I love to play boardgames and card games with my pamangkins. For this weekend, I brought home a game called “Truth or Fib”.
What happens is during your turn, you are asked a question. You throw a die if you’re going to answer the question truthfully or make up a story (no one sees the die except you since it's inside a canister). After you give your answer, the other players would guess and bet if what you answered was truth or fib. If the players guessed correctly, they double whatever chips they’ve bet. If they guessed wrongly, they lose the chips. Whoever earns 21 worth of chips first is declared the winner.
Here's a sample question - the first question I picked for a niece –
Tell me about something that happened during a rainy day.
My niece thought carefully and answered –
One rainy day, I was with Ate .... and while walking in the rain..... uhmmm.... we saw a rain monster!
Hahahaha….. Fib!!! This game should be easy I thought.
So I coached my niece that when she tells a fib, the situation should be at least plausible.
Later on in the game, here’s another question I picked for her –
Tell me about an event that made you extremely happy.
She goes –
There was a parents’ meeting in school and the teachers said that the class with the most number of parents who would attend the meeting will win, and the prize is hamburgers for everyone. Our class won and we’ll get our hamburgers on Nov. 3. <big grin>
There’s no doubt, she’s telling the truth. It’s very detailed! Plus, I know she loves food! And she has a big grin on her face!
So I placed the maximum number of chips allowed and bet on Truth, while my other niece (her older sister) placed her bet on Fib.
Her answer? Fib!
How can that be a Fib I argued?!
Then she goes – well, it’s true that our class won and we’ll get hamburgers as prizes.
So how can you NOT be happy if you won and you’ll get free hamburgers?! I asked.
Then she answered – I’m happy that we won, but not extremely happy because we’ll only get the hamburgers on Nov 3!
Hahahahaha…..
I lost 3 out of 3 games. And I thought the game was pretty easy. Wahahaha....
About "Splashes": Every now and then, I have random discoveries and learnings but they are too short for a blogpost or too unrelated to put together, thus, I never get around writing about them. "Splashes" are a compilation of my random discoveries and learnings. :)
1. Mind over Medicine. A friend was diagnosed with a Stage 4 Lung Cancer in April. He had a mass in his lungs measuring over 4cm in diameter. He isn't a smoker nor is he exposed to second-hand smoke. But to cut the story short, in July, a miracle happened. The mass disappeared. His CT Scan was all clear.
He attributes his healing to several things - on top of his list is his faith in God. The others - making right with others, daily meditation on God's words, eating healthy, freeing your mind from stress, laughter, and prayers from loved ones.
Last week, we met up and he was bringing the book I gave him when he was sick. "Mind over Medicine: Scientific Proof that You can Heal Yourself" by Dr. Lissa Rankin. He said that he lent the book to someone who was recently diagnosed with lung cancer too.
He told me that the book helped him develop the right mindset as he was coping with cancer.
I haven't actually read the book yet but what made me buy it was after reading the book's description and browsing through some pages, the book shows scientific proof of how people, even those at terminal stages or expected to die, got healed. Some case studies cited in the book even include instant healing like the cases of paralytics being able to suddenly walk in Lourdes.
Whether you're a believer or not, it's hard to argue with scientific proof, so I thought the book would be a good read for someone undergoing some health issues.
2. The Martian. I love this movie even if I don't really understand most of the scientific stuff. Haha... But the reason I like it is it was just amazing how the protagonist, Mark Watney (Matt Damon), coped with his hopeless situation. He was left in Mars (and no one knows he is alive), he didn't have any way to communicate with NASA, he had limited food supply and the next batch of astronauts who will come to Mars is still in 3 years' time! Waaa....
To make it even worse, when the next mission lands in Mars in 3 years, it will be in a spot that is far away from Watney's station. It would take approximately 50 days to travel by rover but his rover's battery could only run for a few hours. How hopeless can his situation get?! If you were in Watney's position, what would you have done? Get angry that your team left you behind? Sulk? Just live until the food supplies last? Not Watney. After going through his emotions, he made a conscious decision that he wanted to live. He won't give up. What did he do? He systematically counted his food supply to determine how long it would last - approximately 1 year's worth. Then, he started figuring out a way to grow food while in Mars so he can produce 2 more years' worth of food to keep himself alive until the next mission arrives in Mars. But staying alive isn't enough if he can't get to the spot where the mission would land in 3 years so he also started figuring out a way on how to modify his rover so that he could cover more distance every day. Day in and day out, he methodically did what he needed to do. And even when problems continued cropping up, Watney just kept on methodically solving them one step at a time - all alone in Mars. Amazing life lessons we could apply right here on Earth!
