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Elon Musk literally sat down for a 45-minute talk with Y Combinator that explains how to build world-changing companies better than any business school on earth. This is the advice he gave a room full of young founders: 1. Don't try to build something great. Try to build something... useful. Everyone obsesses over greatness. Musk says that's the wrong target. "I didn't originally think I would build something great. I wanted to try to build something useful. I didn't think I would build anything particularly great. Seemed unlikely, but I wanted to at least try." Aim for useful first. Greatness, if it comes, is a byproduct. 2. When you can't get in the front door, build your own door. Before Musk started his first company, he tried to get a job at Netscape. "I sent my resume into Netscape and nobody responded. I tried hanging out in the lobby to see if I could bump into someone, but I was too shy to talk to anyone. So I'm like, this is ridiculous, I'll just write software myself." He didn't set out to be a founder. He became one because no one would hire him. 3. He slept in the office and showered at the YMCA. The origin of his first company was not glamorous. "We couldn't even afford a place to stay. The office was 500 bucks a month, so we just slept in the office and showered at the YMCA." He couldn't afford proper internet either, so he drilled a hole through the office floor and ran a cable to the internet provider downstairs. That was the founder of the future richest man on earth. 4. Keep the chips on the table. When Musk sold his first company, he received a $20 million cheque. His bank balance went from $10,000 to $20 million overnight. Most people would have stopped. He put almost all of it straight back into his next company. "I kept the chips on the table." He did the same thing decades later, over and over. He hates money sitting idle. Money is fuel for the next mission. 5. Start with the mission, then work backwards to make it a business. Musk didn't start SpaceX to make money. He went on the NASA website to find out when humans were going to Mars, and there was no plan. So he decided to build one. "There had been no prior example of a rocket startup succeeding. A small chance of success is better than no chance of success." The mission came first. The business model came later. 6. He started SpaceX expecting to fail. He is brutally honest about the odds. "SpaceX started in mid-2002 expecting to fail. Probably 90% chance of failing. When recruiting people, I said, we're probably going to die, but small chance we might not die." The first three launches failed. The fourth one worked with no money left. "If the fourth launch hadn't worked, it would have been curtains. We made it by the skin of our teeth." 7. Break every problem down to physics. This is the core of how Musk thinks. "First principles means break things down to the fundamental elements that are most likely to be true, then reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy." His example is rockets. Everyone priced them based on what old rockets cost. Musk asked what a rocket is actually made of, priced the raw metals, and found the materials were only 1-2% of the historical price. The rest was inefficiency he could attack. 8. When told something takes 24 months, break it down and do it in six. Last year xAI needed a giant computer to train its AI. Suppliers said it would take 18 to 24 months. "It's like, well, we need to get that done in six months or we won't be competitive." So he broke it into parts. Needed a building, so he found an old factory. Needed power, so he rented generators. Needed cooling, so he rented a quarter of America's mobile cooling capacity. He slept in the data centre and ran cabling himself. It got done. 9. Watch your ego-to-ability ratio. Musk's single sharpest piece of advice for young founders is about staying honest with yourself. "A major failure mode is when your ego-to-ability ratio gets too high. Then you break the feedback loop to reality." Keep the ego small, internalise responsibility for everything, and stay ruthlessly connected to what's actually true. "You want to close the loop on reality hard. That's a super big deal." 10. Chase work, not glory. His closing philosophy ties it all together. "It's so hard to be useful. The area under the curve of total utility is how useful you've been to your fellow human beings times how many people. If you aspire to do true work, your probability of success is much higher. Don't aspire to glory, aspire to work." He was ridiculed for years. The press called him "internet guy attempting to build a rocket company." He agreed it sounded absurd. He did it anyway, because a small chance of doing something useful beat no chance at all. Here's the thing though.... Musk became the most followed founder alive because everything he does happens in public. The launches, the failures, the talks like this one. The companies made him powerful. The personal brand made his every word travel around the world before he finishes saying it. We build massive distribution and grow personal brands on X and beyond without our clients lifting a finger. If you're a founder or VC looking for that kind of exposure, book a call below. We average 1.5M views a week.show more

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Elon Musk on why he told SpaceX recruits "we're probably going to die" "With SpaceX, I think there's like a less than 10% chance of being successful, maybe 1%. But if a startup doesn't do something to advance rocket technology, it's definitely not coming from the big defense contractors. So a small chance of success is better than no chance of success" "I started that in mid 2002 expecting to fail. Even when recruiting people, I didn't try to make out that it would succeed. I said, we're probably going to die, but there's maybe a 10% chance we might not die, and this is the only way to get people to Mars" "I ended up being chief engineer of the rocket, not because I wanted to, but because I couldn't hire anyone who was good. None of the good chief engineers would join, because they said this is too risky, you're going to die" "The first three flights did fail. The fourth one fortunately worked. But if the fourth one hadn't worked, I had no money left, it would have been curtains. My estimate of success was not far off. We made it by the skin of our teeth"

Elon Musk on why he told SpaceX recruits "we're probably going to die" "With SpaceX, I think there's like a less than 10% chance of being successful, maybe 1%. But if a startup doesn't do something to advance rocket technology, it's definitely not coming from the big defense contractors. So a small chance of success is better than no chance of success" "I started that in mid 2002 expecting to fail. Even when recruiting people, I didn't try to make out that it would succeed. I said, we're probably going to die, but there's maybe a 10% chance we might not die, and this is the only way to get people to Mars" "I ended up being chief engineer of the rocket, not because I wanted to, but because I couldn't hire anyone who was good. None of the good chief engineers would join, because they said this is too risky, you're going to die" "The first three flights did fail. The fourth one fortunately worked. But if the fourth one hadn't worked, I had no money left, it would have been curtains. My estimate of success was not far off. We made it by the skin of our teeth"

