Elon Musk

Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World
by Anna Crowley Redding
Published 1 Jul 2019

Friend, “Plugged In.” 7. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 8. Vance, p. 24. 9. Vance, p. 33. 10. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 11. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 12. Elon Musk, interview by Neil deGrasse Tyson. 13. Vance, p. 38. 14. Vance, p. 38. 15. Vance, p. 38. 16. Elon Musk, interview by Neil deGrasse Tyson. 17. Vance, p. 37 18. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 19. Vance, p. 37. 20. Vance, p. 37. 21. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 22. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 23. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 24. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 25. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 26. Elon Musk and Kimbal Musk, interview by Jeff Skoll. 27.

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Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 72. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 73. Elon Musk, interview by Sarah Lacy. 74. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 75. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 76. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 77. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 78. SpaceX.com/about 79. Elon Musk, interview by Sarah Lacy. 80. Shotwell, interview by Chris Anderson. “SpaceX’s Plan to Fly.” 81. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 82. Paris Productions, “EV1 Funeral.” 83. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 84. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 85. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 86. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 87.

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Musk and Musk, interview by Jeff Skoll. 57. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 58. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 59. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 60. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 61. Vance, p. 96 62. Vance, p. 95. 63. Kimbal Musk, interview by Susan Adams. 64. Musk and Musk, interview by Jeff Skoll. 65. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 66. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 67. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 68. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 69. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 70. Elon Musk, interview by Sarah Lacy. 71. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 72.

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors
by Edward Niedermeyer
Published 14 Sep 2019

US Securities and Exchange Commission, April 29, 2016. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000156459016018886/tsla-10q_20160331.htm Chapter 13 163when an Elon Musk tweet suddenly blew them away: Elon Musk. Twitter, July 10, 2016. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/752182992982843392 163The company’s stock jumped 4 percent: BBC. “Tesla stock rises after Elon Musk’s masterplan tweet.” BBC, July 11, 2016. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36765823 164Six days later, Musk tweeted: Elon Musk. Twitter, July 16, 2016. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/754272832440250368 164The next day he delayed again: Elon Musk. Twitter, July 17, 2016. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/754772663365664768 164Musk finally delivered: Elon Musk. “Master Plan, Part Deux.”

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Business Insider, February 23, 2018. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-dad-tells-bi-about-the-familys-casual-attitude-to-wealth-2018-2 25having sold his first computer game at age twelve: Ashlee Vance. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. New York: Ecco (HarperCollins), 2015. 26“It’s a million-dollar car”: Elon Musk best videos. “Young Elon Musk featured in documentary about millionaires (1999).” YouTube video, October 24, 2015. https://youtu.be/eb3pmifEZ44 26Musk would say that his first meeting with Straubel “was really what ultimately led to Tesla as it is today”: Darren Bryant. “Elon Musk recounts Tesla’s history at 2016 shareholders meeting.” YouTube video, January 10, 2017. https://youtu.be/AKfiKvbqbQw 26Afterward, Straubel emailed Musk: Elon Musk. “In the Beginning.”

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“Tesla plans to disconnect ‘almost all’ Superchargers from the grid and go solar+battery, says Elon Musk.” Electrek, June 9, 2017. https://electrek.co/2017/06/09/tesla-superchargers-solar-battery-grid-elon-musk/ Chapter 10 120As Ashlee Vance tells it: Ashlee Vance. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. New York: Ecco, 2015. 121and Musk himself disputes that there was a formal offer: Mike Ramsey. “Elon Musk Takes Uncustomary Humble Tone for Tesla’s Sales.” Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2015. https://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2015/05/04/elon-musk-takes-uncustomary-humble-tone-for-teslas-sales/ 122I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car: Alan Ohsnman.

Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson
Published 11 Sep 2023

The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Sept. 7, 2018; David Gelles, “Interviewing Elon Musk,” New York Times, Aug. 19, 2018. 49. Grimes: Author’s interviews with Claire Boucher (Grimes), Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk, Maye Musk, Sam Teller. Azealia Banks, letter to Elon Musk, Aug. 19, 2018; Kate Taylor, “Azealia Banks Claims to Be at Elon Musk’s House,” Business Insider, Aug. 13, 2018; Maureen Dowd, “Elon Musk, Blasting Off in Domestic Bliss,” New York Times, July 25, 2020. 50. Shanghai: Author’s interviews with Robin Ren, Elon Musk. 51. Cybertruck: Author’s interviews with Franz von Holzhausen, Elon Musk, Dave Morris. Stephanie Mlot, “Elon Musk Wants to Make Bond’s Lotus Submarine Car a Reality,” PC Magazine, Oct. 18, 2013. 52.

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Haldeman, DC: The Canadian Years,” Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association, 1995; “Before Elon Musk Was Thinking about Mars,” Regina Leader-Post, May 15, 2017; Joseph Keating, “Flying Chiros,” Dynamic Chiropractic, Dec. 15, 2003; Nick Murray, “Elon Musk’s Fascinating History with Moose Jaw,” Moose Jaw Independent, Sept. 15, 2018; Joshua Haldeman, “We Fly Three Continents,” ICA International Review of Chiropractic, Dec. 1954; Phillip de Wet, “Elon Musk’s Family Once Owned an Emerald Mine in Zambia,” Business Insider, Feb. 28, 2018; Phillip de Wet, “A Teenage Elon Musk Once Casually Sold His Father’s Emeralds to Tiffany & Co.,” Business Insider, Feb. 22, 2018; Jeremy Arnold, “Journalism and the Blood Emeralds Story,” Save Journalism, Substack, Mar. 9, 2021; Vance, Elon Musk; Maye Musk, A Woman. 2. A Mind of His Own: Author’s interviews with Maye Musk, Errol Musk, Elon Musk, Tosca Musk, Kimbal Musk. Neil Strauss, “The Architect of Tomorrow,” Rolling Stone, Nov. 15, 2017; Elon Musk, TED Talk with Chris Anderson, Apr. 14, 2022; “Inter-galactic Family Feud,” Mail on Sunday, Mar. 17, 2018; Vance, Elon Musk; Maye Musk, A Woman. 3. Life with Father: Author’s interviews with Maye Musk, Errol Musk, Elon Musk, Tosca Musk, Kimbal Musk, Peter Rive. Elon Musk report cards from Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Glenashley Senior Primary School, Bryanston High School, and Pretoria Boys High School; Neil Strauss, “The Architect of Tomorrow”; Emily Lane Fox, “How Elon Musk’s Mom (and Her Twin Sister) Raised the First Family of Tech,” Vanity Fair, Oct. 21, 2015; Andrew Smith, “Emissary of the Future,” The Telegraph (London), Jan. 8, 2014. 4.

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Elon Musk, The Babylon Bee podcast, Dec. 21, 2021; Tad Friend, “Plugged In,” The New Yorker, Aug. 17, 2009; Maureen Dowd, “Blasting Off in Domestic Bliss,” New York Times, July 25, 2020; Neil Strauss, “The Architect of Tomorrow”; Elon Musk, interview at the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, Nov. 15, 2021. 5. Escape Velocity: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Errol Musk, Kimbal Musk, Tosca Musk, Peter Rive. 6. Canada: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Maye Musk, Tosca Musk. Postmedia News, “Before Elon Musk Was Thinking About Mars, He Was Doing Chores on a Saskatchewan Farm,” Regina Leader-Post, May 15, 2017; Haley Steinberg, “The Education of Elon Musk,” Toronto Life, Jan, 2023; Raffaele Panizza, “Interview with Maye Musk,” Vogue, Oct. 12, 2017; Vance, Elon Musk. 7. Queen’s: Author’s interviews with Maye Musk, Tosca Musk, Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk, Navaid Farooq, Peter Nicholson. Robin Keats, “Rocket Man,” Queen’s Alumni Review, Vol. 1, 2013; Soni, The Founders; Vance, Elon Musk.

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century
by Tim Higgins
Published 2 Aug 2021

“If you can’t get this”: Author interview with person familiar with the matter. CHAPTER 17 “If there is a party”: Tatiana Siegel, “Elon Musk Requested to Meet Amber Heard via Email Years Ago,” Hollywood Reporter (Aug. 24, 2016), https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/​rambling-reporter/​elon-musk-requested-meet-amber-922240. Some said they tried: Tim Higgins, Tripp Mickle, and Rolfe Winkler, “Elon Musk Faces His Own Worst Enemy,” Wall Street Journal (Aug. 31, 2018), https://www.wsj.com/​articles/​elon-musk-faces-his-own-worst-enemy-1535727324. Dealers in Massachusetts: Mike Ramsey and Valerie Bauerlein, “Tesla Clashes with Car Dealers,” Wall Street Journal (June 18, 2013), https://www.wsj.com/​articles/​SB10001424127887324049504578541902814606098.

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In 2015: Tim Higgins, “Tesla Faces Labor Discord as It Ramps Up Model 3 Production,” Wall Street Journal (Oct. 31, 2017), https://www.wsj.com/​articles/​tesla-faces-labor-discord-as-it-ramps-up-model-3-production-1509442202. Those fancy second-row seats: Ibid. That spring while Depp: “Elon Musk Regularly Visited Amber Heard…,” Deadline (July 17, 2020), https://deadline.com/​2020/​07/​elon-musk-amber-heard-johnny-depps-los-angeles-penthouse-1202988261/. Musk seemed to be: Author interviews with Tesla executives. He was spotted by: Lindsay Kimble, “Amber Heard and Elon Musk Party at the Same London Club Just Weeks After Hanging Out in Miami,” People (Aug. 3, 2016), https://people.com/​movies/​amber-heard-and-elon-musk-party-at-same-london-club-weeks-after-miami-sighting/. “Lack of sleep”: Author interview with former Tesla executive.

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“I don’t see how”: Tim Higgins, Tripp Mickle, and Rolfe Winkler, “Elon Musk Faces His Own Worst Enemy,” Wall Street Journal (Aug. 31, 2018), https://www.wsj.com/​articles/​elon-musk-faces-his-own-worst-enemy-1535727324. But it was time: Author interview with people familiar with Field’s thinking. An automation mistake: Email reviewed by the author. Musk’s imperiousness didn’t play: Tim Higgins, “Tesla’s Elon Musk Turns Conference Call into Sparring Session,” Wall Street Journal (May 3, 2018), https://www.wsj.com/​articles/​teslas-elon-musk-turns-conference-call-into-sparring-session-1525339803.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
by Jimmy Soni
Published 22 Feb 2022

“Just three years ago”: Elon Musk commentary in CNN interview, “Watch a Young Elon Musk Get His First Supercar in 1999,” CNN, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9mczdODqzo. unlike other owners: Musk commentary to Sarah Lacy, “Elon Musk: How I Wrecked an Uninsured McClaren F1,” Pando Daily, July 16, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOI8GWoMF4M. “It was like this Hitchcock”: Author interview with Peter Thiel, September 11, 2021. “So, what can this thing do”… “like a discus”: Author interview with Elon Musk, January 19, 2019. See also: Musk commentary to Sarah Lacy, “Elon Musk: How I Wrecked an Uninsured Mclaren F1,” Pando Daily, July 16, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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“I was presented”… “end of the year”: Email from early X.com employee to board member Tim Hurd and group of X.com employees, September 23, 2000, subject line: “Elon Musk.” “Thanks folks”: Email from Elon Musk to early X.com employees, September 23, 2000, subject line: “RE: Elon Musk.” “It was a done deal”: Author interview with Elon Musk, January 19, 2019. “It was a fait accompli”: Author interview with Sandeep Lal, May 26, 2021. “All, as you know”: Email from Peter Thiel to all@x.com, September 24, 2000, subject line: “Email to all employees.” “Hey everyone”: Email from Elon Musk email to all@x.com, September 25, 2000, subject line: “Taking X.com to the next level.”

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“never been a sports”… “go about things”: Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk (New York: Ecco, 2017), 73. “We developed”: Author interview with Elon Musk, January 19, 2019. “We think”: Laurie Flynn, “Online City Guides Compete in Crowded Field,” New York Times, September 14, 1998. “It wasn’t a philosophical issue”: Max Chafkin, “Entrepreneur of the Year, 2007: Elon Musk,” Inc., December 1, 2007. “Despite all the interest”: Laurie Flynn, “Online City Guides Compete in Crowded Field,” New York Times, September 14, 1998. “Literally, to my mailbox”… “$21,005,000”: Author interview with Elon Musk, January 19, 2019. “he has the clean-cut appearance”: Alice LaPlante, “Zipping Right Along,” Upside US ed., Foster City, (vol. 10, issue 11), November 1998, 57–60.

Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History
by Ben Mezrich
Published 6 Nov 2023

PART TWO “To anyone who I’ve offended [with my Twitter posts], I just want to say I reinvented electric cars, and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?” —ELON MUSK “The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.” —ELON MUSK “Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.” —ELON MUSK CHAPTER NINE October 26, 2022 Ten minutes past noon on a Wednesday, and Esther Crawford was in the back corner of the Perch, the lively and industrial in-house coffee shop hanging above the ninth floor of Twitter’s vast and yawning San Francisco global headquarters, itself an art deco behemoth rising high over the edge of the Tenderloin district.

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PART THREE “The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it’s going to become multi-planetary, or it’s going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there’s going to be an extinction event.” —ELON MUSK “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” —ELON MUSK “I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.” —ELON MUSK CHAPTER NINETEEN December 11, 2022 Sunday night, a little after ten p.m. Yoel Roth and his partner were still in the midst of fleeing their home, suitcases in tow and their emails besieged with vitriolic, homophobic messages, their cell phones buzzing with unknown callers and anonymous, virulent texts, their lives upended by hate: hate speech, hate tweets, hate texts, hate calls, hate upon hate upon hate… While Elon Musk stood in the wings of a massive stage at the front of an even more massive arena, waiting for his cue, bouncing from one foot to the other as the noise from a raucous crowd crashed over him in wave after wave after wave.

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CHAPTER SEVEN A twenty-by-twenty prefab: Brittany Chang and Tim Levin, “See inside the $50,000, prefab tiny house that Elon Musk uses as a guest house in Texas,” Business Insider, August 5, 2022. CHAPTER NINE The message was from Leslie Berland: Zoe Schiffer, Casey Newton, and Alex Heath, “Extremely Hardcore,” The Verge, January 17, 2023. Spiro was one of the top trial lawyers: Dan Adler, “How Alex Spiro Became Elon Musk’s (and Megan Thee Stallion’s and Jay-Z’s) Go-to-Lawyer,” Vanity Fair, March 6, 2023. CHAPTER TEN Jason Calacanis: “Back of the envelope”: Elon Musk text exhibits, Exhibit H. Hardwood floors culled: Mae Rice, “Inside Twitter’s Fun and Functional San Francisco Headquarters,” builtinSF, February 18, 2020.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World
by Cade Metz
Published 15 Mar 2021

he and Jeff Dean worked on a project they called “Distillation”: Geoffrey Hinton, Oriol Vinyals, and Jeff Dean, “Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network,” 2015, https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02531. CHAPTER 9: ANTI-HYPE On November 14, 2014, Elon Musk posted a message: James Cook, “Elon Musk: You Have No Idea How Close We Are to Killer Robots,” Business Insider UK, November 17, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-will-be-here-within-five-years-2014-11. Musk said his big fear: Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (New York: Ecco, 2017). The trouble was not that Page: Ibid. The trouble was that Page operated: Ibid.

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Brockman vowed to build the new lab they all seemed to want: Cade Metz, “Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk’s Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free,” Wired, April 27, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/04/openai-elon-musk-sam-altman-plan-to-set-artificial-intelligence-free/. nearly $2 million for the first year: OpenAI, form 990, 2016. Musk and Altman painted OpenAI as a counterweight: Steven Levy, “How Elon Musk and Y Combinator Plan to Stop Computers from Taking Over,” “Backchannel,” Wired, December 11, 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/12/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinator-plan-to-stop-computers-from-taking-over/. backed by over a billion dollars in funding: Ibid.

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he invoked The Terminator: “Closing Bell,” CNBC, transcript, https://www.cnbc.com/2014/06/18/first-on-cnbc-cnbc-transcript-spacex-ceo-elon-musk-speaks-with-cnbcs-closing-bell.html. “potentially more dangerous than nukes”: Elon Musk tweet, August 2, 2014, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/495759307346952192?s=19. The same tweet urged his followers to read Superintelligence: Ibid. Bostrom believed that superintelligence: Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014). “This is quite possibly the most important”: Ibid. warning author Walter Isaacson about the dangers of artificial intelligence: Lessley Anderson, “Elon Musk: A Machine Tasked with Getting Rid of Spam Could End Humanity,” Vanity Fair, October 8, 2014, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/tech/2014/10/elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-fear.

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race
by Tim Fernholz
Published 20 Mar 2018

“Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly”: Elon Musk (@elonmusk), Twitter, June 15, 2016, 8:07 a.m., https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/743097668725940225. “get you back down again”: David Woods, “The Saturn V Launch Vehicle,” Omega Tau podcast, episode 239, March 12, 2017, http://omegataupodcast.net/239-the-saturn-v-launch-vehicle. 14. Pushing the Envelope “don’t take a week off”: Matt McFarland, “Elon Musk Needs a Vacation,” Washington Post, September 29, 2015, accessed November 11, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/09/29/elon-musk-needs-a-vacation. “fault tree analysis”: Elon Musk (@elonmusk), “There was an overpressure event,” Twitter, June 28, 2015, 8:48 a.m., https://twitter.com/elonmusk /status/615185076813459456.

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Who’s this Elon Musk guy? He can never do what we do.’” 4 The Internet Guy Life needs to be more than just solving problems every day. You need to wake up and be excited about the future and be inspired. —Elon Musk The crowds waiting to get into the speech pushed against the doors: groups of students and their chaperones milling through the tumult, young engineers ready to sit in the front row and witness their hero, older scientists prepared to shake their heads. There’s no conference of engineers, astrophysicists, or technologists that doesn’t want a keynote from Elon Musk, the rock star of dorks, whose ambition knows no bounds.

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“to what they are today”: Rebecca Hackler, “Interview with Mike Horkachuck,” NASA Oral History Project, November 6, 2012. “not reaching orbit”: Elon Musk, “Plan Going Forward,” SpaceX blog, August 2, 2008, accessed September 22, 2017, http://www.spacex.com/news/2013/02/11/plan-going-forward. “rather than Falcon 9”: Elon Musk, “Falcon 1, Flight 3 Mission Summary,” SpaceX blog, August 6, 2008, accessed September 19, 2017, http://www.spacex.com/news/2013/02/11/falcon-1-flight-3-mission-summary. “one number, nothing else”: Rebecca Hackler, “Interview with Hans Koenigsmann,” NASA Oral History Project, January 15, 2003. “(starting the company)”: Elon Musk, “Flight 4 Launch Update,” SpaceX blog, October 7, 2007, accessed November 14, 2017, http://www.spacex.com/news/2013/02/11/flight-4-launch-update.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
by Ozan Varol
Published 13 Apr 2020

The opening section on Elon Musk draws on the following sources: Tim Fernholz, Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018); Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (New York: Ecco, 2015); Chris Anderson, “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Wired, October 21, 2012, www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all; Tim Fernholz, “What It Took for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to Disrupt Boeing, Leapfrog NASA, and Become a Serious Space Company,” Quartz, October 21, 2014, https://qz.com/281619/what-it-took-for-elon-musks-spacex-to-disrupt-boeing-leapfrog-nasa-and-become-a-serious-space-company; Tom Junod, “Elon Musk: Triumph of His Will,” Esquire, November 15, 2012, www.esquire.com/news-politics/a16681/elon-musk-interview-1212; Jennifer Reingold, “Hondas in Space,” Fast Company, February 1, 2005, www.fastcompany.com/52065/hondas-space; “Elon Musk Answers Your Questions!

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The discussion on the Falcon 1 is based on the following sources: Tim Fernholz, Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018); Snow, Lateral Thinking; Chris Bergin, “Falcon I Flight: Preliminary Assessment Positive for SpaceX,” Spaceflight.com, March 24, 2007, www.nasaspaceflight.com/2007/03/falcon-i-flight-preliminary-assessment-positive-for-spacex; Tim Fernholz, “What It Took for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to Disrupt Boeing, Leapfrog NASA, and Become a Serious Space Company,” Quartz, October 21, 2014, https://qz.com/281619/what-it-took-for-elon-musks-spacex-to-disrupt-boeing-leapfrog-nasa-and-become-a-serious-space-company; Max Chafkin, “SpaceX’s Secret Weapon Is Gwynne Shotwell,” Bloomberg Quint, July 26, 2018, www.bloombergquint.com/businessweek/she-launches-spaceships-sells-rockets-and-deals-with-elon-musk; Elon Musk, “Falcon 1, Flight 3 Mission Summary,” SpaceX, August 6, 2008, www.spacex.com/news/2013/02/11/falcon-1-flight-3-mission-summary; Dolly Singh, “What Is It Like to Work with Elon Musk?,” Slate, August 14, 2013, https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/08/elon-musk-what-is-it-like-to-work-for-the-spacex-tesla-chief.html; Tom Junod, “Elon Musk: Triumph of His Will,” Esquire, November 15, 2012, www.esquire.com/news-politics/a16681/elon-musk-interview-1212. 33. Snow, Lateral Thinking. 34. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (1934; repr., New York: Scribner’s, 1977). 35.

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The opening section on Elon Musk draws on the following sources: Tim Fernholz, Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018); Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (New York: Ecco, 2015); Chris Anderson, “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Wired, October 21, 2012, www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all; Tim Fernholz, “What It Took for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to Disrupt Boeing, Leapfrog NASA, and Become a Serious Space Company,” Quartz, October 21, 2014, https://qz.com/281619/what-it-took-for-elon-musks-spacex-to-disrupt-boeing-leapfrog-nasa-and-become-a-serious-space-company; Tom Junod, “Elon Musk: Triumph of His Will,” Esquire, November 15, 2012, www.esquire.com/news-politics/a16681/elon-musk-interview-1212; Jennifer Reingold, “Hondas in Space,” Fast Company, February 1, 2005, www.fastcompany.com/52065/hondas-space; “Elon Musk Answers Your Questions! SXSW, March 11, 2018,” video, YouTube, uploaded March 11, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoQARBYbkck; Tom Huddleston Jr., “Elon Musk: Starting SpaceX and Tesla Were ‘the Dumbest Things to Do,’” CNBC, March 23, 2018, www.cnbc.com/2018/03/23/elon-musk-spacex-and-tesla-were-two-of-the-dumbest-business-ideas.html. 2.

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos
by Christian Davenport
Published 20 Mar 2018

“Our parents had no idea”: Tom Junod, “Elon Musk: Triumph of His Will,” Esquire, November 14, 2012. “I thought the Internet”: Elon Musk, “The Future of Energy and Transport,” Oxford Martin School, Oxford University, November 14, 2012. “Well, I don’t think you’ll be coming back”: Elon Musk, “Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders” lecture, October 8, 2003. “The online financial payment system”: Ibid. Given the size of the rock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaW4Ol3_M1o. “We were both interested”: Junod, “Elon Musk.” “Because, of course”: Elon Musk, “Mars Pioneer Award” acceptance speech, 15th Annual International Mars Society Convention, August 4, 2012.

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“Because, of course”: Elon Musk, “Mars Pioneer Award” acceptance speech, 15th Annual International Mars Society Convention, August 4, 2012. “I just did not want Apollo”: Pat Morrison Q & A with Elon Musk, “Space Case,” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 2012. As a winged spaceplane: Elon Musk, Stanford lecture. Space was still the exclusive: For more on SpaceX’s early days, see Ashlee Vance, “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” Ecco, May 19, 2015. On March 14, 2002, Musk founded: Ibid. At the dawn of the Space Age: Launch data compiled by the consulting firm Bryce Space and Technology. “I would bet you 1,000-to-one”: Jennifer Reingold, “Hondas in Space,” Fast Company magazine, October 5, 2005.

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The Boeing Company and Lockheed Martin Corporation, US District Court, Central District of California, case number CV05-7533, October 19, 2005. Boeing was just as dismissive: Leslie Wayne, “A Bold Plan to Go Where Men Have Gone Before,” New York Times, February 5, 2006. The failures were so frequent: Vance, Elon Musk, 124. “I tell folks”: Sandra Sanchez, “SpaceX: Blasting into the Future—A Waco Today Interview with Elon Musk,” Waco Tribune, December 22, 2011. Early on, Musk pegged: Megan Geuss, “Elon Musk Tells BBC He Thought Tesla, SpaceX ‘Had a 10% Chance at Success,’” Ars Technica, January 13, 2016. This was a man who: http://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html. 4. “SOMEWHERE ELSE ENTIRELY” Eisenhower entered: Official White House Transcript of President Eisenhower’s Press and Radio Conference #123, https://www.eisen hower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/sputnik/10_9_57.pdf.

