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Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

ycombinator.com

171–180 of 542 posts

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#171
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#172

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

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

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#173

>I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on businessy things. But actually almost all my time, like 80% of it, is spent on engineering and design. Uh... that's not really a CEO's job though.

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

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#174
post #2

Question/Answer I found interesting: Sama> How should someone figure out how they should be useful? Elon> Whatever this thing is you are trying to create.. What would be the utility delta compared to the current state of the art times how many people it would affect?

that's just utilitarianism in action

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#176
post #7

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

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.

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#177

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 a…

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

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#178

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 sc…

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.

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#179

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 t…

[deleted]

Re: Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

#180
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 under…

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…

> 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.

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