Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

Question/Answer I found interesting:

Sama> How should someone figure out how they should be useful?

Elon> Whatever this thing is you are trying to create.. What would be the utility delta compared to the current state of the art times how many people it would affect?

I am very happy that there's a transcript. But I just spent two minutes trying to figure out how to cut and paste it into a textfile (Scribd won't let me download it without signing up).

My request to YC is to publish transcripts like this as text.

While we're at it, these are great interviews and I'm glad they're being created and published, and I'd appreciate if the series was available as a podcast... I only noticed this new interview because I happened to be on HN right now.

Agreed, it's really excessive to take simple text content and trap it within a PDF that's then trapped inside Scribd, which requires a Scribd account and login to download.

Hi there. That certainly is inconvenient!

Here's a link to the transcript in RTF, and we will definitely note it for future posts: https://goo.gl/kaMMwv

How would one go about meaningfully contributing to solving problems in genetics without having done the work leading to a MD or PhD (or both)?

I was able to copy and paste it just fine. See below.

http://pastebin.com/1v0CaTwF

Heh, now it's asking me to sign up to Dropbox.

Thanks for noting my request, and consider just including the text in the body of the page. It will blow people's minds.

Ah, shoot. I forgot that happens there too (at least you can close that popup and get back to the content :) )

And definitely noted!

I don't know why you are being downvoted. You put forward a valid point. Perhaps the fanboys here could understand the desperation most of the world still lives in, even today!!!

A UFAI would be an extinction level event for our species. That involves studying decision theory, which will improve our ability to make the right choices.

Cheaper access to space would make lives easier for humans on Earth, give us better internet through the use LEO satellites. We would be able to mine space rocks and bring it back to Earth, reducing some material scarcity on Earth. Same for space manufacturing.

The delta from "people die" to "people no longer die" is a massive technological problem. By comparison, once we have that technology, making it available to everyone is many orders of magnitude easier, and much easier to get funding for. Do you really believe, given a cure for mortality, that we couldn't get it to the rest of the world in much less time than it took to develop in the first place?

And with that in place, thousands of other smaller problems evaporate along with it.

I don't have the exact numbers but If I'm not mistaken its said that we need less money to end hunger in the world than what we probably spent trying to get out of earth. So, it seems to me that your point is not really valid because we already have the tech/knowledge/means to end hunger and we didn't so it makes a lot of sense to me to focus some more on political reforms.

Much more likely than a hotfix for death is a world where there are very, very expensive treatments that allow wealthy people to extend their lives by some significant amount.

That's not going to be a fun world to live in, especially if the treatments requires biological raw materials that the destitute can sell.

Certainly very interesting, in fact I wrote this down when I heard it. And if you look at the projects he's working on (Renewable energy, cars able to powered by renewable energy, and preserving life outside of Earth), they all affect a great portion of humanity, and have a very large affect.

I'm not sure you would. I mean, I'm sure you could somehow, but at this point so much of what needs to be done is basic research, and really can be done well in that context. There aren't many things that are ready to leave the context of a research lab and into commercialization. We've got some notable disasters with Theranos, and even the YC funded Taxa (glowing plant - that was a farce from the get-go, but they're doing some potentially interesting stuff now).

As far as education, it's not something you can learn by yourself, it just isn't. Most of the methods in a biological wet lab are very far from standardized and need a great deal of troubleshooting. Most post-docs in a new lab spend a couple months just trying to get basic stuff working that they've done dozens of times before. It's hard. You need people around you with experience and perspective, and doctorate programs are likely the only place you're going to get that kind of training.

I think there are a lot of people that want to approach biology with a CS mindset, especially the people interested in synthetic biology, but that rarely bears fruit. It could get to that place eventually, but there's a lot of ground to cover. In that sense I agree with Elon that, despite the huge impact genetic engineering could have, it's not the next thing because we're not ready yet. There's still too much that's fundamental to biological problems that we simply don't understand, and solving things in one species usually doesn't translate very far across taxa.

I suppose it is easy to rage or blame all of mankind's ills on Elon Musk. Perhaps some day, his quest to challenge the status quo or leave Planet Earth and spread humanity throughout the Solar system might benefit us all.

Gods Speed Elon.....

> Do you really believe, given a cure for mortality, that we couldn't get it to the rest of the world in much less time than it took to develop in the first place?

Why doesn't everyone have potable drinking water or electricity yet?

> Do you think people that want to be useful today should get PhDs? > Elon: Mostly not.

Is this arrogant? I get asked all the time whether a masters in computer science is useful for someone who wants to be a dev. In general, no, a bachelors degree is fine.

Maybe you feel the reverse is the problem, that he's suggesting that some people do need a PhD to be useful? I think there are people and some disciplines for whom getting a PhD greatly expands their ability to contribute.

"Mostly not." Seems like a fair statement to me?

I'm not sure if you would consider this meaningful, but if you have software development skills, either developing applications that can be used to solve problems in genetics, or that save the time of those working on solving those problems.

>I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on businessy things. But actually almost all my time, like 80% of it, is spent on engineering and design.

Uh... that's not really a CEO's job though.

You realize that Elon talking about scifi shit is one of the primary drivers of Tesla stock not tanking? Investors love that crap. I still love the dude though.

I agree with your sentiment but I think the extremely aggressive tone of your post ruined any chance you had of swaying potential anarcho-sympathizers.

Well, we developed an easy way to make insulin, and have been failing at getting it to the rest of the world due to lack of political will or economic pressure. I seriously see no reason why wealthy people who develop immortality will want or be able to share it with the poor. That, and the idea of "once we solve the hard problem, the easier problems become easier" is a terrible logical muddle that can be used to justify literally anything.

He might have a valid point but the point is off-topic.

Here the context is technology, not politics or economic policies.

We have certainly attempted to end hunger and done a pretty good job, however, certain parties and our own reluctance to meddle prevent us from fully accomplishing our goals.. e.g. we know for a fact that very little of the aid going to NK or Palestine gets to where it should, and instead lines their leaders' pockets, but we haven't done anything meaningful about it yet.

And I'm not saying we should do something drastic, Iraq certainly taught us that - however, we certainly don't deserve the blame for any of the aforementioned examples when we are trying our best but prevented by local warmongers (e.g. Africa) and such.

If everyone refused to better yourself because someone else has it worse, nothing would ever get better.

I didn't notice it at first, but there was a link at the bottom of the popup for me that said "No thanks, continue to download." Clicking it triggered the download.

I searched on my podcast app, and found an RSS feed that has the three existing episodes. Who would have known that YC has a SoundCloud account?

https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:24682936...

Sure it would be easy to manufacture a billion doses of anti-death pill. But how will you guarratee high-quality life for billions of immortals and their descendents ?

It's a really hard problem, it could cause a lot of large scale problems(where usually the poor/weak will suffer).

And i wouldn't be surprised if you asked most poor/regular people if they see this as an important problem for them, the answer would be no.

It's a lot easier to go from "expensive treatment" to "inexpensive treatment" (and/or supporting funding) than to go from "no known solution" to "treatment" (however expensive).

Asking people for funding for a cure for mortality is hard, not least of which convincing them of the problem, and then convincing them that a solution is not only feasible but realistic. Asking people to help make an existing cure available to everyone is much easier, because you've already overcome the fundamental disbelief in the problem and the possibility of a solution.

Seems to work for him though...

> Since when did entrepreneurs decided to speak in scifi-bullshit? "We have a digital tertiary self in the form of out email capabilities, our computers, phones, applications."

It's not sci-fi, it's a legitimate view. It's basically the opposite of the common "omg children today are spending too much time with computers, this is unnatural, they should communicate more face to face instead of texting so much" bullshit. The idea is that our tools are a part of us, extensions of our bodies, not something "weird" or "unnatural".

> And also, arrogant to the point of being funny? "Interviewer: Do you think people that want to be useful today should get PhDs?Elon: Mostly not." LOL.

That seems like a sane view of the current state of scientific process. There are way too many career-PhDs. So many that a lot of research is bullshit. I thought this is widely recognized as an issue.

How is that relevant? Are you trying to say that potable water and electricity are mistakes because we haven't gotten them to everybody yet?

Seems like it's working though? Why not redefine what a CEO's role is? Just a though here no arguing intended. :)

And it's a shorted goo.gl url, that also could expire or be removed in the future.

What's indeed against plain text in the body? It's more easy, it will always be readable. And what about accessibility? Or archiving the content?

Because their own leaders/people don't want them to.

Podcasts are also great because they let you save something now and listen to it later (in the car, doing chores, etc.). I'm really interested in listening to this, but by tomorrow when I'm doing something that is amenable to listening in the background I'll probably have forgotten it exists. If I could add "How to Build the Future" to a listening queue I'd certainly be more likely to get around to it!

Historically, expensive treatments for the rich have become universal treatments for everyone over time.

What makes you believe that life extension will be any different? Or, if you disagree that expensive treatments generally stay expensive, what are your examples?

I agree we could have a temporary awkward period in the middle, say 20 years, where it's not cheap yet. But on the scale of history that's a short period of time...I'll admit that's cold comfort to those who die in the meantime.

(See: antibiotics, insulin, appendectomies, lasik, ...)

This is why Theranos was such an effective scam: the current culture of "innovation" is so heavily based in software, an unconstrained space where a creative wunderkind can make great advances, it thinks all problems can be solved through sheer thinking outside the box, "disruption," and dreaming big. Those are all good things to try, but I don't think it's a coincidence Silicon Valley-based big-dreaming startups aren't doing nearly as well as big, boring research labs with heavy understanding of the science and measured goals.

We're just used to CEOs having only a decorative role, who can be replaced in an instant. So much so that when we see a CEO actually working/engaging with the actual product/service, they seem like a peculiar and rare specimen.

Well he is technically the CTO of SpaceX.

What's interesting about a savant is how they can end up defined by what they don't see. I have nothing but respect for Elon, however I think he is working on the wrong problems. That's not his fault and he is most definitely making his best effort. However he's the paragon of a paradigm of a European culture which is as unsustainable as it is powerful.

