How Were These Answers Determined

Why is Elon Musk so determined?

The answer is in these two fragments of an interview with him. Here you can see the entire interview:Transcript of Elon Musk Interview: Iron Man, Growing up in South AfricaCutting out the irrelevant bits:"I guess when I was around 12 or 15…I had an existential crisis, and I was reading various books on trying to figure out the meaning of life and what does it all mean? It all seemed quite meaningless ..."Later in the interview ...“I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.”Conclusion:Basically he wants to give meaning to his life, since just blindly living it feels like a total waste of time and energy. And that was his conclusion of the ONLY thing that might potentially be meaningful. Thus, from his perspective, there isn't really anything else worth doing in life, and thus he'll keep going as long as he'll be physically capable of doing so.Bottom line, the key word there is ONLY. He is so determined, because of his 'limited'/strictly logical view on the meaning of life. He has/sees no other option and that gives him strength and direction.Note that this is not as different from all the religious beliefs (those do basically the same, give meaning to life - and afterlife in that case), and we've seen in history how strong religion can be and how motivating to make people go the extra mile. The only difference is that he's taken a more logical and practical approach and rather than try to make up fictional characters, he admitted that he (or anyone else) doesn't know enough and thus the logical single option is to try to enhance our knowledge.

Is everything in future already determined?

Many have tried to answer this question, and these answers can easily be found in the internet. So I would skip giving a survey of different philosophical views related to the question. You can easily google them. I will go ahead and throw in my opinion.I believe everything — including novel events, things or processes — has a basis, a cause, in the past. Not only that, everything that happen happens according to certain “laws of nature”. This is why we say that things are determined. But if this is taken to mean that there is person who does the determination of everything that will happen, then I disagree.To say that future events are determined, however, is not to altogether deny the role of accidents or chance. What is necessary in one context may be random in another. What is determined from one perspective can be accidental in another.Many species (including ours) have accidental features, unessential for their character or behavior as a species. But these “anomalies” are exactly the reason how we (Charles Darwin in particular) have been able to discover the “law” that determines how species evolve, i.e., by means of natural selection.F=mA is the second of Newton’s famous laws, but certain bodies or systems do not behave according to this law. It appears that they behave according to some chance or accidental causes. This is until we realize that F=mA is true only in inertial frames.The egg will become a chicken. This is determined by its embryology. But once it becomes an omelette, embryology cannot answer why — but culinary arts can. As far as embryology is concerned, the egg becoming an omelette is an accident.I have found a summary explaining the relationship of chance and determination, of contingency and necessity in this blog, Necessity and Accident, from which I quote the following passage:Order emerges out of chaos. The accidental phenomena which constantly flash in and out of existence, like the waves on the face of an ocean, express a deeper process, which is not accidental but necessary. At a decisive point, this necessity reveals itself through accident.In a way, chance and necessity are two sides of the same coin.