Space 2.0
by Rod Pyle
Published 2 Jan 2019

Space.com, February 15, 2017. CHAPTER 8: SPACE EXPLORATION TECHNOLOGIES COR P. 50Masunaga, Samantha. “SpaceX track record ‘right in the ballpark’ with 93% success rate.” Los Angeles Times, September 1, 2016. 51Sam Altman interview with Elon Musk for Y Combinator, September 2016. 52Dillow, Clay. “The Great Rocket Race.” Fortune, October 2016. 53Brown, Alex. “Why Elon Musk Is Suing the U.S. Air Force.” The Atlantic, June 5, 2014. 54De Selding, Peter. “SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9: What are the real cost savings for customers?” SpaceNews, April 25, 2016. 55This figure is quoted across a wide range. Lowest estimates fall at about $1,200 per pound via SpaceX, and go up to about $7,500 per pound for other launch providers.

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Air & Space Magazine, January 2012. 58Besides SpaceX, only Bezos’s Blue Origin and, over twenty years ago, McDonnell Douglas’s DC-X prototype have had substantive success in recovering reusable rockets. For more on DC-X, see Gannon, Megan. “20 Years Ago: Novel DC-X Reusable Rocket Launched into History.” Space.com, August 16, 2003. 59Wall, Michael. “Elon Musk Calls for Moon Base.” Space.com, July 19, 2017. www.space.com/37549-elon-musk-moon-base-mars.html. Accessed June 10, 2017. 60Etherington, Darrell. “SpaceX spent ‘less than half ’ the cost of a new first stage on Falcon 9 relaunch.” Techcrunch, April 5, 2017. techcrunch.com/2017/04/05/spacex-spent-less-than-half-the-cost-of-a-new-first-stage-on-falcon-9-relaunch.

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Pew Research Center, July 2015. 163Media outlets from the Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos), to the National Review, to Al Jazeera, reported positively on the Falcon Heavy launch and the reactions of people worldwide. CHAPTER 17: A NEW AGE DAWNS 164Address by Elon Musk at NASA’s “ISS R&D conference” in Washington, DC, July 19, 2017. 165“ABC News Special Report.” Interview of Elon Musk by David Kerley from a press conference after launch of the Falcon Heavy, February 6, 2018. CHAPTER 18: YOUR PLACE IN SPACE 2.0 166Interview with the author, October 2016. GLOSSARY Apollo program: The US space program started in the 1960s to allow American astronauts to land on, explore, and return from the moon.

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil
by Hamish McKenzie
Published 30 Sep 2017

It spent two minutes shifting through B-roll footage and clips pilfered from documentaries about Musk. The video announced itself with the title American Swindler: The Elon Musk Story and carried an ominous-sounding warning: Foreign-born billionaire Elon Musk. His companies are synonymous with technology and wealth, and his jet-setting lifestyle is the envy of the world. But how exactly did Musk’s companies come about? Who has Elon Musk exploited along the way? And whose world is he actually changing? The truth may startle you. The video proceeded to suggest that Musk has been using his “unprecedented access to the halls of power” to line the pockets of politicians in an effort to secure billions of dollars of subsidies for his ventures Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity—all at the expense of the unsuspecting American taxpayer.

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And so it ends up being the Koch brothers are bad, and climate change is bad, and Exxon is bad—and, you know, I think people ought to be for stuff, not against stuff. I think you could be much more effective if you were for something, rather than being against the Koch brothers.” Then Sears’s tone brightened. “Elon Musk—whatever you think of Tesla—Elon Musk didn’t build Tesla by whining about the internal combustion engine.” “Right,” I agreed. “He could’ve!” “Well, now he is whining about the Kochs,” I said, adding: “Quote unquote ‘whining.’” “Okay, fine,” Sears said with a sigh. “He’s wasting his time. He needs to focus on something more positive.

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A NOTE ON SOURCES This book relies on a combination of my own reporting and that done by others. For all Tesla-related content, I have relied only on publicly available sources, including news stories, magazine profiles, blog posts, videos, documentaries, court documents, and company filings. For the sections about Tesla’s and Elon Musk’s histories, I am indebted especially to Ashlee Vance’s biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Drake Baer’s reporting for Business Insider, and Max Chafkin’s 2007 profile of Musk for Inc. Chris Paine’s documentaries, Who Killed the Electric Car? and Revenge of the Electric Car, were also valuable sources of material.

How We'll Live on Mars (TED Books)
by Stephen Petranek
Published 6 Jul 2015

Brian Cox explains how curiosity-driven science pays for itself, powering innovation and a profound appreciation of our existence. Burt Rutan The Real Future of Space Exploration In this passionate talk, legendary spacecraft designer Burt Rutan lambastes the US government-funded space program for stagnating and asks entrepreneurs to pick up where NASA has left off. Elon Musk The Mind Behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity . . . Entrepreneur Elon Musk is a man with many plans. The founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX sits down with TED curator Chris Anderson to share details about his visionary projects, which include a mass-marketed electric car, a solar energy leasing company, and a fully reusable rocket.

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And although there is no shortage of private projects intending to send people to Mars, only one company can currently make a realistic promise to deliver human bodies to the Red Planet before NASA finally gets around to it. • • • In the same way we can draw a line from Wernher von Braun straight to Apollo 11, when a spaceship carrying astronauts lands on Mars in 2027, we may well be able to draw a line straight to Elon Musk—because that Mars lander will most likely have the SpaceX logo on it. Musk is arguably the most visionary entrepreneur of our time. Seven years after he quit a PhD program in applied physics at Stanford University, he sold his share of PayPal and Zip2, companies he cofounded, giving him a reported net worth of $324 million.

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Like von Braun before him, Musk is in love with the idea that humans should become a spacefaring society. He is keenly aware that Earth will not be habitable forever. Musk seems frustrated by our denial about what we are doing to our habitat, and is ever cognizant of a simple fact: humans will become extinct if we do not reach beyond Earth. Elon Musk’s appearance as a rocket man came none too soon. The technology had advanced very little from 1969, when Neil Armstrong placed his boot on the moon, to 2002, when Musk began SpaceX. In fact, according to Musk, space travel since the Apollo program not only hasn’t moved forward much, it has gone “backward.”

Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX
by Eric Berger
Published 2 Mar 2021

Musk also started Neuralink in 2016 to build machines that can interface directly with the human brain, and he formed a company to dig tunnels beneath congested cities. In short, Elon Musk had a lot on his mind when I nudged his memories back to the tiny island of Omelek. He wanted to help. Musk understands the significance of the Falcon 1 rocket to his life, and how its singular success spurred a transformational change across a number of fronts. Before this book, he had never consented to telling the story in full, or to allow an author free rein inside SpaceX to speak with employees about the company’s formative years. But Elon Musk wanted me to talk to everyone for this book. And he meant it. “It was a high-drama situation,” he said of launching rockets from Omelek.

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Technician Ed Thomas with the second stage of the Falcon 1 rocket inside the hangar on Omelek. (Hans Koenigsmann) A C-17 aircraft flies by Omelek Island during the Flight One campaign after delivering an emergency shipment of LOX. (Tim Buzza) Elon Musk, center top, with the Flight One launch team and Air Force officials prior to launch. (Tim Buzza) Collecting the wreckage after Flight One. (Hans Koenigsmann) A solemn Elon Musk surveys debris collected after Flight One. (Hans Koenigsmann) Kestrel engine with its expanded nozzle. (Hans Koenigsmann) Zach Dunn poses with a Merlin 1C rocket engine on Omelek. Dunn, who started as an intern at SpaceX, would be instrumental in the development of Merlin.

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Flight Four 11. Always Go to Eleven Epilogue Acknowledgments Key SpaceX Employees from 2002 to 2008 Timeline Bulent Altan’s Turkish Goulash Index Photo Section About the Author Copyright About the Publisher Prologue September 14, 2019 A fat, red sun sank into the Texas horizon as Elon Musk bounded toward a silvery spaceship. Reaching its concrete landing pad, Musk marveled up at the stainless steel, steampunk contraption looming above, which shone brilliantly in the dying light. “It’s like something out of a Mad Max movie,” he gushed about the first prototype of his Mars rocket, nicknamed Starhopper.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Great Man Theory: Will Oremus, “Analysis: Elon Musk and Tech’s ‘Great Man’ Fallacy,” The Washington Post, April 27, 2022, washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/27/jack-dorsey-elon-musk-singular-solution. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT endorsed MacAskill’s book: Nicholas Kulish, “How a Scottish Moral Philosopher Got Elon Musk’s Number,” The New York Times, October 8, 2022, sec. Business, nytimes.com/2022/10/08/business/effective-altruism-elon-musk.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT player Igor Kurganov: Rob Copeland, “Elon Musk’s Inner Circle Rocked by Fight over His $230 Billion Fortune,” The Wall Street Journal, July 16, 2022, sec.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “become spoiled brats”: “Young Elon Musk: ‘There Are 62 McLarens in the World and I Will Own One of Them!’ | 1999 Interview,” 2019, youtube.com/watch?v=pAt5OVl0mnA. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT eventually parlay his $22 million: Adam Clark, “Musk Is World’s Richest Person Again After Tesla Stock Surge,” Barrons, February 28, 2023, barrons.com/articles/elon-musk-net-worth-tesla-stock-price-7e44bcee. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT case of opposites: Dorothy Cucci, “Peter Thiel Thinks Elon Musk Is a ‘Fraud,’ and 6 Other Unexpected Details About the Billionaires’ Love-Hate Relationship,” Business Insider, December 2, 2022, businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-elon-musk-relationship-contrarian-book-max-chafkin-2021-9.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT sworn to secrecy: Chamath Palihapitiya et al., “#AIS: FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver on How Gamblers Think,” All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg, 2022, podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/ais-fivethirtyeights-nate-silver-on-how-gamblers-think/id1502871393?i=1000564483582. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT aggressive compensation deal: Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk, Kindle ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023), 408. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Founders Fund: Connie Loizos, “Founders Fund Talks Space, Robots, Elon Musk and Why It Didn’t Back Tesla Motors,” Venture Capital Journal, July 27, 2010, venturecapitaljournal.com/founders-fund-talks-space-robots-elon-musk-and-why-the-team-didnt-back-tesla-motors. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a relieved Musk: Stephen Clark, “Sweet Success at Last for Falcon 1 Rocket,” Spaceflight Now, September 28, 2008, spaceflightnow.com/falcon/004.

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
Published 6 Nov 2023

Is liability now held by Paraguay or Canada? Under the OST, that’s for Canada and Paraguay to work out between themselves. This sort of thing could really matter for space settlements of the future. In our experience, people often have a vague idea that if Elon Musk does something on Mars, that is the business of Elon Musk. But legally, Elon Musk would likely be the US’s responsibility, making the US liable for anything he does off-world. Part of why things are fuzzy is that the terms of the Liability Convention have only been invoked once. Remember when we told you about the time the USSR whoopsied one of their nuclear-powered satellites onto Canada?

