Elon Musk’s College-Day Predictions Of Things To Change The World

Elon Musk thought about several things that would change the world when he was much younger.

The now-Tesla and SpaceX CEO attended the University of Pennsylvania to study physics and economics, but in 1992, transferred to The Warton School on scholarship after two years of studying at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, according to the book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance.

Musk divulged five things he thought, back when he was in college, that would change the world during the Third Row Tesla podcast, which was cited in a recent CNBC feature. Here are some of them.

The internet

Musk already knew that the internet would completely change the way the world would work. “I would not regard this as a profound insight but rather an obvious one,” he said.

He drew comparisons between the internet and human nervous system, stating, “If you didn’t have a nervous system, you wouldn’t know what’s going on.” He detailed how your fingers would not be able to do anything and the only way would be to “do it by diffusion.”

“The way information used to work was by diffusion,” he explained. Musk went to describe how a person would have to ring up another person or write them a letter to relay information, which he noted as an “extremely slow diffusion.”

He praised the internet’s ability to give anyone access to information instantly, even if they were in a remote location. “You have access to all of humanity’s information if you got a link to the internet,” he said in the podcast.

Multi-planetary life

Musk believed that “making life multi-planetary and making consciousness multi-planetary” would change the world.


He always had a fascination with sci-fi books and hoped to “build spaceships to extend the human species’s reach,” according to the book Elon Musk.

So, it’s no surprise that he successfully launched two NASA astronauts to space this year. The SpaceX CEO also hopes to send humans to Mars in the future.

Altering human genetics

Musk also believed that altering human genetics would be a thing in the future. “It will become normal, I think, to change the human genome for getting rid of diseases or propensity to various diseases,” Musk predicted on the podcast. “That’s going to be like the first thing you’d want to be headed out.”

He explained how when someone dies of cancer at the age of 55, they might prefer to make changes and extend the life expectancy of humans. “I’m not arguing for or against it,” Musk added. “I’m just saying it’s more likely to come than not down the road.”