Elon Musk Speech

Nathan Breckenridge

Shannon Skelton

Introduction to Speech

27 April 2014

Elon Musk

Nathan Breckenridge

        What if I told you that the movie character, Tony Stark, from the 2008 “Ironman” film was modeled after a real person?  It turns out the depiction was based on a man named Elon Musk and he’s just as fascinating as a movie character. Elon was ranked as one of the top 100 most influential people by Time’s magazine and Forbes ranked him the 47th most powerful person in the world. Elon Musk describes himself as an engineer and has many passions but his most successful feats regard the electric car and rockets. Elon Musk is a visionary, persistent in his work, and extremely charitable. Through Elon Musk’s many inventions and bright ideas, he has changed the technology and space industries in a revolutionary way.

        Like most visionaries, Musk is a little eccentric and has an interesting life story. Elon’s amazing life started in Pretoria, South Africa. Musk grew up with his mother, father and five brothers. Like his siblings Musk is of average height and fills out his suit that he sports daily. He has a defined jaw line, short brown hair, and thin eyebrows atop squinting dark blue eyes (imagery). His family and brothers encouraged him to go to Canada and to the Queens School of Business. After spending a few years there, he moved to America and earned a degree in economics at the University of Pennsylvania. By moving to America, Musk felt that he could make all of his big dreams come true. One of his biggest dreams was to cut down on the growing carbon emissions and greenhouse gases. We’ve grown up in a time where guzzling black escalades suck through 30 gallons of gas without considering the detrimental effects it could have on the environment (concrete words). This is a major environmental issue of the 21st century and Musk made it his goal to help fix this problem. He founded Tesla, an automobile company that utilizes clean energy and electric power to reduce carbon emissions from gasoline powered engines. In 2002, Musk was the largest shareholder of PayPal and made 22 million dollars after the company became more popular. Instead of retiring after making a fortune through Internet ventures, Elon Musk continues to invest in risky industries such as space exploration. His plans of changing the future are as ample as the stars in the sky (simile).