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Let’s Talk Autarkic Arks In the introduction to this book we mentioned Elon Musk’s statement that an independent settlement could be achieved by midcentury. Our source for this is a Twitter interaction in which a user named Pranay Pathole asked: “Elon, What do you think is the estimated timeframe for creating a self-sustaining civilization on Mars? 20 years? Self-sustaining meaning not relying/dependent on Earth for supplies.” Musk responded, “20 to 30 years from first human landing if launch rate growth is exponential. Assumes transferring ~100k each rendezvous and ~1M total people needed.” Even by Elon Musk standards this is pretty ambitious.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT As ISS Commander: Hilary Brueck, “A NASA Astronaut Who Spent 665 Days Circling the Planet Reveals the Misery of Going to the Bathroom in Space,” Business Insider, May 26, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/how-you-go-to-bathroom-space-nasa-astronaut-2018-5. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Aboard today’s ISS: Tim Peake, Ask an Astronaut (London: Arrow Books, 2018), 90. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT details are scarce: Scott Gleeson, “Elon Musk Says SpaceX Inspiration4 Crew Had ‘Challenges’ with Toilet,” USA Today, September 23, 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2021/09/23/elon-musk-says-spacex-inspiration-4-crew-had-challenges-toilet/5825068001/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Tang sucks.”: Mark Memmott, “Now He Tells Us: ‘Tang Sucks,’ Says Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin,” NPR, June 13, 2013, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/06/13/191271824/now-he-tells-us-tang-sucks-says-apollo-11s-buzz-aldrin.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

“Roko’s Basilisk,” LessWrong, https:// www .lesswrong .com /tag /rokos -basilisk, accessed December 9, 2021. 173   “summoning the demon” : “Elon Musk at the MIT AeroAstro Centennial Symposium,” YouTube Video, July 5, 2015, 1:23:27, https:// www .youtube .com /watch ?v =4DUbiCQpw _4. 173   “so that we’ll have a bolt-hole” : Maureen Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the AI Apocalypse,” Vanity Fair , March 26, 2017, https:// www .vanityfair .com /news /2017 /03 /elon -musk -billion -dollar -crusade -to -stop -ai -space -x. 173   Musk has been developing a neural net apparatus : Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade.” Chapter 13: Pattern Recognition 176   “To the Planetarium” : Walter Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” in One-Way Street: And Other Writings , translated by Edmund Jephcott (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2021). 179   “You can build” : Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World (New York: HarperOne, 2020), 78–79. 179   eating local foods is better for our health : Vicki Robin, Blessing the Hands That Feed Us: What Eating Closer to Home Can Teach Us about Food, Community, and Our Place on Earth (Farming Hills, MI: Thorndike Press, 2014). 181   We consume over three billion gallons : Koustav Samanta and Roslan Khasawneh, and Florence Tan, “APPEC-Global oil demand seen reaching pre-pandemic levels by early 2022,” Reuters , September 27, 2021, https:// www .reuters .com /business /energy /appec -global -oil -demand -seen -reaching -pre -pandemic -levels -by -early -2022 -2021 -09 -27 /. 183   They pooled money : Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014). 186   “Young people feel” : Elise Chen, “These Chinese Millennials Are ‘Chilling,’ and Beijing Isn’t Happy,” New York Times , July 3, 2021, https:// www .nytimes .com /2021 /07 /03 /world /asia /china -slackers -tangping .html. 186   “Amidst global shutdown” : Gaya Herrington, “Beyond Growth,” WEFLIVE , January 23, 2020, https:// www .weflive .com /story /e968fb0963974e1e8f6c636e5654cbc2. 186   “resource scarcity has not” : Edward Helmore, “Yep, It’s Bleak, Says Expert Who Tested 1970s End-of-the-World Prediction,” Guardian , July 25, 2021, https:// www .theguardian .com /environment /2021 /jul /25 /gaya -herrington -mit -study -the -limits -to -growth. 188   “only now … all of us ”: American Utopia, directed by Spike Lee (HBO, 2021), https:// www .hbo .com /specials /american -utopia. 188   There’s no “solution” : See Sarah Pessin’s work, including “From Mystery to Laughter to Trembling Generosity: Agono-Pluralistic Ethics in Connolly v.

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Thanks most of all to my wife, Barbara, for lovingly supporting the years of talks and travel recounted here, and my daughter, Mamie, for giving me both hope and a stake in the future. Notes Introduction: Meet The Mindset     5   Elon Musk colonizing Mars : Mike Wall, “Mars Colony Would Be a Hedge against World War III, Elon Musk Says,” Space.com , March 28, 2018, https:// www .space .com /40112 -elon -musk -mars -colony -world -war -3 .html.     5   Peter Thiel reversing the aging process : Maya Kossoff, “Peter Thiel Wants to Inject Himself with Young People’s Blood,” Vanity Fair , August 1, 2016, 2021, https:// www .vanityfair .com /news /2016 /08 /peter -thiel -wants -to -inject -himself -with -young -peoples -blood.     5   uploading their minds : Alexandra Richards, “Silicon Valley billionaire pays company thousands ‘to be killed and have his brain digitally preserved forever,’ ” Evening Standard , March 15, 2018, https:// www .standard .co .uk /news /world /silicon -valley -billionaire -pays -company -thousands -to -kill -him -and -preserve -his -brain -forever -a3790871 .html.     8   “fairer” phones : Bas Van Abel, interview with Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human podcast, March 29, 2017, https:// www .teamhuman .fm /episodes /ep -30 -bas -van -abel -fingerprints -on -the -touchscreen.   10   cars into space : Joel Gunter, “Elon Musk: The Man Who Sent His Sports Car into Space,” BBC , February 10, 2018, https:// www .bbc .com /news /science -environment -42992143.   10   Biosphere trials : Steve Rose, “Eight Go Mad in Arizona: How a Lockdown Experiment Went Horribly Wrong,” Guardian , July 13, 2020, https:// www .theguardian .com /film /2020 /jul /13 /spaceship -earth -arizona -biosphere -2 -lockdown.

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Then he spoke carefully, as if into a primitive trans lation machine. “It’s not that I hate AI —I just fear them. That may not be interpreted as a threat to their interests.” The bigger the billionaire, the greater the fear, and the countermeasures. Elon Musk told a 2014 audience at MIT that by experimenting with AI, Larry Page and his friends at Google are “summoning the demon .” In a now famous Vanity Fair account of a conversation between Elon Musk and DeepMind creator Demis Hassabis, Musk explained that one of the reasons he intended to colonize Mars was “so that we’ll have a bolt-hole if AI goes rogue and turns on humanity.” Similarly, Musk has been developing a neural net apparatus that can be lasered onto our brains, which would potentially allow us to compete with a superintelligent rogue AI that turns against us.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

See: https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/1/11830206/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-save-earth-code-conference-interview. Elon Musk doesn’t disagree: Dave Mosher, “Here’s Elon Musk’s Complete, Sweeping Vision on Colonizing Mars to Save Humanity,” Business Insider, September 29, 2016. See: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-mars-speech-transcript-2016-9. “Mars Oasis”: Chris Anderson, “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Wired, September 21, 2012. See: https://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002: Michael Sheetz, “The Rise of Spacex and the Future Of Elon Musk’s Mars Dream,” CNBC, March 20, 2019. See: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/20/spacex-rise-elon-musk-mars-dream.html.

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Whatever the case, transportation ten years from today is going to look radically different—and this prediction doesn’t include everything that happened after Elon Musk lost his temper. Hyperloop On an empty swatch of desert outside of Las Vegas, perched atop a high-tech stretch of track, a sleek silver pod begins to quiver. Less than a second later, it’s not just moving, it’s a hundred-mile-per-hour blur. Ten seconds after, it’s zipping down the Virgin Hyperloop One Development Track at 240 mph. If these tracks continued—as they someday will—this high-speed train would take you from Los Angeles to San Francisco in the time it takes to watch a sitcom. Hyperloop is the brainchild of Elon Musk, just one in a series of transportation innovations from a man determined to leave his mark on the industry.

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See: https://spacenews.com/bridenstine-says-nasa-planning-for-human-mars-missions-in-2030s/. .06 percent per person per year: Richard Summers, “Emergencies in Space,” The Practice of Emergency Medicine/Concepts, 2005. See: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a102/d4e61620dd77f93639cf47492f7ca6f8c44f.pdf. Elon Musk once explained: Watch Elon Musk’s speech at the SS R&D Conference on July 19, 2017 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqvBhhTtUm4. Kim is part of the research team behind STAR: Alan Brown, “Smooth Operator: Robot Could Transform Soft-Tissue Surgery,” Alliance of Advanced Biomedical Engineering, August 14, 2017.

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon!
by Joseph N. Pelton
Published 5 Nov 2016

The New Space industry leaders may not be who you think they are. The new operatives in the commercial space game are organizations such as Google, Facebook, and the Tesla-SpaceX complex (within the empire of Elon Musk). Indeed this New Space push is fueled by who we call the space billionaires. At the head of the space billionaire pack are Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com; Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft; Elon Musk (founder of Space X, Paypal, and Tesla); Robert Bigelow, owner of Budget Suites; Sir Richard Branson, head of Virgin Galactic; Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook; and electronic game inventor John Carmack, who created “Doom” and “Quake.”

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Legislators, bankers, and aspiring space entrepreneurs are far more interested in the views of the super-rich capitalists called the space billionaires. A number of these billionaires and space executives have already put some very serious money into enterprises intent on creating a new pathway to the stars. No less than five billionaires with established space ventures—Elon Musk, Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, Sir Richard Branson, and Robert Bigelow—have invested millions if not billions of dollars into commercializing space. They are developing new technologies and establishing space enterprises that can bring the wealth of outer space down to Earth. This is not a pipe dream, but will increasingly be the economic reality of the 2020s.

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Thirty years from now, there'll be a base on the Moon and on Mars, and you would need a million people to be going back and forth on SpaceX rockets…to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars…people to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just—there. No oil.”(Elon Musk, president of SpaceX and Tesla.) On his space business, Virgin Galactic: We'll go into orbit. We'll go to the Moon. This business has no limits. (Richard Branson, reported in Wired magazine January 2005.) On why space is the next frontier: What should exist? To me, that's the most exciting question imaginable.

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following
by Gabrielle Bluestone
Published 5 Apr 2021

Ryan Mac, Mark Di Stefano, and John Paczkowski, "In a New Email, Elon Musk Accused a Cave Rescuer of Being a ‘Child Rapist’ and Said He ‘Hopes’ There’s a Lawsuit," BuzzFeed News, September 4, 2018, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-thai-cave-rescuer-accusations-buzzfeed-email. 58. Jon Passantino, "Elon Musk Says He Sent Ventilators To California Hospitals, They Say They Got Something Else Instead," CNN Business, April 17, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/tech/elon-musk-ventilators-california/index.html. 59. Avery Hartmans, "Elon Musk Lashed Out at Reports That He Never Delivered Ventilators to California Hospitals.

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Here’s What’s Going On, and Why Musk’s Ventilator Efforts Have Become Controversial," Business Insider, April 17, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-ventilator-controversy-explained-2020-4#april-2-musk-defends-the-ventilators-he-delivered-after-facing-criticism-for-sending-non-invasive-bipap-machines-instead-of-traditional-ventilators-6. 60. Tyler Sonnemaker, "The Hackers Who Took Over the Twitter Accounts of Joe Biden and Elon Musk May Have Made Off With as Much as $120,000 Worth of Bitcoin—But We May Never Know for Sure," Business Insider, July 16, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-hackers-joe-biden-elon-musk-received-120000-bitcoin-payments-2020-7. 61. Bill Ruthhart and John Byrne, "Chicago Taps Elon Musk’s Boring Company to Build High-Speed Transit Tunnels That Would Tie Loop with O’Hare," Chicago Tribune, June 14, 2018, https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-met-ohare-high-speed-transit-elon-musk-boring-company-20180613-story.html. 62.

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The writer Jack Crosbie noticed a similar detail about the legend surrounding Elon Musk while working as a journalist at an unnamed tech blog. Neither his boss nor the audience he was writing for seemed to care about whether the information they were reading was true‚ they just wanted a fun, shareable story about a cool tech dude. “The site largely focused on the kind of stuff that would hit big with the content-hungry crowds of Facebook users interested in pages like ‘I Fucking Love Science,’ Star Wars, and the Marvel and DC comic book universes. Above all, our readers fucking loved, and I mean LOVED, Elon Musk,” Crosbie recalled in a 2020 essay for Discourse Blog.81 “The top-performing social headlines we ran, for the most part, were ones that praised something Musk was doing.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
by Paris Marx
Published 4 Jul 2022

Turner, “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities,” American Economic Association 101:6, 2011. 6 Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, HarperCollins, 2015. 7 “The Boring Company Event Webcast,” The Boring Company, December 19, 2018, YouTube.com. 8 Ibid. 9 Aarian Marshall, “Elon Musk Reveals His Awkward Dislike of Mass Transit,” Wired, December 14, 2017, Wired.com. 10 Ibid. 11 “The Boring Company Event Webcast,” The Boring Company. 12 Laura J. Nelson, “Elon Musk Unveils His Company’s First Tunnel in Hawthorne, and It’s Not a Smooth Ride,” Los Angeles Times, December 18, 2018, Latimes.com. 13 Dennis Romero, “Vintage Roller Coaster Fans See Familiar Tech in Elon Musk’s Loop Tunnel,” NBC News, December 28, 2018, Nbcnews.com. 14 Alissa Walker, “Stop Calling Elon Musk’s Boring Tunnel Public Transit,” Curbed, January 8, 2020, Archive.curbed.com. 15 “The Boring Company Event Webcast,” The Boring Company. 16 Jenna Chandler and Alissa Walker, “Elon Musk First Envisioned Double-Decker 405 before Tunnel Idea,” Curbed, November 9, 2018, La.curbed.com. 17 E.V.

