
GeniusThinking
@GeniusGTX • 289,617 subscribers
Celebrate the human genius and uncover who runs the world. Bullish on humanity. Ghostwriter for world class tech/ai founders.
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Mark Zuckerberg explains why he thinks Elon Musk got it right when he cut 80% of Twitter's staff: "Elon led a push early on to make Twitter a lot leaner. You can agree or disagree with exactly all the tactics, but a lot of the specific principles that he pushed on around basically trying to make the organization more technical, around decreasing the distance between engineers of the company and him, fewer layers of management, I think those were generally good changes" "I also think that it was probably good for the industry that he made those changes because my sense is that there were a lot of other people who thought those were good changes but who may have been a little shy about doing them" "Just in my conversations with other founders and how people have reacted to the things that we've done, what I've heard from a lot of folks is when someone like you, when I wrote the letter outlining the organizational changes I wanted to make back in March and when people see what Elon is doing, that gives people the ability to think through how to shape their organizations in a way that can be good for the industry and make all these companies more productive over time" "That was one where I think he was quite ahead of a bunch of the other companies on. Certainly his actions led me and I think a lot of other folks in the industry to think about, hey, are we kind of doing this as much as we should? Could we make our companies better by pushing on some of these same principles?" If you're new here, GeniusThinking is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content.
GeniusThinking527,900 次观看 • 6 天前

Larry Ellison: “When WhatsApp sold for $19B, a lot of us were shocked… until we thought about it” Back in 2014, Mark Zuckerberg paid $19 billion for WhatsApp and its 450 million monthly users. A few months after the deal closed, the Oracle founder explained what Silicon Valley had missed at first: “A lot of us [in Silicon Valley] were shocked — until we thought about it and understood the value of having access to that many consumers,” His point: think about what traditional businesses, cable companies for example, spend to win each customer. “This is not the place to debate how much you can get through WhatsApp — $1 per year per customer is not going to do it — but I believe there will be opportunity to sell these same customers other things as they join your ecosystem.” And he added: “There was quite a battle between Facebook and Google over that property. It wasn’t that one guy did something really silly with a lot of money. Mark Zuckerberg won an auction over Google and paid a high price but got a very valuable asset in the 21st century.” By 2025, WhatsApp had roughly 3.1 billion monthly users worldwide. If you're new here, GeniusThinking is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content.
GeniusThinking760,047 次观看 • 10 天前

Elon Musk says the AI boom hits a WALL this year when we run out of power to run the chips. He says the whole industry is about to learn a hard lesson in hardware. Chip output is exploding, but electricity is nearly flat everywhere outside China. So the two lines cross this year. He says by the end of the year, we will be making more AI chips than we can actually turn on. Millions of them pile up with nowhere to plug in. In his words, the bottleneck for the next year is not chips, it is raw power. Whoever can turn on the most chips fastest wins the race. In the end, the AI race comes down to one thing: Raw electricity. — Elon Musk (.Elon Musk) on Dwarkesh Patel's (.Dwarkesh Patel) podcast
GeniusThinking3,247,933 次观看 • 2 个月前

Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose walks through Gödel's theorem in about a minute, and explains why he believes it sets a hard limit on what AI can do. If you're new here, GeniusThinking is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content.
GeniusThinking153,794 次观看 • 5 天前

Sundar Pichai explains why Google had its own ChatGPT before OpenAI shipped one, and still kept it inside: "We built Transformers and used it immediately in Search to improve language understanding, understanding web pages, understanding your queries, kept building better models. We also started productizing it internally in the form of, there were teams building something called LaMDA" "We exactly even conceived the product, which is ChatGPT. It was LaMDA. If you remember, there was an engineer inside who thought it was sentient. Think of it as an early version of ChatGPT he was speaking to, internally" "In fact, in the Google I/O in '22, we launched something called AI Test Kitchen, and that was LaMDA, but we had constrained it because internally, we didn't have an end-to-end version which was RLHF-ed. The version I saw was a lot more toxic at a level. We couldn't have possibly put it out at that time" "Also, I think as a company, which had this search quality bias, we had a higher bar, maybe, for what we thought was an acceptable product quality to go out" "The way I internalize these moments is if you're in consumer internet, you're going to have surprises" If you're new here, GeniusThinking is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content.
GeniusThinking192,621 次观看 • 7 天前

