Elon Musk’s amazing week
He manages two companies, Tesla and SpaceX, both achieved major milestones this week, and further de-risked the huge vision behind each of these companies. Stoping clime change, and getting to Mars.
I’m not saying these companies will achieve these crazy and amazing visions. I’m definitely saying this week these companies took a big chunk of their basic theory about the product and the market, and have proved it correct.
Tesla
One of Tesla’s main claims was that they’ll be able to create an affordable mass-market electric cars. This week they start the third and final part of their “Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan”. They opened pre-orders for Model 3, and results were pretty strong - selling 325,000 cars within a few days, passing the $11 billion mark in potential revenue.
Tesla’s success was due to the amazing brand they’ve built, the amazing cars, the super charger network providing free electricity, and it’s autopilot technology.
SpaceX
SpaceX’s main claim was that it could reduce the cost of space travel by getting rockets to be reused. A key part of reusing rockets is getting them to land back to earth.
“SpaceX has promoted reusability as a major cost-saver for the private spaceflight industry. Right now, rockets are treated as trash once they’ve taken off, so companies must spend millions of dollars on manufacturing brand new rockets for every single flight. It costs $60 million to make the Falcon 9, and $200,000 to fuel it, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Reusing rockets could substantially lower these costs, he says; theoretically, a rocket would only need to be refueled to launch multiple times again.”
More by Tesla: http://www.spacex.com/news/2013/03/31/reusability-key-making-human-life-multi-planetary
This week SpaceX landed a rocket from orbit, for the second time. This time with high head-winds and to a barge in the middle of the sea. This landing capability is the key feature enabling reusability, and has reduced the risk on SpaceX’s whole theory significantly.
All in all, a great week for Tesala, SpaceX, I guess almost anyone wants the vision of these 2 companies to succeed, and maybe that’s a big reason of why they’re succeeding.
