Elon Musk And Friends Are Spending Millions To Break Out Of The Matrix

Fans of the Wachowskis’ The Matrix films may remember the trilogy’s final suggestion (as far as critics could tell) that humanity’s struggle to escape its own virtual world may take a very, very long time. Thankfully, a number of tech titans are dedicating millions to finding a way out of the techno-reality they’re creating.

Elon Musk and at least one other future-facing donor are reportedly spending millions to establish escape routes from the indistinguishably realistic and Matrix-like virtual world that awaits us all–or which, according to Musk, may have already arrived. The UK’s Independent noted yesterday that new information from Sam Altman, who heads up the powerful Y Combinator and founded the non-profit OpenAI with Musk, suggests that Musk isn’t the only one pouring cash into a virtual contingency plan.

As a recent New Yorker profile of Altman explains, “people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer.” As a result, a second “tech billionaire” is now putting their money where their (hopefully real) mouth is by paying scientists to find the simulation’s emergency exit.

Why Elon Musk’s Mars Vision Needs ‘Some Real Imagination

When Elon Musk introduced earthlings last month to his vision for cities on Mars, his 90-minute remarks fired up imaginations everywhere—except on Mars. For now.

Kim Stanley Robinson has done as much as anyone to bring the idea of colonizing Mars into the mainstream. The writer entwined knowledge, reasoning, and imagination into his landmark Mars trilogy—Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996).

And to Robinson, Musk’s Martian future looks a lot like other people’s familiar past.

“Musk’s plan,” he said, “is sort of the 1920s science-fiction cliché of the boy who builds a rocket to the moon in his back yard.”

An edited transcript of an interview follows:

A Kink in the Hyperloop

One person who’s confident about the company’s prospects is the author of the Forbes article that put it on the map, Bruce Upbin, who in May joined the company as its vice-president of strategic communications.* Pishevar, who has said that he expects there to be a working passenger hyperloop, somewhere in the world, by 2021, insists that the company is stronger than ever, and he shrugs off the suit, which is ongoing, as a speed bump he doesn’t spend much time thinking about. “I think this idea is bigger than any one person, including myself, and in many ways this is a movement, and anyone that begins to feel like they’re indispensable, or that they’re bigger than the idea, doesn’t fit the culture anymore.” He mentioned famous founder schisms at other tech companies. “The people that we sometimes start our journeys with are not the people we end the journeys with.”

But in Silicon Valley, traditional venture capitalists have for the most part steered clear of the company, finding it too speculative, capital-intensive, and long-term to meet their investing criteria. (An exception, Vinod Khosla, told me he was “only a token investor.”) “Most people thought it was not a scam but a fantasy,” says a seasoned Valley insider who knows the players and who allows that Pishevar’s enthusiasm is genuine: “He believes this bullshit.” The lawsuit hasn’t helped. “No one was taking it seriously. Now it’s like, Who are these clowns?”

“He reminds me of Voltaire,” says Kara Swisher, co-founder of Recode and a fan of Pishevar’s, referring to the philosophe’s ever-sunny Candide.“People get attacked and there’s war, and he’s like, ‘All for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.’ ” As we walked around the neighborhood near the company headquarters, Pishevar stopped to hand a few crumpled bills to a homeless man on a crate, and pointed out a retro typeface on the old Sears building. “When I look at cities now, I don’t see them in the present,” he said. “This is the decaying infrastructure of our existing cities. Years from now, none of this is going to be here. New cities are going to rise.”

Maybe the best thing going for hyperloop the concept — if not Hyperloop the company — is that Musk has not abandoned the idea. At last summer’s Code conference, a month before the lawsuit was filed, he said: “I think if the companies that are trying to make it happen now, if for whatever reason that doesn’t work out, then I think, you know, I’ll, I might do something myself in the future.”

Elon Musk’s House of Gigacards

“Master plan part deux” relies on a bold new sales and marketing strategy as well. Rather than continue hiring thousands of door-to-door and telephone reps to sell solar panels, Tesla intends to push SolarCity’s business through its rapidly growing chain of retail stores by converting them into one-stop shops for environmentally conscious consumers. Instead of buying an electric car only to have it use electricity from a far-off coal plant, a customer would be able to lease or buy solar panels as well as Tesla Powerwall storage units so power is available on cloudy days and at night—or to sell back into the grid. Musk hasn’t provided details on what such a package would cost, but Shah, the Generate Capital executive, thinks Tesla could charge $900 a month on a 20-year contract to get a Tesla, a solar roof, a storage unit, and the right to upgrade to a newer-model Tesla twice during the life of the contract.