So the next time you have a problem, think and just do it like Watney. :)
During a trip to New Jersey in 2008, my friends who were based there, drove me to Rhode Island to see the Newport Mansions - summer homes of the ultra rich from 1890s until about 1950s. I was overwhelmed not just by the sheer size of the estates but the opulence of the interiors. One of the mansions which struck me was called "The Breakers" (owned by the Vanderbilt Family). According to our tour guide, this mansion was built in 1895 to the tune of USD7M. And if you were to translate the cost of the mansion to today's equivalent, he said, the figure would be around USD350M. That's more than Php16 Billion! Whoa...
The Breakers - summer home of the Vanderbilts
The mansion is called "The Breakers" because the mansion is by the sea, facing the Atlantic Ocean. From the balcony of the mansion, you could see and hear the waves hitting the breakwater. At that time, I wasn't familiar with the ancestry of the Vanderbilt family so even if the tour guide rattled off all the names of the people who lived there, I was totally clueless. Haha... But what I clearly remember was we went to a room of one of the Vanderbilt children who lived there and the tour guide said that he is Anderson Cooper's grandfather (Cooper is a 6th generation Vanderbilt). At least I recognized one but the funny thing is, I never knew Cooper was a Vanderbilt until that time! Haha.... Anyway, my photo above doesn't really show how big the mansion is but here are photos I got online -
The house covers 1 acre out of the 13-acre estate!
It has 5 floors totaling about 175,000 sqm in floor area.
It has 27 fireplaces and 70+ rooms - 33 rooms of which are for servants alone. (Our tour guide said, at the time the owners lived there, they had 40 servants. Twenty servants for indoor and twenty servants for outdoor. During the tour, I actually asked more questions about the servants than the owners. I was interested to know more about their lives because I could relate better to them. Haha...)
It was built by 2,000 laborers, artisans and artists, working during the day and at night, for 3 years.
Other memorable things I saw inside the house -
There's a separate room in the kitchen that is dedicated for plating the food.
There's also a special section in the kitchen just for cutting and arranging flowers as the servants needed to supply the rooms with fresh flowers everyday.
There's a vault in the kitchen - as big as a bank's vault - where silverware is stored.
There are 2 sets of taps in bath tubs - 1 for freshwater and 1 for saltwater.
Lights are dual-powered - by electricity and gas because power outages were common at that time.
And the interiors were just, as I said, opulent. Some sections of the mansion have 22 carat gold embossing. Most of the installations, furniture and fixtures in The Breakers were taken from palaces and chateaus in Europe. Check out these photos I got online -
Now, weeks ago, while browsing in Amazon, I chanced upon a book entitled "Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt" by Arthur T. Vanderbilt II. Because "The Breakers" fascinated me years ago, I ended up getting the book. The book talks about the rise and fall of the Vanderbilt family starting from its patriarch, Cornelius Vanderbilt (aka The Commodore), up to his great-grandchildren. I'll write more about the core of the book when I have the time, but for this post, I'll zero in on The Breakers. Reading it gave me a richer history of the house and the family who lived in it. The Breakers is owned by The Commodore's favorite grandson who was named after the Commodore himself - Cornelius Vanderbilt II. Cornelius II is the eldest son of William, the eldest son of the Commodore, which makes him the head of House of the Vanderbilts after his grandfather and father passed away. He was married to Alice Claypool Gwynne.
Cornelius II and Alice had 7 kids - Alice (who passed away when she was 5), William Henry “Bill” (who died of typhoon fever while a junior at Yale University in 1892), Neily (Cornelius III), Gertrude, Alfred, Reginald and Gladys.
In 1895, the same year when The Breakers was completed, Cornelius and Alice threw a coming-out party for their daughter, Gertrude, on her 21st birthday. It was held in the mansion, attended by 300 pax. Her parents wanted to find a suitable partner for Gertrude and even invited reporters to the event. A feature story on Gertrude came out which read -
Miss Gertrude Vanderbilt, the richest prospective heiress in America, is still a girl in skirts to her shoe tops. Her father’s fabulous wealth is estimated at $150,000,000…. Her portion of the estate will hardly be less than $20,000,000. It must be a pleasant sensation to live in a $7,000,000 house and to have most of the good things of life without even the trouble of wishing for them. This is the goodly heritage of Miss Gertrude Vanderbilt.