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Nelson, “Elon Musk Unveils His Company’s First Tunnel in Hawthorne, and It’s Not a Smooth Ride,” Los Angeles Times, December 18, 2018, Latimes.com. 13 Dennis Romero, “Vintage Roller Coaster Fans See Familiar Tech in Elon Musk’s Loop Tunnel,” NBC News, December 28, 2018, Nbcnews.com. 14 Alissa Walker, “Stop Calling Elon Musk’s Boring Tunnel Public Transit,” Curbed, January 8, 2020, Archive.curbed.com. 15 “The Boring Company Event Webcast,” The Boring Company. 16 Jenna Chandler and Alissa Walker, “Elon Musk First Envisioned Double-Decker 405 before Tunnel Idea,” Curbed, November 9, 2018, La.curbed.com. 17 E.V. Rickenbacker, “Flying Autos in 20 Years,” Popular Science Monthly 105:1, July 1924, p. 30. 18 Dave Hall, “Flying Cars: Why Haven’t They Taken Off Yet?

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In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Silicon Valley was embraced as the driver of economic growth, and that included valorizing its key figures and buying into its big plans to remake the world—regardless of how poorly they were thought through. Transportation was perceived to be ripe for disruption. Elon Musk graced the covers of major magazines and was profiled repeatedly as the entrepreneur who was going to “save the planet” with his sexy electric sportscars, before promising trains in vacuum tubes and a large-scale tunnel system to solve traffic congestion. But he was not the only one with big plans for mobility.

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration
by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees
Published 18 Apr 2022

For the language in the 1988 NASA authorization act, H.R. 4218, 100th Congress, 2nd Session, see https://space.nss.org/wp-content/uploads/Space-Settlement-Act-Of-1988.pdf, Section 3(a)(2)(d). 3. Michael Sainato, “Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Think the Earth Is Doomed,” Observer, June 30, 2017, https://observer.com/2017/06/colonizing-mars-elon-musk-stephen-hawking-jeff-bezos/. 4. Corey S. Powell, “Jeff Bezos Foresees a Trillion People Living in Millions of Space Colonies. Here’s What He’s Doing to Get the Ball Rolling,” NBC News, May 15, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/jeff-bezos-foresees-trillion-people-living-millions-space-colonies-here-ncna1006036; Shawn Langlois, “Elon Musk Says Jeff Bezos’s Plan to Colonize Space ‘Makes No Sense,’ ” MarketWatch, May 23, 2019, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-jeff-bezos-space-colony-plan-makes-no-sense-2019-05-23; Sainato, “Stephen Hawking.” 5.

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Here’s What He’s Doing to Get the Ball Rolling,” NBC News, May 15, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/jeff-bezos-foresees-trillion-people-living-millions-space-colonies-here-ncna1006036; Shawn Langlois, “Elon Musk Says Jeff Bezos’s Plan to Colonize Space ‘Makes No Sense,’ ” MarketWatch, May 23, 2019, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-jeff-bezos-space-colony-plan-makes-no-sense-2019-05-23; Sainato, “Stephen Hawking.” 5. Nicky Woolf, “SpaceX Founder Elon Musk Plans to Get Humans to Mars in Six Years,” The Guardian, September 27, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/27/elon-musk-spacex-mars-colony. 6. Daniel Deudney, Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020), 210–211. 7. John Lewis, Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets (Reading, MA: Helix Books, 1996), 256.

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This may well occur at some point in the future, whether or not these societies represent either an adjunct to terrestrial civilization or the necessary escape pod promoted by Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk. This diaspora will not occur by 2040, however, unless the passions that once created a race to the moon bypass the rational approach of an international effort that respects the need to maintain a pristine Mars, so far as possible, in order to preserve our ability to discover Martian life and to assure that it has not been contaminated by life brought from Earth. What of the deeply held desires of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to send humans to Mars despite the rationale expressed earlier? Here a rather cynical compromise may prove possible.

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach
by Ashlee Vance
Published 8 May 2023

The only real gating factor preventing the space economy from taking full advantage of this new reality and exploding at internet speed has been a lack of rockets to put up all the new satellites. We needed supercheap rockets that were flying all the time and venture capitalists to fund their creation. For people who already fancied themselves as the next Elon Musk in their dreams, the call to action was loud and clear: Get yourself a team and some money. Let the great rocket race begin. The Peter Beck Project Chapter Eight Big, If True Elon Musk called in the early part of the evening. Or at least my evening. It was November 2018, and I was staying in Auckland, New Zealand, for a couple of weeks, renting a house in a nice suburban neighborhood.

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(Ashlee Vance) (For more on the new space landscape, see the illustrations that appear after Chapter 27.) About the Author ASHLEE VANCE is the New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk and a feature writer at Bloomberg Businessweek. He is also the host of Hello World, a travel show that centers on inventors and scientists all over the planet. Previously, he worked as a reporter for the New York Times, the Economist, and the Register. Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com. Also by Ashlee Vance Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future Geek Silicon Valley: The Inside Guide to Palo Alto, Stanford, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, San Jose, San Francisco Copyright WHEN THE HEAVENS WENT ON SALE.

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Three previous rockets had been launched from this small plot of jungle-covered land in the middle of nowhere and had either blown up shortly after launch or broken apart during flight. The wounds of those past failures had pushed many of the SpaceX engineers and technicians into a state of serious self-doubt. Maybe they were not as bright and creative as they had told themselves. Maybe Elon Musk, the SpaceX founder and CEO, had made a terrible, costly mistake by believing in them. Maybe they were minutes away from needing to look for new jobs. The conditions for this type of operation were comically less than ideal from the start. SpaceX had set up its rocket-launching facility on Kwajalein Atoll, a collection of a hundred islands hanging out together in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with Hawaii and Australia as their theoretical neighbors.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 3 Feb 2015

Also see Marcia Brown, Stone Soup (New York: Aladdin Picture Books), 1997. 17 AI with Hagel. 18 John Hagel, “Pursuing Passion,” Edge Perspectives with John Hagel, November 14, 2009, http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2009/11/pursuing-passion.html. 19 Gregory Berns, “In Hard Times, Fear Can Impair Decision Making,” New York Times, December 6, 2008. Chapter Six: Billionaire Wisdom: Thinking at Scale 1 Elon Musk, “The Rocket Scientist Model for Iron Man,” Time, http://content.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,81836143001_1987904,00.html. 2 Unless otherwise noted, historical details and Musk quotes come from a series of AIs between 2012 and 2014. 3 AI, XPRIZE Adventure Trip, February 2013. 4 Thomas Owen, “Tesla’s Elon Musk: ‘I Ran Out of Cash,’ ” VentureBeat, May 2010, http://venturebeat.com/2010/05/27/elon-musk-personal-finances/. 5 Andrew Sorkin, Dealbook: “Elon Musk, of PayPal and Tesla Fame, Is Broke,” New York Times, June 2010, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/sorkin-elon-musk-of-paypal-and-tesla-fame-is-broke/?

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_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0. 6 SpaceX, “About Page,” http://www.spacex.com/about. 7 Kenneth Chang, “First Private Craft Docks With Space Station,” New York Times, May 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/26/science/space/space-x-capsule-docks-at-space-station.html. 8 Elon Musk interviewed by Kevin Fong, Scott’s Legacy, a BBC Radio 4 program, cited in Jonathan Amos, “Mars for the ‘average person,’ ” BBC News, March 20, 2012, http://www.bbc.com/news/health-17439490. 9 Diarmuid O’Connell, Statement from Tesla’s vice president of corporate and business development, reported in Hunter Walker, “White House Won’t Back Tesla in Direct Sales Fight” in Business Insider, July 14, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-wont-back-tesla-2014-7. 10 Daniel Gross, “Elon’s Élan,” Slate, April 30, 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/04/tesla_and_spacex_founder_elon_musk_has_a_knack_for_getting_others_to_fund.html. 11 Kevin Rose, “Elon Musk,” Video Interview, Episode 20, Foundation, September 2012, http://foundation.bz/20/. 12 Daniel Kahneman, “Why We Make Bad Decisions About Money (And What We Can Do About It),” Big Think, Interview, June 2013, http://bigthink.com/videos/why-we-make-bad-decisions-about-money-and-what-we-can-do-about-it-2. 13 Chris Anderson, “The Shared Genius of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs”, Fortune, November 21, 2013, http://fortune.com/2013/11/21/the-shared-genius-of-elon-musk-and-steve-jobs/. 14 AI, September 2013. 15 Eric Kelsey, “Branson recalls tears, $1 billion check in Virgin Records sale,” Reuters, October 23, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/24/us-richardbranson-virgin-idUSBRE99N01U20131024. 16 Forbes, The World’s Billionaires: #303 Richard Branson, August 2014, http://www.forbes.com/profile/richard-branson/. 17 Richard Branson, “BA Can’t Get It Up - best stunt ever?

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This chapter, which marks the end of that psychological exploration, focuses on the mind hacks of four remarkable men, a quartet of entrepreneurs who have already harnessed exponential technology to build multibillion-dollar companies that forever changed the world: Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Page. I’ve had the chance to work in varying degrees with each of these men. Elon Musk and Larry Page are both trustees and benefactors of the XPRIZE Foundation; Jeff Bezos ran the SEDS chapter at Princeton and has been passionate about opening space for the past forty years; and Richard Branson licensed the winning technology resulting from the Ansari XPRIZE to create Virgin Galactic.

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
by Eric M. Jackson
Published 15 Jan 2004

See also promotions market leader, X.com (PayPal) as, 79 Martin, Paul, 64–66 AuctionFinder and shipping tools, 259–260 background, 97 customer service solutions, 108 departure from PayPal, 264–266 life after PayPal, 312 move to oust Elon Musk, 157–159 positions at X.com (PayPal), 75, 119 reaction to sale of PayPal, 279 response to credit card limit crisis, 127–128 “turn off Checkout” tool, 232 . See also “PayPal Paul” MasterCard sanctions on PayPal, 148, 198 McCormick, Andrew, 255 media coverage CEO change at X.com (PayPal), 112–113 Citigroup C2it, 177 eBay Billpoint tactics, 209–210 eBay buyout of PayPal, 289 eBay “Checkout” feature, 231 Elon Musk’s departure, 177–178 negative, towards PayPal, 179–180, 293–294 PayPal anti-fraud measures, 202–203 PayPal at eBay Live, 275 PayPal IPO, 224–225, 236 PayPal sales of shares, 246–247 positive, towards PayPal, 178 startups, 178–180, 310 town named after startup, 132 meetings communication by, at eBay, 297–298 at Confinity, 24–25 fine for latecomers at PayPal, 197 Melton, Bill, 10 merchant services team at PayPal, 212, 260 mergers and acquisitions Confinity and X.com, 69, 72–73 difficulties from, 113 by eBay, 307 PayPal and eBay, 302 message boards adding to PayPal site, 139 as customer service solution, 101, 107–108, 138–139 “damage control” on, 127 Metcalfe’s law, 42 Microsoft eBay’s tactics compared with, 205, 231 PayPal as “Microsoft of payments,” 26 “Million Auction March,” 186 mission PayPal, 26, 28 PayPal, difference from eBay’s, 307 .

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X.com, an ambiguous financial Web site with a name to match, launched its own payments service. If dotBank’s launch concerned Peter, X.com’s entrance into payments made him livid. Up until Confinity’s move to 165 University Avenue a few months earlier, the two companies had been neighbors in a building just down the street. Elon Musk founded X.com in early 1999 after selling his previous company, an online map service named Zip2, to Compaq for $307 million.1 He set up his new venture in a small suite of offices overlooking a bakery that shared common space with Confinity. Although the two companies had no reason to communicate formally, the employees often bumped into one another in the entrance and restrooms.

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X.com also revamped the content on its homepage, toning down the “all your financial services in one place” messaging in favor of descriptions touting its ability to conduct auction payments. X.com’s decision to duplicate Confinity’s actions was fair play. We had done the same thing with dotBank’s features just a month before. And, even if the X.com team hadn’t grasped the value of entering the eBay auctions market on its own, Elon Musk’s company did understand what Confinity was up to before we could seize a commanding lead. In an online world where all it takes is several hundred lines of code and a handful of HTML pages to overhaul an entire business, being able to adapt to competitive changes is critical for survival, something I would see demonstrated again and again in the years to come.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
by Ashlee Vance
Published 18 May 2015

CONTENTS DEDICATION 1 ELON’S WORLD 2 AFRICA 3 CANADA 4 ELON’S FIRST START-UP 5 PAYPAL MAFIA BOSS 6 MICE IN SPACE PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT 7 ALL ELECTRIC 8 PAIN, SUFFERING, AND SURVIVAL 9 LIFTOFF 10 THE REVENGE OF THE ELECTRIC CAR 11 THE UNIFIED FIELD THEORY OF ELON MUSK EPILOGUE APPENDIX 1 APPENDIX 2 APPENDIX 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES ABOUT THE AUTHOR ALSO BY ASHLEE VANCE CREDITS COPYRIGHT ABOUT THE PUBLISHER 1 ELON’S WORLD DO YOU THINK I’M INSANE?” This question came from Elon Musk near the very end of a long dinner we shared at a high-end seafood restaurant in Silicon Valley. I’d gotten to the restaurant first and settled down with a gin and tonic, knowing Musk would—as ever—be late.