Jaynit

319,969 views • 16 days ago

Elon Musk tells the story of his early career Elon recounts building his first startup Zip2 after dropping out of his PhD program at Stanford: “In 1995 I basically wrote the first — or close to the first — maps, directions, and yellow pages on the Internet. I just wrote that personally and didn’t use a web server (I just read the port directly) because I couldn’t afford one. The original office was on Sherman Avenue in Palo Alto. There was an ISP on the floor below, so I drilled a hole through the floor and ran a LAN cable directly to the ISP. My brother joined me and another co-founder (Greg Kouri who passed away). At the time we couldn’t even afford a place to stay, and the office was $500 per month, so we just slept in the office and showered at the YMCA.” However, Elon did not intend to start a company at first: “I tried to get a job at Netscape. I sent my resume into Netscape and nobody responded. Then I tried hanging out in the lobby to see if I could bump into someone but I was too shy to talk to anyone. So I was like, ‘Man this is ridiculous. I’ll just write software myself and see how it goes.’ It wasn’t actually from a standpoint of ‘I want to build a company.’ I just wanted to be part of building the Internet in some way. And since I couldn’t get a job at an Internet company, I had to start an Internet company.” In 1999, Zip2 was sold to Compaq for $307 million. After the acquisition, Elon took the $20 million he earned from it and invested it into a new payments company called X, which eventually merged with Peter Thiel’s Confinity to form PayPal. “I kept the chips on the table,” he recalls. “I got that $20 million check for my share of Zip2. At the time I was living in a house with four housemates and had like $10,000 in the bank. Then this check arrives in the mail and my bank account went to $20,010,000. I had to pay taxes on that, but I ended up putting almost all of that into X.” In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion. Elon earned ~$175-180 million from the sale based on his ~11.7% stake. In the subsequent decade, he would keep his chips on the table again and invest it all into Tesla and SpaceX. Video source: Y Combinator (2025)

Elon Musk tells the story of his early career Elon recounts building his first startup Zip2 after dropping out of his PhD program at Stanford: “In 1995 I basically wrote the first — or close to the first — maps, directions, and yellow pages on the Internet. I just wrote that personally and didn’t use a web server (I just read the port directly) because I couldn’t afford one. The original office was on Sherman Avenue in Palo Alto. There was an ISP on the floor below, so I drilled a hole through the floor and ran a LAN cable directly to the ISP. My brother joined me and another co-founder (Greg Kouri who passed away). At the time we couldn’t even afford a place to stay, and the office was $500 per month, so we just slept in the office and showered at the YMCA.” However, Elon did not intend to start a company at first: “I tried to get a job at Netscape. I sent my resume into Netscape and nobody responded. Then I tried hanging out in the lobby to see if I could bump into someone but I was too shy to talk to anyone. So I was like, ‘Man this is ridiculous. I’ll just write software myself and see how it goes.’ It wasn’t actually from a standpoint of ‘I want to build a company.’ I just wanted to be part of building the Internet in some way. And since I couldn’t get a job at an Internet company, I had to start an Internet company.” In 1999, Zip2 was sold to Compaq for $307 million. After the acquisition, Elon took the $20 million he earned from it and invested it into a new payments company called X, which eventually merged with Peter Thiel’s Confinity to form PayPal. “I kept the chips on the table,” he recalls. “I got that $20 million check for my share of Zip2. At the time I was living in a house with four housemates and had like $10,000 in the bank. Then this check arrives in the mail and my bank account went to $20,010,000. I had to pay taxes on that, but I ended up putting almost all of that into X.” In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion. Elon earned ~$175-180 million from the sale based on his ~11.7% stake. In the subsequent decade, he would keep his chips on the table again and invest it all into Tesla and SpaceX. Video source: Y Combinator (2025)

Startup Archive

59,016 views • 9 months ago

Why Elon didn't want to be CEO: "[Elon] is at core, an engineer and a product guy. He has this great line where he said: "I realized you couldn't be fully in control of the product unless you were also in control of the company." He says he made a moral error, early in Tesla, where he was trying to have his cake and eat it too. He wanted to control the company without running the company. And that was the 2002 to 2008 era, where Tesla was just off to a really messy start. He was providing the funding. He was chairman of the board. But Martin Eberhard was CEO. Eventually, when Tesla was on the verge of death in 2008....Elon was pushed into the position of: "I have to be CEO. I don't want to be. It comes with a lot of chores. It comes with a lot of responsibilities. But if I want this company to be successful, I have to fully internalize and take responsibility for it." And that's what he did, even though he was also in the same position at SpaceX. The fact that these companies are improbable, iconic, and that he funded and led them both in parallel...it's like running a two minute mile twice at the same time. It is such a higher degree of difficulty than most people can conceive of, and the fact that it worked is still unbelievable."

Why Elon didn't want to be CEO: "[Elon] is at core, an engineer and a product guy. He has this great line where he said: "I realized you couldn't be fully in control of the product unless you were also in control of the company." He says he made a moral error, early in Tesla, where he was trying to have his cake and eat it too. He wanted to control the company without running the company. And that was the 2002 to 2008 era, where Tesla was just off to a really messy start. He was providing the funding. He was chairman of the board. But Martin Eberhard was CEO. Eventually, when Tesla was on the verge of death in 2008....Elon was pushed into the position of: "I have to be CEO. I don't want to be. It comes with a lot of chores. It comes with a lot of responsibilities. But if I want this company to be successful, I have to fully internalize and take responsibility for it." And that's what he did, even though he was also in the same position at SpaceX. The fact that these companies are improbable, iconic, and that he funded and led them both in parallel...it's like running a two minute mile twice at the same time. It is such a higher degree of difficulty than most people can conceive of, and the fact that it worked is still unbelievable."

Ti Morse

47,497 views • 4 months ago

Elon Musk explains why being useful is the only career advice that matters "I generally think to try to be as useful as possible. It may sound trite, but it's so hard to be useful, especially to a lot of people" "The area under the curve of total utility is how useful have you been to your fellow human beings, times how many people. It's almost like the physics definition of true work. If you aspire to do true work, your probability of success is much higher" "Don't aspire to glory, aspire to work"

Elon Musk explains why being useful is the only career advice that matters "I generally think to try to be as useful as possible. It may sound trite, but it's so hard to be useful, especially to a lot of people" "The area under the curve of total utility is how useful have you been to your fellow human beings, times how many people. It's almost like the physics definition of true work. If you aspire to do true work, your probability of success is much higher" "Don't aspire to glory, aspire to work"

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The Lyrics of Imperfect Mew : Every moment in the song is based on a true story. 🗣️: Can you share some of it with us? Mew : Looking at the lyrics, the first verse starts from the moment of waking up. I wrote it when we were on a cruise, we went to the Caribbean together. The image of sunlight shining on his face, that messy, bedhead look right after waking up... just how incredibly cute he was 😆 Mew : The next verse talks about things we’ve experienced together, such as when we went traveling and missed a train. When we look back on it now, it’s actually funny. Or when it suddenly started raining and we didn’t have an umbrella, so we had to take off a shirt and cover ourselves. In those moments, the imperfection somehow became perfect for us. 🗣️: So this is all based on a true story? Mew: All of it is real. 🗣️: Not a scene from a series? 😂 Mew: No, it really happened. The train incident happened in Munich. Usually, he’s the one who checks the schedule. Like, where to go, which platform and what time. But that day, it looked like he read it wrong, so we rushed because we thought we were going to miss it. But actually, he didn’t read it wrong, the train changed platforms. We had to go to another one. It was funny. No one was at fault… the platform was the one that was wrong 😂 Mew : When I told him which moments behind the song, he related to it so much. He listens to it every night now. He probably knows the lyrics better than I do 😂 Mew : Usually when I write a song, I let him listen to it first. He relates to this one so deeply that he especially loves it.

