“He was never actually diagnosed as a kid,” his mother says, “but he says he has Asperger’s, and I’m sure he’s right.”
One of his favorites was Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,
. But as he got closer to enrolling, he began to worry. “I figured I could spend several years at Stanford, get a PhD, and my conclusion on capacitors would be that they aren’t feasible,” he says. “Most PhDs are irrelevant. The number that actually move the needle is almost none
Ancient Egyptians learned how to build the pyramids, but then that knowledge was lost. The same happened to Rome, which built aqueducts and other wonders that were lost in the Dark Ages. Was that happening to America?
Move fast, blow things up, repeat. “It’s not how well you avoid problems,” Mueller says. “It’s how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it.”
Both Eberhard and Musk considered themselves to be the main founder of Tesla. In Eberhard’s mind, he had come up with the idea, enlisted his friend Tarpenning, registered a company, chosen a name, and gone out and found funders. “Elon called himself the chief architect and all kinds of things, but he wasn’t,” Eberhard says. “He was just a board member and investor.” But in Musk’s mind, he was the one who put Eberhard together with Straubel and provided the funding needed to start the company.
SpaceX had no one covering its expenses. It did not have a cost-plus contract, and it got paid only when it launched or delivered on certain milestones. Lockheed, on the other hand, profited whenever there was a delay.
Altman and Musk decided to cofound a nonprofit artificial intelligence research lab, which they named OpenAI. It would make its software open-source and try to counter Google’s growing dominance of the field.
Musk’s determination to develop artificial intelligence capabilities at his own companies caused a break with OpenAI in 2018. He tried to convince Altman that OpenAI, which he thought was falling behind Google, should be folded into Tesla. The OpenAI team rejected that idea, and Altman stepped in as president of the lab, starting a for-profit arm that was able to raise equity funding.
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