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What separated Tesla from the competition was the willingness to charge after its vision without compromise, a complete commitment to execute to Musk’s standards. 11 THE UNIFIED FIELD THEORY OF ELON MUSK THE RIVE BROTHERS USED TO BE LIKE A TECHNOLOGY GANG. In the late 1990s, they would jump on skateboards and zip around the streets of Santa Cruz, knocking on the doors of businesses and asking if they needed any help managing their computing systems. The young men, who had all grown up in South Africa with their cousin Elon Musk, soon decided there must be an easier way to hawk their technology smarts than going door-to-door. They wrote some software that allowed them to take control of their clients’ systems from afar and to automate many of the standard tasks that companies required, such as installing updates for applications.

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It was only after I’d spent lots of time with Musk that I realized the question was more for him than me. Nothing I said would have mattered. Musk was stopping one last time and wondering aloud if I could be trusted and then looking into my eyes to make his judgment. A split second later, we shook hands and Musk drove off in a red Tesla Model S sedan. ANY STUDY OF ELON MUSK must begin at the headquarters of SpaceX, in Hawthorne, California—a suburb of Los Angeles located a few miles from Los Angeles International Airport. It’s there that visitors will find two giant posters of Mars hanging side by side on the wall leading up to Musk’s cubicle. The poster to the left depicts Mars as it is today—a cold, barren red orb.

Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere
by Christian Wolmar
Published 18 Jan 2018

Ford’s chief executive Mark Fields said in February 2015 that fully autonomous cars would be on the market by 2020, though he did not say they would be made by Ford. Anthony Foxx, then US Transportation Secretary, claimed in January 2016 that driverless cars would be in use all over the world by 2025. And yet even an article headed ‘Elon Musk is right: driverless cars will arrive by 2021’ on a website called ‘The Next Web’ concluded that ‘2021 might be a tad optimistic but it seems we are closer than decades away.’ It is not only politicians, the auto manufacturers and tech companies making these predictions either. Uber’s (later-ejected) chief executive Travis Kalanick tweeted in August 2015 that he expected Uber’s fleet to be driverless by 2030 and that the service would then be so inexpensive and ubiquitous that car ownership would be obsolete.

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The network of charging points required to service such housing would be incredibly expensive to provide, and it is not at all clear who would fund it. Because of the vehicles’ shortcomings, their greater cost and the lack of charging points, take-up has been 33 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere slow, though it has accelerated recently. At the high end, Tesla – a start-up firm created by Elon Musk, the serial entrepreneur and inventor, as well as a powerful and leading advocate for driverless vehicles – produced its Model S in 2012. It has a range of 200 miles for the basic model, extending to 335 for the most expensive version. Tesla does not use single-purpose, large battery cells like those in other electric vehicles.

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While sales of electric vehicles are clearly set to grow, there are major logistical and practical problems to overcome before they can become the car of choice for most people. 35 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere The key issue is whether enough batteries can be produced. Tesla is constructing what will become the biggest building in the world (in terms of its footprint) in Nevada to manufacture lithium-ion batteries, and it is eventually expected to produce enough batteries for 1.5 million cars per year. Elon Musk is planning several more such ‘gigafactories’ but there is clearly, at the moment, huge undercapacity of battery manufacturing in relation to the demand that would be created if even 10 or 20 per cent of cars, let alone a majority, were electric powered. While this is not an insuperable problem, there are also questions about the availability of sufficient lithium to produce these batteries.

The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results
by Andrew McAfee
Published 14 Nov 2023

Needleman, and Georgia Wells, “TikTok’s Stratospheric Rise: An Oral History,” Wall Street Journal, updated November 5, 2022, www.wsj.com/articles/tiktoks-stratospheric-rise-an-oral-history-11667599696. 3 “defining characteristic”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Founder’s Letter: Our Next Chapter,” About Facebook, October 28, 2021, https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/founders-letter/. 4 investment was $15 billion: Martin Peers, “On Metaverse Spending, Zuckerberg Doesn’t Care What Critics Say,” The Information, October 26, 2022, www.theinformation.com/articles/on-metaverse-spending-zuckerberg-doesn-t-care-what-critics-say. 5 two hundred thousand users: Jeff Horwitz, Salvador Rodriguez, and Meghan Bobrowsky, “Company Documents Show Meta’s Flagship Metaverse Falling Short,” Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2022, www.wsj.com/articles/meta-metaverse-horizon-worlds-zuckerberg-facebook-internal-documents-11665778961. 6 “Why don’t we love the product”: Alex Heath, “Meta’s Flagship Metaverse App Is Too Buggy and Employees Are Barely Using It, Says Exec in Charge,” The Verge, October 6, 2022, www.theverge.com/2022/10/6/23391895/meta-facebook-horizon-worlds-vr-social-network-too-buggy-leaked-memo. 7 from Adi Robertson: Adi Robertson, “Meta Quest Pro Review: Get Me Out of Here,” The Verge, updated November 22, 2022, www.theverge.com/23451629/meta-quest-pro-vr-headset-horizon-review. 8 less than 60 percent: Mike Isaac and Cade Metz, “Skepticism, Confusion, Frustration: Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Struggles,” New York Times, October 9, 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/technology/meta-zuckerberg-metaverse.html. 9 an open letter: Meghan Bobrowsky, “Meta Investor Urges CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Slash Staff and Cut Costs,” Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2022, www.wsj.com/articles/meta-investor-urges-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-to-slash-staff-and-cut-costs-11666634172. 10 Zuckerberg holds: Katie Canales, “‘The Most Powerful Person Who’s Ever Walked the Face of the Earth’: How Mark Zuckerberg’s Stranglehold on Facebook Could Put the Company at Risk,” Business Insider, October 13, 2021, www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-control-facebook-whistleblower-key-man-risk-2021-10. 11 tried to back out: Jacob Kastrenakes, “Elon Musk Officially Tries to Bail on Buying Twitter,” The Verge, July 8, 2022, www.theverge.com/2022/7/8/23200961/elon-musk-files-back-out-twitter-deal-breach-of-contract. 12 carrying a sink: Elon Musk (@elonmusk), “Entering Twitter HQ—let that sink in!,” Twitter, 2:45 p.m., October 26, 2022, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585341984679469056. 13 verifying accounts: Amanda Holpuch, “Why Does Twitter Verify Some Accounts?,” New York Times, November 2, 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/us/twitter-verification-elon-musk.html. 14 with author Stephen King: Elon Musk (@elonmusk), “We need to pay the bills somehow!

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Boudette, “Tesla Fixes Model 3 Flaw, Getting Consumer Reports to Change Review,” New York Times, May 30, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/business/tesla-consumer-reports.html. 64 two-thirds of all the payload: Kate Duffy, “Elon Musk Says SpaceX Is Aiming to Launch Its Most-Used Rocket Once a Week on Average This Year,” Business Insider, February 4, 2022, www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-launch-every-week-payload-2022-2. 65 2018 NASA report: Harry Jones, “The Recent Large Reduction in Space Launch Cost,” 48th International Conference on Environmental Systems, 2018. 66 presentation Musk gave: Dave Mosher, “Elon Musk Just Gave the Most Revealing Look Yet at the Rocket Ship SpaceX Is Building to Fly to the Moon and Mars,” Business Insider, September 22, 2018, www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-pictures-big-falcon-rocket-spaceship-2018-9. 67 made out of stainless steel: Ryan Whitwam, “Elon Musk Explains Why the Starship Will Be Stainless Steel,” ExtremeTech, January 24, 2019, www.extremetech.com/extreme/284346-elon-musk-explains-why-the-starship-will-be-stainless-steel. 68 “Everything for Starship”: Florian Kordina, “SLS vs.

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,” The New Yorker, February 6, 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/13/the-second-avenue-subway-is-here. 59 “The tunnel modules”: Flyvbjerg, “Make Megaprojects More Modular.” 60 “The Tesla’s stopping distance”: Patrick Olsen, “Tesla Model 3 Falls Short of a CR Recommendation,” Consumer Reports, May 30, 2018, www.consumerreports.org/hybrids-evs/tesla-model-3-review-falls-short-of-consumer-reports-recommendation/. 61 Musk tweeted: Elon Musk (@elonmusk), replying to @ElectrekCo and @FredericLambert, Twitter May 21, 2018, 9:31 p.m., https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/998738003668357120. 62 “CR now recommends the Model 3”: Olsen, “Tesla Model 3 Falls Short.” 63 “To see something updated that quickly”: Neal E. Boudette, “Tesla Fixes Model 3 Flaw, Getting Consumer Reports to Change Review,” New York Times, May 30, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/business/tesla-consumer-reports.html. 64 two-thirds of all the payload: Kate Duffy, “Elon Musk Says SpaceX Is Aiming to Launch Its Most-Used Rocket Once a Week on Average This Year,” Business Insider, February 4, 2022, www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-launch-every-week-payload-2022-2. 65 2018 NASA report: Harry Jones, “The Recent Large Reduction in Space Launch Cost,” 48th International Conference on Environmental Systems, 2018. 66 presentation Musk gave: Dave Mosher, “Elon Musk Just Gave the Most Revealing Look Yet at the Rocket Ship SpaceX Is Building to Fly to the Moon and Mars,” Business Insider, September 22, 2018, www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-pictures-big-falcon-rocket-spaceship-2018-9. 67 made out of stainless steel: Ryan Whitwam, “Elon Musk Explains Why the Starship Will Be Stainless Steel,” ExtremeTech, January 24, 2019, www.extremetech.com/extreme/284346-elon-musk-explains-why-the-starship-will-be-stainless-steel. 68 “Everything for Starship”: Florian Kordina, “SLS vs.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

“no one even knew how to play”: Blake Masters, “Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup—Class 5 Notes Essay,” Blakemasters.com, April 20, 2012, https://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-5-notes-essay. one headline declared: Mark Gimein, “High Tech’s New ‘It Guy’: Elon Musk Is Poised to Become Silicon Valley’s Next Big Thing,” Ottawa Citizen, August 23, 1999, D1. strength of a demo website: Max Chafkin, “Entrepreneur of the Year, 2007: Elon Musk,” Inc., December 1, 2007, https://www.inc.com/magazine/20071201/entrepreneur-of-the-year-elon-musk.html. “be done in two minutes”: Craig Tolliver, “X.com Opens Its Virtual Doors,” CBS MarketWatch, December 10, 1999, https://web.archive.org/web/20000301165053/http://www.x.com/external_CBS_interview.htm.

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shortly after the 2016 election: Maureen Dowd, “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself,” The New York Times, January 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/fashion/peter-thiel-donald-trump-silicon-valley-technology-gawker.html. Thiel and his coconspirators: Max Chafkin, “Entrepreneur of the Year, 2007: Elon Musk,” Inc., December 1, 2007, https://www.inc.com/magazine/20071201/entrepreneur-of-the-year-elon-musk.html. CHAPTER ONE: FUCK YOU, WORLD built in the 1960s: “Community Profile,” Community, Foster City website, accessed January 20, 2021, https://www.fostercity.org/sites/default/files/fileattachments/community_development/page/3211/final-snapshot-030812-02-community-profile.pdf.

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“numbers are being cooked”: Graig Graziosi, “Republican Senate Hopeful Says Coronavirus Numbers Being ‘Cooked’ to Hurt Trump,” The Independent, July 28, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/coronavirus-deaths-trump-republican-senate-kris-kobach-a9642731.html. Tesla workers in Fremont: Neal E. Boudette, “Hundreds of Tesla Workers Tested Positive for the Virus after Elon Musk Reopened a Plant, Data Shows,” The New York Times, March 13, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/13/world/tesla-elon-musk-coronavirus-outbreak.html. virus as the “sniffles”: “Trump Says Son Barron’s Covid Illness ‘‘Just Went Away,’ ” NBC News, October 22, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/video/trump-says-son-barron-s-covid-illness-just-went-away-94447173800.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben
Published 15 Apr 2019

Kai-Fu Lee, “The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence,” New York Times, June 24, 2017. 16. Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired, April 1, 2000. 17. Sarah Marsh, “Essays Reveal Stephen Hawking Predicted Race of Superhumans,” Guardian, October 4, 2018 18. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion Dollar Crusade.” 19. James Vincent, “Elon Musk Says We Need to Regulate AI Before It Becomes a Danger to Humanity,” theverge.com, July 17, 2017. 20. Stephen Hawking, “Artificial Intelligence Could Be the Greatest Disaster in Human History,” Independent, October 20, 2016. 21. James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era (New York: St.