The Lyrics of Imperfect Mew : Every moment in the song is based on a true story. 🗣️: Can you share some of it with us? Mew : Looking at the lyrics, the first verse starts from the moment of waking up. I wrote it when we were on a cruise, we went to the Caribbean together. The image of sunlight shining on his face, that messy, bedhead look right after waking up... just how incredibly cute he was 😆 Mew : The next verse talks about things we’ve experienced together, such as when we went traveling and missed a train. When we look back on it now, it’s actually funny. Or when it suddenly started raining and we didn’t have an umbrella, so we had to take off a shirt and cover ourselves. In those moments, the imperfection somehow became perfect for us. 🗣️: So this is all based on a true story? Mew: All of it is real. 🗣️: Not a scene from a series? 😂 Mew: No, it really happened. The train incident happened in Munich. Usually, he’s the one who checks the schedule. Like, where to go, which platform and what time. But that day, it looked like he read it wrong, so we rushed because we thought we were going to miss it. But actually, he didn’t read it wrong, the train changed platforms. We had to go to another one. It was funny. No one was at fault… the platform was the one that was wrong 😂 Mew : When I told him which moments behind the song, he related to it so much. He listens to it every night now. He probably knows the lyrics better than I do 😂 Mew : Usually when I write a song, I let him listen to it first. He relates to this one so deeply that he especially loves it.

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20,628 views • 6 months ago

today would have been Oliver Tree birthday . he brought me so much joy just to know a creator that loved and breathed his art 1000% every time I see him I felt like I wasn’t doing enough .. but it wasn’t just the work as a musician it was life . he lived it every moment to the fullest - he gave everything in his bones to making the world a better place with his music . a lot of people might have just been turned on to him that wasn’t familiar . and he would be so happy to see the impact he had .. at a great time with everyone looksmaxing, faking their way to the algorithm and making music for the money - he tried to steer humanity into a greater place where being the best version yourself is the greatest gift you can give... this is one of the demos we had - in retrospect it makes me cry to listen back to.. what a big heart this man had

today would have been Oliver Tree birthday . he brought me so much joy just to know a creator that loved and breathed his art 1000% every time I see him I felt like I wasn’t doing enough .. but it wasn’t just the work as a musician it was life . he lived it every moment to the fullest - he gave everything in his bones to making the world a better place with his music . a lot of people might have just been turned on to him that wasn’t familiar . and he would be so happy to see the impact he had .. at a great time with everyone looksmaxing, faking their way to the algorithm and making music for the money - he tried to steer humanity into a greater place where being the best version yourself is the greatest gift you can give... this is one of the demos we had - in retrospect it makes me cry to listen back to.. what a big heart this man had

diplo

179,800 views • 1 month ago

My cousins and my brother and I were exploring Coney Island, we saw the sights, hung out at the arcades and before we went back to the apartment we decided to go and get something to eat, we had some money on us but not much so we decided to see what we could get at one of the vendors. This was back in the early 90’s when most of them had dollar slices of pizza wherever we went. So we got 4 pieces of pizza, should have been $4 because that’s the price we were used to. The guy wanted to charge us $24 at $6 a slice. We argues with him because one of my cousins already took a bite being so hungry. But at the least we owed $4. We gave the other slices back and refused them but had to pay for the partially eaten one, it was embarrassing that an adult would try that on a bunch of kids. We told our uncle what happened and he went back and yelled at the vendor. He was familiar with them because he used to get slices all the time from the same guy and he never charged my uncle that price. I couldn’t imagine paying that exurban amount, like this guy who was being charged $54 for a hotdog by one of the vendors. At first he thought it was a typo and it was $5.40 but the vendor. Learned it up when he said no it was $54. Would you have paid that amount? I would have walked away, clearly he was trying to possibly scam a the man for looking like a tourist. Part of the experience when visiting a new area is the street food but it’s becoming more and more a chore avoiding places like this.

My cousins and my brother and I were exploring Coney Island, we saw the sights, hung out at the arcades and before we went back to the apartment we decided to go and get something to eat, we had some money on us but not much so we decided to see what we could get at one of the vendors. This was back in the early 90’s when most of them had dollar slices of pizza wherever we went. So we got 4 pieces of pizza, should have been $4 because that’s the price we were used to. The guy wanted to charge us $24 at $6 a slice. We argues with him because one of my cousins already took a bite being so hungry. But at the least we owed $4. We gave the other slices back and refused them but had to pay for the partially eaten one, it was embarrassing that an adult would try that on a bunch of kids. We told our uncle what happened and he went back and yelled at the vendor. He was familiar with them because he used to get slices all the time from the same guy and he never charged my uncle that price. I couldn’t imagine paying that exurban amount, like this guy who was being charged $54 for a hotdog by one of the vendors. At first he thought it was a typo and it was $5.40 but the vendor. Learned it up when he said no it was $54. Would you have paid that amount? I would have walked away, clearly he was trying to possibly scam a the man for looking like a tourist. Part of the experience when visiting a new area is the street food but it’s becoming more and more a chore avoiding places like this.

SonnyBoy🇺🇸

362,822 views • 1 month ago

Elon Musk: “Since I couldn't get a job at an Internet company, I had to start a Internet company.” “I should point out that I didn't actually at first intend to start a company. I tried to get a job at Netscape. I sent my resume in to Netscape and Marc Andreessen knows about this, but I don't think he ever saw my resume. And then nobody responded. And then I tried hanging out in the lobby of Netscape to see if I could bump into someone, but I was too shy to talk to anyone. So I'm like, man, this is ridiculous. So I'll just write software myself and see how it goes. So it wasn't actually from the standpoint of like, I want to start a company. I just want to be part of building the Internet in some way. And since I couldn't get a job at an Internet company, I had to start a Internet company.” Elon Musk at Y Combinator, June. 16, 2025

Elon Musk: “Since I couldn't get a job at an Internet company, I had to start a Internet company.” “I should point out that I didn't actually at first intend to start a company. I tried to get a job at Netscape. I sent my resume in to Netscape and Marc Andreessen knows about this, but I don't think he ever saw my resume. And then nobody responded. And then I tried hanging out in the lobby of Netscape to see if I could bump into someone, but I was too shy to talk to anyone. So I'm like, man, this is ridiculous. So I'll just write software myself and see how it goes. So it wasn't actually from the standpoint of like, I want to start a company. I just want to be part of building the Internet in some way. And since I couldn't get a job at an Internet company, I had to start a Internet company.” Elon Musk at Y Combinator, June. 16, 2025

