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."

A former Google China president and now venture capitalist says Elon Musk uses shiny cars and the promise of medical implants as bait for his real goals: Distributing energy away from traditional power companies and turning humans into cyborgs. First, says Kai-Fu Lee, were Tesla cars. "By selling us fancy, beautiful Teslas--luxury cars that none of us can say no to, it seems to have changed to distributed energy," Lee, the CEO of Sinovation Ventures, told Quartz in an interview today. As Tesla CEO, Musk has acquired the solar energy startup SolarCity that he previously helped lead as chairman, then he began sharing a vision where a battery in the home stores energy from the sun (preferably using SolarCity's new solar panels). That energy will be used to power the home and charge electric cars.

Sending tourists for a trip around the moon is the latest big idea launched by Elon Musk, a Silicon Valley star known for turning his passions into visionary enterprises. Musk has become one of the United States' best-known innovators. He was a founder of payments company PayPal, electric carmaker Tesla Motors and SpaceX, maker and launcher of rockets and spacecraft. SpaceX recently announced that two private citizens have paid money to be sent around the Moon in what would mark the farthest humans have ever traveled to deep space since the 1970s. In a sector where entrepreneurs often speak of "moonshots," Musk is one of the biggest dreamers.

In February MIT Technology Review highlighted 10 breakthrough technologies poised to significantly change the world over the next few years. Here's how they have progressed since then. We predicted that 2016 would bring major progress on high-tech cancer cures enabled by using gene editing to tune the human immune system, and it did. First, American scientists got a green light to start using the gene-editing technique called CRISPR to customize T cells and turn them into cancer killers. That study turned out to have the backing of Internet billionaire Sean Parker, who in April had announced he'd give away $250 million toward "hacking" the immune system. By November, a Chinese company announced it had raced ahead and dosed a patient with the first T cells edited with CRISPR.

Tesla started in 2006 as a niche electric sports car manufacturer. Its 2008 Roadster had an insane range of 244 miles and an equally bonkers price of more than $100,000. It was the first step in CEO Elon Musk's 2006 master plan to eventually bring a high-range, reasonably priced EV to the masses. Ten years later, that strategy is finally about to pay off. Tesla has been moving in this direction since its inception.

Instead of talking about rocket trips to Mars or self-driving cars, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk turned his attention Friday night to a more mundane topic. He came to talk about roofs. But like all things Musk, there was nothing normal about the roofs he came to discuss. On Wisteria Lane, the backlot set of what used to be the Desperate Housewives TV series at Universal Studios Hollywood, Musk showed off a new kind of solar roof that will be offered starting next year through SolarCity, the home solar installation company that he is seeking to merge into Tesla. Instead of a massive, unattractive array of solar panels typically seen in suburbia, SolarCity had installed roof tiles that are solar collector themselves on several of the houses that are part of the film set.

Analysts expect Tesla Motors (TSLA) to show that it has reigned in its losses when the automaker releases its third quarter earnings Wednesday after more than doubling analysts' loss expectations last quarter. Investors polled by FactSet expected the California-based company, led by South African investor and engineer Elon Musk, to post a loss of 53 cents per share--an improvement from last year's third quarter losses of 1.78 per share and second quarter losses of 1.06 per share. Analysts surveyed by Reuters, however, estimated the company's earnings per share (EPS) would turn positive, hitting 37 cents for the quarter ending in December. Such optimistic forecasts are likely fueled by Tesla's announcement that it saw a 70 percent rise in third-quarter deliveries early in October--welcome news after, two months earlier, it disclosed third quarter expenditure needs of 1.1 billion. The earnings report will come one week after the automaker announced all of its cars currently in production would be self-driving, with "a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver."

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is no stranger to risk. Fans of the company have called its leader savvy and visionary; critics and competitors have described some of his decisions as reckless. Reaction to Musk's latest move, announced on Wednesday, has been no different. His decision to equip all new Tesla vehicles with radar and cameras that will enable them to (eventually) drive autonomously--without human intervention--has been described as brilliant while others have called it dangerous. This is a speculator's game.

Tesla is partnering with Panasonic to supply batteries for its upcoming Model 3. Newslook Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants to his company to acquire SolarCity. SAN FRANCISCO -- Tesla's fleet is going autonomous. Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced Wednesday that its Model S, X and forthcoming Model 3 sedan will start being outfitted with "the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." That constitutes full Level 5 autonomy, which doesn't require any driver involvement. That's the ultimate goal for a range of automakers and tech companies, including Google, Ford and Volvo, which have vowed to produce such self-driving vehicles by 2021.

Elon Musk tweeted last week that Tesla would be unveiling a product "unexpected by most" on Oct. 17. On Sunday, however, the Tesla chief announced on Twitter that the launch had been moved to Wednesday as the product needed more refinement. The product is being kept under wraps by Tesla and it is not clear what product the company plans to unveil or what refinements the it is working on. There has been speculation that the unveiling could be that of the Model 3 electric car, along with Autopilot 2.0 semi-autonomous driving system. With the launch of Autopilot 2.0, Tesla is expected to add more sensors to its cars and provide the vehicle more self-driving features.