I see and read a lot about Elon Musk, between his appearances in the news and the technology and engineering articles that I tend to gravitate towards, but I don’t recall having ever seen an interview with him.
My love of Wait But Why has given me a very thorough run-down of Elon’s projects over the last few years between Tesla, Hyperloop, SpaceX and more recently Neuralink, and it has always been clear from the sheer scale of his vision that he’s a brilliant mind that is thinking decades ahead of us. However, reading about him and his projects doesn’t make you appreciate his genius quite like seeing him talk about them.
Elon recently did an interview at TED2017 and for 40 minutes, he and Chris Anderson talked about all of the projects that Elon is juggling. What is most captivating is the way in which Elon thinks about the future and rationally asserts how things are going to change in the future.
One of his main drivers for all of this is to make the world a better place to live in the future, which I find very noble. I’m not pretending that he’s not making a killing while doing so, but I see no problem with getting rich while simultaneously improving the present and future world in which we live.
He is bound to have his predictions be wrong in some cases: in the future, we’ll look back at his views and with hindsight laugh at how far off his visions were. However, I’d put money on his predictions being closer to reality than most of us could do.
His unique ability to boil industries and behaviour down to rational unit processes and elements enables him to engineer solutions that work today and can evolve over time to meet the needs of future generations.
I fully recommend listening to his TED2017 interview: it was fascinating to see how effortlessly he thinks through the future and talks about the ways that he thinks best plans for what it brings.
