I am surprised that YC would make this page so remarkably mobile-unfriendly. I don't have the time to listen to the interview, I just want to read the transcript. They could have just pasted it in a reader-friendly format, but instead it's in an annoying Scribd applet. I don't want to sign up for their service or download the app, not to mention that it's a terrible mobile reader anyway. This was very disappointing.
Used the $$ selector in Chrome to find Scribd's .ff0 elements, copied them into SublimeText, did some regex work to clean out the tags (a span element for every line? with absolute positioning? Really Scribd?), and then exploited the fact that paragraphs got jammed together with no whitespace between the last punctuation and the beginning of the next paragraph to use a regex to auto-break the paragraphs.
Your work is awesome. Thank you so much. Here, I pasted it into a gist so that it's not in a typewriter font. I thought it would also fix the lines being 25 words long but it didn't, but it's still an improvement: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/3ea317a1f71bbfeca6df5d8469...
In other communities, to circumvent asinine ploys at lock-in, someone would just brute force the pdf file with a burner facebook login, and repost it. But then, you'd still be stuck with a pdf.
It's always been well behaved and predictable though. And if you have a mobile browser that forces text to wrap when you zoom in (I don't know how you brows the web without this) then it really was fine.
It is great to bring this topic on mobile unfriendly display. The posts like these are ones that make keep coming back to hackernews. It reminds me that there are people who really care of the things i care about.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"During the first quarter of 2016, Tesla delivered over 25 MWh of energy storage to customers on four continents. Over 2,500 Powerwalls and nearly 100 Powerpacks were delivered in North America, Asia, Europe, and Africa.[33]"
Yes, likely you'd need to get all-new batteries every 10 years[1] or so. (And likely recycle the old ones.)
The good news is that batteries are getting about 8% more efficient every year (price per kwh) [2]. So 10 years from now batteries will be 1.08^10 = ~2.15x as efficient [3].
So when you replace them, they'll cost half as much for the same amount of energy storage (and probably half the space too). It's basically Moore's law for batteries except slower.
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.
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 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.
What about all the people working in marketing, software patent lawyers, drug dealers? You want them to quit their jobs?
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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).
Believe it or not, there are different motivations people have for choosing their careers. Some become footballers because they want to rake in as much money as Beckham, others because they enjoy football so much that they decide that's what they want to do all the time. I'm pretty sure most people don't have just one overriding motivation for what they do, but an amalgam of different factors. Your statement about maximizing profit as a primary motivator is less of a factual statement and more of a revelation about your own motivations.
Most of the world population doesn't have the kind of opportunities you do. You are probably at the top 5% of the 7 billion population. Chances are you can choose between a 100k job and a 120k job that you find unsavory and maybe you choose the lower paid one. Most of the population has different choices to make. You are the one projecting your privelaged position onto the rest of the world.
Just what the hell does anyone even mean by "make the world a better place"?!
I am willing to bet that if we held a forum to settle what a "better world" means, we'd have to adjourn it with no resolution. The questions of better world for whom, and on what terms, by what definition, what expense and, oh yeah, who pays the bill and why would never find one conclusion.
What you really mean to say is that Capitalist market rewarded choices does make the world a better place according to your definition of it. But don't lay claim to speak for the world when for many Capitalism market rewards are making the world a better place.
This is why I distrust those that want to direct us toward a magical, "better world" and and do so by decrying voluntary exchanges between people as counter to their vision.
I think you're wrong about one thing. You see, you always think of the greater good as you define it. However, watching a football star is the desire of many, and they pay money for it, so the football star is in fact doing it for the greater good by entertaining many. Capitalism moves in the direction of where the money is - and the money is in things people want. So capitalism is a most efficient machine to produce things for the greater good. Any other definition of 'greater good', i.e. yours, would have to be forced on them by the force of law and ultimately, threats and violence.
"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.
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?
He raises the net happiness. He does things no one else does and is a joy to watch. It's like saying if a great musician never lived people would just listen to different music. Sure, but there would be a certain joy and pleasure people never would have experienced, and never realized they were missing.
Tesla make a lot of people happy but there must be accountants at Jaguar, BMW etc. who have not enjoyed losing sales to the California start up. However there are many happy Tesla customers and only a small handful of motor company accountants. Obviously there are sales staff too plus suits in the oil companies who have been pained by Tesla, but still the balance is a net happy one. Compare with Tony Blair, makes his business cronies happy but inflicts more misery.
Footballers do have a connection with their fans and it is their admiration that is sought far more than money. So they are very much in it to bring happiness to the world, to put on the show. I don't see them working for free though.
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.
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.
Segmenting a market is often suboptimal. See how Intel is "segmenting" their CPU market by hard locking features in "consumer" CPUs. This effectively means they are not available unless you pay big big money.
Why is that suboptimal? It certainly is suboptimal for consumers in the short run, since it helps Intel increase producer surplus. How that producer surplus is used to create better technology has a pretty important role in determining whether it's optimal in the longer run.
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.
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).
HN's privilege is showing pretty badly here in these comments. Seem to be completely oblivious to the oppressive squalor that most the world lives in, only thinking about which high-paying cushy job they should take to "change the world."
Well you know, we were talking about Elon Musk after all. So that kinda assumes, that we're not talking about jobs for survival kind of situation. Even if it is the vast majority of population.
Speaking from my own experience, I've known quite a few people working in factories that didn't want "desk jobs" or to be "paper pushers", even if those jobs paid more. And some even had the turned down promotion offers to prove it.
I didn't miss the opportunity bit. It seems your logic there is backwards: It's precisely if I can choose to do whatever I feel like that I have opportunity, and precisely those people you agree may have other goals than maximizing profit.
Sure, if you have no money and have an "opportunity" to flip burgers, most people would take that job even if they were vegans. That's survival, but I don't think that says much about what they would choose to do.
A better example I think is when people decide to go back to school because they've realized they only get shitty jobs without education. In that situation, they could choose to do whatever. Do most people find a list of best-paying jobs and pick the one at the top to decide what they should study? I think they do not.
Really you chose your career only from a profit motive? What are you, a sales person?
I certainly did not chose my profession from a profit motive and neither did most of the people I know. We did what we did because that is what we like or enjoy. Of course practical issues of making a living wage factors in.