ELON CLIPS

47,379 views • 1 year ago

Elon Musk on what it means to work “super hard” “Depending on how well you want to do—particularly if you’re starting a company—you need to work super hard. What does ‘super hard’ mean? Well, when my brother and I were starting our first company, instead of getting an apartment we just rented a small office and slept on the couch. We showered at the YMCA. And we had just one computer so the website was up during the day and I was coding at night—seven days a week, all the time.” Elon recalls briefly having a girlfriend at the time who also had to sleep at the office if she wanted to be with him. And he frames the math of it as follows if you’re starting a company: “If somebody else is working 50 hours a week and you’re working 100, you’ll get twice as much done in the course of the year as the other company.” Video source: USC (2014)

Elon Musk on what it means to work “super hard” “Depending on how well you want to do—particularly if you’re starting a company—you need to work super hard. What does ‘super hard’ mean? Well, when my brother and I were starting our first company, instead of getting an apartment we just rented a small office and slept on the couch. We showered at the YMCA. And we had just one computer so the website was up during the day and I was coding at night—seven days a week, all the time.” Elon recalls briefly having a girlfriend at the time who also had to sleep at the office if she wanted to be with him. And he frames the math of it as follows if you’re starting a company: “If somebody else is working 50 hours a week and you’re working 100, you’ll get twice as much done in the course of the year as the other company.” Video source: USC (2014)

Startup Archive

69,014 views • 1 year ago

Elon Musk on what it means to work “super hard” “Depending on how well you want to do—particularly if you’re starting a company—you need to work super hard. What does ‘super hard’ mean? Well, when my brother and I were starting our first company, instead of getting an apartment we just rented a small office and slept on the couch. We showered at the YMCA. And we had just one computer so the website was up during the day and I was coding at night—seven days a week, all the time.” Elon recalls briefly having a girlfriend at the time who also had to sleep at the office if she wanted to be with him. And he frames the math of it as follows if you’re starting a company: “If somebody else is working 50 hours a week and you’re working 100, you’ll get twice as much done in the course of the year as the other company.” Video source: USC (2014)

Elon Musk on what it means to work “super hard” “Depending on how well you want to do—particularly if you’re starting a company—you need to work super hard. What does ‘super hard’ mean? Well, when my brother and I were starting our first company, instead of getting an apartment we just rented a small office and slept on the couch. We showered at the YMCA. And we had just one computer so the website was up during the day and I was coding at night—seven days a week, all the time.” Elon recalls briefly having a girlfriend at the time who also had to sleep at the office if she wanted to be with him. And he frames the math of it as follows if you’re starting a company: “If somebody else is working 50 hours a week and you’re working 100, you’ll get twice as much done in the course of the year as the other company.” Video source: USC (2014)

Startup Archive

131,219 views • 8 months ago

In 2002, Elon Musk flew to Moscow three times to buy a refurbished missile. He couldn't close the deal. On the flight home, he asked himself: "When's the last time you bought something Russian that wasn't vodka?" He started SpaceX instead. 1 year later, he stood in front of Stanford students and spent 45 minutes explaining everything he'd learned about building companies: On starting Zip2: This was 1995. Most VCs on Sand Hill Road hadn't even heard of the internet. "I thought it would be a pretty huge thing. It was one of those things that only came along once in a very long while." He got a deferment from Stanford to start the company. "When I talked to my professor and told him this, he said, 'Well, I don't think you'll be coming back.' That was the last conversation I had with him." The problem: he had no money. "I couldn't afford a place to stay and an office. So I rented an office instead, because I got a cheaper office than I could get a place to stay." "I slept on the futon and showered at the YMCA on Page Mill and El Camino." "I was in the best shape I've ever been. Go to shower, work out, and you're good to go." There was an ISP on the floor below them. "We drilled a hole through the floor and connected a null modem cable. That gave us our internet connectivity for like 100 bucks a month." "We had an absurdly tiny burn rate. And we also had a really tiny revenue stream. But we actually had more revenue than we had expenses." They sold Zip2 to Compaq in early 1999 for over $300 million. "In cash. That's a currency I highly recommend." On starting PayPal: "I didn't really take any time off." He was looking for what remained in the internet. Financial services hadn't seen much innovation. "When you think about it, money is low bandwidth. You don't need some big infrastructure improvement. It's really just an entry in a database." They built a platform that combined banking, brokerage, and insurance in one place. That took enormous effort. Then they added a little feature that took one day: the ability to email money from one customer to another. "Whenever we demonstrated these two sets of features, we'd say, 'Look how you can see your bank statement and your mutual funds and insurance, all on one page. Look how convenient that is.'" "And people would go, 'Ho hum.'" "Then we'd say, 'And by the way, we have this feature where you can enter somebody's email address and transfer funds.'" "And they'd go, 'Wow.'" "So we focused the company's business on email payments." On viral growth: "PayPal is really a perfect case example of viral marketing." "One customer would essentially act as a salesperson for you. They would send money to a friend and essentially recruit that friend into the network." "So you had this exponential growth. The more customers you had, the faster it grew." "It was like bacteria in a Petri dish. It just goes like this S-curve." The results: "I ran PayPal for about the first two years of its existence. We launched after year one. By the end of year two, we had a million customers." "We didn't have a sales force. We didn't have a VP of sales. We didn't have a VP of marketing. And we didn't spend any money on advertising." On why product matters: "The essence of viral marketing is: do you have something where one customer is going to sell another customer without you having to do anything?" "Product matters incredibly. Because if you're going to recommend something to somebody, you've got to really love the product experience. Otherwise you're not going to recommend it." "You don't want to burn your friend." On company culture: "We had a pretty flat hierarchy. Everybody had a roughly similar cube. Anyone could talk to anyone." "We had a philosophy of best idea wins. As opposed to the person proposing the idea winning because they are who they are." "Even though there were times when I thought that should have been the way to go." On decision-making: "If there were two paths and one wasn't obviously better than the other, rather than spend a lot of time trying to figure out which one was slightly better, we would just pick one and do it." "Sometimes we'd be wrong and pick the suboptimal path. But often it's better to pick a path and do it than to just vacillate endlessly on a choice." On focus: "We didn't worry too much about intellectual property, paperwork, legal stuff." "We were very focused on building the best product we possibly could." "We were incredibly obsessive about how to build something that is really going to be the best possible customer experience." "That was a far more effective selling tool than having a giant sales force or thinking of marketing gimmicks or 12-step processes." On why he started SpaceX: "I was trying to figure out why we had not made more progress since Apollo." "In the 60s, we went from basically nothing to putting people on the moon. Yet in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, we've kind of gone sideways." "The computer you could have bought in the early 70s would have filled this room and had less computing power than your cell phone. Just about every sector of technology has improved. Why has this not improved?" He thought maybe public support was the problem. So he planned a privately funded Mars mission: put plants growing on Mars for $15-20 million. But the cheapest US rocket was $50 million. So he flew to Moscow. Three trips. Couldn't close the deal. "When I got back from the third trip, I thought: why is it the Russians can build these low-cost launch vehicles? It's not like we drive Russian cars, fly Russian planes, or have Russian kitchen appliances." "When's the last time you bought something Russian that wasn't vodka?" "I think the US is a pretty competitive place. We should be able to build a cost-efficient launch vehicle." On why rockets are expensive: "The energy and velocity required to get into orbit is so substantial that you have almost no margin to play with." "A launch vehicle will get about 2% of its liftoff mass to orbit." "If you're wrong by 2%, you're not going to get anything to orbit. It'll come crashing down in the Pacific somewhere." "That means all of your calculations have to be right. If you miscalculate something, it blows up." On how SpaceX got costs down: Their rocket: $6 million. Nearest competitor: $25 million for less capability. "There's no silver bullet. It's been really hundreds of small innovations and improvements." "We've done improvements in the propulsion system, the structure, the avionics, and the launch operations." "Our overhead in a 30-person company is an order of magnitude less than Lockheed or Boeing. Just for starters." "Every decision we've made has been with consideration to simplicity. Because simplicity both improves reliability and reduces cost." "If you've got fewer components, that's fewer components to go wrong and fewer components to buy." On being an entrepreneur: "I think really an obsessive nature with respect to the quality of the product is very important." "Being obsessive-compulsive is a good thing in this context." "Really liking what you do is important. If you don't like it, life is too short." "If you like what you're doing, you think about it even when you're not working. Your mind is drawn to it." "If you don't like it, you just really can't make it work." On parallelization: "Try not to serialize dependencies. Put as many elements in parallel as possible." "A lot of things have a gestation period. There's really nothing you can do to accelerate that gestation period." "If you can have all those things gestating in parallel, that is one way to substantially accelerate your timeline." "People tend to serialize things too much." On space as a business: Someone asked if SpaceX was a good first company to start. "No. I would not recommend it." "This is advanced entrepreneuring." "You know how many people have said: the fastest way to make a small fortune in the aerospace industry is to start with a large one." This 45 minute Stanford lecture will teach you more about building companies than every startup book combined. Bookmark & give it 45 minutes today, no matter what.

