Elon Musk is one of the world’s most respected entrepreneurs. He is one of the founders and CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. Musk is co-founder at SolarCity and a co-creator of PayPal, which leaves us wondering, is there anything this guy can’t do?
Here are the top 10 times Elon Musk completely blew our minds.
1. “I simply look at the future and say what is the thing that will actually work? And using a non-renewable resource obviously will not work so we must find an alternative.” He also said, “If I had a button to stop all hydrocarbon usage I wouldn’t press it, instead I think we need to accelerate the transition towards renewables.”
2.”I thought, what are the three areas that would respect the future of humanity? They were the internet, sustainable energy and space exploration, becoming a multi-planet species.”
3. “It is important to like people you work with, otherwise the drop is going to be quite miserable and, in fact, we have a strict no assholes policy at SpaceX and we give a little warning but we fire people if the continue to be assholes.”
4. When asked how did he feel about being told that worrying about the dark side of artificial intelligent was like worrying with overpopulation in Mars. He responded, “I think that is an inaccurate analogy. The risks with digital superintelligence is that it would be superhuman, it would just zip past human.”
5. “I’m not sure if people are aware of this but the world could be powered many times over by solar if you had enough battery capacity to pair it with it. We have this enormous fusion generator in the sky.”
6. “I never thought I was someone who could ever be capable of having a nervous breakdown, but this is the closest I’ve ever come, because it seems pretty dark, we are running on fumes at that point, SpaceX had virtually no money, the fourth failure would’ve been absolutely game over. After it was a success NASA called and told us we won one and a half billion dollar contract. “
7.”I believe in the scientific method and one should have a healthy skepticism of things in general, and in a scientific way of looking at things you always see them probabilistically not tentatively, so I think that most of the times when someone say he is a skeptical in the scientific community what they are really saying is that it’s not a hundred certain that this is the case.”
8.”I just like computers. I didn’t expect to create companies or anything like that. Rather that you want to be an entrepreneur or you want to make money, what are some useful things you can do that you wish existed in the world?”
9. He was asked when was he going to build a new electric airline, which he responded, “I’d love to work on an electric aircraft, I think all transport with the ironic exception of rockets will go electric, so I think what Airbus is doing with electric aircraft is very smart and I think they’ll be very happy with any investment that they make electrification of aircraft. We need electrification of aircrafts as well as cars.”
10. “Software engineering is probably the single biggest area that people should learn and I think I’m more sort of a fan in physics and general economics and critical thinking. They should teach a lot more critical thinking.”