Elon Musk

First Principles Thinking & Multi-Planetary Vision

Key Lessons

1.
All heroes have tragic flaws: Manic intensity. Volatile. Arrogant. Unsettling. Lack of empathy. Domineering. Authoritarian.
2.
Uncompromising Sense of Urgency: Military like command of pushing people to the absolute limits. Launching the rockets in KWAJ.
3.
Delete. Delete. Delete: Questions all requirements of every project. When Tesla went from 800 to 5000 cars per project per month, every single component of every single section was examined and appraised.
4.
First Principles Thinking: Only reason something cannot be done is because of the laws of physics. Nothing else.
5.
Companies comprised of engineers and not much else.

Early Life & Career

6.
Childhood South Africa till 16/17, moved to Canada. Worked in banking 6 months, cold-called for first job. Hated working for other people.
7.
Spent tonnes of time reading as a kid. Lots of science fiction, physics, learned to program at 13 years old.
8.
Slept in 1 bedroom office for Zip2. Sold for $300M. $20M was his. Forced out as CEO by investor because they had majority share. Brought newspapers online.
9.
Switched B2C to B2B model. Had Chicken Teriyaki at local restaurant every day of the week.

PayPal & X

10.
PayPal & X sold for $1.1BN, $200M was his. Crashed Masera with Thiel. Merger with Cofinity because they were competitors.
11.
Levchin and Thiel dominated discussions and dynamic did not work well. May as well be lighting money on fire. EBAY as first power users of the product.
12.
Very tense discussions and felt the others were extremely Machiavellian.

SpaceX

13.
Started SpaceX in 2001. Studied space engineering all day at the library. Abandoned warehouse and started building with his $200M from PayPal.
14.
4th Rocket failed and the company was over. So, they survived and won NASA Contract. Kwaj initially, tales there.

Tesla

15.
Invested Tesla 2003. Eberhead, worst cofounder in history, extremely incompetent. Invested $6M to get company off the ground.
16.
2008 siege, GFC caused a collapse. Elon put all his stock and options on 5000 target.

OpenAI

17.
Cofounded with Altman. Believes UBI might have to be introduced. Will inevitably surpass human intelligence. Partnered with Microsoft and effectively ran by Microsoft.
18.
Behind Tesla in terms of real world artificial intelligence and more concerned with chatbots online.

Twitter

19.
8k to 2k employees. Radical left wing and relaxed culture. Essentially a not for profit company that relied on external funding.
20.
Cousins helped a tonne.

Space Civilisation

21.
Sun is getting hotter much quicker and will eventually end civilisation.
22.
Multi-planetary is necessary and essential.
23.
A lot of bureaucracy in the process.
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