It’s Time for Elon Musk to Add BeanX to His Astounding CV | HackerNoon

Elon Musk is the foremost inventor of our times. His groundbreaking ventures span across disciplines and have impacted billions worldwide. With seemingly no limits to his intellectual and financial prowess, one wonders: What should Elon Musk pursue next?

Having tackled electric cars, reusable rockets, and brain implants, can he save our morning coffee☕️ (now endangered by climate change)?

Should Elon Musk invent a new coffee (or cocoa) bean?

It might be an idea that helps saves the world, in more ways than one.

A suitable challenge

Musk has sown the seeds for pioneering ventures that are delivering important global outcomes: SpaceX, Neuralink, Tesla, OpenAI/Grok and X. Musk’s ventures are improving space access, furthering medicine, combatting climate emissions, defining AI, laying for foundation for post-legacy media and free speech. With DOGE, Musk is also co-heading an ambitious bureaucratic reform programme.

From planning settlements in Mars, to social change and government reboot, Musk is never far from the action. With this stellar record, it’s tempting to demand more. Some ideas immediately spring to mind.

Perhaps Musk can build an electronic voting machine (EVM)? California was counting votes 3 weeks after elections, while India, courtesy of EVMs counted 640 million votes in one day! How about an electric plane? Search engine? Smart device?

These suggestions, while useful, don’t go far enough. They’re relatively mediocre compared to what Elon is capable of. Indeed, even expecting more inventions within the ventures he’s pioneered (e.g., next generation Tesla or X-payments), would seem rather “evolutionary”, and under-utilize his talent for radical innovation.

The next Elon Musk invention should relate to a significant global issue.

What should it be? To answer this, we must:

1. Distill what Musk is good at
2. Identify a significant, complex, critical, existential challenge
3. Match genius to opportunity

Musk has addressed seemingly impossible challenges, across disparate domains, through insight (the famous first principles thinking) and innovation. The products he’s developed, or inspired are consumer oriented — things people can directly use.

In terms of positioning, I consider them to be practical-luxury items. They are not essential commodities, at least not when they were invented. For example, no one “needs” a Tesla — other cars also suffice. However, they are not purely luxury items either; their innovative design, value, and functionality strikes the perfect balance somewhere in between.

While Musk’s ventures push the limits of human achievement and address major issues like climate change, other critical challenges remain. These particularly include environmental degradation, deforestation, loss of wildlife habitats, water scarcity, soil health, and horticultural production.

Now we align Musk’s USP (bringing insight and innovation to practical-luxury consumer items) to a problem space.

What could this intersection be?

It is of course: the humble coffee (or cocoa) bean!

Coffee and chocolate are those simple luxuries of life that we almost take for granted now. Both these beans however are facing production crises due to climate change. This is creating a worldwide shortage and driving up prices and reducing availability.

These humble beans sit at the nexus of humanity’s greatest challenges: ecological change, agriculture, water shortages and farmer livelihoods. Solving this issue isn’t just impactful for the environment; it’s also an intrepid adventure to secure the future of our prized indulgences. Elon Musk should turn his intention to coffee or cocoa beans, or BeanX as we can collectively call the bean, and/or the future enterprise behind it.

Proposition: BeanX

Coffee and cocoa are under siege from climate change. Water shortages, floods, droughts, decimated yield, unpredictable climate, disease, loss of available land. A crop needs to combat so many natural factors to survive and reach us as a consumable product.

By applying innovation to mitigate these effects, we can get better results.

Solar powered irrigation? Climate resilience technology? Disease resistance? Beans that require less water? AI-based harvesting? Perhaps even a new type of bean or native variants and alternatives — like New Zealand firm Zoffee is trailing?

Problem-solving often has unexpected gateways. NASA, a space agency, may seem irrelevant to 99.999% of the world’s population, yet the technologies it has used have found applications in other areas.

Addressing the bean crisis will necessitate tackling several existential socio-economic issues, such as environmental degradation, production resilience, soil health, water management, and farmer livelihoods. It is a gateway for solving very fundamental issues facing the world today.

With Musk’s extraordinary genius, one might even entertain extraordinary possibilities like programmable (at crop or neurally-embedded chip level), premium net-zero coffee, or chocolate, cultivated in vertical solar farms, harvested by robots, and enjoyed via mood-sensing BeanX-presso machines?

Coffee and cocoa beans sit at the intersection of environment and economics. While their shortage may seem an awfully “first-world problem”, the reality is that they have evolved from edible products to become cultural staples. They represent simple luxuries of life.

Coffee and cocoa beans are much like EVs. They are an indulgence. Elon Musk is accustomed to building products with “sustainable indulgence”. A Tesla experience is, relatively speaking, an indulgence, but in a very sustainable way. It’s also a discrete gateway to solving the broader issues of climate emissions and fossil fuel dependence.

BeanX could be the Tesla-esque reimagination of coffee!

Elon Musk has redefined what’s possible in technology, space exploration, and sustainability. Now, it’s time to turn his genius to a matter of global importance: inventing the perfect coffee or cocoa bean. BeanX could save the planet, save the cultural institutions of coffee and chocolate, and secure Musk’s legacy as the patron saint of eco-friendly luxury.

The world needs a hero to save coffee and chocolate. It’s time for Elon Musk to add BeanX to his astounding CV.