If the journalist thought it was a pleasant sensation to live in a USD7M house, it surely wasn't a pleasant sensation to be talked about that way. :(
Since the book is peppered with excerpts from the diaries of Vanderbilt members, you'll get an idea of their thoughts and feelings. I actually love how raw and honest their journal entries were. Here's one from Gertrude's journals -
"...There were lots of things I could not do simply because I was Miss Vanderbilt. That I should have to go through life being pointed at, having my actions talked about, seemed too hard. That I should be courted and made a friend of simply because I was who I was, was unbearable to me. I longed to be someone else, to be liked only for myself, to live quietly and happily without the burden that goes with riches. Of course time made all this easier to bear, and when I was eighteen I felt as if I could hold my head up under it, and that I would act my part well for God had put me there, just where I was, and if He had not meant me to have strength to go through He would never have put me where I was..."
If the parents worked hard to entice Gertrude to getting married, they exerted all efforts to stop Gertrude’s older brother, Neily (Cornelius III), from marrying Grace Wilson, whom they thought wasn't suitable for their son.
On the morning of the wedding of Neily and Grace, on June 18, 1896, Neily had an attack of acute rheumatism. The doctors sent a certification to the newspapers that he is confined to his bed and cannot safely leave his room. The wedding was postponed since the groom can’t make it.
Cornelius and Neily continued to argue; if Neily marries Grace, Cornelius threatened to disinherit him. Much later that day, when the doctor went to the house to discuss Neily’s rheumatism with Cornelius, the doctor thought that Cornelius himself looked sick. Cornelius suddenly collapsed and suffered a massive stroke. He was completely paralyzed on his right side, unable to speak. (I remember the tour guide mentioning that that patriarch of the family who owns The Breakers got to enjoy the mansion for 1 year only before he suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed).
Anyway, against his dad's wishes and even after his dad's stroke, Neily still married Grace. But not a member of the immediate Vanderbilt family came to the wedding.
Back at The Breakers, a wedding did take place there that same year - on August 25, 1896 - that of Neily’s younger brother, Alfred. All were invited except for Neily and Grace.
Three years later, on Sept 11, 1899, Cornelius felt better about his health and decided to leave The Breakers for New York with the intention of attending board meetings of their various railroad companies. The next morning in New York, Cornelius suffered a massive heart attack and passed away due to cerebral hemorrhage. He was 55.
When it was time to read Cornelius’ will, the family assembled at the great stone fireplace in the library of The Breakers. The fireplace came from a 16th century chateau in France that cost USD75,000 in 1895 (about USD82.6M in today's money).
The fireplace had an inscription in archaic French which translates to:
Little do I care for riches, and do not miss them, since only wisdom prevails in the end. (I remember our tour guide pointing to the inscription on the white marble during the tour and she even made a comment on how ironic it was for a last to be read in that spot.)
In his last will, Cornelius left The Breakers with Alice, plus 2 other family mansions in New York (one of which is where Bergdorf Goodman now stands in New York).
Gertrude, Alfred, Reginald and Gladys shared a USD20M trust fund (about USD17.6B in today's money), and each of them received USD5M outright (about USD4.4B in today's money).
Neily, for going against his father’s will in marrying Grace, got the least with a trust of USD1 million (about USD880M in today's money), and USD500,000 outright (about USD440M in today's money). It looks small compared to his siblings but hey, that’s still over USD1B in today’s money!
(Btw, the will of Cornelius was dated June 18, 1896 - the date of Neily and Grace's wedding and the day the father and son argued. It's heartbreaking that the father-son relationship was strained because they didn't mutually agree on something. Based on the book, the two were never able to patch things up until the death of Cornelius. Sigh...)
Usually in Vanderbilt wills, the eldest son gets the most because the residuary estate goes to him. But in this case, Cornelius gave the residuary estate to Alfred (not to Neily, the eldest son) which was worth over USD42M (about USD37B in today's money). Alfred also inherited the Commodore’s portrait, bust and gold congressional medal which are always passed on to the new head of the House of Vanderbilt, officially making Alfred the new head of the dynasty.