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Pei Wang, Ben Goertzel, and Stan Franklin (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2008), available online at selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_drives_final.pdf, p. 9. 25. Anders Sandberg, “Why We Should Fear the Paperclipper,” sentientdevelopments.com, February 14, 2011. 26. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion Dollar Crusade,” p. 89. 27. Barrat, Our Final Invention, p. 19. 28. Ibid., p. 265. 29. Pinker, Enlightenment Now, p. 300. 30. Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (New York: Henry Holt, 2018), p. 135. 31. Damien Cave, “Artificial Stupidity,” Salon, October 4, 2000. 32. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion Dollar Crusade,” p. 90. 33. Sam Thielman, “Is Facebook Even Capable of Stopping an Influence Campaign on Its Platform?”

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Sam Thielman, “Is Facebook Even Capable of Stopping an Influence Campaign on Its Platform?” Talking Points Memo, September 15, 2017. 34. James Walker, “Researchers Shut Down AI that Invented Its Own Language,” digitaljournal.com, July 21, 2017. 35. Cade Metz, “Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and the Feud over Killer Robots,” New York Times, June 9, 2018. 36. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion Dollar Crusade,” p. 91. 37. Khatchadourian, “Doomsday Invention.” CHAPTER 16 1. Knoepfler, GMO Sapiens, p. 177. 2. Rachel Nuwer, “Babies Start Learning Language in the Womb,” smithsonianmag.com, January 4, 2013. 3. Michael D. Lemonick, “Designer Babies,” Time, January 11, 1999. 4.

The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees
by Ben Mezrich
Published 6 Sep 2021

Einhorn had then fired back in one of his quarterly letters to his investors, as reported by CNBC and others: We wonder whether surge production techniques to support self-congratulatory tweets are economically efficient ways of ramping production, or whether customers will be happy with the quality of a car rushed through production to prove a point to short sellers…The most striking feature of the quarter is that Elon Musk appears erratic and desperate. But that was only the beginning. In his next quarterly letter, Einhorn took even more direct aim, comparing Tesla to Lehman Brothers, the failed bank. Like Lehman, we think the deception is about to catch up to TSLA…Elon Musk’s erratic behavior suggests he sees it the same way. Continuing on—as reported by Bloomberg at the time—Einhorn had charged that Tesla would never be able to meet the low price targets they’d chosen for the Model 3, and that Elon himself was actually trying to get himself fired.

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The WSB board could post all they wanted; shit-talking, after all, was a part of every sport. But Gabe Plotkin knew that time was on his side. A melting ice cube always ended up the same—a nice big puddle of water. Part Two “We like the stock! We like the stock!” —Jim Cramer “Gamestonk!!” —Elon Musk Chapter Twelve January 11, 2021 Keith Gill’s left boot touched the black ice first, the sole slipping against the frictionless surface, sending his entire left leg out in front of him in a bizarre angle that would have brought him right down to the sidewalk if he hadn’t been holding his daughter’s gloved hand in his own.

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Forty feet below the surface of Hawthorne, California, a working-class enclave fifteen miles outside Los Angeles. A freshly bored tunnel fitted with electrodynamic suspension rails and linear induction motors, as well as a partially constructed Hyperloop capsule, complete with inlet fan and axial compressor. Elon Musk, CEO and chief techno-king of Tesla; CEO, CTO, and chief designer of SpaceX; dogecoin enthusiast; bitcoin proselytizer; sometime richest man in the world; and the former president of the Galactic Federation of Planets, was moving fast, his legs churning at what felt like a thousand RPMs, as he tore through the twelve-foot-high, mile-long Hyperloop test track.

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success
by Shane Snow
Published 8 Sep 2014

An independent fact checker verified the information in my reporting and I delivered material from this chapter to Elon Musk himself for firsthand verification. (Musk did not return anything.) Two major magazine profiles of Musk provide further biographical details: Chris Anderson, “The Shared Genius of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs,” Fortune, November 2013, and Tom Junod, “The Triumph of His Will,” Esquire, November 2012. 171 “I didn’t think there was anything I could do”: Chris Anderson, “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Wired, October 21, 2012, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all/ (accessed February 15, 2014). 172 NASA employed about 18,000: NASA’s headcount comes from “Space Organizations Part 1: NASA—Nasa’s Workforce,” Library Index, http://www.libraryindex.com/pages/987/Space-Organizations-Part-1-NASA-NASA-S-WORKFORCE.html, and the catalog of collaborators on the Apollo project is documented by Catherine Thimmesh, Team Moon: How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006). 172 “To make life multiplanetary” and the continuation of “human consciousness”: Musk often repeats these phrases in interviews, such as David Pescovitz, “Elon Musk on Making Life Multi-Planetary,” Boing Boing, April 10, 2012, http://boingboing.net/2012/04/10/elon-musk-on-making-life-multi.html (accessed February 15, 2014), and Junod, “The Triumph of His Will.” 174 over-the-top demonstration to create buzz: For more on Lady Gaga, Baumgartner, Alexander the Great, and 10x Storytelling, visit shanesnow.com/10xstorytelling. 175 “We choose to go to the moon”: John F.

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Two major magazine profiles of Musk provide further biographical details: Chris Anderson, “The Shared Genius of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs,” Fortune, November 2013, and Tom Junod, “The Triumph of His Will,” Esquire, November 2012. 171 “I didn’t think there was anything I could do”: Chris Anderson, “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Wired, October 21, 2012, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all/ (accessed February 15, 2014). 172 NASA employed about 18,000: NASA’s headcount comes from “Space Organizations Part 1: NASA—Nasa’s Workforce,” Library Index, http://www.libraryindex.com/pages/987/Space-Organizations-Part-1-NASA-NASA-S-WORKFORCE.html, and the catalog of collaborators on the Apollo project is documented by Catherine Thimmesh, Team Moon: How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006). 172 “To make life multiplanetary” and the continuation of “human consciousness”: Musk often repeats these phrases in interviews, such as David Pescovitz, “Elon Musk on Making Life Multi-Planetary,” Boing Boing, April 10, 2012, http://boingboing.net/2012/04/10/elon-musk-on-making-life-multi.html (accessed February 15, 2014), and Junod, “The Triumph of His Will.” 174 over-the-top demonstration to create buzz: For more on Lady Gaga, Baumgartner, Alexander the Great, and 10x Storytelling, visit shanesnow.com/10xstorytelling. 175 “We choose to go to the moon”: John F.

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Now they milled about in the high-ceilinged corporate command room, abuzz with excitement. This could be it. As they waited beneath the giant screens broadcasting their rocket’s video feed from 4,955 miles away, the man behind their mission stepped into the mission control trailer at the back of the room. Elon Musk. The dark-haired South African entered, wearing his usual outfit—fitted T-shirt and jeans—and took command. The oft-mythologized billionaire—after whom Robert Downey Jr. modeled his character, Tony Stark, in the Iron Man films—was at the time simply a millionaire and perhaps not even that. Into SpaceX he’d plunged his personal fortune, which over six years had been whittled down to a stump.

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe
by William Poundstone
Published 3 Jun 2019

He likened this to the mathematical nature of physics. Harvard physicist Lisa Randall disagreed. She put the probability of our being a simulation at “effectively zero.” For her the real question was “why so many people think it’s an interesting question.” One who takes simulations seriously is entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has helped fund Nick Bostrom’s work. “The strongest argument for us being in a simulation,” Musk said at the 2016 Recode conference, “is the following: 40 years ago, we had Pong. Two rectangles and a dot. Now 40 years later we have photorealistic 3D simulations with millions playing simultaneously.

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Nearly all involve technology well beyond what’s presently available. One exception is a low-tech device, the quantum suicide machine. Quantum Suicide Machine Max Tegmark has led a charmed life. In high school in Sweden he made a small fortune coding a video game. He’s now an MIT cosmologist whose work has been funded by Elon Musk. Yet a share of Tegmark’s popular fame is due to some half-joking remarks he made in 1997. Like a lot of other physicists, Tegmark had racked his brain trying to come up with an experimental test of many worlds. He eventually came up with a notion known as a quantum suicide machine. In David Papineau’s words, the high concept is: Get in the box with Schrödinger’s cat.

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Located in Oxford, the home of William of Ockham and Lewis Carroll, the institute was founded by Swedish-born Nick Bostrom and has been financed largely by the American technology industry. Lead donor James Martin was a former IBM employee in New York who struck it rich as a corporate consultant and futurist. More recently Elon Musk donated $1.5 million to study policy questions, much of which has been channeled to the institute. The irony is that Bostrom, who decided the doomsday argument is inconclusive, now spends his days trying to stave off doomsday. FHI is a think tank whose goal is to prevent the end of the world. Bostrom and colleagues attempt to identify threats to human existence and devise ways to deal with them.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green
by Henry Sanderson
Published 12 Sep 2022

. __________ * Analysts at the American brokerage firm Bernstein calculated that for every one percent you want to grow GDP, you must increase mined volumes by two percent. * In this book, references to ‘the Congo’ in the period from 1964 onwards always refer to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa) rather than Congo-Brazzaville. 1 The Battery Age ‘The spice must flow. The new spice.’ Elon Musk, Tesla CEO1 In late September 2020 Elon Musk strode out onto a stage in the bright California sunlight to address a car park full of Teslas at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Fremont. Dubbed ‘Battery Day’, the event had been hyped up by Musk for months (he had promised it would be ‘insane’). Due to Covid-19 attendees sat alone behind the steering wheels of bright shiny Model 3 and Model Y cars wearing masks.

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To Claudia and Jamie Contents Introduction 1 The Battery Age 2 Dashed Hopes: The Troubled History of the EV 3 The Breakthrough: The Lithium-Ion Revolution 4 China’s Battery King 5 The Chinese Lithium Rush 6 Chile’s Buried Treasure 7 The Cobalt Problem 8 The Rise of a Cobalt Giant 9 Blood Cobalt 10 Dirty Nickel 11 The Green Copper Tycoon 12 The Final Frontier: Mining the Deep Sea 13 Reduce, Re-use, Recycle: A Closed Loop 14 The World’s Greenest Battery 15 Cornwall’s Mining Revival Conclusion Acknowledgements Notes Index Introduction ‘We have to scale battery production to crazy levels that people can’t even fathom today.’ Elon Musk, Tesla CEO1 In mid-2020 as the world settled into lockdown, we decided to get an electric car. Our son was seven months old and I had begun to think seriously about his future and whether the world would act quickly enough to mitigate the threats of climate change. Shares in Tesla were soaring, and the carmaker was on the cusp of becoming the most valuable in the world, despite the fact it made a fraction of the eleven million cars a year produced by Toyota.

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The current stock of electric cars globally is around ten million, less than twice the number of cars in Beijing and only one percent of the global total. There are over one billion cars globally on the roads. We will also need to replace buses and trucks with electric versions, as well as ships, ferries and even planes. All this will require batteries on a scale unimaginable a few years ago. Tesla’s South African-born founder Elon Musk had built a vast battery ‘Gigafactory’ in the desert of Nevada to supply his electric cars as well as the batteries to store renewable sources of energy. But he was not alone: across China a new factory was being built every week in 2020. Through my work as a Financial Times journalist, I had covered the raw materials electric cars needed: the lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper, as well as aluminium and steel.

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors
by Spencer Jakab
Published 1 Feb 2022

Not the degenerates, though—maybe because they didn’t know any better. The amateurs plunged in, and soon they were running circles around investing legends like Warren Buffett. But they were doing dumb things too like buying the shares of bankrupt companies or snapping up stocks with names that sounded like ones mentioned on Twitter by Elon Musk but that actually were worthless shells. Traders and fund managers thought it was hilarious. From what I saw and heard that morning, though, Wall Street wouldn’t be laughing anymore. My oldest son had prompted my deep dive into the subreddit by asking whether I was writing something about GameStop.

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“There was no face to the name—he was just a mythical dude. He became an idolized figure,” says Seth Mahoney, a college student and active Robinhood customer who was twenty years old and had been on WallStreetBets for three years and Reddit for nine years at the time of the GameStop squeeze. “He’s one of those leaders, like Elon Musk with Dogecoin.”[4] By the time he was at the height of his influence, Gill was only posting memes or updates of his E*Trade account. Yet those screenshots took on a powerful importance as the trade became successful, explains Dr. Jay Van Bavel, a psychologist at New York University attached to its Social Identity and Morality Lab.