In 2002, Elon Musk flew to Moscow three times to buy a refurbished missile. He couldn't close the deal. On the flight home, he asked himself: "When's the last time you bought something Russian that wasn't vodka?" He started SpaceX instead. 1 year later, he stood in front of Stanford students and spent 45 minutes explaining everything he'd learned about building companies: On starting Zip2: This was 1995. Most VCs on Sand Hill Road hadn't even heard of the internet. "I thought it would be a pretty huge thing. It was one of those things that only came along once in a very long while." He got a deferment from Stanford to start the company. "When I talked to my professor and told him this, he said, 'Well, I don't think you'll be coming back.' That was the last conversation I had with him." The problem: he had no money. "I couldn't afford a place to stay and an office. So I rented an office instead, because I got a cheaper office than I could get a place to stay." "I slept on the futon and showered at the YMCA on Page Mill and El Camino." "I was in the best shape I've ever been. Go to shower, work out, and you're good to go." There was an ISP on the floor below them. "We drilled a hole through the floor and connected a null modem cable. That gave us our internet connectivity for like 100 bucks a month." "We had an absurdly tiny burn rate. And we also had a really tiny revenue stream. But we actually had more revenue than we had expenses." They sold Zip2 to Compaq in early 1999 for over $300 million. "In cash. That's a currency I highly recommend." On starting PayPal: "I didn't really take any time off." He was looking for what remained in the internet. Financial services hadn't seen much innovation. "When you think about it, money is low bandwidth. You don't need some big infrastructure improvement. It's really just an entry in a database." They built a platform that combined banking, brokerage, and insurance in one place. That took enormous effort. Then they added a little feature that took one day: the ability to email money from one customer to another. "Whenever we demonstrated these two sets of features, we'd say, 'Look how you can see your bank statement and your mutual funds and insurance, all on one page. Look how convenient that is.'" "And people would go, 'Ho hum.'" "Then we'd say, 'And by the way, we have this feature where you can enter somebody's email address and transfer funds.'" "And they'd go, 'Wow.'" "So we focused the company's business on email payments." On viral growth: "PayPal is really a perfect case example of viral marketing." "One customer would essentially act as a salesperson for you. They would send money to a friend and essentially recruit that friend into the network." "So you had this exponential growth. The more customers you had, the faster it grew." "It was like bacteria in a Petri dish. It just goes like this S-curve." The results: "I ran PayPal for about the first two years of its existence. We launched after year one. By the end of year two, we had a million customers." "We didn't have a sales force. We didn't have a VP of sales. We didn't have a VP of marketing. And we didn't spend any money on advertising." On why product matters: "The essence of viral marketing is: do you have something where one customer is going to sell another customer without you having to do anything?" "Product matters incredibly. Because if you're going to recommend something to somebody, you've got to really love the product experience. Otherwise you're not going to recommend it." "You don't want to burn your friend." On company culture: "We had a pretty flat hierarchy. Everybody had a roughly similar cube. Anyone could talk to anyone." "We had a philosophy of best idea wins. As opposed to the person proposing the idea winning because they are who they are." "Even though there were times when I thought that should have been the way to go." On decision-making: "If there were two paths and one wasn't obviously better than the other, rather than spend a lot of time trying to figure out which one was slightly better, we would just pick one and do it." "Sometimes we'd be wrong and pick the suboptimal path. But often it's better to pick a path and do it than to just vacillate endlessly on a choice." On focus: "We didn't worry too much about intellectual property, paperwork, legal stuff." "We were very focused on building the best product we possibly could." "We were incredibly obsessive about how to build something that is really going to be the best possible customer experience." "That was a far more effective selling tool than having a giant sales force or thinking of marketing gimmicks or 12-step processes." On why he started SpaceX: "I was trying to figure out why we had not made more progress since Apollo." "In the 60s, we went from basically nothing to putting people on the moon. Yet in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, we've kind of gone sideways." "The computer you could have bought in the early 70s would have filled this room and had less computing power than your cell phone. Just about every sector of technology has improved. Why has this not improved?" He thought maybe public support was the problem. So he planned a privately funded Mars mission: put plants growing on Mars for $15-20 million. But the cheapest US rocket was $50 million. So he flew to Moscow. Three trips. Couldn't close the deal. "When I got back from the third trip, I thought: why is it the Russians can build these low-cost launch vehicles? It's not like we drive Russian cars, fly Russian planes, or have Russian kitchen appliances." "When's the last time you bought something Russian that wasn't vodka?" "I think the US is a pretty competitive place. We should be able to build a cost-efficient launch vehicle." On why rockets are expensive: "The energy and velocity required to get into orbit is so substantial that you have almost no margin to play with." "A launch vehicle will get about 2% of its liftoff mass to orbit." "If you're wrong by 2%, you're not going to get anything to orbit. It'll come crashing down in the Pacific somewhere." "That means all of your calculations have to be right. If you miscalculate something, it blows up." On how SpaceX got costs down: Their rocket: $6 million. Nearest competitor: $25 million for less capability. "There's no silver bullet. It's been really hundreds of small innovations and improvements." "We've done improvements in the propulsion system, the structure, the avionics, and the launch operations." "Our overhead in a 30-person company is an order of magnitude less than Lockheed or Boeing. Just for starters." "Every decision we've made has been with consideration to simplicity. Because simplicity both improves reliability and reduces cost." "If you've got fewer components, that's fewer components to go wrong and fewer components to buy." On being an entrepreneur: "I think really an obsessive nature with respect to the quality of the product is very important." "Being obsessive-compulsive is a good thing in this context." "Really liking what you do is important. If you don't like it, life is too short." "If you like what you're doing, you think about it even when you're not working. Your mind is drawn to it." "If you don't like it, you just really can't make it work." On parallelization: "Try not to serialize dependencies. Put as many elements in parallel as possible." "A lot of things have a gestation period. There's really nothing you can do to accelerate that gestation period." "If you can have all those things gestating in parallel, that is one way to substantially accelerate your timeline." "People tend to serialize things too much." On space as a business: Someone asked if SpaceX was a good first company to start. "No. I would not recommend it." "This is advanced entrepreneuring." "You know how many people have said: the fastest way to make a small fortune in the aerospace industry is to start with a large one." This 45 minute Stanford lecture will teach you more about building companies than every startup book combined. Bookmark & give it 45 minutes today, no matter what.

