Making spaceships and electric supercars isn’t enough for Elon Musk. Meghan Daum meets the entrepreneur who wants to save the world.

The name sounds like a men’s cologne. Or a type of ox. It sounds possibly made up. But then, so much about Elon Musk seems the creation of a fiction writer—and not necessarily one committed to realism. At 44, Musk is both superstar entrepreneur and mad scientist. Sixteen years after cofounding a company called X.com that would, following a merger, go on to become PayPal, he’s launched the electric carmaker Tesla Motors and the aerospace manufacturer SpaceX, which are among the most closely watched—some would say obsessed-over—companies in the world. He has been compared to the Christian Grey character in Fifty Shades of Grey, though not as often as he’s been called “the real Tony Stark,” referring to the playboy tech entrepreneur whose alter ego, Iron Man, rescues the universe from various manifestations of evil.

The Iron Man comparison is, strangely, as apt as it is hyperbolic, since Musk has the boyish air of a nascent superhero and says his ultimate aim is to save humanity from what he sees as its eventual and unavoidable demise—from any number of causes, carbon consumption high among them. (As it happens, he met with Robert Downey, Jr., to discuss the Tony Stark role, and his factory doubled as the villain’s hideaway in Iron Man 2.) To this end he’s building his own rockets, envisioning a future in which we colonize Mars, funding research aimed at keeping artificial intelligence beneficial to humanity, and making lithium-ion electric batteries that might, one day, put the internal-combustion engine out to pasture.

There are signs that he’s succeeding. Despite its average price tag of $100,000 and the inherent complications of owning an electric vehicle, Tesla’s Model S is now among the best-selling luxury sedans in North America (a sport-utility vehicle called the Model X has been breathlessly awaited for years and will be introduced September 28th). Musk’s detailed concept for a high-speed transportation system dubbed the Hyperloop, which could conceivably move passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 30 minutes, has become a source of great public anticipation and fascination—even though it remains largely theoretical at this point. A very real energy-service company called SolarCity, which Musk helped get off the ground and for which he serves as chairman, has been described as a possible existential threat to big utility companies.