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If you think Elon Musk only does cars and rockets, you're not thinking big enough

elon musk commencement speech
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has outlined his big ideas in college commencement speeches. REUTERS / Phil McCarten

Say what you will about Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, there's no question that he's in it for humanity.

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When he became hyper-rich after eBay bought PayPal, he didn't spend his millions to develop a social media app.

Rather, he bought into an electric car company, declared that he wanted to send astronauts to Mars, and invested in solar power.

On Thursday, Musk will reportedly reveal two new Tesla products: a "home" battery and a much bigger "utility scale" battery. Effectively, Tesla will offer customers the opportunity to buy (or lease) a Tesla battery without shelling out $100,000 for a Tesla vehicle.

If you're a cynic, you might say that Musk is just trying to create a new story for Wall Street, to counter some of the skepticism that's emerged over Tesla's immediate financial prospects. The stock has been trading higher ahead of the announcement, after dipping at the end of last year (it's still well down from its peak of $291, hit last September).

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But that's not what Musk is doing. 

You can't look at Musk's companies as ... well, companies. Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity (which is actually run by Musk's cousins) taken together are really a system, and Musk is a systems engineer, or designer, or architect (take your pick).

To prevent global warming, you need to completely change the transportation matrix, replacing the internal-combustion engine en masse. That's Tesla role in the Muskian system.

To power Tesla's cars, you need electricity that isn't generated by fossil fuels. That's where SolarCity comes into the picture. Musk wants to capture the free energy of the Sun.

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And just is case it all goes to hell, the planet become uninhabitable, or an asteroid bears down on Earth, SpaceX is there to, as Musk puts it, make us "multi-planetary." We could use Mars as a lifeboat.

Musk's whole system runs on power gathered from the Sun, and if you want to do that at any kind of scale, you need to store the energy. 

SolarCity Tesla Battery
SolarCity customers currently have access to a Tesla home battery. Screenshot via SolarCity

That's where the batteries come in. Tesla wouldn't be Tesla without its innovative, idiosyncratic battery design – thousands of laptop-style lithium-ion cells, wired together. This design enabled Tesla to be the only electric car maker selling a vehicle that delivered range on par with the gas-powered competition.

Over the years since Tesla's founding and Musk's arrival, the company has steadily improved its power-management capabilities. With that has come reduced cost. Until now, those savings went mainly to Tesla owners, who were paying $100,000 for a battery plus a car. 

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But now Tesla wants to put the battery at the center of a save-the-Earth system – making it affordable to acquire one and encouraging at least the beginnings of a major revolution in how customers store and use energy. That's why Musk tweeted about the Thursday event by referring to the batteries as the "missing piece."

The point is that Musk has been thinking this way all along. It wasn't like he woke up a year ago and said "Let's do a better job of commercializing our batteries!" The batteries have been a driving force in the Tesla story for its entire history.

Tesla Gigafactory
Construction of the Tesla Gigafactory outside Reno, Nevada. REUTERS/James Glover II

In case you have any doubt about that, just look at the $5 billion battery factory – the Gigafactory – that Tesla and Panasonic are building in Nevada. Musk wants to be delivering 500,000 cars by 2020. But he's going to need million of li-ion battery cells to power them.

This is how big thinking works. So while Thursday's Tesla announcement might not be quite as sexy as pulling the cover off a hot new car, in the long run, it could matter far more to life on Earth.

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At least if Musk is thinking big enough.

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