I make a high salary now, but that is rather by accident. I just happened to be good in STEM subjects and enjoy math and programming. I didn't pursue it because it was an optimal economic decision.
I can fully relate to Elon Musk. When I try to pick a programming job e.g. I factor in many things such as salary, colleagues, location etc, but actually how useful the product seems is a major factor for me. I am generally willing to sacrifice salary to do something which I feel helps humanity more. E.g. I'd day a pay cut to develop a medical application over a horse betting application.
Of course money isn't irrelevant. If there is just too little money in medical software then I'd suck it up and sell my soul to betting, big oil or whatever ;-)
I think quite a few of the respondents are missing the point because you said that most people choose to "maximise profit" which has a negative connotation. (Or apparently so, in their minds)
I read your comment as saying that most people choose a job based on maximising utility; one component of which is financial reward; and that top-class sports is one industry in which there is generally a consensus that "people are paid too much" - i.e. that there is a distortion; that perhaps their love of playing and the positives they contribute to society are already well priced in to their wages.
Also, it seems entirely reasonable to me that any market distortion implies an opportunity cost - that aggregate happiness; over time, would be greater; if we spent a little less on footballers and a little more on e.g. imho; carbon capture!
You even explicitly state that it would be extremely judgemental to blame individuals - i.e. footballers - for maximising their individual happiness at the expense of human society as a whole; and that instead this should be blamed on a market or political failure.
Now this is an insult to number of jobs which are chosen by skilled enough to get better paid jobs but they won't. Examples - doctors & nurses, most people in disaster orgs like Red Cross, Doctors without Frontiers etc. and I am sure many other types of jobs out there (corporate vs creative job, anybody?)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Also stops some people from doing good things - they'd be bored, so they'd either go after politics (yup, either big or local), actual art (ok), maybe make something as in crafts (probably best outcome).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I ask as someone who is vaguely familiar with Taleb's ideas but didn't read the book:
That is a really fascinating point, especially considering this is literally a case where you are "betting your (future) life" on the low probability outcome event.
I mean, what is your hedge in that case? Does Taleb talk about that too?
Taleb investment advice: put almost all of your savings in super stable investments, like treasuries. Use the rest to bet on unicorn startups, or highly leveraged options (as long as those options have a limited downside and an unlimited upside!). I'm not quite sure how to apply this to one's career.
I guess a hedge in that case would be to try to arrange things so they come out OK if you miss the goal. Like if you want to be president aim for the fail case being a successful lesser politician. Not sure what Taleb says.
I would be far more interested in how to build a successful business. Everyone asks Elon about his big ideas, but how do you turn those big ideas into reality, specifically? I have never seen anyone ask him those questions. I thoroughly enjoyed the interview with Jessica Livingston because that was the primary topic. A missed opportunity in my opinion. I hope the rest of the interviews are more about the nuts and bolts of how to build a successful business.
EDIT
Ask him about the early days at PayPal. What are the lessons he learned that he applied to Tesla and SpaceX? What worked for PayPal but not the other companies and why?
>What worked for PayPal but not the other companies and why?
Amusingly if you read chapter 1 of Founders at Work quite a big part of what worked at PayPal may have been firing Elon Musk. Max Levchin largely built PayPal tech wise using Unix and then it was merged with Musk's X.com and Musk became CEO and wanted to switch everything to Windows.
>Levchin: The three of us are pretty good friends now. At the time, already I had hated the guy's guts for forcing me to do Windows, and then, in the end, I was like,"You gotta go, man."My whole argument to him was, "We can't switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can't allow any additional changes. It's one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major—you just don't want to do it right now." That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud.
> Amusingly if you read chapter 1 of Founders at Work quite a big part of what worked at PayPal may have been firing Elon Musk. Max Levchin largely built PayPal tech wise using Unix and then it was merged with Musk's X.com and Musk became CEO and wanted to switch everything to Windows.
I encourage you to read "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future." Musk talked about PayPal and the Windows switch in detail in Appendix 2:
“As for the technology change, that’s not really well understood. On the face of it, it doesn’t sound like it makes much sense for us to be writing our front-end code in Microsoft C++ instead of Linux. But the reason is that the programming tools for Microsoft and a PC are actually extremely powerful. They’re developed for the gaming industry. I mean, this is going to sound like heresy in a sort of Silicon Valley context, but you can program faster, you can get functionality faster in the PC C++ world. All of the games for the Xbox are written in Microsoft C++. The same goes for games on the PC. They’re incredibly sophisticated, hard things to do, and these great tools have been developed thanks to the gaming industry. There were more smart programmers in the gaming industry than anywhere else. I’m not sure the general public understands this. It was also 2000, and there were not the huge software libraries for Linux that you would find today. Microsoft had huge support libraries. So you could get a DLL that could do anything, but you couldn’t get—you couldn’t get Linux libraries that could do anything.
“Two of the guys that left PayPal went off to Blizzard and helped created World of Warcraft. When you look at the complexity of something like that living on PCs and Microsoft C++, it’s pretty incredible. It blows away any website.
“In retrospect, I should have delayed the brand transition, and I should have spent a lot more time with Max getting him comfortable on the technology. I mean, it was a little difficult because like the Linux system Max had created was called Max Code. So Max has had quite a strong affinity for Max Code. This was a bunch of libraries that Max and his friends had done. But it just made it quite hard to develop new features. And if you look at PayPal today, I mean, part of the reason they haven’t developed any new features is because it’s quite difficult to maintain the old system.
“Ultimately, I didn’t disagree with the board’s decision in the PayPal case, in the sense that with the information that the board had I would have made maybe the same decision. I probably would have, whereas in the case of Zip2 I would not have. I thought they just simply made a terrible decision based on information they had. I don’t think the X.com board made a terrible decision based on the information they had. But it did make me want to be careful about who invested in my companies in the future.
“I’ve thought about trying to get PayPal back. I’ve just been too strung out with other things. Almost no one understands how PayPal actually worked or why it took off when other payment systems before and after it didn’t. Most of the people at PayPal don’t understand this. The reason it worked was because the cost of transactions in PayPal was lower than any other system. And the reason the cost of transactions was lower is because we were able to do an increasing percentage of our transactions as ACH, or automated clearinghouse, electronic transactions, and most importantly, internal transactions. Internal transactions were essentially fraud-free and cost us nothing. An ACH transaction costs, I don’t know, like twenty cents or something. But it was slow, so that was the bad thing. It’s dependent on the bank’s batch processing time. And then the credit card transaction was fast, but expensive in terms of the credit card processing fees and very prone to fraud. That’s the problem Square is having now.