Elon Musk says Tesla will sell a Cybercab to a customer for under 30,000 dollars before 2027. A chartered financial analyst built the model for what one would actually earn you. On Herbert Ong's channel, Soren Basher gave 8 things worth knowing: 1. Fourteen thousand in the worst case
GeniusThinking1,163,149 次观看 • 1 个月前

Jensen Huang says the first AI supercomputer he ever built had exactly one customer on earth: Elon Musk. Back in 2016, he had just created a machine called the DGX1. It cost $300,000 dollars. He announced it on stage, and the room went completely silent since nobody understood it, so nobody wanted to buy it. Since Elon knew him because Nvidia had built the first self-driving computer for the Tesla Model S, Elon bought & tried it. Elon said he had a small company that could use it. Jensen boxed one up himself and drove it to San Francisco. He carried it up to a room full of researchers. That tiny company turned out to be OpenAI. The machine nobody wanted went on to launch the AI revolution. — Jensen Huang (.Jensen Huang)
GeniusThinking1,288,959 次观看 • 1 个月前

CEO and founder of Dell, Michael Dell, says one piece of information killed Compaq. And they had it printed on every chip they shipped. He cracked open their machines and read the date codes. "If you opened up the computers, the chips had dates on them that showed the weeks they were made." Compaq carried 90 days of inventory between factory and customer. Dell carried five. Component prices fell every quarter. Compaq's 90-day shelf was a 90-day price loss. Dell's five-day shelf was a five-day discount. Same machines. Same components. Half the overhead. "It was crazy. It was like a massive advantage." Compaq's CEO called Dell a "mail-order company." A "garage operation." He never read the date codes. "One of the best things was they just didn't understand it. They misunderstood it, which was fantastic." Dell is worth over $90 billion. Compaq does not exist. The number was sitting on their own warehouse shelves the entire time. — Michael Dell (Michael Dell 🇺🇸) on David Senra's (David Senra) Founders podcast
GeniusThinking1,512,825 次观看 • 5 个月前

Elon Musk says acquiring Twitter and electing Trump were the same bet... In two years, Musk had spent $44 billion buying Twitter and millions backing one candidate. Critics called it pure ego. Or politics. Or the end of his reputation. He spent another billion ignoring them. Musk had a different framing. "Those actions were good for civilization." Twitter. The election. America's runway. He named the framework: **the civilization hedge**. Musk, whose mission was extending consciousness off Earth, viewed Earth as the precondition. A SpaceX that built Mars colonies and a Tesla that scaled Optimus to billions of units required America to stay coherent for at least the next thirty years — a runway that depended on which laws got written, which agencies got built, and which speech got allowed. "America needs to be strong enough to last long enough to extend life to other planets." A platform with the speech he wanted. An administration with the policies he needed. A civilization with the runway to leave Earth. After Musk made the bets, his goal was unchanged — extending consciousness still required Earth functional. Musk, on the bet underneath both moves: "And to get AI and robotics to the point where we can ensure that the future is good." What's the bet you're making that nobody around you understands? P.S. I made a full playbook breaking down the timeless decision-making mental models used by history's greatest thinkers. So if you want to stop overthinking, control chaos, and navigate any decision with the clarity... Comment "models" and follow GeniusThinking so I can DM you a copy. If you're new here, follow GeniusThinking for content the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. — Elon Musk ( Elon Musk ), CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, on Dwarkesh Patel's ( Dwarkesh Patel ) podcast
GeniusThinking1,127,112 次观看 • 5 个月前

Elon Musk says one constraint blocks every Starbase hire: Their partner's job. Brownsville, Texas. Population 187,000. The nearest tech hub: Austin. 350 miles north. Engineers had to relocate everything. Houses sold. Schools researched. Career ladders restarted. "Getting engineers to move… I call it the significant other problem." A spouse with a career. Kids in school. A partner's job market. The technical work was the easy part of recruiting. The recruiting problem started somewhere else. Then Musk explained why Brownsville was a harder sell than Silicon Valley. "For Starbase that was particularly difficult, since the odds of finding a non-SpaceX job… are pretty low." He named the constraint: **the significant other problem**. A name the recruiters used, the engineers admitted, and the partners felt first. Musk, who had moved his own household to Texas for SpaceX, had paid the same tax. And kept Tesla majority in California, where the talent could still spouse-shop. A startup hire at a Silicon Valley campus could promise their spouse a dozen recruiters within driving distance, while a Starbase hire could promise rocketry, palm trees, and almost nothing else by way of secondary employment. "It's quite difficult. It's like a technology monastery thing, remote and mostly dudes." One household. Two careers. One Brownsville. Two careers and one zip code rarely worked out. After Musk named the problem, the recruiting funnel narrowed to the single, retired, and remote-spouse. Musk, on what the technology monastery cost: "Not much of an improvement over SF." What's the constraint on hiring at your company that has nothing to do with the work? P.S. I made a full playbook breaking down the timeless decision-making mental models used by history's greatest thinkers. Comment "models" and follow GeniusThinking so I can DM you a copy. — Elon Musk ( Elon Musk ), CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, on Dwarkesh Patel's ( Dwarkesh Patel ) podcast
GeniusThinking925,168 次观看 • 5 个月前

