5 Companies Involving Elon Musk and What They're Up To

Elon Musk is an engineer and entrepreneur who has been linked with bringing the future. He first became a millionaire when he sold his first company, Zip2, to Compaq for $340 million in 1999.

Since then, he has founded companies that cover almost all major industries. Here are five of Elon Musk's companies and what they're currently up to:

Neuralink

This mysterious neurotechnology company Neuralink, founded in July 2016, has potential applications in the fields of prosthetics, robotics, medicine, and even military purposes. It mainly develops implantable brain-machine interfaces, once announcing that they are working on "threads," 4 to 6 micron devices that is supposedly the first step towards connecting the human brain to the Internet.

On August 28, 2020, Neuralink had the attention of the world as it conducted a livestream demonstration of its neural interface. They demonstrated the ability of their neural link to pick up brain signals from pigs installed with the miniature devices. One of the reasons Musk has in this endeavor is to keep humans keep up with artificial intelligence that continues to grow in complexity.

OpenAI

OpenAI is made up of a for-profit arm OpenAI LP, and a non-profit arm OpenAI Inc. It was founded in December 2015 and focuses on artificial intelligence research. The industry considers this Elon Musk company as a competitor to the Google subsidiary DeepMind.

Since it was founded, OpenAI has engaged in a number of AI and robotics-related applications. In 2018, it launched its Debate Game, which uses machine learning to teach robots to debate problems in front of a human judge.

Its latest breakthrough, the Generative Pretrained Transformer 3 (GPT3), an unsupervised deep learning language model. It recently made headlines around the world when a college student, Liam Porr, created a fake blog using GPT3, and drew 26 thousand visitors in two weeks.

The Boring Company

Aside from the witty company name, The Boring Company was a former SpaceX subsidiary that aims to solve the difficult traffic conditions by "boring" tunnels and underground transport infrastructures for the people to use. Elon Musk cited his own experiences with Los Angeles traffic as the inspiration for the company.

Its founder and CEO Elon Musk has recently updated people via Twitter, claiming that it is only a "few months from being operational." He was referring to a Las Vegas, Nevada project where The Boring Company placed a $52.5 million bid for an "underground people mover" that will ease the traffic on The Strip, one of Las Vegas' busiest streets.

Tesla, Inc.

After a year it was founded in 2003, Elon Musk joined the former Tesla Motors and is now its CEO. As an automotive company, Tesla has been known globally for its electric cars which are commercially available at prices competitive with other, conventional cars. Seventeen years after it was founded, Tesla Inc is now responsible for 81 percent of battery electric vehicles sold in the United States for the first six months of 2020.

Also, to cater to its growing electric vehicle market, Tesla Inc has created a supercharger network that acts as the fuel refilling stations for Tesla cars. By the end of 2019, there have been 15,000 superchargers installed across more than 1,700 spots around the world.

SpaceX

SpaceX is the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk months before he sold his revolutionary online payment method PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion. The aerospace manufacturer and space transportation company is a partner to NASA through its Commercial Crew Program. In this endeavor, SpaceX has developed a number of launch vehicles, some of them used by NASA for its space missions, including the Starlink and Crew Dragon projects.

NASA and SpaceX have recently completed their Crew Dragon Demo 2, which carried astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the ISS and back to Earth, making a successful splashdown in the ocean.

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