Great, works here, thanks! (In case anyone wants the SC profile link: https://soundcloud.com/ycombinator)

Is he in any way preventing you from dedicating your time and effort to the things you consider important?

I like Elon Musk, but the hero-worship disturbs me. Yeah, he founded one pretty successful company, got in early at a very successful company, and has been using the money to fund cool projects ever since. I think Tesla and SpaceX are both interesting, but still experimental: he hasn't been singlehandedly Tony Starking up the future in a lab, he's just used a lot of money from making some smart/lucky decisions to hire good people.

He must mean reviewing designs and prototypes, not actually creating things.

> I thought he was like John Carmack or something, but at the end of the day he's mostly a sales guy with big dreams. The self-taught rocket engineer stuff is mostly self-promotion.

Where do you get that impression? Except maybe from not following anything about him. Unless you think that the following quote from this interview is an outright lie:

"I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on businessy things. But actually almost all my time, like 80% of it, is spent on engineering and design. Engineering and design, so it's developing next-generation product. That's 80% of it.

(...)

I think a lot of people think I'm kind of a business person or something, which is fine. Business is fine. But really it's like at SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell is Chief Operating Officer. She manages legal, finance, sales, and general business activity. And then my time is almost entirely with the engineering team, working on improving the Falcon 9 and our Dragon spacecraft and developing the Mars Colonial architecture. At Tesla, it's working on the Model 3 and, yeah, so I'm in the design studio, take up a half a day a week, dealing with aesthetics and look-and-feel things. And then most of the rest of the week is just going through engineering of the car itself as well as engineering of the factory. Because the biggest epiphany I've had this year is that what really matters is the machine that builds the machine, the factory. And that is at least two orders of magnitude harder than the vehicle itself."

No, I'm saying that "the future" arriving is more a function of political will than it is of technological development. It's a mistake to imagine that we can merely build magic technologies and humanity will benefit; if we don't make the effort to organize to share what we make, "the future" will be a set of circumstances enjoyed by a narrow subset of humanity.

I'm not talking about a cure for death, but something that is the life extension analogue to plastic surgery.

I would not characterize many CEOs as being "a decorative role, who can be replaced in an instant". Leading may not be hands-on engineering and design (at least, you hope!), but it's certainly FAR from decorative.

Having watched a good number of Elon Musk interviews, I wish more interviewers would ask more direct questions. Asking Elon general questions usually results in fairly similar responses to what you have heard before or read in his biography.

I would characterize most CEOs I've met(and not only) as decorative. And that's why they do get replaced in an instant.

Me too. Click, select all, copy, switch to favorite text editor, paste. No signup/login prompt, and no problem. Maybe they fixed it?

What exactly does a CEO do?

I haven't spent much time in a corporate environment, mostly in a workshop making structural steel, so it's not at all clear to me who the CxO layer does.

As another comment suggested their roles seem to be mostly decorative. Do these roles actually make decisions, or just sign off on them?

My guess is that JavaScript blocking interferes with Scribd.

>has been using the money to fund cool projects

Musk and his companies' investors enjoy most of the financial upside of the government support, while taxpayers shoulder the cost. [1]

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-2015...

Ah yes, the tried and true "You haven't solved MY pet problem, therefore you shouldn't be working on anything else" argument.

And people wonder why we rarely get anything done...

Consider computational biology. There are lots of problems which hinge on understanding the impact of genetics on populations and variations in genetics and that effect. As there are already sources of genetic data sets and infrastructure to generate those data sets, genetic research becomes more of a data science problem than a medical problem.

Tesla/SpaceX are not your typical for-profit companies, where CEOs are decorative and all that matters is quarterly reports.

If anyone deserves hero-worship, it's Elon. In our age where the Kardashians and other vapid people are being worshiped, we need people like Elon to get a bit of the limelight and encourage and motivate ordinary people.

Not really. Many discussions here are about politics and economic policies, which btw are important forces for some enterpreneurs to be aware of.

Ending world hunger would cost a lot more than time spent trying to get out of Earth, because in order to end world hunger, you'd have to reform political systems that are impeding the abolishment of world hunger. For example, there is no way world hunger can be ended without massive regime change in North Korea, and any such change would be monumentally expensive, even if done peacefully.

Solving the first 80% of world hunger was cheap, solving the last 20% is expensive.

You probably couldn't. But if you refer to two things Musk said - a) genetics is important, and b) PhD is not the best way to be useful - I think he didn't mean it to be taken together. He spent some time talking about how being useful means "area under the curve" - do a big thing for small number of people, or do a small thing for a large number of people. Most people can aim for either of the two, and in both cases PhD is probably not the most efficient use of your time.

Haha, yes, technology has nothing to do with politics or economics, of course.

Ask yourself what the real subtext is; what most people are going to think when they read "But actually almost all my time, like 80% of it, is spent on engineering and design".

Is the mental image that of Tony Stark, single-handedly designing rocket components in some kind of advanced cad/cam-ish lab, scoffing at staid business meetings he delegates, or is it of a guy talking to a bunch of engineers, and hearing presentations, picking favorites among a bunch of proposals, signing off on this or that?

You are supposed to think of the former (PR), whereas the latter is closer to the truth.

I built this thing if you want to follow along. Unfortunately no video, but at least you can copy the text:

https://jotengine.com/t/elon

Scribd is a YC company. What you're experiencing is called "growth hacking".

IMHO there are plenty of evil corporations and CEOs to abhor. That Musk's drives, priorities, and business practices appear mostly admirable seems to me to be one of the least controversial viewpoints imaginable.

You should check out https://narro.co for turning most anything into a personal podcast.

Is this meant to imply that this is somehow unusual or particular to Tesla? The government provides incentives and subsidies all over the place. Even Coca-Cola benefits from subsidies.

My counterexample is a facelift.

"he hasn't been singlehandedly Tony Starking up the future in a lab"

So this is the measure of progress now? How can this sentence sound like anything other than sour grapes?

You use the tools available to you for the betterment of your species in some way.

Affect like how? As of today they're useless, except for Tesla who's motivating car automakers to go towards autonomous cars - but they had the tech before.

CEO is a role that will vary noticeably from company to company. But in general, the CEO will sign off on a lot of decisions and make a few ones.

Basically, it's like this:

If your subordinates come to you and are like, "This is absolutely the right thing to do," then you'll 95% of the time sign off on it. If you find that that's not true, it's probably time to fire your subordinates, they apparently aren't doing a good job.

If subordinate A comes to you and says, "We should do X," and subordinate B comes to you and says, "We should do mutually exclusive thing Y," then you may need to decide between them.

CEOs should also ideally have a strategic sense and say things like, "Guys, I want us to look at doing something like thing Z. Research it and tell me your conclusions," when everyone else thought that there was no decision to be made at all -- just keep chugging along.

> That involves studying decision theory, which will improve our ability to make the right choices.

I'm circumspect about studying decision theory from an AI perspective will be very helpful in learning how to modulate our own decision processes. Most of it is focused on finding ways to keep AIs from doing weird things that humans already don't do anyway.

So how would someone like Elon Musk contribute to a political solution to world problems? It sounds like a suboptimal field for someone with his set of talents to work on, and perhaps better suited to someone who has a less engineering and more politically oriented skillset.

Why does Elon continuously talk about AI as if it's taking over the world? At this point, Siri can barely understand me saying the word 'salad'.

Slow down Elon... slow down..

Why not? If he's got the skills necessary to be more deeply involved in the engineering aspects, what else does he have to do that he cannot assign to another C-level exec?

Yeah, I imagine the latter is closer to the truth. I doubt Elon is spending all his time in CAD software, but I'm pretty sure he talks to people who do and looks at their work, and can meaningfully comment / advise on it.

I've seen the type before. I've personally met one of the guys running Reaction Engines Limited (the Skylon company); I've been on a talk he had for physicists at Rutherfort Appleton Laboratories. He mostly talked big-picture things during the presentation; then on a Q&A session someone asked him about details about the engine, and the guy went into full physics professor mode, explaining the engineering tradeoffs they made in excruciating details.

That's how I imagine Elon too.

So what are the right problems to work on, and what paradigms are more sustainable than European culture?

Like I said, I like him! I just don't understand why we should think he has special knowledge of what the future holds.

There have been others. Ed Land, of Polaroid, had a private lab next to his office as CEO. But they're rare.

I kind of like him too. But it's still scifi BS :D

Funny that investors actually like it.

It's something that's not widely needed or desired, therefore a luxury product. Market forces can be funny like that.

My counter-counter example would be dentistry, or various forms of surgery in general. Especially the latter is expensive as hell, but most of the world managed to create systems that give access to it to pretty much everyone. Even the US somewhat manages that.

The John Carmack comparison is point-on!

> I'd appreciate if the series was available as a podcast

It's available on SoundCloud.

https://soundcloud.com/ycombinator

A facelift isn't all that useful in the grand scheme of things, even to the wealthy, and it requires a significant quantity of very highly skilled manual labor, which keeps the price high. Neither of the above would be true of a treatment that delays or reverses aging.

Is this the Tesla factory in the background?

How do you get transcripts done? In house,outsourced to a transcription service,voice recognition software?

I guess Kurzweil and Elon spend some time on WhatsApp. But since Elon thinks in terms of first principles. He probably has this reasoning:

1. Are the any laws of physics that stop us from creating AI ? Answer is No. Nature already built it so its possible.

2. Is it possible to improve AI significantly ? Yes, because if we can build AI, AI can build better AI.

3. How soon can it happen? Since the trend is exponential. It can happen within 100 years.

4. Is it good idea to start worrying about it now? Sure why not.

When i stumble upon it from time to time, scribd is the strange thing that wants to stand between me and information. This is very annoying.

Musk isn't the most reliable source of information about himself: ' Musk sells himself as a singular mover of mountains and does not like to share credit for his success. At SpaceX, in particular, the engineers “flew into a collective rage every time they caught Musk in the press claiming to have designed the Falcon rocket more or less by himself,” '

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/539861/techs-enduring-gre...