Unfortunately, Alfred died on May 7, 1915, at age 37. He was aboard RMS Lusitania bound for Liverpool when it got torpedoed and sank. He and his valet helped passengers to get into lifeboats. Alfred promised a young mother with a baby that he would look for an extra life vest for her but there wasn’t any life vest available so he offered his own life vest even if he knew he couldn’t swim. Alfred died a hero. :) Because of Alfred's tragic death, Reggie, the youngest son of Cornelius and Alice, became the new head of the House of Vanderbilt.
Reggie got married in 1912, divorced in 1919, and in 1922, at age 42, met 17-year old Gloria Morgan. Four days after they had met, Reggie asked Gloria to marry him. Reggie disclosed to Gloria that he had already squandered all his fortune totaling USD13Million (about USD3.04B in today's money). He didn't have any big house, yacht, art collection ... nothing. Here’s what Reggie told Gloria:
“Most of the inheritance left to me outright by my father has long since gone. I now derive my income from a five-million-dollar trust, which, after my death, must go to Cathleen and any other children I might have. And there may well not be other children. The chances are you would be a Mrs. Vanderbilt with no money. Do you understand exactly what I am saying to you?”
“As my wife, you will have a big name but little money to live up to it. I’ve spent every cent of my personal fortune…. As long as I live, you will be taken care of, but I am an ill man. Should I die, the $5,000,000 trust fund goes to my daughter by my former wife, Cathleen. Your only chance of financial security in the future would be to have a child who would then share the trust fund with Cathleen. Your chance of having a child by me is one of those 100 to 1 shots, for my doctor doubts that I can become a father again.”
But Gloria still married Reginald. And in 1924, Gloria gave birth to their daughter whom they named Gloria or who was known as "Little Gloria" when she was a child. Little Gloria happens to be Anderson Cooper’s mom. Still alive today at age 91. :)
Gloria and Reggie Vanderbilt with Little Gloria (Source)
I did further reading online on what happened to The Breakers and apparently, when Alice, the matriarch passed away in 1934, she passed on The Breakers to Gladys Vanderbilt Szaparys, her youngest daughter. In 1948, Gladys leased The Breakers to The Preservation Society of Newport County for USD1/year but continued to maintain an apartment in the 3rd floor of The Breakers until her death in 1965.
In 1972, The Preservation Society of Newport County purchased The Breakers for USD365,000 (about USD4.94M in today's money) from Glady's heirs, but two of Gladys' children, Gladys (named after after her) and Paul, still maintains an apartment at the 3rd floor of The Breakers. I do recall our tour guide mentioning that the tour only covers the first 2 floors because some of the great-grandchildren still use a section in the upper floors during the summer.
The latest news I could dig up about The Breakers is dated June 2015 from New York Post. It talks about a feud between the The Preservation Society and the Vanderbilt heirs over The Preservation Society's plan to build a visitor center within the The Breakers grounds which the Vanderbilts and preservationists are strongly against.
I like how one of Cornelius and Alice's great-grandchildren, Paul, who still lives at The Breakers, said in the New York Post article -
"The Breakers was a house. It's not just a mansion, a museum. Children played there. People got sick there. All the things that families undergo happened there. We think that people who visit there are interested in that aspect."
I do hope the feud gets peacefully settled. :)
After finishing the book, I am now interested to know more about (Little) Gloria Vanderbilt's life story (Anderson's mom). It's one interesting story on its own - when she was a child, she was fought over. Her custody trial was one of the most sensationalized in the US. But more than the litigation, I am more interested to know how she was able recover from the trauma of her difficult childhood, successfully carve a name for herself as an artist, fashion designer and author, and gracefully dealt with his son's suicide (Anderson's older brother). I saw in Amazon that Gloria and Anderson will launch a book next year (to be released on May 3, 2016) entitled "The Rainbow Comes and Goes: And Other Life Lessons I Learned from My Mom". I already pre-ordered. :)
Anyway, if you're visiting New Jersey and you have a day to spare, make sure to include Rhode Island in your itinerary. Some mansions are open on certain days only so make sure to check the schedule of the mansions you want to visit. Here's the official website - http://www.newportmansions.org/
(P.S. In computing the equivalent USD figures of the Vanderbilt's wealth in today's money, I used the calculator at measuringworth.com.)
