How Elon Thinks

[whooshing] All right, so I have an advanced copy of your book, The Book of Elon: Elon Musk's Most Useful Ideas in His Own Words. You just said something that there's only four of these copies in the world. Who has them?

It's a, it's a pretty special list. It's like Naval Ravikant, MrBeast, Ivanka Trump, and you.

[laughing]

[laughing]

Okay, so the idea for this is you spent five years, thousands of hours studying Elon. He's been a hero, a personal hero of yours for a very long time. I just wanna, like, I r- obviously read and reread the book. I'm just gonna, like, run through a bunch of highlights and ideas, like, that I thought were interesting, and just kinda throw them to you, and you see, like, what, uh, like, what you find interesting about it-

Yeah

... or, like, add additional context. So something we were talking about when we were having coffee this morning is the importance of encouraging as many people as possible. Like, we have enough deal makers. We need people making products and building companies.

Yeah.

You don't need to be doing deals all day long, and that is, like, a main theme that Elon talks about all the time. And so he says this, right, uh, this quote in the book, which I loved, "I do not start companies with the standpoint of what is the best risk-adjusted rate of return or what I think could be successful. I just find things that need to happen, and I try to make them happen. I thought these things needed to get done. If the money was lost, okay, it was still worth trying." What is his mindset around what he chooses to spend his time and energy on?

He seems to attack problems that nobody else is working on that have a positive impact on the future. That's his philosophy and mindset going into everything he does, which is, I think, unique. A lot of people assume that he's money motivated, or a lot of people are money motivated, and you hear all ent- entrepreneurs all the time talk about, like, oh, like, "This is a great business model. This is a good place to go in. I'm gonna go start self-storage because, like, the failure rate is so low." And it is just not how he thinks in any way, shape, or form. He literally says, "Nobody else is crazy enough to try space, so that's the company I have to go build, 'cause nobody else is working on it, and I can."

He has a great line in here. He's like, "Don't start a company because you wanna be an entrepreneur or because you wanna make money. It is better to approach from this angle. What is a useful thing you could build that you wish existed in the world?"

Yeah. I think there's a paradox there of, like, the thing that you can do that nobody else is working on is actually more likely to be successful. Like, it forces you to try to do something unique that also ends up being more valuable for everybody else, because you're solving a problem, you're adding a capability to humanity. You're not just starting another commodity business of some sort.