In the past 15 years, one of the important things that I learned about good leaders is the vision that they bring to the table. They might not provide a complete arc of everything they might do to change the paradigm, but only the dots that eventually gets connected.
The arc and the dots enabled by visionaries like Jobs, or Musk would at times change the entire industry and impact humanity as a whole. It is these dots that transform into the decisions and enable the paradigm shift. Leaders sow these dots as seeds and nurture them before connecting them to build the arc that they envisioned.
In the blog below, I will explain the arc initiated by Elon Musk. He, unlike many, is more vocal about his vision and the bold timeline he sets to achieve it. But his vision statements are yet, just parts and not the complete picture.
For us to understand his vision in its entirety, we might need to look a little outside of Tesla, at his other companies, on how they relate to Tesla and Mars. I would explain with Starlink, built by SpaceX connects with his vision.
Starlink helps to enable broadband using a network of satellites, might look unrelated to Tesla, but when looked deeper, we recognize how Starlink might become the backbone of Tesla making it that much stronger.
The cars built by Tesla are ‘connected by design’. They consume unfathomable amounts of data and internet bandwidth. We know that their systems getting more sophisticated and complex and it would only lead to an exponential increase in data consumption. This thirst for data would be fueled further by more Teslas getting purchased by customers.
Once deployed Starlink satellites will provide the bandwidth for Tesla cars to share information with their servers. It is Starlink that is going to be one of the major pieces of the puzzle that is going to help Tesla achieve the level 5 stage of autonomy by providing data to these machine learning systems.
Machine learning and Neural net help to perfect autopilot and through the improvements in these systems Tesla would be able to improve its Autopilot.
Data is crucial for these ML systems and is going to be the most important factor that differentiates the company that will achieve level 5 autonomy first. Google understands it and is why it is an early investor in SpaceX and Starlink to a tune of $1 Billion.
Teslas are not going to depend on its servers to make decisions while Autopiloting, instead they would be done by the computer onboard called the hardware 3. But the car would continuously send and receive data from their servers which in turn helps in improving its autopilot capability.
This capability of data transfer is going to be provided by Starlink that would help Tesla control the data pipe and is managed by Elon as a part of being in the CEO of SpaceX. It gives him control over the innovations that might be otherwise be outsourced to internet providers.
This is similar to the purchase of SolarCity giving Tesla a vertical integration of the energy business to its cars. Though criticized initially, we see other car manufacturers trying to replicate the model but unable to match Tesla.
The other important reason for the existence of Starlink is Mars. When applying the first principle approach to provide an internet connection to the initial settlers on Mars, you would beam them through the satellites and not be laying fiber optic cables.
The satellites would already be orbiting the planet long before the first settlers landing on Mars. The satellites would also cost minimal as they are assembled and flown from the earth. The scale of deployment when looked from the capacity of a starship, would only need one launch to blanket most of Mars that would be used for settlement.
We know with no signs of life there, there is no possibility of finding coal, petroleum, or Natural gas on Mars. That’s why SolarCity(Tesla energy) acquisition makes sense, as it is the only other way to provide electricity on Mars when excluding Nuclear. This is also the reason why Elon Musk makes electric and not gasoline cars.
The way I see it, every company built by Elon Musk help take the step in the right direction for enabling human settlement on Mars.
The actions initiated by those dots or decisions are having a positive effect on the earth and its beings. Starlink is just one of the dots that is being enabled by Elon Musk and his team, but it is one of the most important ones.