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Today we dive into 10 ideas from Elon Musk:

1. Starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass

2. Elon’s life philosophy

3. Technology does not automatically improve

4. The technologies most likely to affect the future of humanity

5. How to come up with startup ideas

6. Any new technology is expensive when it starts out

7. The cross-pollination of ideas between industries is valuable

8. The only reason for a company to exist is to create a great product

9. Why to become a founder

10. Being useful and why stuff doesn’t need to change the world to be good

#1 Starting a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass

“A lot of times people think creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it’s really not that fun. There are periods of fun, and there are periods where it’s just awful. Particularly if you’re the CEO of the company. You actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company. There’s no point in spending your time on things that are going right. So you only spend your time on things that are going wrong that other people can’t take care of… The most pernicious and painful problems.”

Elon believes founders need to have a “fairly high pain threshold” and explains that starting a company is like “staring into the abyss and eating glass.”

“The staring into the abyss part is that you’re going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company because most startups fail… You’re constantly saying, okay, if I don’t get this right, the company will die. It’s going to be quite stressful. And then the eating glass part is you’ve got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. And so you end up working on problems that you’d really wish you weren’t working on… And that goes on for a long time.”

Video source: Khan Academy “Elon Musk - CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX | Entrepreneurship”

#2 Elon’s life philosophy

In the clip below, Elon is asked why he cares so much about transitioning Earth to sustainable energy and making humans multi-planetary.

He responds: “At a foundational level, [you’re asking] what is my philosophy and why does it lead to this conclusion?”

Elon explains that he had an existential crisis as a teenager, and after reading various religious texts and philosophers—none of which provided a convincing explanation of the meaning of life—he came across The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

“Basically what Douglas Adams was saying is that we don’t really know what the right questions are to ask… The universe is the answer, but what are the questions?”

He continues:

“The more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, the better we can understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe.”

He summarizes his philosophy as follows:

“If you accept as a proposition that we don’t really understand the meaning of life and we wish to understand the meaning of life, then in order to understand the meaning of life, we should expand consciousness such that we can ask better questions, learn more, expand beyond the solar system, ensure that life on earth is good collectively for civilization. And then we can be less dumb about the nature of the universe and maybe we can answer some questions about where this all came from and where it’s going.”

Video source: Tesla Owners Silicon Valley “Elon Musk on Life, The Universe and Everything: Interview Part 2”

#3 Technology does not automatically improve

“People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better. And actually it will I think—by itself—degrade.”

He continues:

“If you look at the progress in space, in 1969 we were able to send somebody to the moon. Then we had the Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle could only take people to low-earth orbit. Then the Space Shuttle retired and the United States could take no one to orbit.”

This is why he believe SpaceX’s mission of making humans a space-faring civilization is so important. It’s not inevitable, and it will require a lot of talented people working really hard to make it happen.

“You look at great civilizations like ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that. And the Romans, they built these incredible aqueducts. They forgot how to do it.”

Video source: TED “Elon Musk: The future we’re building — and boring”

#4 The technologies most likely to affect the future of humanity

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