How To Be The Next Elon Musk According To Elon Musk

So, uh, one of the, I think, most common questions I hear young people, ambitious young people, ask is: "I want to be the next Elon Musk. How do I do that?"

Um, obviously, the next Elon Musk will work on very different things than you did. But what have you done or what did you do when you were younger that you think sort of set you up to have a big impact?

Well, I think first of all I should say that I do not expect to be involved in all these things. So, the five things that I thought about at the time in college quite a long time ago—25 years ago—um, you know, being, you know, making life multiplanetary, um, accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, um, the internet broadly speaking, um, and then genetics and AI.

I think I didn't expect to be involved in all of those things. I actually, at the time in college, I sort of thought, um, helping with electrification of cars was how I would start out. And that's, uh, that's actually what I worked on as an intern, was, um, advanced ultra capacitors, to see if there would be a breakthrough relative to batteries for energy storage in cars.

And then when I came out to go to Stanford, um, that's what I was going to be doing my grad studies on, is, um, was working on advanced energy storage technologies for electric cars. And then I put that on hold to start an internet company in '95 because, um, there does seem to be like a time for particular technologies, um, when they're at a steep point in the inflection curve.

And, um, I didn't want to, you know, do a PhD at Stanford and then watch it all happen. Um, and then I wasn't entirely certain that the technology I'd be working on would actually succeed.

Um, like you can get a, you can get a, you know, doctorate on many things that ultimately do not have a practical bearing on the world. Um, and I wanted to, you know, just, I really was just trying to be useful.

That's the optimization: it's like, what can I do that would actually be useful?