Like so much else with Elon Musk, the vision is elegant and ripe with potential. So far, only around one million of the world’s 2.5 billion cars are electric, and only 1 percent of U.S. homes have gone solar. Sales of the Powerwall and a higher-capacity version designed for businesses have been disappointing. Tesla says production problems are to blame, though it’s not clear that fixing those issues will be enough make the Powerwall a cost-effective way to run a home entirely on solar power. But if consumers do decide to buy these soup-to-nuts renewable-power setups, and if solar penetration rises to 15 percent, as it has in Australia in recent years, the overall market opportunity just in the U.S. will be $470 billion, says Shah. And Tesla is also hoping to become a leading provider of equipment and services to large utilities. The company recently announced a deal to provide 20 megawatts of power storage to Southern California Edison for the “largest lithium-ion battery storage project in the world.”

That said, Tesla has yet to show it can build a world-class industrial sales organization. And how many people are really going to go to their local Tesla store and buy in to Musk’s dream? Even Tesla’s affluent true believers might balk, says Gerber. “Elon seems to think that green-minded rich guys like me will decide to put solar on my house, and buy a car or two while they’re at it,” he says. “That’s not how people think.” What’s more, 63 percent of homes in the U.S. are not owned by the resident but by landlords or condo associations, according to the National Multifamily Housing Council. These owners have little incentive to invest in solar and storage.

Possibly the biggest risk is that Musk loses credibility by taking on so many huge challenges at once. While he’s delivered on many bold product promises in the past, his luster could fade with a few well-publicized misses. Tesla is facing criticism for the aggressive way it marketed its Autopilot feature, leading some people to believe they could leave the driving to the car. “They’re pushing hard to be seen as being on the leading edge, and I’m not sure safety is their number-one priority,” says Fisher of Consumer Reports. After a Florida man was killed in May, Tesla updated the cars’ software so that drivers who ignore too many warnings to keep their hands on the wheel won’t be able to reactivate Autopilot for the rest of the trip.

Just how safe Tesla investors are is another matter, judging from the daunting degree of difficulty facing Musk. Many investors think Tesla was assuming appropriate levels of risk with its crisp plan to take on Detroit. Others believe the company’s best opportunity is to become the leading maker of batteries for storing solar power and powering multiple manufacturers’ electric cars. That could be lucrative even if Musk can’t dominate the electric-car or solar-installation businesses. But unless shareholders shoot down the SolarCity merger, Tesla investors will not be taking one of those routes.

Instead, Musk will ask them to go along with something far bolder. His record as an innovator and visionary is beyond question. But the next year or two will determine whether he can do what Edison failed to do: translate his sweeping vision into historic business success.

Leaked Hyperloop One Docs Reveal The Startup Thirsty For Cash As Costs Will Stretch Into Billions

Despite announcing a $50 million investment in mid-October, Hyperloop One plans to raise as much as $250 million in its next funding round early next year and is already seeking tens of millions in new financing, according to an investment document obtained by FORBES. Meanwhile, according to another company document, internal estimates of the cost of Hyperloop One projects could greatly exceed predictions from the concept’s architect, billionaire tech industrialist Elon Musk.

The documents paint a picture of an “aggressive” expansion plan at Hyperloop One, the startup established by investor Shervin Pishevar, which has raised $160 million so far and is attempting to bring Musk’s vision to reality. Hyperloop’s One’s expansion plans reveal widely varying projected costs for systems that are expected to carry freight by 2020 and passengers by 2021. The company is also forecasting sky-high profit margins for itself and its partners by 2030, according to one of the documents.

Elon Musk’s Wild Ride

Elon Musk recently took the stage in Guadalajara, Mexico, for the performance he’s waited a lifetime to give. Sporting a new, oddly manicured mustache, Musk did his best shy Tony Stark impersonation, informing a crowd of space enthusiasts that, yes, he does plan to colonize Mars. Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, will send thousands of rockets and people to the Red Planet—perhaps within the decade and perhaps at a cost of just $10 billion. Some of the astronauts will die as part of the experiment. Others will live out their days in … well, Musk was not very specific on that.

Musk continues to befuddle planet earth. He’s part techno messiah—a being sent here from the future to save mankind from itself—and part charlatan—a slick businessman dragging foolish investors along on ever grander, cash-burning bets. Every time one of his companies stumbles, Musk seems to have another spectacular thing to announce—a new mode of transportation, the space internet, or a Martian colony—to thrill and confuse. Is Musk trying to distract us from the troubling aspects of his companies, or are the doubters just the shortsighted, risk-averse people holding us all back from a fantastic future?

Elon Musk is pushing the Tesla-SolarCity merger through despite naysayers and lawsuits

In an SEC form filed on Oct. 7, Elon Musk indicated that the company “is currently planning to raise additional funds by the end of this year, including through potential equity or debt offerings, subject to market conditions and recognizing that Tesla cannot be certain that additional funds would be available to it on favorable terms or at all.”

But in a tweet on Sunday, Musk walked back that statement and said neither SolarCity nor Tesla will have to raise equity or debt in either the end of this year or in the first quarter of 2017. In a revised form, filed on Oct. 11, the company changed the language to “Tesla may raise funds in the future, including through potential equity or debt offering.”

Stop Elon From Failing Again