It always saddens me when I see a slew of Debbie Downer comments from the HN crowd.

"Yes, he ushered in the electric car revolution, but the production carbon footprint is still huge!"

"Yes, he's building rockets, but he took a bunch of government money!"

"Yes, he's paving the way to Mars, but what has he done for world hunger?"

And it not just with Musk, but really with anyone who has been successful. I would have thought that the technologists were above such petty envy. We're here to improve humanity's lot, aren't we?

Why do they discuss the speed of the line? Isn't the finalized output a much more useful metric? (e.g. one car per hour)?

If there's a ton of work done at the various checkpoints, the pace is slow but maybe the length of the line isn't very far?

This is the part I somewhat disagree. I've seen lots of strong computational biologists make the leap into generic data science, but I've seen way too many CS/data science types struggle. They take the data at face value, not recognizing the fact that biological data has flaws. A sound understanding of biology/chemistry helps a lot with identifying those flaws and generally with designing experiments/research.

Admittedly that's a bit of a generalization and I am sure there are a decent number of exceptions but consistent with my experience.

This was a bunch of fun.

Notes:

Be useful, that's fine, no need to alter the world drastically.

Big Next shifts: AI & Genetic Modification (oh and a faster connection to our minds)

High probability of failure, not a problem. Tesla, Space X. Push the ball forward.

Democratization of AI is a best possible outcome (direct connection, we are the AI)

FWIW, the Android speech recognition (the default you get when clicking the microphone on home screen) has improved by leaps and bounds in the past 2-3 years. I have a very unusual mixed accent in English and it understands perfectly almost anything I throw at it

How to build the future: Take $5B in public subsidy for boondoggle technologies, and then tell everyone you're fiscally conservative.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-2015...

Focus. Some people want to focus on the tech side. If you want to focus on politics side, go ahead and do it.

I understand the technology focus though, policy is probably the worst possible use of your time if you want to help, and it carries a great risk of turning you into an evil person.

"But we're extremely bandwidth-constrained in that interface between the cortex and that tertiary digital form of yourself. And helping solve that bandwidth constraint would be, I think, very important in the future as well. Yeah."

After working and consulting with labs while building/hacking software/hardware for neural interfaces and seeing where the field is now, I have very little hope. Too much bureaucracy, and too much (darpa) money going after red queens races (lets not even get started at all the private/nih money flowing into some labs funding even more technologically incompetent PI's) at least in neuroimaging, and companies lining up to get MIT postdocs to peddle their latest and greatest toys.

I even had to find someone willing to write my grant and go through the submission process for an abstract (not even the full proposal) for DARPA-BAA-16-33, because despite calling for "BTO seeks unconventional approaches that are outside the mainstream, challenge assumptions, and have the potential to radically change established practice, lead to extraordinary outcomes, and create entirely new fields.", apparently an email submission is just not ok despite having co authored in this area and currently designing BCI related hardware and software in the open in my free time compared to a lot of newly minted assoc. profs struggling to get their matlab scripts (that someone else probably wrote years ago) to run on cluster their uni just spend 10's of millions on again this year expanding, forget understanding how any of the machines from which data is collected (and can barely analyze themselves) actually work…

Yeah… semonga berhasil ;)

A CEO's job is to delegate responsibilities, and an essential part of delegation is deciding what to delegate, and what to handle yourself. The latter depends on the CEO's passion and skillset, and since engineering and design is where Musk's lies, that is what he focuses on. Most CEOs have humanities or social sciences backgrounds, so they focus on the non-engineering aspects of the business.

Tesla's energy storage enables people to use solar energy at night, without the process being a big hassle. If it gets cheap enough, it will make solar power competitive with fossil power in most scenarios. Currently, the battery installations are a cost-competitive alternative to fossil ways of covering peak load. Calling it useless is probably a stretch.

Ditto with Tesla's cars; they aren't a drop-in replacement for gasoline cars in all scenarios but I've heard more than one Tesla owner say that they will never buy a gas-powered car again. So obviously that implies greater utility for the person in question than any current gas-powered car.

TIL that OpenAI was founded by Sam and Elon. Should get my resume polished :-)

Genetics startups still need engineers and product people.

ex. Counsyl (https://www.counsyl.com)

I suppose I should have wrote "will affect". If we end up colonizing Mars, or even getting one person to land on Mars, I think Space X will have been involved in creating competition in the aerospace industry at the least.

My point was that his ideas are ones that have potential for huge amounts of change. Whether or not we will see that change is another matter.

I'm just here for the free energy drinks and VMware backpacks.

I'll bet he has plenty of respect for the "poor losers" but little for those who took advantage of them (PhD programs).

He also exploits people because he's "building the future." He is an evil capitalist with a cult of personality and doesn't deserve the worship he gets.

Let's not forget the $80 billion or so spent on the auto bailout...

Some HN commenters never cease to amaze with their negativity...

Au contraire, people that know the technology and industry can see through the PR much more clearly.

Awesome, thanks! Just added the URL to my iPhone podcast app.

The problem with Musk is that he's managed to garner a cult of personality for being a perfect representation of an issue that has been plaguing the high tech industry for years. For decades the public has been contributing (through taxes) to the creation of the entire research and development/high tech industry, an industry that wouldn't have been created otherwise since it creates long-term profit at the expense of short-term profit (which isn't expedient to capital), an industry that requires immense collaboration among society, a society which has been contributing its social intelligence since the beginning of society itself, yet what do the people get for all this? Nothing. The public work is looted and privatized, then we are forced to buy back the products we created so a few capitalists can profit. Again, the production is collective yet its product is appropriated privately.

Try "surgery" instead of "plastic surgery". Plastic surgery is a luxury product with little demand, but the life-saving kind of surgery is just as expensive (or even more) in labour and resources, but because there's a demand and a moral urgency, societies figured out how to finance it for ordinary people.

By that, he's referring to the brain-computer interface [0], right? Or is it broader than that?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain–computer_interface

As somebody who is relatively uninformed, is there anywhere to read about Musk's shadier practices?

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12509079 and marked it off-topic.

I had the added annoying step of ctrl-f'ing for "Interviewer" and "Elon" and replacing them with "<return> Interviewer" and "<return> Elon", but I think that has more to do with how crappy Windows 10's clipboard is than Scribd.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12509079 and marked it off-topic.

Not to mention recent advancements in deep learning / machine learning with neural nets. It seems like that field has really proliferated over the past 5ish years. (I'm not sure what breakthrough specifically has led to all this, but we have TensorFlow, Torch, etc.)

He doesn't! He's a smart guy, for sure, he has some pretty interesting ideas - but as for the interview, it was done just because he's famous. He's stating his opinions. If you treat them as anything more, then it's not exactly his fault.

I think people overestimate the value of interviews. It's just individuals talking, not a compressed textbook!

Yes, we should be able to go to space and have electric cars and ALSO improve living conditions for people. But one of those doesn't affect white guys in the tech industry.

Give the people with ideas funding and the future will happen. Instead what has been happening is the uber-elite have been hoarding their money and not putting it back into the economy. This is how to delay the future.

To me the future is welcomed with a guarded mentality, in that for all the benifits purported to follow it, but the reality is that as we progress technologically we are going to create a new wealth schism in the people of the world the blowback of that will come back one day and bite us. If we can push the future and lessen income inequality and increase the wealth, not of investors, but average people, that is the way forward.

A CEO is responsible for execution. Execution of a strategy, declaring a vision, setting the tone of the culture of all the workers, getting all hands working together and delivering value. Understand the market, their future in the market, the direction the company needs to move in, the strengths and weaknesses of themselves (and the company) and design strategies to mitigate weakness and risk.

In that role, maybe they make lots of decisions, maybe they write things like "Part Deux", or maybe they stand around an scream a lot. Whatever works; probably a little of all of the above, and a good CEO knows when to use which approach.

At some level they may also report to a board, who helps them, or replaces them, all based on their execution success. And at another level, they report to shareholders who do the same.

I'm not saying this is the correct amount, but UN [1] says 30 billion/year would be enough to do it. However, I believe that they are taking into account only the financial needs and not the political effort necessary to do it, mainly to prevent people from diverting that money from going into the right place.

I wasn't going to get into this subject to prevent a long debate, but I'm always amazed on how these things go. We have all the money in the world to fix it for good, but for some unknown reason we just can't do it.

There was a time that I thought that if someone as powerful and "rich" as Musk ran for president for some big and important country (like the US) they could fix everything.

But for some reason that is unknown to me this will never happen. And when something close to it (in the power and money sense), like Trump running for president, does happen we know that we are not going to get this "magic fix".

It seems that at the moment that the possible fixer gets to a position where he can fix things, he no longer wants do it.

Another stupid idea, or parallel, is Pablo Escobar. At some point in his life the guy spent 2k+/day just for money rubbers. At first he wanted to be good and do good for Colombian people, but when he got to a position where he could do it, he no longer wanted to do that.

I guess we will never fix anything and the world will be as screwed as it is today. Or worse.

[1] http://borgenproject.org/the-cost-to-end-world-hunger/

I would say that I have benefited greatly from tech products or companies such as search, youtube, facebook, and amazon, just to name a few. Companies are not charities, they exist to make profit, often by providing useful services to their customers.

Bullshit. Two of the three items on the GP's list have already been done and complainers seem to be in denial about that.

Startup industry is a great place to find tons of PR bullshit though, so I wonder if this isn't people projecting their own guilt...

> Most of the methods in a biological wet lab are very far from standardized and need a great deal of troubleshooting. Most post-docs in a new lab spend a couple months just trying to get basic stuff working that they've done dozens of times before.

Having had experience with syn bio in grad school and trying to reconcile the empirical (biology) and first principles (CS/math) approaches, I've been thinking a lot lately about how to streamline the troubleshooting process for picking up and optimizing wet lab methods. I'd love to chat - my email's in my profile.

Or at least know how to feed their own egos with self-serving "insights".