Elon Musk says steel killed carbon fiber on Starship at one-fiftieth the cost. Carbon fiber was supposed to be the future of rocketry. Lighter than aluminum. Stronger than steel. Trusted by every Formula 1 team. SpaceX picked it for Starship. "Particularly if you go for a high-strength specialized carbon fiber that can handle cryogenic oxygen, it's roughly 50 times the cost of steel." Then progress stalled. The autoclaves needed to cure the resin had to outsize every autoclave on Earth, and the team couldn't even produce a clean barrel section without wrinkles. Musk, watching the Mars timeline slip: "At this rate, we're never going to get to Mars. So we've got to think of something else." So he asked the question nobody at SpaceX had asked: "What about steel?" It became known as the cryogenic stainless flip. Musk, who had already shipped Falcon 9 in aluminum-lithium, broke with the textbook. "When you look at the material properties of stainless steel, full-hard, strain hardened stainless steel, at cryogenic temperature the strength to weight is actually similar to carbon fiber." Starship ran on cryogenic methane and oxygen. The airframe lived at temperatures that flipped steel ahead of carbon fiber. "You could smoke a cigar while welding stainless steel." After Musk made the call, steel weighed less than the carbon fiber version. Fifty times cheaper in raw material. Twice the heat tolerance. Half the heat shield mass. Musk, looking back: "In retrospect, we should have started with steel in the beginning. It was dumb not to do steel." What "obvious" material in your work is silently costing you the project? — Elon Musk (.Elon Musk , CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, on Dwarkesh Patel's (.Dwarkesh Patel) podcast
GeniusThinking335,489 次观看 • 1 个月前

Elon Musk says steel killed carbon fiber on Starship at one-fiftieth the cost. Carbon fiber was supposed to be the future of rocketry. Lighter than aluminum. Stronger than steel. Trusted by every Formula 1 team. SpaceX picked it for Starship. "Particularly if you go for a high-strength specialized carbon fiber that can handle cryogenic oxygen, it's roughly 50 times the cost of steel." Then progress stalled. The autoclaves needed to cure the resin had to outsize every autoclave on Earth, and the team couldn't even produce a clean barrel section without wrinkles. Musk, watching the Mars timeline slip: "At this rate, we're never going to get to Mars. So we've got to think of something else." So he asked the question nobody at SpaceX had asked: "What about steel?" It became known as the **cryogenic stainless flip**. Musk, who had already shipped Falcon 9 in aluminum-lithium, broke with the textbook. "When you look at the material properties of stainless steel, full-hard, strain hardened stainless steel, at cryogenic temperature the strength to weight is actually similar to carbon fiber." Starship ran on cryogenic methane and oxygen. The airframe lived at temperatures that flipped steel ahead of carbon fiber. "You could smoke a cigar while welding stainless steel." After Musk made the call, steel weighed less than the carbon fiber version. Fifty times cheaper in raw material. Twice the heat tolerance. Half the heat shield mass. Musk, looking back: "In retrospect, we should have started with steel in the beginning. It was dumb not to do steel." What "obvious" material in your work is silently costing you the project? If you're new here, GeniusThinking is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content. P.S. I've made a free playbook on how to use and create your own mental models. This includes the same thinking strategies Feynman, Munger, and Musk built their careers on. Ttrusted by 5,000+ founders and investors. Grab your copy: — Elon Musk ( Elon Musk ), CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, on Dwarkesh Patel's ( Dwarkesh Patel ) podcast
GeniusThinking829,800 次观看 • 5 个月前