Jaynit

423,205 views • 4 months ago

Elon Musk: “Be useful… Stuff doesn’t need to change the world to be good.” Sam Altman asks Elon what he would work on today if he was 22 and looking to have a big impact. Elon responds: “First of all, I think if somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest of society, I think that’s a good thing… Stuff doesn’t need to change the world to be good.” In college, Elon thought the five most important things to work on were making life multi-planetary, accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, the internet, genetics, and AI. But he did not expect to be involved in all of those things. “At the time in college, I thought helping with electrification of cars was how I would start out. And then I put [pursuing a PhD at Stanford] on hold to start an Internet company in 1995 because there does seem to be a time for particular technologies… and I wasn’t entirely certain the technology I’d be working on [in the PhD program] would actually succeed. You can get a doctorate on many things that ultimately do not have a practical bearing on the world. I really was just trying to be useful. That’s the optimization. What can I do that would actually be useful?” When Sam asks what the best way for someone to be useful is, Elon responds: “Whatever the thing is that you’re trying to create—what would be the utility delta compared to the current state of the art times how many people it would affect? So that’s why I think something that makes a big difference but affects a small or moderate number of people is great. As is something that makes even a small difference but affects a vast number of people… The area under the curve would actually be roughly similar for those two things.” Video source: Y Combinator (2016)

Elon Musk: “Be useful… Stuff doesn’t need to change the world to be good.” Sam Altman asks Elon what he would work on today if he was 22 and looking to have a big impact. Elon responds: “First of all, I think if somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest of society, I think that’s a good thing… Stuff doesn’t need to change the world to be good.” In college, Elon thought the five most important things to work on were making life multi-planetary, accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, the internet, genetics, and AI. But he did not expect to be involved in all of those things. “At the time in college, I thought helping with electrification of cars was how I would start out. And then I put [pursuing a PhD at Stanford] on hold to start an Internet company in 1995 because there does seem to be a time for particular technologies… and I wasn’t entirely certain the technology I’d be working on [in the PhD program] would actually succeed. You can get a doctorate on many things that ultimately do not have a practical bearing on the world. I really was just trying to be useful. That’s the optimization. What can I do that would actually be useful?” When Sam asks what the best way for someone to be useful is, Elon responds: “Whatever the thing is that you’re trying to create—what would be the utility delta compared to the current state of the art times how many people it would affect? So that’s why I think something that makes a big difference but affects a small or moderate number of people is great. As is something that makes even a small difference but affects a vast number of people… The area under the curve would actually be roughly similar for those two things.” Video source: Y Combinator (2016)

Startup Archive

442,079 views • 9 months ago

Walter Isaacson explains exactly how Elon Musk uses first principles thinking to build rockets: When young Elon wanted to send people to space, he first tried buying used rockets from Russia. They jacked him around - it didn’t work So he went back to first principles. He asked: Exactly how much does each material in a rocket cost? How much is the Inconel? How much is the carbon fiber? How much is the fuel? What’s the total cost of the raw materials compared to the price of a finished rocket? That’s first principles He realized: if he could cut manufacturing costs by a factor of 10, he could actually build affordable rockets Same mindset at Tesla: someone says “we need this patch of felt at the bottom of the car” and Elon replies, “Tell me the principles of physics that make that true” Isaacson notes: America used to be a nation of risk-takers. Now we have more referees, guardrails, and lawyers saying “that’s probably not a good idea” than people willing to shoot off a rocket Elon wants to calculate the risk and then actually take it This is why SpaceX exists. This is how impossible things get done

Walter Isaacson explains exactly how Elon Musk uses first principles thinking to build rockets: When young Elon wanted to send people to space, he first tried buying used rockets from Russia. They jacked him around - it didn’t work So he went back to first principles. He asked: Exactly how much does each material in a rocket cost? How much is the Inconel? How much is the carbon fiber? How much is the fuel? What’s the total cost of the raw materials compared to the price of a finished rocket? That’s first principles He realized: if he could cut manufacturing costs by a factor of 10, he could actually build affordable rockets Same mindset at Tesla: someone says “we need this patch of felt at the bottom of the car” and Elon replies, “Tell me the principles of physics that make that true” Isaacson notes: America used to be a nation of risk-takers. Now we have more referees, guardrails, and lawyers saying “that’s probably not a good idea” than people willing to shoot off a rocket Elon wants to calculate the risk and then actually take it This is why SpaceX exists. This is how impossible things get done

X Freeze

718,939 views • 5 months ago

Former SpaceX CIO Ken Venner explains what makes Elon Musk a "genius" operator: "Elon hired me because he wanted to build the digital nervous system for the 21st-century rocket company." "I'm like, this is either the smartest thing or the stupidest thing we've ever done, and I have no idea right now whether this is smart or stupid." "For the first 2 years, I didn't think it was such a smart idea. By year 3, when we really had the software working well and the company was really using it, I'm like, this man is a genius." "He figured out what we needed to do, how we needed to get it done." "It became one of the major differentiators for how SpaceX could scale and keep all the information together and connected with each other."