This site is overwhelmingly supportive of Mr. Musk and his enterprises. Does everyone have to be?

Great interview, I'm always really interested in hearing what entrepreneurs like Musk have to say. However, none of the interviews ever seem to delve into the personal aspects of his life. I would love to have Elon go through a typical day and explain how achieves some balance in his life and what that looks like for him. Being a husband, a father and a friend must be quite challenging and I would love to hear more about how he views his life in general.

Wow you built something I always wished existed... going to check this out later, thank you much.

>except for Tesla who's motivating car automakers to go towards autonomous cars - but they had the tech before.

This is enough, no?

The same with Space-X...

Besides the part about the importance of being useful and how to be useful I find the following answer most interesting:

> So it's not that I think that the risk is that the AI would develop a will of its own right off the bat. I think the concern is that someone may use it in a way that is bad. Or even if they weren't going to use it in a way that's bad but somebody could take it from them and use it in a way that's bad, that, I think, is quite a big danger. So I think we must have democratization of AI technology to make it widely available. And that's the reason that obviously you, me, and the rest of the team created OpenAI was to help spread out AI technology so it doesn't get concentrated in the hands of a few.

>leave the context of a research lab and into commercialization. We've got some notable disasters with Theranos

Did that spring from a research lab or from a happyhour with mba types wanting to jump on "start-up" fortunes

Exactly. He sucks up airtime for quieter, likely superior approaches in other or the same areas. It's anger not envy. What's the point of Wired interviewing Elon Musk for the 10,000th time? There are so many people doing so much good stuff out there. Finding them isn't hard. They are on the internet too.

It seemed to me the question was asked in the context of some closing small talk, and got a very Musk answer :) as far as I know, the Tesla assembly lines have nowhere near the amount of robotics of the much larger volume lines of for instance Honda, so very slow by those standards.

> There was a time that I thought that if someone as powerful and "rich" as Musk ran for president for some big and important country (like the US) they could fix everything.

> But for some reason that is unknown to me this will never happen. And when something close to it (in the power and money sense), like Trump running for president, does happen we know that we are not going to get this "magic fix".

I don't understand why do people still care about presidents? They can't do crap. Even the decisions they sign off are not really made by them. You don't even get to be a candidate if you aren't already up to ears in the usual political mud of deals and backstabbing. Democracies we know, as they mature, become very efficient at filtering out people who are too dangerous to status quo as they go up.

That's why if Elon even run for the office, I'd know it's the end of the good he can do for anyone.

Yes, the people behind this site are also responsible for this interview so it's bad PR if the comments are critical.

Check an archive of this thread, a lot of negative comments got removed.

I read something a couple of decades ago that's helped me avoid, occasionally, the mindset that causes me to be a curmudgeon: someone else's success is not my problem.

Thats not to say that any particular criticism is unjustified. Just that tearing down someone for its own sake is not good for anyone - rock throwers included.

utility delta X users who hate PDFs/Scribd = a large integral .

From the buzz, I thought VC's were funding every 18 year old with a wild idea. Is it really hard to get serious work funded due to a lack of available capital?

> What's the point of Wired interviewing Elon Musk for the 10,000th time?

Ad money, like with all publishing. If they actually cared about providing useful content to people, they'd seek out those quieter ones and interview them too. Don't blame Elon for the market actors that want to earn money off his fanbase. Blame those market actors instead.

I assume so, but very general/handwavy with his wording, rather than on potential specific applications (of potential future mainstream use), which would help.

I think most people on this forum would be interested in how such can be related to gaming, but I know researchers that who be interested in cheaper/as or more accurate mapping (think "realtime" volumetric [mni-brain like] relative powermaps calc'd from beamforming/dsp on n-electrode arrays along the scalp at x sampling rates, and canceling out influences in the impedances due to rotational moments in the head [prob using gyros/3-axis accelerometers] and potential moisture build up along the scalp) for as much a 2-3 hours of scan time on a fmri/meg now, as well as being able to collect more data outside of the "lab" (and other brain states as well).

You see, you've already lost me because nearly everything worthwhile has been funded by public sector money, notably space and the Internet. To my mind, claiming to be 'fiscally conservative' may be a good tactical claim as a CEO of rapidly expanding publically held companies, but in practical terms it's a terrible idea. If Elon is turning public money into technology, I'm enthusiastic about that. I'm sure there are ways to nationalize his industry if it proves necessary.

Better that, than privatizing things: that's a recipe for bad answers and a untimely demise due to market forces. Maybe I don't want AI, electric cars, and space travel to die because some hedge fund needed immediate profits the very next quarter.

Part of the problem is that a CEO plays a very different role in a three person company, a 300 person company, a 3000 person company, and a 30k person company. I have a very difficult time imagining swapping out the CEO of an early round startup without having a major existential crisis.

First of all, those subsidies exist exactly to be used like this, so at best you can complain the government uses money to incentivize businesses. Elon is one of the few people who uses subsidies as they should be.

Secondly, his companies have a good track record of paying governments loan back, in full, before the due time.

Funny how a success story can be twisted into a negative.

What amazes me about Elon is the level of self control, discipline, perseverance, resilience, willpower etc.

He's not the only one playing the game so effectively at that level but to me, he exemplifies rational behavior.

I wish more entrepreneurs like Page or Bezos were in the public eye as much as Musk. I believe those traits are common to achieve your goals.

> Be useful, that's fine, no need to alter the world drastically.

More specifically: if you make a minor improvement that affects a lot of people (improve video streaming) it is just as good as a major improvement that drastically affects a few people (curing an extremely rare disease). It's the area under the curve that matters. The best would obviously be a large effect over a large number of people, but minor improvements can be very useful.

He gives us a glimpse into his life in the interview:

At Tesla his time is spent "almost entirely with the engineering team, working on improving the Falcon 9 and our Dragon spacecraft and developing the Mars Colonial architecture."

At Tesla he is "in the design studio, take up a half a day a week, dealing with aesthetics and look-and-feel things. And then most of the rest of the week is just going through engineering of the car itself as well as engineering of the factory."

He spends "basically half a day at OpenAI most weeks"

Replace "President" with "leader", "chieftain", "captain", "boss", "guide" or any other word such as this and we still get to the same place: nowhere.

My point was that if someone with enough pull (pull being money, power or anything else that "drives" the world) wanted to make it good, they could. But it seems that they can't. It's simply not possible.

What matters is the collective and although there are companies with the size of small countries we still can't fix even small countries like we can in a company.

I guess that at the end we are doomed to coexist with poverty, hunger, illnesses and all of the bad things that could be easily destroyed if we really wanted to, but looks like that despite the fact that we all say we want to get rid of these things we really don't want to.

Are you sure you're thinking of HN? The top comment on any article about Tesla here is usually someone saying "Whatever this article is about is old news and also a bad idea and also doesn't work, and BTW Tesla is losing money hand-over-fist."

If only society in general would adopt that perspective. Unfortunately there seems to be a growing sentiment that someone else's success was somehow at their expense and therefore they are owed something by the successful.

Some choice quotes:

"Do you think people who want to be useful should get a PhD?" "Umm... Mostly not."

"Sometimes it [technology] gets worse... In '69 we were able to go to the moon.. Then the space shuttle could only take people to LEO, then the space shuttle retired... That trends to zero. People think technology automatically gets better every year but it actually doesn't, it gets better if smart people work like crazy to make it better... By itself if people don't work on it technology will decline. We look at Rome and how they were able to build these incredible roadways and aqueducts and indoor plumbing, and they forgot how to do all of those things.

Entropy is not on your side."

"I know a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time doing media and business-y things... But 80% of my time is spent on engineering and design."

"A very long time ago you took me on a tour of SpaceX. And the most impressive thing was that you knew every detail of the rocket and every pieces of engineering that went into it and I don't think many people get that about you."

"What really matters is the machine that builds the machine, the factory. That is at least 2 orders of magnitude harder than the vehicle itself."

I like very much how humble and how easy and crystal clear are his responses.

How do facelifts extend life? I thought they were purely cosmetic.

Yes, I agree. There are not many like him. I only wish him great success.

I'm curious -- what would you ask him?

A CEO's job is strategy. All these other replies are wrong.

that's just utilitarianism in action

I like the things that Elon Musk has done and tried, but what irritates me are all the sycophants in the media who think he's a genius wizard rather than a smart entrepreneur and don't take some of his claims with a grain of salt.

Genetic research uses computational techniques today. However, most academics who understand genetics well are crappy programmers. My source for this is a friend who is a tenure-track professor of evolutionary biology at a major university, with publications based on computational analyses of genomes. In pulling those publications together, he inevitably had to spend a lot of time time reviewing and cleaning up the terrible code of his co-authors, checking for correctness. "And I'm not even good at coding," he said. "That's how bad this stuff was!"

So, I think there must be a role for strong developers to partner with strong genetic researchers to make the best use of computers for research. That role might not exist now--you might have the opportunity to go create it. But it does seem sorely needed.

I think he says something about spending time with his kids, etc in this Recode interview (don't remember clearly though) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsixsRI-Sz4

They are funding every easily digestible, consumer friendly app that has a trendy design. This is a small subset of all interesting and worthwhile ideas.

> Replace "President" with "leader", "chieftain", "captain", "boss", "guide" or any other word such as this and we still get to the same place: nowhere.

Yes and no. Captains (of ships) can be very effective. So can many leaders, and CEOs of companies that didn't go public or take too much VC money. It gets easier when people are expected to listen to you and you don't have to worry about reelection.

> I guess that at the end we are doomed to coexist with poverty, hunger, illnesses and all of the bad things that could be easily destroyed if we really wanted to, but looks like that despite the fact that we all say we want to get rid of these things we really don't want to.