“Square is doing the wrong version of PayPal. The critical thing is to achieve internal transactions. ...
The way I see it PayPal essentially helped an established incumbent monopoly (US credit card companies) with issues at the time maintain and extend its global relevance, lock down domination of cross-border consumer payments, meaningfully extend US intelligence sector surveillance, and continue to fuck the little guy. Only Europe and China are building a resistance now, 15 years later. That you have 5 or 10 rich people coming out of that little cash-cow who feel like publicly playing god with humanity's future or that they deserve some kind of respect for the 'achievement' is pathetic. Any number of people could have built that better, or with morals. If they had any sense they'd be ashamed at what they've done, and how it has seemingly irrevocably crumbled in to bigcorp screw-the-customer service mode. Besides, we all know the real e-vehicle revolution has already happened, right here in China.
That would be the cynical (and probably realistic) interpretation, however because both the European (most of Europe, nearby countries) and Chinese network (nodes across much of the world, particularly Asia) are relatively internationally distributed (and thereby subject to multiple bureaucracies) they are somewhat less prone to centralized interference/monitoring. Further, neither region has as bad a record as the US in using financial systems for aggressive political gain.
There are numerous reports from NGOs about the social impact of the credit card system and some reports from European Parliament detailing the use of financial systems for US surveillance, most recently around the fiasco resulting in SWIFT2 (aka SWIFT1 with a different name and more servers). A key recent instance of the political use of financial systems is the blocking of Iran from SWIFT, well documented to have been campaigned by Israel via the US defence establishment. They eventually convinced Europe to sign off on it too... amusingly India just said "we'll stop using cash for oil and ship them gold instead". Also http://www.scribd.com/doc/215642587/Finance-and-the-Future-B... (my talk from HAR2009)
The problem is that even with a highly intelligent and driven person like Musk there also is a definite role played by luck and circumstances. Therefore it's highly unlikely to be able to garner some actionable insights from past successes other than the most general ones.
Which ironically means that such people are not uniquely prepared to guide our future. Maybe we could pick selfless but intelligent people as our leaders. Any benefit that this "experience" gives to Mr. Musk is overwhelmed by his penchant for flashy, greedy narcissism. Exhibit: the hyperloop.
Unfortunately, it only covers about Musk till his Paypal days. From Chapter 5 about SpaceX, he just has a guest appearance in the story, which mostly goes to describe the factories, the deals etc.
I really expected the book to hold what Elon thought during Tesla's low times. His motivation that kept him going in SpaceX even after subsequent crashes etc.
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?
"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
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.)
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 like the implication that you have to choose between excellence/"supreme intellect" and niceness. It excuses all sorts of assholes who believe that about themselves. What's wrong with being someone like Terry Tao?
Counterpoint from the philosopher George Bernard Shaw:
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
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 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.
Humanity moves on its way naturally because it is made up of individuals. If none of those individuals did anything useful or never "moved mountains", humanity would never move forward or progress.
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.
Precisely, I won't name names but there are a few "drains" on family that I know that didn't start spaceX or tesla, yet they are not utilitarian positive contributors, I'd say.
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?
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 :-)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Make no mistake, the lifelong servitude of Mandela and Gandhi is so far beyond the work of a businessman, however groundbreaking and amazing Musk is, that it's a societal disgrace to humanity to reference them as equals. I write this as someone who respects and admires Musk as much as anyone in this forum, if not more.
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.
I don't understand why you would be concerned and not elated by his effect on society. Tech has been stuck for 40 years in most major industries, and in a time when it seems impossible to overcome the entrenched incumbents of those industries, here comes a person who shows us that it is in fact possible. Now people have hope that our future will be decided not by frail, unmoving conglomerates, but instead by nimble and innovative start ups. There are going to be more science ventures thanks to that.
I want to respond to you, because you seem to view Musk as obviously great. And you know, how could someone not like him? I can tell you there's something about him that rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it's because his only big success is Paypal, which you can argue was him being in the right place at the right time. All his other ventures, while more grandiose, have not yet been super successful. So I don't feel like he deserves a lot of the hero-worship he gets. And certain things, rockets exploding and his Tesla autopilot causing fatalities, make it seem like his companies are cutting corners and not actually great companies.
Elon definitely is not a fluke like you imply. He is not the best eng but it is his relentless work ethic (read: no other timesink in his life at all) that puts him above the others. Have you ever worked more than 100hrs a week? I don't even think I've managed it once but Elon does it every week. To admire elon, you must first understand what that means.
You say he has only had one successful venture but before Paypal he sold his company Zip2 to Compaq for some 300M. Then he started x.com, which only later merged with Peter and max's company. Elons x.com brought more than 50% of the staff. This means that he was a huge component in Paypals success no way you cut it.
We have established that he is no fluke, now lets examine your criticisms of Tesla and SpaceX and why you should not have them at all. Tesla is not perfect but there is absolutely, 100%, no other way to have sustainable transport than electric cars. Even if Tesla used child labour with huge workplace accident rates, you should still support them, because no matter how you cut it, we will destroy our atmosphere permanently without huge electric car adoption. Nevermind all of the other parts of the power industry that are hugely polluting.
On to SpaceX. They are saving taxpayers millions of dollars every year by allowing governments to cut satellite launch costs by 4x over Boeing or Lockheed.
In short:
Elon is not a fluke and has super human work ethic
Tesla is our one shot at everyone not dying en masse by the time I'm in 40s (head in the sand if it soothes you but thats the case)
SpaceX saves millions of taxpayer dollars every year.
> Even if Tesla used child labour with huge workplace accident rates, you should still support them, because no matter how you cut it, we will destroy our atmosphere permanently without huge electric car adoption. Nevermind all of the other parts of the power industry that are hugely polluting.
You should be advocating for international cooperation and government action, not a company that creates electric sports cars.
That is totally a reasonable thing to suggest, and examining it brings to light the importance of Tesla.