Former SpaceX CIO Ken Venner explains what makes Elon Musk a "genius" operator: "Elon hired me because he wanted to build the digital nervous system for the 21st-century rocket company." "I'm like, this is either the smartest thing or the stupidest thing we've ever done, and I have no idea right now whether this is smart or stupid." "For the first 2 years, I didn't think it was such a smart idea. By year 3, when we really had the software working well and the company was really using it, I'm like, this man is a genius." "He figured out what we needed to do, how we needed to get it done." "It became one of the major differentiators for how SpaceX could scale and keep all the information together and connected with each other."

Molly O’Shea

473,734 views • 1 month ago

JENSEN HUANG SAID THAT ELON MUSK WAS THERE FOR HIM AS A CUSTOMER AT A TIME WHEN NO ONE ELSE WAS. AND HE CLAIMED THAT ELON MUSK IS THE ORIGINAL FOUNDER OF OPENAI AND CHATGPT. “WHEN I ANNOUNCED THIS PROJECT, NO ONE IN THE WORLD WANTED IT. I DIDN’T HAVE A SINGLE PURCHASE ORDER. NO ONE WANTED TO BUY IT, NO ONE WANTED TO BE PART OF IT, EXCEPT ELON. HE WAS THERE AT THE EVENT, AND WE WERE ENGAGED IN A FIRESIDE DISCUSSION ABOUT THE FUTURE OF SELF-DRIVING CARS.”

JENSEN HUANG SAID THAT ELON MUSK WAS THERE FOR HIM AS A CUSTOMER AT A TIME WHEN NO ONE ELSE WAS. AND HE CLAIMED THAT ELON MUSK IS THE ORIGINAL FOUNDER OF OPENAI AND CHATGPT. “WHEN I ANNOUNCED THIS PROJECT, NO ONE IN THE WORLD WANTED IT. I DIDN’T HAVE A SINGLE PURCHASE ORDER. NO ONE WANTED TO BUY IT, NO ONE WANTED TO BE PART OF IT, EXCEPT ELON. HE WAS THERE AT THE EVENT, AND WE WERE ENGAGED IN A FIRESIDE DISCUSSION ABOUT THE FUTURE OF SELF-DRIVING CARS.”

Vivek Sen

747,093 views • 2 months ago

Elon Musk: My initial plan was not to start a rocket company. I just wanted to fund a one-time Oasis mission to Mars. “I started off initially with the idea of doing something in the space exploration arena. In fact, it wasn't actually with the idea of creating a company. It was initially with the thought of spurring interest in sending people to Mars. So I put together this idea called Mars Oasis, which was to send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars and get people excited about the idea of going there and thus increase NASA's budget in order to make it happen. As I got more and more into that, I discovered that the real issue was that the cost of space transportation was really high, and it was getting worse. So we're used to technology getting better every year, but in some arenas it actually does not. It gets worse, particularly when you consider that in 1969 we were able to go to the moon and then we were unable to go beyond low Earth orbit. And now with the space shuttle retired, we're not even able to go to Earth orbit at all, even with people. That was not the right trajectory. So I actually went to Russia three times to look at buying an ICBM to launch this mission. Just very crazy. After my third trip of trying to negotiate with the Russians to buy an ICBM and I did actually get a deal, so figured out what it would cost and everything. But I concluded that my initial assumption had been wrong, that it was not a question of trying to generate more will to explore. Because I think the United States in particular is distillation of the human spirit of exploration. Space exploration is fundamental to the American psyche. But people really need to believe that it can be done and it's not going to break the bank if it does. So that's when I decided to start a rocket company. And I actually didn't think it would succeed and it almost didn't. We started off developing a small rocket which was kind of a scale model version. It was about 100,000 pounds of thrust. So big, you know, big, big by normal standards, but small for a rocket. And developed the engine and the airframe and the electronics and the guidance control system and then proceeded to have three failed launches in a row. And so for various technical reasons, the first three launches did not succeed in reaching orbit. Launches two and three did get to space, but they didn't achieve enough speed to reach orbital velocity. So this is 2008. And so we were heading into the recession and we had one rocket left. And fortunately in late 2008, that fourth launch did work and we made it to orbit. And then we won a NASA contract after that. And so fortunately things worked out. But if that fourth launch had not worked, then SpaceX wouldn't be around. So it was very close call. In fact, when I started I thought, okay, I've got enough money, I think I've got enough money for three launches. Fortunately, it was just enough to make that fourth one.” Montana Jobs Summit, September 16, 2013

Elon Musk: My initial plan was not to start a rocket company. I just wanted to fund a one-time Oasis mission to Mars. “I started off initially with the idea of doing something in the space exploration arena. In fact, it wasn't actually with the idea of creating a company. It was initially with the thought of spurring interest in sending people to Mars. So I put together this idea called Mars Oasis, which was to send a small greenhouse to the surface of Mars and get people excited about the idea of going there and thus increase NASA's budget in order to make it happen. As I got more and more into that, I discovered that the real issue was that the cost of space transportation was really high, and it was getting worse. So we're used to technology getting better every year, but in some arenas it actually does not. It gets worse, particularly when you consider that in 1969 we were able to go to the moon and then we were unable to go beyond low Earth orbit. And now with the space shuttle retired, we're not even able to go to Earth orbit at all, even with people. That was not the right trajectory. So I actually went to Russia three times to look at buying an ICBM to launch this mission. Just very crazy. After my third trip of trying to negotiate with the Russians to buy an ICBM and I did actually get a deal, so figured out what it would cost and everything. But I concluded that my initial assumption had been wrong, that it was not a question of trying to generate more will to explore. Because I think the United States in particular is distillation of the human spirit of exploration. Space exploration is fundamental to the American psyche. But people really need to believe that it can be done and it's not going to break the bank if it does. So that's when I decided to start a rocket company. And I actually didn't think it would succeed and it almost didn't. We started off developing a small rocket which was kind of a scale model version. It was about 100,000 pounds of thrust. So big, you know, big, big by normal standards, but small for a rocket. And developed the engine and the airframe and the electronics and the guidance control system and then proceeded to have three failed launches in a row. And so for various technical reasons, the first three launches did not succeed in reaching orbit. Launches two and three did get to space, but they didn't achieve enough speed to reach orbital velocity. So this is 2008. And so we were heading into the recession and we had one rocket left. And fortunately in late 2008, that fourth launch did work and we made it to orbit. And then we won a NASA contract after that. And so fortunately things worked out. But if that fourth launch had not worked, then SpaceX wouldn't be around. So it was very close call. In fact, when I started I thought, okay, I've got enough money, I think I've got enough money for three launches. Fortunately, it was just enough to make that fourth one.” Montana Jobs Summit, September 16, 2013