As humans we really suck at coordinating ourselves together. It's a large an interesting topic. That's why I think technological solutions are so alluring. As undemocratic as it is, you can get much more done if you sidestep the need to first get everyone on board. So I guess we will be doomed to coexist with relative poverty as long as there's anything - status, power, wealth - people want to have more of than their neighbours. But absolute poverty? People going hungry? This, I believe, can be solved, and with enough technology can be solved without asking everyone for opinion. If food gets dirt cheap everywhere (and I mean "dirt cheap", not "pretty cheap thanks to economies of scale but not cheap enough for those actually making that food"), even the poorest person on Earth will have access to it, because there'll be zero reason for everyone to expend energy on preventing that access.

Only one has been done, building rockets. It's not safe to say he paved the way for the electric car revolution since there hasn't been one.

It's an interview that covers many topics. He doesn't have time to fully qualify every statement. Frankly, doing so just to satisfy the critics would be a waste of time that he could spend building his companies.

A good rule of thumb is to try to be charitable when evaluating a piece content, unless you have a good reason not to be.

blame the fanbase

Seems like it's not working, since his companies are hemorrhaging money.

Umm so there's no way to read the full transcript?

"yet what do the people get for all this"

Nothing?

They get massive consumer surpluses.

They get cars, fridges, air travel, tv, entertainment, healthcare - better, faster, cheaper (except the later).

Anyone who is able to hold a job and have an income in the Western World sees their material lives improve radically.

It is a lie to say 'the capitalists win'. Consumers get far more of the surpluses than any other group.

No... sorry but it sounds like you have no idea what a CEO's actual role is.

I'd argue that a lot of this a reaction to the standard media celebrity. Everywhere there are puff pieces trumpeting minor successes and pathetic daily trivialities of b-grade celebrities. And when it isn't this, younlater learn how success was achieved in a negative way or of terrible behaviour by the previously championed individual. Having a high level of cynicism helps keep one sane and avoid the hype. You are rarely disappointed.

He's a product/visionary CEO. They can be fairly hands on because they are very passionate about the specifics of what the company is building. The best of these have incredible intuition and domain knowledge, and are highly successful.

Yeah I was being a little flippant.

Classic speed vs. throughput.

Also a bit of an outdated mental model. Had the privilege of touring the tesla factory recently... one neat tidbit that stuck with me is the host described "the line" more like a river with many tributaries joining in all along the watershed.

So if you wanted to have a non-softball engineering discussion about "the line", you would ask questions like which tributaries are the bottlenecks, how much parallelism is there, are improvements marginal or do you wholesale upgrade entire sublines at once, what's the caching strategy, etc.

There are rational, non-envy-based reasons to object to all the hero-worship. For example, all the things "he" did above were actually done by big teams of people working together, but Elon gets all the credit. He deserves credit, but not all of it.

And let's not forget the millions of people who worked to generate wealth that could be transferred via, and taxed by, PayPal, accruing the fortune with which to start all these projects in the first place. If I didn't "know better" I'd be tempted to conclude that the luck of being in the right place at the right time with a good idea, is the main difference between Elon and the rest, or at least that any intrinsic differences are not as great as you might think. Heck I'm a "visionary" too, just add one billion dollars and tons of free time and see what I come up with! (Campaign coming soon to Kickstarter, LOL)

Man is at once animal and rational, and sometimes the rational side reacts against our own animalistic urge to designate an alpha ape and worship only that one ape. Many of us got into technology as a way of breaking down this same kind of bullshit hierarchy that you can find in so many other places & domains of human life. Technology was supposed to be the great equalizer. In some cases it has worked that way but in others it has only amplified the disequilibrium. It seems we can't escape our inner ape.

Therefore is it "technologists" to whom you should be appealing here for greater reverence? Maybe it's not your technological side, but your ape side, that wants to be more reverent.

How to build reliable stuff on time?

But the answer might be shorter.

I dunno. There are more Teslas than Fords around here. Perhaps the revolution is not evenly distributed.

I wonder why the transcript is linked from scribd. It makes me download their app and doesn't even open the document.

Why can't this just be good old HTML than a scribd walled garden? A horrible interface with ads shoved on your face.

Don't look at the puck's position, look at the first derivative.

SpaceX could also end up having a huge effect on the availability and affordability of high speed internet access.

The easiest way that probably anyone on HN (who can fizzbuzz) can help is with data management. So much stuff is still done by hand that could be easily scripted.

Researchers in our institute were amazed how easy it is to use e.g. google forms to gather data in a reasonable format. Once you get data in a reasonable format you can help them with transforming it/joining it with other sources/cleaning them up. ETLs and data integration are often completely foreign concepts to them.

And that's researchers, you might still start calling them quite computer-competent after you talk to the people in the clinic. All the research is for nothing if it's not brought to "bedside" to benefit the patients in a clinical setting, outside all trials. For that you need to make sure genomics pipelines are automated and reproducible and only clinically relevant information gets to the oncologists (or other doctors) deciding on treatment. This is still not quite there even in the best places.

I think most of the really world-changing stuff will just be hard work on relatively easy problems. It's hard to get excited about these (compared to the latest neural networks or distributed high performance systems) but they need to get done

I have one.

He has always said the chances of SpaceX succeeding was very slim - but at what point(after any particular technical achievement) he realized the this might work out.

You're kind of right. Let's say they find the right uses for existing tech that's not being used as it should.

If that's the thing, then I am with it.

And make sure there's ice

I've heard from interviewers that he's notoriously difficult to interview. He doesnt trust reporters and usually has certain questions they cant ask him.

Please don't take the comments too seriously. Especially only an hour after the story's been posted. Let the downvotes and the flags take their toll.

Yes, people on the internet will be negative. No, that doesn't mean you should respond to them.

Are Tesla's energy storage solutions available anywhere outside their vehicles?

I just want to read the whole text without signing up for some stupid app. Why oh why is this so hard in 2016?

Two points for your consideration:

#1: We clearly have the resources to publicly invest in innovative technologies like electric cars, AI and space travel. So why must these investments go directly into the hands of a few individuals to make all the final decisions (and who have bad habits of not paying their workers btw)? Why can't we make these investments through democratically accountable teams, perhaps via some academic mechanism?

#2: When you make a risky investment as an individual in a startup, you expect to get a commensurate return on that investment if the startup becomes successful in the marketplace. Why don't the collective investments of the public in Musk's ventures come back to citizens in a kind of public dividend?

You seem to harbor a bit of negativity towards some HN commenters... :)

In the case of real estate, that is precisely the case. Land is a zero-sum market devoid of any meritocracy.

Considering that housing is a pretty huge expense for the majority of people, it's a legitimate gripe.

> I would have thought that the technologists were above such petty envy.

That's a pernicious assumption. Technologists are still human and are vulnerable to the same emotions and biases of the hoi polloi.

The equation should have per-subject weights to modulate the "how many people" part. For instance, if my app helps Mr. Musk be 10% more productive, that's more impactful than helping Mr. Smith be 10% more productive.

Yes. Tesla Powerwall, a home battery.

https://www.tesla.com/powerwall

I was able to scroll through the full transcript (7 pages) within the scribd frame, below the youtube and soundcloud frames.

CEO - Chief EXECUTION officer. Isn't building and designing the "big piece" of execution. If he's involved in the actual execution then that means is a company laser focused on "executing" its vision.

I just wish more middle management at my company knew how the product worked.

I would add another multiplicative factor: the probability that you have success in what you are trying to achieve, if that probability is near zero you effort will be in vain.

There is no "tech side" or "politics side", it's all the same fucking side. You can't create the Internet without vast political consequence. You can't indefinitely extend life without the same. Every human action is steeped in political and social consequence.

Any company can build an electric car and lose money while doing it. The question isn't whether he can build a cool electric car, he clearly can. I really question the position he has put himself in financially.

- He used Tesla stock to secure loans he used to purchase his stake in Solar City, the decision to purchase Solar City is at least in part driven by the fact that Elon Musk IS Tesla, without him at the helm it would be a problem and if he got margin called it would affect Tesla since he would lose a significant amount of his shares. There is no Tesla boardmember/major shareholder that doesn't have a conflict of interest for this issue.

- His companies buy each other's bonds, they're basically just moving money around and building a larger house of cards - if one company goes down at this point I really don't see how it wouldn't have significant reprecussions for the others. This is especially problematic when it comes to Space X which is privately owned and its deep connection to his public companies.

- It seems that if I took a big pile of money in my yard and lit it on fire, Elon would probably want to compete there (and do it better than me). All of his companies are very capital intensive and he is very leveraged at this point and has a lot of people tied to his fate - him not being focused on any one business makes this a bigger problem.

And here's my biggest Elon problem:

- He is a walking PR campaign. Why do we barely know any of the higher level engineers at Space X or Tesla? He is splitting his time between multiple companies, I find it impossible to believe he is involved in every engineering breakthrough at all of these companies and yet I have honestly never once heard him give credit to any of his management or engineering team.

That last one is the worst for me. I don't think he's a great person and it's annoying seeing everyone fawning over him like he's Elon Kardashian for tech people. The fact an almost universal complaint at his companies is that people are undercompensated and overworked further reinforces my personal opinion he doesn't value the work of other people.

> apparently an email submission is just not ok despite having co authored in this area and currently designing BCI related hardware and software in the open in my free time

I'm not sure of the specifics, but this comes across as very entitled and narcissistic, but I assume that's most likely a case of misinterpretation of your point . That said, if they have a submission process, expect to go through it. It's entirely possibly they get a ton of useless submissions and inquiries through email, and part of their process is to ignore those. If an applicant can't be bothered to go through the initial steps to get onto the short list for consideration, why should they think that's a good candidate to be throwing money at, regardless of their resume?

I'm fairly sure i've heard this answer and it would be after that falcon 1 launch that would have bankrupted the company if it blew up.

The income is not evenly distributed.

To that I agree. I wasn't talking so much about startups. Admittedly a CEO(quite often a founder) there plays a much more instrumental role.

> Heck I'm a "visionary" too, just add one billion dollars and tons of free time and see what I come up with!

Thread winner. There is little difference between a billionaire and anyone else except a billion dollars.

If you've checked out recent papers in machine translation with deep learning, they're about as good as current products with supposedly just a week of unsupervised training. So it's really going places.

