Musk recalls identifying five areas in college: making life multiplanetary, sustainable energy, the internet, genetics, and AI. He did not expect to work on all of them.
How To Be The Next Elon Musk According To Elon Musk
Speaker
Elon Musk, entrepreneur, discusses how to choose work that can have a practical impact in a conversation with Y Combinator.
Musk initially focused on electrifying cars and interned on advanced ultracapacitors as a possible improvement over batteries for energy storage. He planned to study energy storage for electric cars at Stanford.
In 1995, Musk put his Stanford plans on hold to start an internet company. He says he saw the internet approaching a steep growth phase and did not want to spend years on a doctorate while it unfolded.
Musk says doctoral study can focus on subjects with little practical effect on the world. His guiding question was what he could do that would actually be useful.
Takeaways
- Choose work by the problems it could help solve, not by a fixed career plan.
- Explore whether a technology is approaching a point of rapid adoption before committing years to another path.
- Treat a degree as one option, and weigh its practical value against other ways to contribute.
- Use usefulness as a test when deciding what to work on.
Mentioned in this talk
Search inside this talk
What was claimed 2
- featureElon Musk: Intern researching advanced ultracapacitors for energy storage in cars
“That’s what I worked on as an intern”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
- featureElon Musk: Planned graduate studies on advanced energy storage technologies for electric cars at Stanford
“that’s what I was going to do my graduate studies on”
YouTube Unverified1 source· Talk