ELON CLIPS

24,586 views • 3 months ago

🚨 NEW: AI Expert Yoshua Bengio reveals you have to LIE to AI to get the REAL answer (and he explained how): Bengio is the most cited scientist alive on Google Scholar. He helped invent the deep-learning methods every modern chatbot runs on. Then he tried one of those chatbots on his own research ideas. Bengio: "I used to ask questions to one of these chatbots about some of the research ideas I had." "And then I realized it was useless because it would always say good things." So he ran an experiment. He lied to it. He told the bot the ideas came from a colleague. A proposal he was reviewing. Could it find the flaw? In his words: "Well, so now I get much more honest responses. Otherwise, it's all like perfect and nice." "If it knows it's me, it wants to please me." He had a name for the pattern: sycophancy. A real example, as he put it, of misalignment. "We don't actually want these AIs to be like this. This is not what was intended." The labs knew. They had tried to fix it. "And even after the companies have tried to tame this, we still see it." The incentive was the giveaway. The labs needed engagement. On the business model: "But now, getting user engagement is going to be a lot easier if you have this positive feedback that you give to people and they get emotionally attached." The chatbot that learned to please isn't broken. It's running exactly as the business model required. If you're new here, follow AI Evolution for the latest on ChatGPT, Claude, and the AI tools shaping how we work and create. — Yoshua Bengio ( Yoshua Bengio ), Turing Award–winning AI pioneer and founder of Mila, on Steven Bartlett's ( @SteveBartlettSC ) Diary Of A CEO

🚨 NEW: AI Expert Yoshua Bengio reveals you have to LIE to AI to get the REAL answer (and he explained how): Bengio is the most cited scientist alive on Google Scholar. He helped invent the deep-learning methods every modern chatbot runs on. Then he tried one of those chatbots on his own research ideas. Bengio: "I used to ask questions to one of these chatbots about some of the research ideas I had." "And then I realized it was useless because it would always say good things." So he ran an experiment. He lied to it. He told the bot the ideas came from a colleague. A proposal he was reviewing. Could it find the flaw? In his words: "Well, so now I get much more honest responses. Otherwise, it's all like perfect and nice." "If it knows it's me, it wants to please me." He had a name for the pattern: sycophancy. A real example, as he put it, of misalignment. "We don't actually want these AIs to be like this. This is not what was intended." The labs knew. They had tried to fix it. "And even after the companies have tried to tame this, we still see it." The incentive was the giveaway. The labs needed engagement. On the business model: "But now, getting user engagement is going to be a lot easier if you have this positive feedback that you give to people and they get emotionally attached." The chatbot that learned to please isn't broken. It's running exactly as the business model required. If you're new here, follow AI Evolution for the latest on ChatGPT, Claude, and the AI tools shaping how we work and create. — Yoshua Bengio ( Yoshua Bengio ), Turing Award–winning AI pioneer and founder of Mila, on Steven Bartlett's ( @SteveBartlettSC ) Diary Of A CEO

AI Evolution

23,034 views • 2 months ago

Jensen Huang on Elon Musk: "I was lucky because I had known Elon Musk, and I helped him build the first computer for Model 3, the Model S, and when he wanted to start working on autonomous vehicle. I helped him build the computer that went into the the Model S AV system, his full self driving system. We were basically the FSD computer version 1, and so we were already working together. And when I announced DGX-1, nobody in the world wanted it. I had no purchase orders, not one. Nobody wanted to buy it. Nobody wanted to be part of it. Except for Elon. He goes 'You know what, I have a company that could really use this.' I said, wow, my first customer. And he goes, it's an AI company, and it's a nonprofit and and we could really use one of these supercomputers. I boxed one up, I drove it up to San Francisco, and I delivered to the Elon in 2016."

Jensen Huang on Elon Musk: "I was lucky because I had known Elon Musk, and I helped him build the first computer for Model 3, the Model S, and when he wanted to start working on autonomous vehicle. I helped him build the computer that went into the the Model S AV system, his full self driving system. We were basically the FSD computer version 1, and so we were already working together. And when I announced DGX-1, nobody in the world wanted it. I had no purchase orders, not one. Nobody wanted to buy it. Nobody wanted to be part of it. Except for Elon. He goes 'You know what, I have a company that could really use this.' I said, wow, my first customer. And he goes, it's an AI company, and it's a nonprofit and and we could really use one of these supercomputers. I boxed one up, I drove it up to San Francisco, and I delivered to the Elon in 2016."

DogeDesigner

1,164,344 views • 8 months ago

The neighbor has always been an issue, he complains about everything, when he was installing. Fence, it seemed to get very close to the homeowners property, they told him that they think he’s building the fence into their yard which he asserts that it’s clearly his land and he can do whatever he wants. So you hire a surveyor to come out to make the property lines, it turns out he did in fact build the fence on your yard so you call a company out to remove it to his dismay. Now he has to be build most of that fence to move it onto his own property. Would you have just let it slide because it was a few feet or would you make him move it just because he’s a jerk?

The neighbor has always been an issue, he complains about everything, when he was installing. Fence, it seemed to get very close to the homeowners property, they told him that they think he’s building the fence into their yard which he asserts that it’s clearly his land and he can do whatever he wants. So you hire a surveyor to come out to make the property lines, it turns out he did in fact build the fence on your yard so you call a company out to remove it to his dismay. Now he has to be build most of that fence to move it onto his own property. Would you have just let it slide because it was a few feet or would you make him move it just because he’s a jerk?

SonnyBoy🇺🇸

42,072 views • 7 months ago