Of course, the demos (http://104.131.78.120) fail all the time because they haven't done the work to feed in the whole internet and handle proper names and stuff.

Plus he is a pretty mediocre public speaker...yet puts himself out there & makes an impact

He is quite correct that societies can go backwards. There are many scenarios in which we would have 'the tech' and then end up abandoning and losing it. One simple example would be if one corporation profited more by wrecking 'the tech' of another and blocking its adoption, than the other could profit by furthering it. When it all comes down to money you get those suboptimal outcomes, and in the end somebody cashed in epically, but things were not made.

I'm pleased Elon gets this, but it's a chilling thought. We don't have to have MORE stuff, internets, communications etc. just because of Moore's Law, just because it's possible. We can also have progressively less because it's in someone's interest for it to be less.

He didn't "do" those things, but he did put practically all his money where his mouth was to make them happen, with extremely uncertain payoff.

He could have invested his money, maybe funded some low-cost web startups, but instead he did what he thought was needed, financial risk being secondary. I think that's what makes him stand out.

I have all the respect in the world for what Mr. Musk has accomplished, but it has come at an amazing cost to the people around him.

He is worshiped from afar but reviled by many the closer you get to his inner circle. Go read "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future."

The question I always ask myself with the people who move mountains is what cost did that progress come at? What would someone's spouse, kids, friends, etc. say about the person?

It seemed to insist I install an app to go past the third page.

But that's the nature of network effects. Jaron Lanier's spoken eloquently about that, and Elon Musk exemplifies it. Whether he likes it or not, he is the figurehead and the focal point. Because he's willing to be that, it builds on itself. Because he's in a valuation-driven growth-only economy on which his businesses depend, it's in his interest to serve as this focal point, and because 'visionary' is an appealing story, the feedback loop gets set up and whirls into motion.

I think he is so much of a nerd that it doesn't change him all that much. I like him better for that, but it's true he doesn't deserve the amount of credit he's given, simply because that's unrealistic.

But, if he CEASES to be 'that guy' and 'the visionary sole leader and innovator', it's less of an appealing story, and his businesses would suffer. He is surfing on a wave of attention which sustains the valuations of his companies, and using the valuation to invest in gigantic projects that may do a lot of good. Surf on, say I.

I assume the equation he's talking about already propagates the value to the "leaves", where if the app is boosting a person's productivity, and that person's productivity increases value for a group of people, then it's that final group of people's increased value that is counted toward the original total. And there could be more than 2 layers before you quantify the value without recursing any deeper, of course.

Wasn't Falcon 1 a test bed for Falcon 9? I remember one when Tom Mueller called Elon Musk to say the a full length Merlin burn was completed without melting the engine. That was a big milestone.

I am pretty sure there have multiple of this yahoo moments successively - that made him believe that SpaceX will be able to succeed.

That can't be the reason on the national level. People used to buy plenty of Fords.

People that worship another person generally aren't well informed. For example, people look at Elon Musk like he's a pop culture icon -- I see people talking about him on my news feed all the time, yet these people aren't even technical. It's just a way for someone to identify to some type of group. Oh look what Elon's doing, he's so great. My reaction is, why are you sharing press articles about this person? Does it make you feel better about yourself?

Here are a few of those engineers:

http://aviationweek.com/blog/dragons-radiation-tolerant-desi...

http://events.technologyreview.com/video/watch/innovators-un...

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a5073/4328638/

https://youtu.be/VOagay_opLQ

That's for their spouse, kids, friends, etc to say. I'll judge business people by their businesses, musicians by their music, and so on and so forth. If I meet them personally, then I might make personal judgments, but I've no interest in the tabloid side of tech news.

While I understand and agree with the point you're making, I think it's also important to acknowledge we're all different, we're all good at different things and we all eventually fulfill some purpose.

Some of us are great at spending time with our wives and taking the kids to soccer practice. We fill our lives with family and friends, and get immense joy from that. We're so busy, likely, we'll never do anything "noteworthy" or wind up in the Guinness Book of Records. (Note: I'm not in any way implying that's a bad thing, I'm simply stating it as likely true)

Others in this world maybe are not so good socially, or maybe do spend "too much" time at work, and do burn out those around them. They do, however, achieve greatness that genuinely moves the entire human race forward.

It just so happens that second kind of person is around one in a few hundred million, so there really aren't so many around.

I'm not super familiar with facelift costs over time, but a quick google gives me this link: http://www.drhodgkinson.com.au/news-resource/different-types...

Quoth the article: "Facelifts have come a long way in the last 20 years, not only in terms of technique, but also in terms of accessibility to both women and men. In the 1970s and even into the 1980s, the facelift was a luxury reserved for the rich and famous."

This leads me to believe facelifts have greatly declined in cost over the past 30 years. The number of such surgeries has greatly increased as well ("Since 2000, overall procedures have risen 115 percent, but the types of procedures patients are choosing are changing." -- http://www.plasticsurgery.org/news/2016/new-statistics-refle... )

Do you have any other examples? Because the one you gave doesn't appear to support the argument that prices will remain high for long periods of time. Especially given that facelifts are a cosmetic surgery and thus there's relatively little drive to give them to everyone.

You can't create tech without political consequence, no. But there are "sides" in a sense that tech can be driving changes in policy. So you can use tech to make political changes without getting directly involved in all the mess the politics is.

That's one of the reasons I love watching his public speaking events (like the tesla model reveals).

Yeah, there's a good bit of production involved, but it usually feels like when a buddy is showing you something really cool that he made.

I would ask him, if he is still using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adderall .

> It always saddens me when I see a slew of Debbie Downer comments from the HN crowd.

My observation over the last few years has been a steady decline in the quality of comments on HN, and a steady increase in the number of Debbie Downer comments.

No matter what someone is doing - there will always, always be a comment about how whatever they are trying to achieve is stupid and they should instead be doing x, y, z.

It's a shame, really.

It's quite possible, that Page, and Bezos don't see much value in collaborating with the press. Maybe that seems like a non productive use of time to them. For example, look how much Zuck is in the press.

I agree, it's brilliant, and a great counter to the idea of how the "entrepreneur hero" is intrinsically better than the rest of us.

He also appeared in an episode The Simpsons. His acting was awful, but he did put himself out there.

> He is a walking PR campaign. Why do we barely know any of the higher level engineers at Space X or Tesla?

Remind me a great deal of what existed with Steve Jobs. Another example is Jeff Bezos with Amazon. Not saying that in tech circles some of their execs and/or engineers are not well known but certainly not people that your Aunt would have heard about. Also I guess Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook (although Sheryl Sandberg is fairly well known). Another is the "Google Guys" but you don't hear much about them lately probably because the PR has been tamped down. But early on it was every magazine cover and apparently from what I heard later Sergey wasn't even anywhere near as important as Larry was.

This happens also with VC firms. One partner (in a small firm like AVC) is the big cheese, the others you barely hear about.

That said this is not unusual in business or for that matter team sports or even entertainment. For many reason including some people simply want to be behind the scenes.

>If an applicant can't be bothered to go through the initial steps to get onto the short list for consideration, why should they think that's a good candidate to be throwing money at, regardless of their resume?

That's a fair question. I'd like to ask a question in response: if an applicant has worked under/helped/seen those who could be bothered the jump through the hoops to get on the short of consideration and then funded, walked away because someone threw money at them to work on financial/trading software (thus enabling and "freed" to pursued related research work in more detail in their spare time), why shouldn't they throw money at such candidate despite considering how far throwing more of the same into neuroimaging research has gotten us thus far?

Personally, jumping through arbitrary/superficial hoops is not a game I want to play (plenty of others are good at that, and I wish them all the best, darpa's latest and greatest ways at dealing with signal 2 noise issue is their problem, and anyone should feel free to point that out), I'm having much more fun playing my own game from my fancy apt all the away across the world, while still working with those don't want to waste my time (and mine there's). Luckly for others and folks like me, darpa aren't the only folks interested, and money isn't the only "limited" resource of consideration.

#1: It's seed money with which Elon is raising mind-boggling amounts of investor money, using his celebrity as a lever. I consider it a hack, but it's an effective one. Also, being the public face of a decision isn't the same thing as making the decision. So far, I like the results being produced.

#2: Got me there with colonizing Mars: that will be rich-only. However, proliferation of electric cars combined with breakthroughs in energy storage combined with local solar power can end up as a VERY big public dividend: effectively, it becomes possible to invest in technology that drastically reduces the self-sustaining costs and carbon footprint of the individual. Combine that with growing your own food and you're your own little generation ship: it's a drastic change from traditional labor/capital society, because you can set up your little 'life capsule' and then spend your days doing whatever, perhaps working on OpenAI :)

And if it's good enough for Elon it's good enough for everybody else: imagine if not just megacorporations but ordinary citizens were subsidized to convert to this battery-pack-based, solar-powered energy consumption model. We could use plain human self-interest to drive widespread adoption of tech that would reduce the catastrophic swerve into a far more chaotic and destructive global climate.

I'd call that a public dividend, worldwide.

Would you prefer that our celebrities were less accomplished, or just that we didn't have celebrities at all?

It's important to know what people think and they should be able to express themselves even if they are saying (what you consider) negative things.

When it comes to jealousy people ignore abilities and focus on luck.

> "Yes, he's building rockets, but he took a bunch of government money!"

To be fair, pretty much all of his companies rely on government subsidies. He's basically built his businesses around it.

"I admit that mathematical science is a good thing. But excessive devotion to it is a bad thing. If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb." -- Aldus Huxley

I disagree with the idea that negativity, in and of itself, deserves downvoting. Shouldn't these negative comments at least be evaluated for how they add to the discussion? Blanket dismissal of negativity leads only to "Yea it's great!" echo chambers.

I have no preference, and frankly, I'm in no position to know what's best for anyone else besides myself.

I think YC funded scribed at some point, and I can't for the life of me work out why.

Does it make you feel better about yourself to shit on someone who's excited about electric cars and space travel even if they're not particularly technical?