The thought of colonizing a planet used to be pure fantasy… just a theme for sci-fi movies and comic books. But guess what? There’s a real person who’s stated life purpose is to turn humans into space colonizers. Elon Musk. One of the richest men the world with a net worth of USD12B as of September 2015 based on Forbes.
With the innovations Musk's companies have produced, Musk is the closest to a real-life Tony Stark. He has revolutionized the aerospace, automotive and solar industries like no one had since the Wright Brothers.
Reading "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future" by Ashlee Vance gave me peek into Musk's life story.
So who is Musk? What is his life story?
He’s the man behind SpaceX, a company that builds affordable rockets in the US. Why did he focus on affordability? Simply put, his analogy was why build a Ferrari for every launch when it was was possible that a Honda Accord might do the trick?
SpaceX sends a rocket up about once a month, carrying satellites for companies and nations and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). Its USD60 million per launch cost is much less than Europe’s, Japan’s, even Russians' and the Chinese. (One player for example charges USD380 million per flight.)
In November 2012, just a few months after it started shipping, the Model S was named Motor Trend’s Car of the Year out-beating eleven other vehicles from companies such as Porsche, BMW, Lexus, and Subaru in terms of raw speed, mileage, handling, and storage space. And it could be recharged for free at Tesla’s stations located in highways across the US.
Tesla had transformed the car into a gadget—a device that actually got better after you bought it. While owners sleep, Tesla’s engineers tap into the car via internet connection and download software updates. How cool is that?!
Several months later, Consumer Reports gave the Model S its highest car rating in history—99 out of 100—while proclaiming that it was likely the best car ever built. The Model S was not just the best electric car; it was best car, period, and the car people desired.
America had not seen a successful car company since Chrysler emerged in 1925. One year after the Model S went on sale, Tesla had posted a profit, hit $562 million in quarterly revenue, raised its sales forecast, and become as valuable as Mazda Motor.
In October 2014, Musk unveiled a supercharged version of the Model S with two motors—one in the front and one in the back. It could go zero to 60 in 3.2 seconds. The company had turned a sedan into a supercar.
Musk isn’t technically the original founder of Tesla but he just bought into the company in the early stages (incorporated in 2003, the original founders were Eberhard and Tarpenning and they named it Tesla Motors after Nikola Tesla, the inventor and electric motor pioneer). But as what people say, without Musk’s money, marketing savvy, engineering ingenuity, and leadership, the innovation may not have unfolded the way as it did.
When Musk accomplished these 2 feats - SpaceX and Tesla - analysts started comparing him to Steve Jobs who had successfully claimed similar achievements in two different industries (a new Apple product hit + a blockbuster Pixar movie in the same year). In Musk’s case, there was even a third feat - SolarCity - started in 2006, it is now the largest installer and financier of solar panels for consumers and businesses. In 2014, SolarCity was valued at close to $7 billion. Whoa...
And do you know what made Musk get into solar energy? It just made sense to him since enough solar energy hits the Earth’s surface in about an hour to equal a year’s worth of worldwide energy consumption from all sources put together.
Brilliant mind. It makes one curious how his mind is wired. And why ordinary mortals like us don’t have thoughts like that. Hahaha….
Anyway, before telling you how his mind wired, some may remember Musk in his early tech successes. In 1995, he had a company called Zip2 (described as a primitive Google Maps combined with Yelp) which Compaq ended buying in 1999 for USD307M (where Musk got USD22M).
His next startup was a payment solution called X.com but he ended up buying another payment startup called Paypal to consolidate with X.com (again, he wasn’t the original founder of PayPal; he just bought into it). eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for USD1.5B and being the biggest shareholder, Musk got a lot and that’s what he used to initially fund SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity. But it wasn’t an easy ride as most of his companies took several years to perfect the inventions and start making money.
So what makes Musk special? What was his growing up years like that made him what he is today?
Musk was born in South Africa in 1971 (his grandparents and parents were born in Canada but they moved to South Africa).
When he was a kid, his parents thought he was deaf because when people spoke to him, he seemed to be in trance and had a distant look in his eyes. But according to Musk, in those trance-like moments, he was able to concentrate on a single task ... he could see images in his mind’s eye with a clarity like an engineering drawing produced by computer software. Wow....
