Everyone's intensely curious about Elon Musk: eager to sense the mind behind the inventor who has eclipsed his own Hollywood superhero and action figure; to understand the entrepreneur who founded Tesla, Solar City, and SpaceX, companies that have begun to disrupt whole industries; and to glimpse the vision whose success has caused lazy journalists to stop writing that "he's firing on all cylinders" - because that's just too last century.
In an epoch struggling with global energy problems, he's stepped confidently upon the world stage and begun to help reshape the future. In this May 19th Tedtalk, Musk thoughtfully answered wide ranging questions from Chris Anderson, the former Editor of Wired magazine and current cofounder of 3DRobotics, a drone manufacturing company.
The conversation takes off with Tesla and the hyper-modern factory that produces the Model S sedan, which just earned a perfect score in crash safety tests, then shifts to Solar City's disruption of the 100 year old, centralized utility industry, and picks up speed with SpaceX, the world's first private company to fly cargo to the International Space Station.
Taking these rapidly cascading developments in stride is guy whose Tesla stock just blasted off past $150 - gaining 371% this year alone - so that his young electric vehicle company now commands half of the value of General Motors. No word yet whether Bill Gates is suffering from tech icon envy.