I have literally never heard Elon mention another person who already worked at the company. I can find plenty of times he was announcing a key hire, like when they brought in Peter Hochholdinger. Every new feature, product, etc is announced by Musk. Which like you said is similar to Apple. I think similar to Jobs, Elon is at least significantly involved in a lot of details - and I think similar to Jobs he feels that since he was involved it wouldn't have happened without him.

Google isn't a good example in my opinion though, generally people besides the CEO announce their products, i.e. Google Maps was announced by Bret Taylor. Look at the history of Google and Microsoft and you will see tons of "xxx announces/introduces yyy". Tesla's entire history is "Elon Musk announces ..." (after teasing on Twitter for 5 months to keep the stock price up).

I don't think everything is bad about him. I think the thing he is amazing at is setting the vision for his companies - which is really valuable. It really seems like everyone understands the mission and where things are going and he's very clear about it. So I think he has good qualities, I just think he's also narcissistic, financially impulsive and unfocused.

Relevant: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-06/how-elon-musk-used-...

According to this, the answer to "How to Build the Future" is "make the story big, and get free money from government".

Note: I have not fact-checked it or anything. Just find it interesting and relevant, so don't expect me to argue about it, and don't flag me as a troll.

I find this false. Tesla is mainly a electric car company, not an autonomous car company. Other companies have the same class of capabilities in the market, it's just that Tesla has the good will of the people. I like Tesla, but calling it an autonomous car company is ridiculous.

> I'd like to ask a question in response ... why shouldn't they throw money at such candidate

Because they don't see that candidate. Your indication that your email was sufficient implies a few underlying assumptions which may or may not be true: a) They have enough staff to actively monitor this mailbox for submissions, b) there aren't too many useless submissions that make it unlikely the staff will be able to find the useful ones, c) that even if the staff exists, it doesn't require some bureaucratic hurdle to be met so it can be allocated to this use, d) that the staff assigned to monitoring this source is capable of assessing your accomplishments and how they relate to the grant in question.

Since there is a grant process, I think it's likely that whatever resources they do have are allocated towards assessing entries that come in through that process. There's probably more than enough work to be done in that department, such that monitoring mailboxes for the odd useful non-conformant applicant is not a priority. Even so, I assume if the stars aligned and someone happened to see the email, and knew the applicant was uniquely qualified or had time to research the person, then it's likely it might be followed up on (depending on how much interest that person had in this particular grant or field).

The important thing to consider in this is that none of these scenarios have anything to do with how qualified the applicant is. Taking issue with them not persuing you in this process when I think it's likely your application may have never even seen human eyes seems an odd response to me. The little information I have to go on makes it sound like you did the equivalent of applying for an engineering position at Apple by walking into the nearest Apple store and dropping off your resume. I'd expect about the same level of success with that. Sure, the store manager might pass it on, or know someone who is interested, but really, that's not their job or responsibility.

I realy appreciate how to build the future series, it's an inspiring effort. but you guys need to work on "endings". I mean both zuckerberg and musk videos ends little bit odd. specially musk's video ends kinda raw.

This interview was pretty dry to me. It almost seemed rehearsed, as if Elon requested the questions go like this. They only scratched the surface of a bunch of general "big picture" subjects that anyone whose paying attention right now would already know about.

I think it's reasonable to express some doubt. To be down on Debbie Downer is to be a Debbie Downer Downer.

Estimating this is probably futile, but in principle, I agree.

Gads, what a terrible background for an interview.

>Because they don't see that candidate.

>The important thing to consider in this is that none of these scenarios have anything to do with how qualified the applicant is.

I know this, which is why I kinda of have no faith in these kinds of initiatives (the kinds Elon is inadvertently/or not parading over) since most of effort involved goes into being seen, the people behind the "process" could care less of after such funds have been allocated as to what becomes of them. I've seen enough people do work behinds the scenes (and how far south/delayed projects go after they leave), actually making things happen for those who do go through the "process" in labs/orgs to not really care too deeply about getting through this hurdle that's ultimately meaningless in the scope of the work.

Things are moving forward overall, just a bit slowly than they have to (although I've made more related useful for stuff for others in less time after not working in labs directly anymore).

>The little information I have to go on makes it sound like you did the equivalent of applying for an engineering position at Apple by walking into the nearest Apple store and dropping off your resume.

I've talked about similar issues before on HN (with others also in similar positions with their work in research <-> industry) in more depth with more links and such, so its not really worth going into here.

absurd hero worship. I like Elon Musk just fine, but you're fawning over him. How do you propose we nominate "great persons" for your "equation" anyway?

For the record, that book and its stories need to be taken with a grain of salt. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/597982078374817794

Not saying Musk's accounts of the events are perfectly truthful either. Great book though!

you should read some Taleb on this subject. ignoring low probability outcomes is not a good risk/success model.

Definitely. You've got bankers robbing the public for trillions, and wars of questionable effectiveness costing five trillion over the last decade or so, and then you've got Elon taking very large personal risks in technology that could potentially have great positive impact on humanity, and yet he gets the same level of hate in the press.

In Mark Manson's new book[0] he talks about how humans can excel at very few things, often barely one, and that "being a good person" for lack of a better phrase counts as one. It seems obvious in hindsight, but struck me because I hadn't thought of it that way before.

(The book is incredible, by the way. I've already read it twice, just like Derek Sivers. Recommend it highly.)

[0]: https://markmanson.net/books/subtle-art

I believe the humanity moves on its way naturally anyway, those trying desperately to move mountains are simply wasting their lives here on Earth. A balanced way is a key to everything.

Since the book is not free to read online, would you provide a tl;dr?

This is true throughout history. Publicly selfless heroes (Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Elon Musk) often have to "sacrifice" (is it conscious?) their private selves, to be able to be the incarnation of what their work is.

It bothers a lot of people, personally I am fine with it and would make the same decision. I think it's a personality thing.

If I would pray I'd pray for Elon. He's been such a source of inspiration to me. He's so brave in carrying his burden. May the fruits of his work prosper soon. Then he can take a break.

Last time I checked, not only were the number of EVs produced and sold in the US minuscule, but the derivative was negative. I don't recall the precise year, probably 2013-2014, but fewer cars were sold in the second than the first.

I can't locate the post presently, and don't know how trends have progressed. The statistic surprised me when I found it.

What about all the people working in marketing, software patent lawyers, drug dealers? You want them to quit their jobs?

---

Let me make my point in a less obtuse way. Most people make decisions about their careers based on opportunity and maximising profit. No one becomes a footballer to make the world a better place. This would all be fine as long as the capitalist market rewarded choices that make the world a better place. Obviously it does not and it's not the fault of a footballer that we as a civilisation choose to channel our available resources their way and not towards frivolous play like space exploration.

If anyone ever figures out a way to make the free market choose the greater good they will win all the Nobel prizes forever (we won't need Nobel prizes after that).

It's 'executive' not 'execution'

Why is that question so important to you? A lot of people are drains on everyone around them and they don't move mountains. If the quest is valuable enough to society, it far outweighs the costs to a single man's relationships.

As a rationalization for why you yourself would not want to live that way, that's fair enough. Neither would I.

Elon Musk is worth $12B. He's a businessman. He lives in a giant mansion. Ghandi owned like 5 things. I'm not knocking Musk, but this is a strange interpretation of a very successful capitalist.

Pretty much every company relies on government subsidies of some form or another. (Cheap transportation infrastructure and a workforce partially or entirely educated via the public school system are two of the larger subsidies governments provide.) Taxpayers generally don't have a problem with that when those subsidies are a net benefit to society.

I assume that sama's comment addresses harsh and unreasonable negativity.

Here's an example of a negative comment that (rightly) hasn't been downvoted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12509856

Here's an example of a negative comment that (rightly) has been downvoted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508752

If sama is talking about negativity in general, then it would be a very sad thing to complain about people being negative. Because negativity is important, especially in discussions, especially for the reasons you touched upon. But I assume he knows better than to complain about people disagreeing.

I think he's just complaining about the number of people this topic has attracted that have come here simply to vent. And I agree, it's kind of a pain, but within a couple hours they get sorted out of the discussion. It's great that it's possible to say what they say on HN. And I just don't think it's worth complaining about, especially as someone involved in the production of the linked story. That's just feeding the trolls.

And when Jobs died, we needed a new icon to worship and show us the Future. Musk was in the right place at the right time.

Nah, in fact I'd say it's the opposite. There are more middle if the road comments and meta complaining. The HN crowd is notoriously hard on everyone - especially so if there are technical questions involved -and it has been that way forever.

Paradromics (https://paradromics.com) is working on full-bandwidth neural interfaces.

They don't need it because they have sustainable businesses regardless of the press, so they don't do it. Musk wouldn't have a business without constant coverage and a strong brand (brand equity helps him cut deals no one else could).

Another way to phrase this is: If you take on big enough challenges that are important enough to America (and humanity), the government will rightfully help fund your quest.

'Tis an interesting point.

> Drug dealers

Perhaps drug dealers (and their suppliers) can implement testing, QA and proper labeling.

I'm not totally sure about software patent lawyers. But, deep down, my gut says that if software patent law wasn't to crappy, perhaps the occupation would be perceived in a better light. Maybe they could push for reform from the inside?

On the whole, I think every industry can do some introspection on how they can affect more people for the betterment of society. It would do us all some good.

You can definitely contribute. If you're a software engineer, then you could join a research lab as a scientific programmer. Good labs are well-funded in these areas and will have funding to cover salary for a programmer to implement data analysis pipelines, polish research software and make it publicly available etc.

Alternatively if you're a software engineer or a product designer, or many other roles, then you could join a company working on commercializing genetic medicine. They're are lots and those companies are definitely not just looking for people with PhDs.

Once in a place like that, you'd be able to chat further with people about your career direction.

Let me make my point in a less obtuse way. Most people make decisions about their careers based on opportunity and maximising profit. No one becomes a footballer to make the world a better place. This would all be fine as long as the capitalist market rewarded choices that make the world a better place. Obviously it does not and it's not the fault of a footballer that we as a civilisation choose to channel our available resources their way and not towards frivolous play like space exploration.

