People have a lot say about Elon Musk, but the 60 Minutes interviewer cut across that grain and instead asked him to describe himself: An engineer, since he was a boy, who's interested in things that change the world and affect the future, in other words, wondrous new technologies. He has a desire to show the possibilities of... our imagination, our ingenuity, our resolve perhaps, not so much profit.
In the Bloomberg Risk Takers episode on Musk, which I wrote about previously, I thought he kept a reserve of cash from his sale of Zip2 and PayPal. But apparently he was worse than broke, he was in debt, as he poured it all on his three companies - Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity. In the dark years of 2007 and 2008, at least one of his companies was bankrupt. When he called prospective investors asking for help, they not only laughed at him, but also lobbed obscenities at him. If he were ever to have a nervous breakdown, he said, he came very close in that period.
In the end, he reasoned that people reveled in taking potshots of him and Tesla, for one, because he was betting on something that was not likely to succeed. But that's what drives him, and that's what drives me, too. Theory of Algorithms and The Core Algorithm are just the platforms, really, for a wealth of initiatives, products and services that will span science, art and religion. In my rough estimation, the chances of success may be so small as to be less than 5%. But that is all I need to succeed.
Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!
Ron Villejo, PhD
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