Colonising Mars

Musk’s SpaceX enterprise was founded with the intention of making space travel affordable. By extension, Musk has stated that he hopes human beings will one day become a “multi-planetary species”. At the 68th International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide last September, Musk said he hopes to send cargo ships to the Red Planet within the next five years, with humans settling by 2024.

A recovery vehicle and a test sled sit on rails after a test at the Hyperloop site north of Las Vegas, Nevada. Photograph: David Becker/Getty Images

Travelling at 700mph underground

The Hyperloop high-speed train system has been dubbed a “cross between a Concorde, a railgun, and an air hockey table” by Musk, and will allow passengers to travel at over 700mph. Musk expects that the two routes he has so far proposed, Los Angeles to San Francisco and New York City to Washington DC, should take no longer than 30 minutes on a Hyperloop train.

Epic proportions: Tesla’s Gigafactory 1 near Sparks, Nevada. Photograph: Teslarati.com

Powering the world

Nicknamed the “alien dreadnought” by Musk, Tesla’s Gigafactory 1 is a huge battery factory in the middle of the Nevada desert. It is being constructed with the ambitious objectives of becoming the largest building in the world by footprint, at 540,000 sq m (5.8m sq ft), as well as producing almost the equivalent of the world’s entire current output of lithium-ion batteries.

Thinking ahead: Neuralink aim to explore the brain-computer interface. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

To turbocharge brains

Elon Musk is a founding member of Neuralink, a company that intends to be a “merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence” in developing technology to connect computers to our brains. The brain-computer interface (BCI) technology could be used for cognitive enhancement, ranging from improving memory and decision-making abilities to staving off the symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

An interesting notion: the Boring Company’s flamethrowers. Photograph: Teslarati.com

Playing with fire

Despite widespread condemnation, Elon Musk’s Boring Company sold 20,000 flamethrowers at $500 each on preorder in January. The initiative saw Musk raise $10m in sales but some customers may be left out in the cold should customs authorities thwart the trade of the offensive weapons when they are due to be shipped out in the spring.