Government is like Thor's hammer. If you can wield it, you wield tremendous power.
Think of mega corps as Thor, wielding the hammer. This is how government works: A mega corp pays for politics to happen in a certain way, and thus change happens at huge scale through taxpayer money.
However, you may not wield the hammer if you are not Thor, because it's too heavy. Analogously, lobbying is too expensive for small players, and to be a politician advocating risky things without a huge payout is career suicide.
Advocating governmental change is a nice thought, but how government actually works is by having enough cash. Be a huge mega-corp and then paying lobbyists that pay people inside of government.
Or, you could simply grow a company and do your best to be completely independent of government while stile abiding by their rules and operating under fair laws. That's what Tesla is doing.
At this point, your baseless bias against Tesla should be clear to yourself. If you can take this revelation with humility, that you have been advocating against the exact thing that humanity truly needs, I declare you in the top 98% of people for emotional self-control. It is not an easy thing to accept that you're wrong, but I've spelt it out.
And we need your help, stranger, because time is running out super fast and there are millions out there making the same misjudgment that you have here, but some of them are a genuine threat to Tesla's fate.
It is a race against the clock to get everyone behind this guy.
Because the message of "only superhumans who work 80 hour weeks can accomplish great things" is not the kind of effect I want on society. We have enough of that as it is. We need less of it, not more.
Does it not concern you that tech has been stuck for 40 years? That space has been stuck for however many years? Despite all this hard work everywhere? I'd rather resolve those problems at the core than address the symptoms or possibly worsen them by betting everything on one person and hope they will bring us salvation.
>"only superhumans who work 80 hour weeks can accomplish great things" is not the kind of effect I want on society. We have enough of that as it is. We need less of it, not more.
I don't think you know what you're talking about here. Let me explain why 80 hours a week is a good thing.
At large, people lead lives of quiet struggle against forces they do not understand. They continue this because they are in a local minimum of daily energy expenditure, and like simulated anealling, you stay stuck unless you keep putting in more energy. Women return to husbands that beat them because that's their local minimum, even though they have the option of returning to the dating pool, moving out, creating a new social circle: These tasks are putting energy into their lives so that they might arrive at a new minimum with a value much lower than the previous minimum. You could say that they are better off for it, thanks to the energy put in.
She puts in more energy, then she ends up closer to the global minimum.
This can be applied to society. If people are relaxed as they are today, they are probably in a local minimum and not the global minimum. But in some form, analogously, the wife beating continues, and we simply rationalize it like you have shown here, and we continue.
I am 22. I assume you're in your 30s/40s. We have no future, my friend, and it's thanks to collective 'shrugging it off' decade after decade since WW2. I won't accept that, and you should not either. You are making up silly excuses to protect yourself from the truth which is 'Wow, America really does need this man, and he truly is doing great things'.
Because Musk is not perfect. What makes him great is also what makes him terrible. And people seem to want to ignore the first part and focus on the second part around here.
Well okay, but there are more constructive ways to put it than the comment I responded to. How about something like, 'while celebrating Musk's achievements, we shouldn't forget that not everything a great man does is worth emulating, e.g. let's not copy the working conditions of SpaceX.'
Perhaps not. Mr Downey's performance is not achieved by raw personal magnetism alone, but requires a substantial crew to deliver the fully polished product. The cost of creating Tony Stark runs at roughly $100m per hour. I doubt even the astronomical budgets of astronautical agencies could absorb that.
As for Mr Musk's personal style, I found this interview quite captivating. All the more so for his lack of bluster and posturing.
I agree he isn't that good at delivery but he feels very authentic and that does it for me more than the total fakery I see at e.g. Apple now. I say this because I am a big Apple fan I liked Steve Jobs presentations, but it hurts my ears when everybody at Apple try to sound like Steve Jobs throwing out "Best ever", "Only Apple can do this", "This is the best X we ever built" etc.
Elon Musk never says rubbish like this which feels totally markety. When Elon Musk rants about something it feels more like a geek who is really excited about something, rather than slick market speak.
>Elon Musk never says rubbish like this which feels totally markety. When Elon Musk rants about something it feels more like a geek who is really excited about something..
Maybe, that is how you market to geeks..Know your target audience and all that...Looks like it is working!
IMO bad amateur acting often involves people reciting lines in a weird stilted way instead of just talking normally. I don't know how to act like someone else, but I can act like myself at least.
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.
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).
I get your premise, however Blue Origin is sustainable for as long as Bezos deems it so, regardless of having a business under it. He has $67 billion in wealth he can liquidate to burn on anything he chooses; he's regularly selling off large blocks of his Amazon stake now. Burning $500 million per year will not matter in any meaningful sense to him, stacked against something he has decided is critically important. He's likely to be worth more than $100 billion over time and he's 52 years old - $500 million times 30 years is something he can afford if need be.
> 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.
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'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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
So, I can't answer about solving big problems, but I did genetic engineering research in grad school on bacteria. One could very easily conduct serious genetic engineering in one's bedroom for less that $500 or so. Of course this is fairly basic stuff, but still, you'd be amazed what is possible with very little equipment.
For example, there is a yearly competition called iGEM, which is synthetic biology competition for undergrads. Some of the stuff they do with limited resources is quite impressive.
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.
Moreover.. Musk said he didn't anticipate being involved in all 5 things he thought about in college, including genetics. What is he working on that's genetics related?? Did he just misspeak?
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.
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.
That is mostly because those "types" as you call them didn't take math courses or slept through them, or don't use the math tools in everyday work - because it's not needed.
In other words, they're not Computer Scientists. They are Computer Programmers instead. (or maybe Computer System Engineers)
I believe that the comment you are responding to was speaking to the asymmetry that people with experience in computational biology have an easier time moving to general data science problems than do people with experience in general data science working on computational biology problems.
I agree that the asymmetry exists: there is a tremendous baseline of scientific knowledge and experience that is needed to make significant contributions to the field. I personally have worked with people with backgrounds in programming or CS on medical problems, and it has been frustrating because they lack what I would term "scientific common sense". I would personally prefer, and would be able to make more progress with, working with (for example) anyone who has completed a sequence of education sufficient for pre-med requirements and has some programming experience over a "full stack data engineer". Even if someone with a programming or CS background were inclined to pick up the textbooks and amass the baseline scientific knowledge (I'm sure they exist, although I haven't met them yet), they'd still lack the years of laboratory work and experience of applying this knowledge.
