From Energy To Transport To Healthcare, Here Are 8 Industries Being Disrupted By Elon Musk And His Companies

Elon Musk is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has plans to colonize Mars, and thinks AI may turn humans into its pets. But beyond the hype and his enormous net worth and Twitter presence, here's how Musk's companies are actually taking on ... virtually every industry. Elon Musk thinks and acts on a larger, more cosmic scale than we're accustomed to from entrepreneurs. Elon Musk has become a household name synonymous with the future. Whether he's working on electric vehicles (Tesla) or sending rockets into space (SpaceX), his larger-than-life reputation attracts its fair share of hero-worship. Musk can get a hundred breathless reporters to write about him and his companies with little more than a concept drawing and a tweet. His main projects take on almost every major industry and global problem conceivable, and imagine a disruptive fundamental rewiring of that space or sector. Whether he can deliver on his vast promises is often beside the point. And Musk himself is more than happy to feed into this hype machine. We've decided to take a different kind of look into the Musk ecosystem. Rather than assess Elon Musk and his companies on promises and hype, we wanted to look at the ways in which his companies are or are not transforming the industries in which they live -- with numbers, hard evidence, and concrete demonstrations of disruption. Read on for a deep dive into just how the money, invention, and ingenuity of Elon Musk and his companies are transforming these vital industries. First with SolarCity and now with Tesla, eliminating our dependence on fossil fuels and instead drawing energy from the "giant fusion reactor in the sky" aka the sun has been one of Musk's priorities for more than a decade. SolarCity, his first attempt to make solar power mainstream and ubiquitous, was at the forefront of the early 2000s "solar gold rush." In some ways it was a failure, but it remains important to understand its trajectory to understand how Musk and Tesla plan to take on the problem of renewable energy. SolarCity grew to become the country's largest provider of residential solar, then suffered some very public financial problems before being purchased by Musk's other company, Tesla, for $2 billion. That 2016 acquisition was controversial, with many observers calling it a "thinly veiled bailout." And yet Tesla's continuation of SolarCity's work has helped make a stronger case for solar than SolarCity was ever able to make on its own. Elon Musk originally suggested the concept for the company that became SolarCity to his cousins, Peter and Lyndon Rive, in 2004. The concept for SolarCity emerged out of a simple realization: the clock was running low on fossil fuels. The need for a replacement was emerging fast. "If they started now," as Men's Journal reports Musk telling Lyndon in 2004, "They might rule the market."