Elon Musk on building companies
Musk sees a company as simply a group of people assembled to make products, and argues that money follows from making useful things rather than from chasing it. He favors attempting hard things even with long odds, backed by serious hours, scarce talent and a low ego-to-ability ratio that keeps you honest with reality. He worries that public-market pressure for quarterly results, and the absence of a creative genius at the top, push companies away from long-term breakthroughs.
12 points · 5 appearances · 2020–2026
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2017–2026
“And I would say that is, that forms the basis of my philosophy, which is that we don't know the meaning of life, but the more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, digital and biological, the more we're able to understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. So I have a philosophy of curiosity.”
2017–2026 · changed view
“I think it's important to have a future that is inspiring and appealing. I just think there have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Like, why do you want to live? What's the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? And if we're not out there, if the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multiplanet species, I find that it's incredibly depressing if that's not the future that we're going to have.”
2017–2025
“Well, I think it's helpful. The tools of physics are very powerful and can be applied, I think to almost any, really any arena in life. It's really just critical thinking. For something important you need to reason from first principles and think about things in the limit one direction or the other.”
2020–2026 · changed view
“If an AI cannot figure out new physics, it's clearly not equal to humans, let alone nor has surpassed humans, 'cause humans have figured out new physics.”