My original comment was apparently poorly worded because it was interpreted by the responders differently than I intended, but delightfully, it resulted in very thoughtful comments. I am very skeptical that one can make even small contributions to genetics without the experience of years of specialized work. There are ancillary problems that could be done by someone with a programming or CS background, e.g., a better LIMS system, or perhaps protocol management, but I don't see those tasks as leading to later making meaningful contributions to the field of genetics. The MD or PhD isn't required, but all the work done leading up to it is, and so as I see it those prepared to make the contributions are most likely going to have gotten the degree on the way.
Indeed, the main problem in genetics are not related to handling data, but require major experimentation, even at cellular level, not to mention higher ones.
Not much CS can help with right now - the most useful tools (mass fuzzy searches and molecular simulations) are already there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are any of his claims even original? It's not like needing to spread humans to other planets is original, yet it seems like everyone's worshiping him over such statements as though it's a new idea.
I think it was interesting his comment about how he really isn't working like a CEO: "Yeah. 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."
This seems very similar to Steve Jobs who said he became CEO so that nobody could tell him what he could or couldn't work on. But like Elon Musk he seemed most interested in creating things and not really running the business.
I think this is a clue to successful business. If you got leaders like that you retain focus on good products rather than getting caught up in optimizing financials without a strong focus on actually building quality stuff people want or need.
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?
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.
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.
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.
PayPal (really X.com) was founded based on: "17% of the world's economy is lost to the financial industry. Wtf, they are just numbers in a database, can't we do better?"
I dunno what the percent is now, or whether PayPal decreased it significantly (or increased it even), but the difference is Elon's ability to look at problems, reduce them to fundamentals, decide if they can be improved upon or not, then working toward moving reality in that direction.
So, if the 'PayPal tax' is unacceptable to you, the "visionary" thing to do would be, figure out what the root causes of that tax are, figure out why they are unnecessary and how much correcting them will move the needle. Any significant progress in this area would be worth well more than a billion dollars, and you'd have no problem raising that capital. Make it happen!
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.
Of course, but I don't see a problem with celebrating what Elon is doing. I think your comment would be more relevant for the libertarian argument that CEOs need to be paid bucketloads of money, or the idea that rich people deserve all their riches because they did it all by themselves. I don't really think Elon is a guy that thinks he built everything himself. I have more an issue with conservative politicians who will not acknowledge that great organizations and businesses are team efforts and that all member of society should be appreciated, not just those on the top.
Elon like many great leaders before him is accomplish great things because he recognizes talent and allow talented people to do what they are good at. Too many talented people are held down by their leaders.
Of course if Elon was placed in Somalia he would have accomplished nothing. The talents and infrastructure he needs to do great things would not have been there. It is American society which has given him the opportunities he has exploited.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I think that's just the medium, nothing unique to HN. Any sort of online forum where people post comments is going to be overwhelmingly biased towards negative comments- either people going on about how much they hate whatever the subject is (be it Elon Musk or Python or whatever), or people being contrarian about some aspect of the article, or people being negative or contrarian about other posters.
People are just much more likely to comment if they hate something than if they love something. Also if they disagree with something than if they agree. Comments in any online forum are not a uniform sampling of the views of the readers.
HN's saving grace is that many of the articles linked to are on subjects that are just obscure enough to avoid being overwhelmed by "this sucks/this rules" sorts of bikeshedding comments. Also most of the topics are complicated or obscure enough as to make them difficult targets for kneejerk nitpickery.
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.
Where exactly do you live? A quick search indicates that Tesla is outselling Ford in Norway. If you live in Norway, then astazangasta is correct and you're looking at a symptom of income inequality. Norway is rather wealthy even by Western standards.
Tesla has done a great job of dressing up a status symbol as an environmentally friendly choice. (Or vice versa.)
If you look at the poorer citizens in your country, you'll likely find no Teslas, and few electric cars in general.
Yes it's Norway, and no, while poorer people (like me) don't drive Teslas - they drive Leafs or e-Golfs, so I maintain it has nothing to do with inequality. Nobody buy Fords because they don't have a viable EV offering on the market. Norwegians aren't really wealthier than say Danes, who have very different outcome of EV market so far due to very different policies.
Nobody I know here bought a petrol car last two years; one got a plug-in hybrid. Tesla is hardly a status symbol here, it attracts customers both from the middle and luxury segments. People who in the past would consider Audi A5 or Volvo X70 would go for Tesla. The economics for electric cars are simply much better.
"Poor" is relative since apparently workers in Norway earn more per capita than any other nation. A quick search indicates you guys earn something like 55% more than workers in France or Britain. So you could feel pretty poor relative to your neighbors and still bring in significantly more than the average in even affluent countries.
A quick search also indicates that your gas is 25% more expensive than France or Britain, and more importantly that your electric car incentives are so absurd that your politicians are beginning to roll them back. No taxes, no tolls, no ferry charges, no parking fees, free use of bus lanes. Electric cars there are cheaper than equivalent gas powered cars, because the taxes are ~50% of the cost. Yeah, with incentives like that, I'd probably own an electric car, too. I'm not sure this counts as an electric car revolution so much as a government handout, though. If the government subsidized 50% of the price of Fords, you'd probably see their sales skyrocket but no one would really call that a revolution.
Tesla is definitely a status symbol, though. The fact that Audi drivers moved to Tesla didn't dispute that because Audi is also a status symbol. Volvo to a lesser extent.
Average income here is way below Bay Area however, and it has less EV per capita than Norway. Perhaps you chose a poor metric.
Parking is not free, although some municipalities subsidize rebates for EV spots in select garages. Urban dwellers (majority of EV market) nearly never take ferries. Incentives were clearly temporary from the beginning, you are hardly breaking any news to me here. The price of car is not subsidized, a Tesla here costs more dollar-to-dollar than it does in California before rebates.
Sure there are (also temporary) import tax incentives, but it's about the only way a government can encourage adoption of clean tech in chicken and egg infrastructure situation. There has to be some upside for being the first guy in the town who can't fill at gas station. As soon as it gains momentum, the incentives will be rolled back. It is however already clear that EV adoption in Norway is a success.
