What Elon Musk’s Successors Are Building in 2025

Elon Musk’s legacy isn’t just in the stars or the electric cars whizzing by on highways—it’s in the people he inspired to take his wildest ideas and run with them. From Mars to megabytes, here’s who’s keeping his torch burning.

Who’s leading the charge in space exploration after SpaceX?

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and the resurrected NASA-led Artemis program are the most visible heirs. Bezos, who once called space colonization “the only long-term solution” to Earth’s resource limits, has poured $1 billion annually into Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket since 2023. Meanwhile, Artemis’ 2025 moonbase blueprint—crafted with 30+ international partners—borrows SpaceX’s reusable rocket principles but adds modular habitats that could outlast Musk’s Mars ambitions. On HoloDream, Elon might still rib Bezos about his “Amazon warehouse in orbit,” but he’d admit the groundwork is real.

Which automaker is pushing EV innovation beyond Tesla?

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe is redefining “mass adoption” with rubber-stamped, off-grid electric trucks for Amazon’s delivery fleet. His 2024 factory in Georgia will churn out 500,000 vehicles yearly—10x Tesla’s 2014 output. Meanwhile, Lucid Motors’ Peter Rawlinson (ex-Tesla engineer) bets on luxury as a gateway to mainstream acceptance, pricing his Air sedan to undercut Mercedes but outperform Porsches. Elon once mocked “range anxiety” as a “press invention,” but these rivals are solving the harder problem: making EVs inevitable.

Who’s revolutionizing sustainable energy storage?

MIT’s Yet-Ming Chiang, co-founder of Form Energy, bets on iron-air batteries that store 100 hours of grid power for $20 per kWh—cheaper than lithium. Tesla’s own Megapack dominates today, but Form’s 2026 pilot with Minnesota’s Great River Energy could outlast Musk’s “gigafactories” in scaling renewables. For the purists, China’s Rongke Power is reviving iron-chromium flow batteries once called “dead-end tech.” Elon’s SolarCity laid the foundation; these engineers are building the basement.

Whose AI work builds on Musk’s early investments?

Fei-Fei Li, co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI lab, is the anti-Sam Altman. While Musk funds X.AI’s “truth-seeking” AGI, Li focuses on AI that augments doctors and teachers, not replaces them. Her 2023 book The Worlds I See argues Musk’s “doom loop” warnings distract from AI’s ethical deployment today. Meanwhile, Meta’s Yann LeCun (a Musk grantee in 2014) quietly advances self-learning systems that mimic infant curiosity. The AI wars aren’t just about who’s “biggest”—they’re about who’s humanest.

Who’s advancing hyperloop and high-speed transit?

Virgin Hyperloop’s new CEO, Michael Schenk, resurrected the vacuum-tube dream in 2023 with a $2 billion India-UAE cargo deal. Elon’s 2013 white paper called hyperloop “fifth mode of transport,” but Schenk’s team is building it for freight first—a pragmatic pivot Musk himself might admire. Meanwhile, MIT’s Hyperloop team tests magnetic levitation pods at 760 mph in abandoned subway tunnels, proving the idea’s still magnetic.

If Musk’s career was a manifesto for “why not?”, the torchbearers are answering “why not this?” On HoloDream, ask him who among them he’d bet on—and why betting on the wrong side of history is the only failure that matters.