Back in the 90’s when people were gradually starting to digest the massive www (world wide web), few brilliant minds were busy molding it for the future generations to come. That was the time when Larry Page with Sergey Brin first introduced us to Google search, in 1998.
Seemingly, he was not the only billionaire who ideated about creating a search engine back in the day. Even before Yahoo, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote a thesis in 1993 on a Google-like search engine for his Wharton degree.
In a recently surfaced 2-min video, Elon Musk responds to few questions about his leaps from one venture to another. When asked about his long old thesis on Google, Musk replies, “We could have built something similar to Google twenty years ago.”
He goes on saying that he worked on three independent things namely ultra-capacitors, solar panels, and the “Google thing.”
As you may already know, Musk-owned Tesla is currently doing phenomenal in the electric vehicles. Whereas on the other hand, SolarCity, a Tesla subsidiary company, is gaining up fast on the solar panel manufacturers.
While we weren’t able to get our hands on the thesis online, a wild guess is it could’ve been similar to Page Rank algorithm since every major search engine in that timeline was working on the same technology.
One could argue that if Elon Musk would have built a web page search engine rather than satellites, Sundar Pichai and others like him might have stepped down from the throne. Perhaps, Verizon would have bought a sidelined Google instead of Yahoo. Nevertheless, no one actually knows what big idea Elon Musk might have next in mind. But now that people are talking about it, maybe Elon Musk resurfaces his rusting project of a Google-like search engine.
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