Also you have to be really really broke to see an ordinary German sedan as a status symbol, certainly not anywhere in Western Europe.
> Average income here is way below Bay Area however, and it has less EV per capita than Norway. Perhaps you chose a poor metric.
I'm not sure I did pick a poor metric. Income in the Bay Area is pretty uneven. You see a lot of Teslas at the Google campus, but relatively few at Wal-Mart. Salaries at tech companies are six figure but minimum wage is just above $10/hr.
> Parking is not free, although some municipalities subsidize rebates for EV spots in select garages. Urban dwellers (majority of EV market) nearly never take ferries. Incentives were clearly temporary from the beginning, you are hardly breaking any news to me here.
The article I read indicated that they were, but maybe not. Obviously the tax exemption is the big factor.
> The price of car is not subsidized, a Tesla here costs more dollar-to-dollar than it does in California before rebates.
That's not a realistic claim if the government is waving taxes that would otherwise amount to half the total cost of the car.
It's not very interesting to compare the absolute Tesla cost there and in California. What's interesting to compare is the Tesla cost there vs California relative to other options. A Tesla Model S in California costs about as much as a BMW M3. It looks like in Norway the effective cost of a Model S is closer to a basic Model 3.
> Sure there are (also temporary) import tax incentives, but it's about the only way a government can encourage adoption of clean tech in chicken and egg infrastructure situation. There has to be some upside for being the first guy in the town who can't fill at gas station. As soon as it gains momentum, the incentives will be rolled back. It is however already clear that EV adoption in Norway is a success.
I'm not opposed to tax incentives. My point is just that the "revolution" here is being driven by massive government subsidies. A 50% subsidy will make almost anything a success.
> Also you have to be really really broke to see an ordinary German sedan as a status symbol, certainly not anywhere in Western Europe.
I think this says something about your financial situation that you think the only way to see an Audi as a status symbol is if you're "really broke". I don't know about Norway, but most cars sold in Europe are not Audis or BMWs. Fiat outsells BMW and Audi. So does GM. So does Ford. And Peugot. And Renault. Volkwagon beats Audi and BMW combined. BMW and Audi are not "ordinary German sedans". They are luxury cars purchased by a minority of the population. They are absolutely status symbols.
> Salaries at tech companies are six figure but minimum wage is just above $10/hr.
Guess what, same here. An engineer at Statoil makes a lot more than a janitor. Minimum wage here is higher and there's a more elaborate safety net, still living at that end is very uncomfortable. Again I don't see any takeaway from this.
> That's not a realistic claim if the government is waving taxes that would otherwise amount to half the total cost of the car.
This is a realistic claim because the government does not subsidize a vehicle with own money as it is often presented here, but withholds extra taxation. No taxpayer money harmed. Tax discounts are not unprecedented, e.g. tax code here has elaborate cases for families with children, people with disabilities etc. Two people doing identical job can be paying very different amount of tax. Different categories of imported food can have taxes differing by magnitude, and so on.
> What's interesting to compare is the Tesla cost there vs California relative to other options.
I don't think anyone had illusions that Tesla isn't economic in Norway relative to other options. That's why people buy it and I mentioned it before.
The end result is people here drive tons of Teslas and other EVs, and the market has changed for good. When tax incentives removed, people will still drive them, as they are simply better rides overall with simpler maintenance routine.
I don't see in any way why has Tesla miscalculated the market as initially stated. I see tons of their cars on the roads every day, so it arrived here. It is hilarious my benign remark was treated as some classist rub.
> I don't know about Norway, but most cars sold in Europe are not Audis or BMWs.
Look, I'm not sure how it's in the States, but a BMW or Audi won't get you laid in Europe. Kids won't drop their candy and men won't think of your "status". Cabbies drive Merc E class here (not just in Norway). Pakistani immigrants drive German sedans. Everyone knows they are more expensive but not out of range of a middle income family on a financing - just a matter of your priorities. Porsche Cayenne is "luxury", Maibach is, but A5 and the likes, made in hundreds thousands each year is not. Tesla is cool in its own high tech way, but salon trim doesn't give a luxury vibe either.
> Guess what, same here. An engineer at Statoil makes a lot more than a janitor. Minimum wage here is higher and there's a more elaborate safety net, still living at that end is very uncomfortable. Again I don't see any takeaway from this.
Point being that poor people don't buy Teslas. That's why inequality of income in the Bay is relevant. Wealthy engineers are buying Teslas because they can afford it. Most of the population cannot. Your government subsidies make Teslas affordable to a larger chunk of the population, but wealth is still a significant factor. Subsidies just happen to be a bigger one.
> This is a realistic claim because the government does not subsidize a vehicle with own money as it is often presented here, but withholds extra taxation.
These two scenarios are effectively the same:
1. Car costs X and taxes are Y. Government waives Y in taxes.
2. Car costs X and taxes are Y. Government provides discount of Y against cost of car.
Whether the government waives taxes or literally helps you pay the car is irrelevant. The net effect on the government's finances (and the customer's finances) is the same.
Again, I'm not saying this is a bad thing. But it is absolutely a massive subsidy.
> The end result is people here drive tons of Teslas and other EVs, and the market has changed for good. When tax incentives removed, people will still drive them, as they are simply better rides overall with simpler maintenance routine.
Maybe. I bet if the incentives disappeared tomorrow a lot of people would stop buying them, especially if the price hasn't dropped on its own. Hopefully incentives like Norways are helping to push down cost permanently by increasing the volume, though.
> I don't see in any way why has Tesla miscalculated the market as initially stated. I see tons of their cars on the roads every day, so it arrived here. It is hilarious my benign remark was treated as some classist rub.
I don't think anyone actually asserted that Tesla had miscalculated the market, only that there hasn't been a revolution yet. Good for Norway for achieving a local one at least.
> Look, I'm not sure how it's in the States, but a BMW or Audi won't get you laid in Europe. Kids won't drop their candy and men won't think of your "status". Cabbies drive Merc E class here (not just in Norway). Pakistani immigrants drive German sedans. Everyone knows they are more expensive but not out of range of a middle income family on a financing - just a matter of your priorities. Porsche Cayenne is "luxury", Maibach is, but A5 and the likes, made in hundreds thousands each year is not. Tesla is cool in its own high tech way, but salon trim doesn't give a luxury vibe either.