Musk also loved to read. After school, he would go to the bookstore and stay there from 2pm to 6pm to read. When he ran out of books to read at the library (around 3rd or 4th grade), he started to read Encyclopedia Britannica. And since he had a photographic memory, he remembered a lot of facts. At the dinner table, when one of his siblings would wonder aloud about the distance from Earth to the Moon, Musk would say the exact measurement at perigee and apogee. (I can’t even remember these terms! Wahaha…)
Musk was 10 when he saw a computer for the first time in a mall and got awed, and soon got his own computer. At 12, he designed a video game about alien space fighters he called Blastar and which was featured on a trade publication in South Africa.
(Side note: His gift on being able to study something new and put all the details together is very much still there. When SpaceX was just starting, Musk and team went to Russia to buy a rocket but the sellers wouldn’t budge in to the price he wants. He told his team that they could just build their own rocket and presented a document detailing the costs of the materials needed to build, assemble, and launch a rocket! Wow...)
Growing in South Africa, Musk was exposed to apartheid. He was bullied too - very badly. He mentioned in the book that he even got a nose job when he was an adult to repair the damage bullying did to his face.
His classmates in South Africa remember Musk as likable and quiet but not considered as one of the smartest. But the reason for this was Musk didn’t have interest in subjects that didn’t make sense to him where he was ok with just getting a passing grade. But for subjects like like physics and computers which he found important and useful, he got high grades. In his own words:
There needs to be a reason for a grade. I’d rather play video games, write software, and read books than try and get an A if there’s no point in getting an A. I can remember failing subjects in like fourth and fifth grade. Then, my mother’s boyfriend told me I’d be held back if I didn’t pass. I didn’t actually know you had to pass the subjects to move to the next grade. I got the best grades in class after that.
At 17, Musk left South Africa for Canada. He spent the next year working a series of odd jobs around Canada like tending vegetables, shoveling out grain bins and cleaning the boiler room of a lumber mill.
One activity which Musk likes to do together with his brother is to read the newspaper and identify interesting people they would like to meet. They would cold-call these people to ask if they were available to have lunch. Among those that they called was a top executive at a bank. It took six months to get a sked with this bank executive but the 2 made an impression that this bank executive ended up offering Musk a summer internship at the bank and became his trusted advisor. His exposure during his internship greatly influenced him to do his tech startups (Zip2 and X.com) and the rest is history.
That is Musk's life story in less than 2,000 words. :)
So what else is in Musk’s pipeline other than turning humans into an interplanetary species?
The latest software update of Model S gives the car autopilot functions. The car has radar to detect objects and warn of possible collisions and could guide itself via GPS. “Later, you will be able to summon the car,” Musk said. “It will come to wherever you are." Wow. Tesla’s third-generation car, or the Model 3, due out in 2017, is expected to be priced at around USD35,000 - a milestone that would officially make electric cars truly mainstream. Tesla has also begun modeling a type of submarine car that could transition from road to water. Double wow. SpaceX, on the other hand, is developing reusable rockets. Instead of the conventional disposable rockets which break apart and crash into the sea, SpaceX is testing rockets that can return to Earth on a floating pad at sea or precisely land back at their original launchpad. Imagine, rockets that can be used over and over again for trips to space (just like planes!). Reusable rockets are expected to further cut prices to at least 1/10 versus its rivals. Amazing.
Musk also unveiled something he called Hyperloop – a new mode of hi-speed transportation via cars in pods inside a tube. You might wondering how fast is fast when he says hi-speed? The Hyperloop could take you from LA to SFO in 35 minutes! He explained that the pods would float on a bed of air produced by skis at their base. Each pod would be thrust forward by an electromagnetic pulse, and motors placed throughout the tube would give the pods added boosts as needed. These mechanisms could keep the pods going at 800 mph. And it's going to be solar-powered. Mind-blowing, right?!
I hope I get a chance to visit SpaceX, the Tesla factory or even the Hyperloop test site and see all the brilliant engineers of Musk working on these mind-blowing inventions. The things which Musk's companies have developed are the kind of things we used to see only in fictional movies and books. And once upon a time, a kid in South Africa read about them too. But this kid, unlike us ordinary mortals, didn't just stop at the pure enjoyment of reading about them. He was able to figure out how to make them happen. :)
