Elon Musk in NYT

[Swampcat]

Here's an interesting article in the NYT on Elon Musk.<br /><br />Note: May require free registration to view.<br /><br /><center><br />A Bold Plan to Go Where Men Have Gone Before<br /><br /><blockquote><p align="left"><font color="orange">ASK Elon Musk what he wants to do with his life — after having amassed a $300 million fortune from the Internet — and the answer is surprising. At 34, he says he is too young to retire. Philanthropy is a bit staid. Starting another Web-based venture is hardly a challenge, not for a man who bought the idea for PayPal, built it up and then sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion.<br /><br />In seeking a new direction in life that would be as ambitious as his dreams, Mr. Musk has picked a doozy: cheap and reliable access to space.<br /><br />Making money from space is a road that several other self-made millionaires have traveled, from a Texas banker named Andrew Beal to one of Microsoft's co-founders, Paul G. Allen. There have been enough of them to warrant a mocking nickname: "thrillionaires." And so far their efforts have either ended in failure or have been just ventures in "space tourism" that brought test pilots to the fringe of space.<br /><br />Mr. Musk wants more, and he has put $100 million of his fortune on the line to try to get it. His goal is to make a business out of inexpensively launching satellites into orbit. Inexpensive, of course, is a relative term, in a business where launchings of private commercial weather, telecommunications and other payloads start at $30 million and go up to $85 million or more.<br /><br />Through his company, Space Explorations Technology, or SpaceX, Mr. Musk wants to send things to space for one-third of the going rate or less — even bringing down the price to $7 million for small payloads to low Earth orbit — with a series of simple rockets of his own design. His goal is to build a Volkswagen of</font></p></blockquote></center> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <font size="3" color="#ff9900"><p><font size="1" color="#993300"><strong><em>------------------------------------------------------------------- </em></strong></font></p><p><font size="1" color="#993300"><strong><em>"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government."</em></strong></font></p><p><font size="1" color="#993300"><strong>Thomas Jefferson</strong></font></p></font> </div>