Cars in general don't get you laid anywhere. That doesn't mean that they aren't status symbols. Most status symbols aren't actually out of reach of the average middle class family. Smart marketing is to price these things such that they are affordable but also a decent stretch. That keeps them reasonably exclusive while also providing access to a massive market of consumers. This is no different in the US. Middle class families can afford BMWs, but most of them don't.
You're welcome to think that expensive cars aren't status symbols if you like, though.
True, but here they wouldn't buy cars at all, just use bus. The income extremes don't matter as much if we stick to the cars that are actually on the roads. If we restrict to what lower vs higher middle class buys, calling that 'income inequality' in original sense of the problem is a joke. The gap is not huge and social mobility there is relatively easy (in Norway).
> The net effect on the government's finances (and the customer's finances) is the same.
There are other fiscal effects as well, even if not explicit in annual budgeting. E.g. my town is mostly surrounded by mountains and every winter it has an exhaust cushion over it. Which triggers crises among the asthmatics, so the municipality has to introduce date driving for prolonged periods. E.g. drive with odd number licence plate on odd days and even on even. This has both direct costs and productivity losses.
The whole idea to push for electric was to reduce externalized costs of car pollution on population and the nature. Mind you it's not the first such an effort: in the 1990s, the government here (and in some other countries) promoted diesels vs petrol cars for lower emissions. That is until they learned about particle emissions of diesels.
And how it was done? Correct, import tax rebates on diesel vehicles. Except you never ever hear anyone saying "diesel revolution has not arrived" or "diesel has to be subsidised by government to compete".
> You're welcome to think that expensive cars aren't status symbols if you like, though.
Maybe I misunderstand the concept then, point is these cars are bloody ordinary in Europe. When I singled out A5 I meant it's being bought by people who previously would consider different class vehicles, as Tesla was meant to compete with 7-seaters and top of the line sedans.
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.
> 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.
To be fair though, Tesla cars are an expensive luxury brand and have no real revolutionary potential at the moment. The revolution is to make affordable electric cars and the infrastructure to build them, and there are serious doubts about how much Tesla can scale to that. It's similar to electric bicycles, in that there are some masterfully engineered, high tech ones out there...at the cost of a decent used motorcycle, and trying to scale it ends up being clunky, heavy, and still more expensive than the bike you put it on.
When he actually improves humanity's lot instead of producing boutique goods for rich people, then maybe we'll see more praise.
> Tesla cars are an expensive luxury brand and have no real revolutionary potential at the moment. The revolution is to make affordable electric cars and the infrastructure to build them
So...their plan being to bootstrap the large-scale manufacturing of affordable vehicles with a smaller number of more expensive sales, you're saying that Tesla simultaneously is and isn't revolutionary at the same time?
But Tesla's goal is exactly that: to make electric cars affordable and create the necessary infrastructure for them. And he does that by starting with the market segment where it's easiest to get started: high margin sports cars and luxury cars, and working his way down from there.
It'll be a while before his electric cars can really compete with cheap cars, but I'm sure he'll get there. He's making good progress.
I don't think he will. You can't work your way down from that, you have to design the product with the end market in mind. My bet is that electric cars simply are impossible to make at a $20k price point approaching anywhere near Tesla quality, in the same way you won't be able to make a decent electric bike for $300.
Probably the same way Ferrari is, no point to make wide acceptance of that brand.
Why wouldn't he be able to work down from that? It seems to be working quite well. The Model 3 costs $35k, which, while by no means cheap, is a lot more affordable than the Roadster and the S.
There's a lot of R&D going into this, and it's just easier to bootstrap a car company out of nothing while building expensive, high-margin luxury cars than when building competitive mass market cars. The mass market will come, but before it gets to that, costs have to go down more, and infrastructure for electric cars has to become ubiquitous.
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.
Yeah, but this is taken to the extreme. I mean, Tesla isn't currently profitable and they are relying on subsidies to just stay afloat. We're talking billions of dollars of government cash flowing into Tesla/SpaceX to keep them from going bankrupt. You can't tell me it's the same for other car companies because it's simply not true.
I've read that GM received a taxpayer funded cash infusion of around $49 billion around 2009-10. I've also read that after the Treasury sold it's last shares of GM the final loss to taxpayers was somewhere in the $9.5-$10 billion range. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think Tesla's subsidies have ever reached that level. I believe Tesla is staying afloat largely due to investor capital, or am I incorrect?
Disclosure: I work at SpaceX as a technician so I may be biased.
- Fiat Chrysler Automobiles — $2.06 Billion in subsidies
Took 10 seconds of Googling to find that.
Plus Tesla is actually innovating on a massive scale and pulling the world into a more sustainable, quieter future. I too hate subsidies but as long as the US Governemnt is going to keep up corporate welfare it may as well be towards the actual innovators building a better future than the laggards trying their best to maintain the status quo so they can extract maximum profits.
People who like to think of themselves as ambitious and effective sometimes get a wee bit jealous when presented with someone who really hit it big, I think.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A better comparison might have been NUMMI's production capacity in it's prime as a joint GM/Toyota plant. They were producing about 26k vehicles/month (312k/year) until May 2010. [1] Apples to oranges - a Carolla is not a Model X - but interesting datum nonetheless.
Yeah I considered NUMMI but I thought the Delta plant would be better comparison since it was built in the mid 2000's and NUMMI was built in the mid-80s (although obviously upgraded multiple times).
The Delta plant employs ~4,000 employees so you get about 70 cars/employee/year.
If NUMMI was making 310k vehicles per year with 4,700 employees according to Wiki, that would be about 66 cars/employee/year -- which is much closer than I expected.
Last year Tesla turned out 50,000 vehicles and they currently have ~6,000 employees in Fremont -- or about 8 cars/employee/year.
Obviously an unfair comparison since Tesla is ramping production and NUMMI / Delta are both final assembly plants and Tesla is doing a lot of stamping and component production in Fremont but interesting nonetheless.
