Powerwall 2 home comprises a complete solar roof and special batteries embedded into the walls of the house to store the solar energy. The stored energy is then converted by an efficient Tesla inverter into usable energy by all household appliances. The first set of solar roofs and Powerwall homes would be delivered this year. And according to the noises coming out of Elon Musk’s corporate headquarters, the solar roofs would be cheaper than conventional roofs. However, cheaper in this sense means the money you save on electricity bills makes the investment on solar roofs cheaper in the long run. But the initial investment on solar roofs and the components would certainly be very expensive though. This is just the beginning. With SolarCity in the forefront of research for better batteries for Tesla motors and SpaceX rockets, it is a sure thing that the prices of solar panels and storage batteries for domestic use would only become cheaper. And in the not too distant future, one of the most important and basic human needs, decent housing, would be determined by what Elon Musk and SolarCity do. Once upon a time, Bill Gates and Windows were the gods of the modern world. Then we had Bill Jobs and the iPhone, followed closely by Google and their presence in every aspect of our lives with their digital products; it looks likely that by the time Elon Musk is done with solar power, his influence would dwarf what the world saw with previous tech behemoths.