If anyone ever figures out a way to make the free market choose the greater good they will win all the Nobel prizes forever (we won't need Nobel prizes after that).

The weights would be different based on who's assigning them.

According to your logic, Elon's been "in the right place at the right time" how many times? That you think that's due to luck, when it's clear he's a polymath with great design talent and work ethic, says more about him as a psychological Rorschach than anything else, I think.

He does trigger conservative-minded people pretty hard, which I imagine is partly due to how Tesla got politicized during Obama's first term.

I don't know how serious you are about the billion dollars thing (or what exactly your point may be), but I'd bet a billion dollars you wouldn't be anywhere as effective as Elon is with that money. The idea that any two people are going to be equivalently effective given $X is silly. There are just as many orders of difference in effectiveness with money as there are in any other endeavor.

Why isn't some entertainment - even if it's somewhat frivolous - for the greater good?

An hour spent watching a football game is an hour less committing crime or doing other unsavory acts.

But agreed - that person would win all the Nobel Peace prizes.

I'm wary of the specific claim about sports (or better, I do almost completely disagree with it).

But if you look at the worst offenders, you'll see that the professions that take the most profit normally also take the most power. And in yielding that power, they have a big share on the blame of making their negative utility profession lucrative.

He is a captivating public speaker. He accessibly expresses new ideas of considerable importance and complexity. What else do you want from him?

SpaceX doesn't need Vince Offer.

Free markets are the problem, not the solution. You're not going to get much strategic planetary intelligence out of a system designed to maximise short-term profit. The absolute best you can hope for is the occasional individual like Musk who takes a longer view.

Politics - which includes economics - is a much bigger challenge than AI.

We've completely transformed our understanding of science and technology, but our political and economic thinking would be recognisable to a Roman senator and a medieval banker.

Politics and economics are still waiting for a Copernican revolution. Our survival prospects as a species are limited until that revolution happens.

In theory - and in the greater scheme - that's a small sacrifice to pay if the end result is impactful enough.

Not every one needs to subscribe to the world view that a person has to win spectacularly at big things to find meaning in life.

Thank you for clarifying. I do agree that it is expected to optimize ones career for maximum income.

Even so, an individual can often choose to push for the greater good within the confines of free market forces.

A footballer can use their image to promote organizations that do good. A SaaS owner can help their customers become more secure and efficient. Lawyers can push for better oversight and reform.

Maybe we can't all be Elon, but we can all try to improve our surroundings.

Maybe I'm too young and naive, but I think it can be done.

It's a team effort, not necessarily an individual effort.

The people in marketing are the ones helping to bring the positive utility-delta stuff to light, so the utility delta actually happens.

I'd say impactful, since apparently success only means rich to some people :D

> Maybe they could push for reform from the inside?

Here's an example, Mozilla's Open Software Patent License, trying to do some reform from the inside: https://www.mozilla.org/about/policy/patents/

I literally have no idea what they're talking about.

SpaceX is providing the US government with cargo supply services at a fraction of the cost of previous alternatives and that's "free money from the government"?

Read all about it: http://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-releases-cots-final-report

The government investments do not "go directly into the hands of a few individuals..."

The Federal tax credits for plug-in cars, for example, are available to all automakers (or more accurately, the customers of all automakers). You could start an electric car company today and your customers would be eligible for the credit. Nissan Motor Co. is the #1 beneficiary of the tax credits to date.

All automakers were eligible for the DOE's ATVM loan program. Tesla received (and paid back) about $500 million under the auspices of the program. Ford received $5.9 billion and Nissan received $1.4 billion. Neither Ford nor Nissan have paid back the loan.

The Federal government bailed out GM and Chrysler to the tune of about $20 billion.

We've spent trillions of dollars to secure our interests in the middle east, which keeps oil supplies stable to the benefit of ICE automakers.

People always complain about government subsidies when there are articles about Elon Musk, but it is hardly ever even-handed.

I haven't read the book, but this doesn't seem to fit with what's known about general intelligence, nor the examples of polymaths from the renaissance period.

I suspect the causes are societal, from the constraints placed on our time and freedom to explore and become well rounded.

I don't know what you guys will do without Elon Musk. He's truly a gift to you all.

Hmm that doesn't seem to make sense. Free markets (which include the vast majority of countries on the planet) enable people to create wealth. Maybe some sort of mix of a planet-wide initiative and the normal free markets we have would make sense. Calling free markets "the problem" doesn't really do anything for anybody.

That strategy is similar to our current best strategy for bringing peace by killing more people than the enemy. It's proven to work but it is very wasteful on both sides.

I guess the entire cognitive dissonance com from this line:

> How soon can it happen? Since the trend is exponential. It can happen within 100 years.

Some people think "well, it's likely to happen within 100 years -> it's up to us to be prepared".

Other people think "well, it's unlikely to happen within 10 years -> it's not worth it to begin to prepare".

I don't even know if one of those is wrong!

Many billionaire doesn't give a damn about humanity or earth in general. In fact this precise trait had made them billionaire in the first place.

I toured the GM Lansing Delta Township assembly plant a few years ago where they make mid-size SUVs like the GMC Acadia, Buick Enclave, and Chevy Traverse. At the time, with a ton of robotic welders, sleds, etc. they were running 3 shifts and turning out 60 cars/hour.

Last year, Tesla sold 50,000 cars. It would take the Delta plant roughly a month to make that many. GM has ~15 equivalent plants worldwide.

I love Tesla and am glad to see the NUMMI plant up and running again, but even their most ambitious sales plans for the next 10 years pale in comparison to business as usual for the major manufacturers.

edit

Curiosity got the better of me, so I looked up the 2015 sales figures for those 3 vehicles from that one plant. Acadia: 96,393; Traverse: 119,945; Enclave: 62,081. So roughly 280,000 SUVs produced at the one assembly plant last year without much fanfare.

Yet those people chose to be around him? No one has ever forced anyone to work for Elon Musk.

Are you accusing Elon Musk of being the thinking man's Kim Kardashian?

I've often thought that if Elon had the stage presence of Robert Downey Junior as Tony Stark, we'd already be on Mars.

I actually don't think that most people make decisions about their careers based on maximizing profit at all. In fact, I think very few people would choose a soul-sucking job running against their values just because it pays more.

I don't think those are planned to ship until 2018.

"No one becomes a footballer to make the world a better place."

Maybe not, but Messi increases the happiness delta a lot for many, many people. I think the world is a much better place with him as a footballer than an accountant or something.

Nah bro, as a billionaire, I make all of my money to help the world.

He's gained weight, look at his gut. Also, does he sleep? Look at his eyes. I would bet money he works 60+ hours a week.

Yes, and I believe Sam brought that up later in the conversation.

There are any number of people who are far more toxic to those around them without having accomplished any significant progress in the process, so Elon Musk is a poor choice of target for that criticism.

People talk about Elon because he has interesting ideas, does interesting things, and inspires a lot of other people. If many young people (or even old people), watch this interview, it seriously has the potential to make the world a slightly better place, if at least some of them try to put his ideas into practice.

Hypothetically, this is unnecessary.

Assuming that a 10% increase in productivity causes a 10% increase in the impact on people (either in quality or quantity), 10% of Mr. Musk's impact may be greater in absolute terms than 10% of Mr. Smith's.

One may debate whether 10% productivity = 10% impact, but if that increase is attributed back to you, there's no need to artificially manipulate the equation.

Free markets are an optimal pachinko machine for distributing capital, that needs no oversight or central direction.

It doesn't generate its own pachinko balls, that's utterly orthogonal. Free market capitalism is what you DO with a population that has disposable income. You can't feed the bottom of it into the top, it doesn't even work that way.

It's not even optimal for reaching the highest developments of ideas and inventions, because local maximums will starve out the newer ideas that need to grow and become competitive. It does nothing about network effects and tends towards monopoly.

But it's a fantastic distribution mechanism for the wealth of existing populations: no overseer required! Within some known limitations it works very nicely.

NO wealth is ever created.

> An hour spent watching a football game is an hour less committing crime or doing other unsavory acts.

Not for the vast, vast majority of people watching football. Most people aren't engaging in crime or "unsavory acts" whenever they have to entertain themselves.

I think mass entertainment is definitely for the greater good, but not because it reduces crime in any appreciable fashion.

Are you sure the net happiness from football was really raised by Messi or did he simply shift it to his county and teams he plays for? If you take away his great play doesn't it just make other players stick out more, and fans would derive happiness from other players?

Keep it up Sam. People who comment negatively are usually those who have not put themselves out there and tried to actually create or build something in the real world. This was a great interview and I really enjoyed it.

Some people way happiness at a job more importantly than quality of life outside of it.

If a balanced way is the key to everything those not trying at all to move humanity on its way are wasting their lives too.

People share in an effort to communicate to the world something about themselves. The feel better part will come from their friends and family knowing about what makes them tick and strangers the might be able to recognize a kindred spirit and in turn extend their network of people they enjoy hanging out with.

let me know if you need me to break down other basic human instincts for you :-)

The argument isn't about soul-sucking jobs, but about jobs that don't contribute to society. I'm sure there are people out there who enjoy cold-calling and scamming people.

But to address your argument: you missed the "opportunity" bit. If you're a well-off, well educated person you can choose to do whatever you feel like and I'm sure some people do without worrying about money (perhaps they have lots already). Most people will chose the best paying job that is available to them. Sorry, but reality is on my side on this one. Go visit a factory if you want to see if people want self-realisation or money to survive. Again: please remember the "opportunity" part. If you tell a factory worker he can earn 4$ an hour assembling landmines or 2$ an hour assembling asthma inhalers I will eat my hat if they don't go with the money (and I wouldn't blame them for this).

I'm dying to hear how Blue Origin is more sustainable than SpaceX.

Only one other player stands out as much. It seems silly to say that either should have been an accountant, because if he were, then the same arguments would apply to the other.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lionel-messi-is-impossib...