The speed of the line is important because it is directly tied to the output in the form of the "pipeline". The question then become how long is the pipeline? 1day, 2days, 20 weeks? In which case you wait x-amount of time for the first car and then the rest is gravy.
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.
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 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"?
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.
That article complains about the incestuous relationship between SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX. It has a point - SpaceX and Tesla using government support to keep SolarCity afloat.
Zero hedge isn't always right, but they do provide alternative view points rarely seen elsewhere.
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.
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"
"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…
> 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?
>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.
> 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.
>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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
In most all Tesla product unveilings, Elon will make a directed thank-you to the 'Tesla Team'.
The blog posts are mostly made by the Tesla Team.
In the gigafactory unveiling, some speeches in Norway and the Netherlands, and other press events, a top engineer JT speaks alongside him. He brought his chief designer on stage at the gigafactory unveiling, as well as another engineer aside from JT.
Companies like this need a BDFL. It's crucial that Elon stays in complete control to ensure focus, not to flounder it.
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.
Woah that hit home. I wish I could run a business without businessy things. How do you find the right people?! I'm a really good tech guy and designer. I can whip up anything, I've just never found the right person to sell it and deal with other humans.
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.
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?
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.
Planet diversification and renewable energy are good priorities, and that not doing them narrows future options dramatically, but the other things on this list are pure sci-fi fandom. Cyborgs and whatnot will probably come around eventually bit I see no reason to hasten them. I'd like to fix our current problems before these things make them more intractable:
- inequality
- workaholism of upper classes skewing culture
- degredidation of biodiversity worldwide
If we move to Mars let's make this planet a temple. 50% earth surface no humans or something.
Cyborgs are desirable because they solve the "control problem" of AGI. Essentially, if you create a superintelligent AI, how do you make sure it doesn't outwit you and all other humans in order to do terrible things? There aren't any plausible methods that I'm aware of to accomplish that goal. So you sidestep it by not making any AI that's more intelligent than humans. Unfortunately there also aren't good ways to make sure that no one makes AI that's more intelligent than humans (plus arguably superintelligent AI could be an extremely good thing if it doesn't turn into Skynet). So the remaining obvious option is increasing human intelligence at the same time as we improve AI -- or even better, merge humans and AI together.
The term AI has two somewhat separate meanings and you're equivocating. Which is unsurprising, given that Musk himself is not saying anything to separate them.
Anyways. The AI we must be careful with is "strong AI", that is, human level in all or most intellectual endeavours.
The AI he will profit with is "weak AI", or the current and foreseeable AI technology. We don't need to be careful with that one, but not as much. It is industrial-equipment level of careful.
Strong AI needs nuclear ICBM levels of careful, maybe even more.
Strong AI is fantasy AI in my opinion. We're not interested in creating artificial well-rounded humans, we're interested in automating specific, complicated tasks. Like driving a car. And in some ways, AI is already better than us at driving cars; less accidents, always perfect attention, etc.
But AI without a real purpose but that can think and feel the way we do? I see no reason why anyone would put that in charge of ICBMs.
This was a lot less insightful than I was hoping for. I understand he's naval gazing on the 'human condition' from a billion dollar vantage and trying to rationalize investment in his personal academic fetishes...
but really? The world is burning and he's pontificating an ego expression of 1950's atomic age. No 1% left behind. Ridiculous.
Lately I'm very concerned about my posture. Now I'm watching two people who both have a bad posture like me (hunchback, forward head). And I'm sure this is becoming a problem in the 'read from a screen all day' age.
So the future of better interfaces (with your brain) Elon is talking about might be also much better for our health.
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.)
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.
I feel that he is right being paranoid, because it is not impossible to build an AI, what his goal is to build an open AI so an AI isn't in the hands of a private organization, who knows what they can do. That being said, it is a long time before we have an actual ASI, but its great that we have the open AI initiative, so the AI itself is built in the open, or squarely in the open.
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
my theory is that Elon does not truly believe that AI poses an immediate threat but that he needs to spin it that way because people are more open to the idea of augmenting themselves (neural lace) in face of an existential threat, whereas without that it would more likely be spun by the media as being unnatural, "playing god" and all that jazz
Earth is 8 light minutes from the sun, Mars is 12 light minutes from the sun. So when Earth and Mars are closest to each other, they're 4 light minutes away from each other, and when they're farthest from each other (on opposite sides of the sun), they're 20 light minutes away from each other.
is it just me or this interview is kinda unprepared?
the questions that sama asks, the way that musk answer & the way that interview stop.
But overall, I enjoy this series, kudos!
"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I interpreted the main claim to be "expensive life extending procedures..." I think if you drop the "life extending," then bringing up facelifts makes sense. Otherwise... it doesn't really seem to fit into the debate in a meaningful way.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Can you list a few? I think only Hyperloop was a truly new idea. And I don't think it is going anywhere. It now feels like something that he did to capture the attention of the geek world.
> 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."
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,” '
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
#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?
#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.
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.
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.
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.
I am not sure that all European cultural paradigms are unsustainable, but I said that the one Elon is working under seems to me to be. I think Elon is doing the best he can working on the problems that are available for him to work on.
To me, one wrong problem is anything that perpetuates the automobile/road system as is. I think the whole thing needs to be completely rebuilt.
To me the enormity of our problems from a sustainability standpoint are so great that anything but a massive mobilization and shift in our way of life is arranging deck chairs on the titanic.
I think that religion was a science of mobilizing public opinion, and I think science has replaced it, and has yet to do as good a job, and has yet to recognize that fact.
I think the right problem is how to manage mass social/cultural change in a very brief period of time.
I'll say again, Elon is doing a fantastic job within the paradigm of our current industrialized cultural norms, which says that we can keep on with business as usual and make some adjustments to our systems ... but I think it's not enough by an order of magnitude, and so that's why I think minds like Elon's should be working on manufacturing a social/cultural reality that prepares us for a huge change in lifestyle.
To me that's a problem of social engineering, same as religion, and same as building a company, and Elon excels at it.
More to the point: if I had Elon's advantages and talent, I would have begun with a more humble product and system, and taken on trains - not hyperloop, but freight and communter. Our trains are a system that's ripe for a revolution, and really potentially paradigm shifting.
However none of what I say makes sense if you've been stuffed with all the typical narratives and have not developed your imagination or your sense of history.