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“Free is sort of a Rubicon that, once you cross it, people are less thoughtful about how to consume it,” explains Egan, the behavioral finance expert. Sometimes this was a case of mistaken identity by new investors unfamiliar with the sketchy penny stock world. A tiny medical company called Signal Advance, initially valued at $7 million, briefly was worth more than $1 billion after Elon Musk tweeted to his followers that they should use the encrypted-messaging app Signal. And sometimes the confusion seemed deliberate. A firm named Tongji Medical changed its name to Clubhouse Media Group and surged by over 1,000 percent when Musk mentioned the unrelated and unlisted audio app. Incredibly, its value even eclipsed the real app’s private market valuation.

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility
by Robert Zubrin
Published 30 Apr 2019

Kenneth Chang, “Falcon Heavy, in a Roar of Thunder, Carries SpaceX's Ambition into Orbit,” New York Times, February 6, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/science/falcon-heavy-spacex-launch.html (accessed October 14, 2018). 6. Noah Robischon and Elizabeth Segran, “Elon Musk's Mars Mission Revealed: SpaceX's Interplanetary Transport System,” Fast Company, September 27, 2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3064139/elon-musks-mars-mission-revealed-spacexs-interplanetary-transport-system (accessed October 14, 2018). 7. Robert Zubrin, “Colonizing Mars: A Critique of the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System,” New Atlantis, October 21, 2016, https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/colonizing-mars (accessed October 14, 2018). 8. Adam Baidawi and Kenneth Chang, “Elon Musk's Mars Vision: A One-Size-Fits-All Rocket. A Very Big One,” New York Times, September 27, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/science/elon-musk-mars.html (accessed October 14, 2018). 9.

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While both nations have inherited significant parts of the Soviet Union's space technology, relatively free Ukraine's smaller portion is far more investible than that of kleptocratic Russia. CHAPTER 2. FREE SPACE 1. James Titcomb, “Elon Musk Plans London to New York Flights in 29 Minutes,” Telegraph, September 29, 2017, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/09/29/elon-musk-unveils-plans-london-new-york-rocket-flights-30-minutes/ (accessed October 14, 2018). Note the BFR, “Big F…ing Rocket,” was originally introduced by Musk as the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) in September 2016 and renamed BFR in early 2017, under which title it became widely known and discussed.

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In fact, these results show the exact opposite, since Mars would have needed more than 20 psi of CO2 in its atmosphere four billion years ago to have been warm enough for liquid water. So plenty of CO2 must still be soaked in the soil. Mike Brown, “Elon Musk Wants to Terraform Mars, and He's Refusing to Back Down,” Yahoo News, August 1, 2018, https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-wants-terraform-mars-123100942.html (accessed October 15, 2018). CHAPTER 5. ASTEROIDS FOR FUN AND PROFIT 1. John Lewis, Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets (New York: Helix Books, 1996). 2. David Harland, Jupiter Odyssey: The Story of NASA's Galileo Mission (Chichester, UK: Praxis, 2000). 3.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
by Brad Stone
Published 10 May 2021

Amazon’s new air hub: Jason Del Re, “Amazon Is Building a $1.5 Billion Hub for Its Own Cargo Airline,” Vox, January 31, 2017, https://www.vox.com/2017/1/31/14462256/amazon-air-cargo-hub-kentucky-airport-prime-air (January 24, 2021). belabored public process: Spencer Soper, “Behind Amazon’s HQ2 Fiasco: Jeff Bezos Was Jealous of Elon Musk,” Bloomberg, February 3, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-03/amazon-s-hq2-fiasco-was-driven-by-bezos-envy-of-elon-musk (January 24, 2021). Gray was charged with reckless: Christian Farr, “Former Amazon Driver Acquitted in Death of 84-Year-Old Woman,” NBC5, August 1, 2019, https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/former-amazon-driver-acquitted-in-death-of-84-year-old-pedestrian/127151/ (January 24, 2021).

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And in the fall of 2017, Jeff Bezos finally: Tom Metcalf, “Jeff Bezos Passes Bill Gates to Become the World’s Richest Person,” Bloomberg, October 27, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-27/bezos-seizes-title-of-world-s-richest-person-after-amazon-soars (January 25, 2021). CHAPTER 11: GRADATIM FEROCITER Two books were valuable resources for this chapter: Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018), and Tim Fernholz, Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). the firm landed a Falcon 9 booster: Loren Grush, “SpaceX Successfully Lands Its Rocket on a Floating Drone Ship for the First Time,” The Verge, April 8, 2016, https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/8/11392138/spacex-landing-success-falcon-9-rocket-barge-at-sea (January 24, 2021).

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SpaceX challenged the patent: Todd Bishop, “Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Dealt Setback in Patent Dispute with SpaceX over Rocket Landings,” GeekWire, March 5, 2015, https://www.geekwire.com/2015/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-dealt-setback-in-patent-dispute-with-spacex-over-rocket-landings/ (January 24, 2021); Todd Bishop, “Blue Origin’s Rocket-Landing Patent Canceled in Victory for SpaceX,” GeekWire, September 1, 2015, https://www.geekwire.com/2015/blue-origins-rocket-landing-patent-canceled-in-victory-for-spacex/ (January 24, 2021). the United Launch Alliance (ULA): Armin Rosen, “Elon Musk’s Aerospace Argument Just Took a Hit,” Business Insider, June 17, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/ula-wont-buy-rocket-engines-from-russia-anymore-2014-6 (January 24, 2021). landed its own reusable booster: Loren Grush, “Spacex Successfully Landed Its Falcon 9 Rocket After Launching It to Space,” The Verge, December 21, 2015, https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/21/10640306/spacex-elon-musk-rocket-landing-success (January 24, 2021). Bezos tweeted: Jeff Bezos, Tweet, December 21, 2015, 8:49 p.m., https://twitter.com/jeffbezos/status/679116636310360067?

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything
by Martin Ford
Published 13 Sep 2021

While this is admittedly a far cry from human-level AI, Kurzweil remains confident in his strategy, telling me that “humans use this hierarchical approach” and that ultimately it will be “sufficient for AGI.”36 Yet another path toward artificial general intelligence is being forged by OpenAI, a San Francisco–based research organization that was founded in 2015 with financial backing from, among others, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Linked-in co-founder Reid Hoffman. OpenAI was initially set up as a nonprofit entity with a mission to undertake a safe and ethical quest for AGI. The organization was conceived partly in response to Elon Musk’s deep concern about the potential for superhuman machine intelligence to someday pose a genuine threat to humanity. From the onset, OpenAI has attracted some of the field’s top researchers, including Ilya Sutskever, who was part of the team from Geoff Hinton’s University of Toronto Lab that built the neural network that triumphed at the 2012 ImageNet competition.

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See, for example: Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, “The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?,” Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, Working Paper, September 17, 2013, www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/future-of-employment.pdf, p. 38. 6. Matt McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon,’” Washington Post, October 24, 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/10/24/elon-musk-with-artificial-intelligence-we-are-summoning-the-demon/. 7. Anand S. Rao and Gerard Verweij, “Sizing the prize: What’s the real value of AI for your business and how can you capitalise?,” PwC, October 2018, www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/analytics/assets/pwc-ai-analysis-sizing-the-prize-report.pdf.

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,’” The Independent, May 1, 2014, www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-but-are-we-taking-ai-seriously-enough-9313474.html. 28. Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Oxford University Press, 2014, p. vii. 29. Matt McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon,’” Washington Post, October 24, 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/10/24/elon-musk-with-artificial-intelligence-we-are-summoning-the-demon/. 30. Sam Harris, “Can we build AI without losing control over it? (video),” TED Talk, June 2016, www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_can_we_build_ai_without_losing_control_over_it?

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future
by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever
Published 2 Apr 2017

Kevin Kelly, “The three breakthroughs that have finally unleashed AI on the world,” WIRED 27 October 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligence (accessed 21 October 2016). 7. Matt McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon,’ ” Washington Post 24 October 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/10/24/elon-musk-with-artificial-intelligence-we-are-summoning-the-demon (accessed 21 October 2016). 8. Rory Cellan-Jones, “Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind,” BBC 2 December 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540 (accessed 21 October 2016). 9.

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Effects of Autonomy and Transparency on Attributions in Human– Robot Interaction” (in: RO-MAN 2006—The 15th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T., 2006), M.I.T. (undated), http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~taemie/papers/200609_ROMAN_TKim.pdf (accessed 21 October 2016). 14. Kirsten Korosec, “Elon Musk says Tesla vehicles will drive themselves in two years,” Fortune 21 December 2015, http://fortune.com/2015/12/21/elon-musk-interview (accessed 21 October 2016). 15. Max Chafkin, “Uber’s first self-driving fleet arrives in Pittsburgh this month,” Bloomberg 18 August 2016, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-08-18/uber-s-first-self-driving-fleet-arrives-in-pittsburgh-this-month-is06r7on (accessed 23 October 2016).

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Airlines found the service too expensive to run and unprofitable to maintain. The sonic boom angered communities. The plane was exotic and beautiful but finicky. Perhaps most important of all, it was too expensive for the majority, and there was no obvious way to make its benefits available more broadly. This is part of the genius of Elon Musk as he develops Tesla: that his luxury company is rapidly moving downstream to become a mass-market player. Clearly, though, in the case of the Concorde, the conditions necessary for a futuristic disruption were not in place. They still are not, although some people are trying, including Musk himself, with his Hyperloop transportation project.

Vassal State
by Angus Hanton
Published 25 Mar 2024

See ‘Baroness Morgan speaking on how we can make technology work for everyone’ [transcript of speech delivered at the Talent Charter Annual Event held at the Gherkin in the City of London on 15 January 2020], Gov.uk [website] (15 January 2020), https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/baroness-morgan-speaking-on-how-we-can-make-technology-work-for-everyone. 4 Quoted in ‘Mayor Bloomberg: “Make sure you are the first one in there every day & the last one to leave”’, TechCrunch [website] (30 November 2011), https://techcrunch.com/2011/11/30/founder-stories-mayor-bloomberg-make-sure-you-are-the-first-one-in-there-every-day-the-last-one-to-leave/. 5 Quoted in ‘Why Jeff Bezos should care more for Amazon’s employees’, New York Times (21 August 2015), https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/22/business/dealbook/why-jeff-bezos-should-care-more-for-amazons-employees.html. 6 Quoted in Catherine Clifford, ‘Elon Musk on working 120 hours in a week: “However hard it was for [the team], I would make it worse for me”’, CNBC Make It [website] (10 December 2018), https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/10/elon-musk-says-working-120-hours-in-a-week-was-a-show-of-leadership.html. 7 Quoted in Wilfred Chan, ‘Elon Musk praises Chinese workers for “burning the 3am oil” – here’s what that really looks like’, Guardian (12 May 2022), https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/12/elon-musk-praises-chinese-workers-for-extreme-work-culture. 8 ‘Hours worked’, OECD [website], https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm. 9 Sarah Green Carmichael, ‘The research is clear: long hours backfire for people and for companies’, Harvard Business Review (19 August 2015), https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-backfire-for-people-and-for-companies. 10 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans.

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38055-1/presidential-economic-address. 23 ‘Global advisory board’, Pimco [website], https://www.pimco.co.uk/en-gb/global-advisory-board; ‘Alistair Darling elected to Morgan Stanley board of directors’, Morgan Stanley [website] (8 December 2015), https://www.morganstanley.com/press-releases/alistair-darling-elected-to-morgan-stanley-board-of-directors. 24 ‘George Osborne’, 9Yards Capital [website], https://theorg.com/org/9yards-capital/org-chart/george-osborne. 25 Mark Sweney, ‘Former chancellor Sajid Javid takes new role at JP Morgan’, Guardian (18 August 2020), https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/18/former-chancellor-sajid-javid-role-jp-morgan-adviser-us-bank-mp-conservative. 26 ‘Kwasi Kwarteng’, Wikipedia [website], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwasi_Kwarteng. 27 Annabelle Dickson, ‘Boris Johnson’s parting shot: “Stay close to the Americans”’, Politico [website] (20 July 2022), https://www.politico.eu/article/stay-close-americans-boris-johnson-parting-shot/. 28 ‘Chancellor Rishi Sunak held US green card until last year’, BBC News [website] (8 April 2022), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-61044847. 29 Peter Walker et al., ‘Akshata Murty may have avoided up to £20m in tax with non-dom status’, Guardian (7 April 2022), https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/07/rishi-sunaks-wife-says-its-not-relevant-to-say-where-she-pays-tax-overseas. 30 Rupert Neate, ‘Rishi Sunak and Akshata Murty join UK rich list with combined £730m fortune’, Guardian (20 May 2022), https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/may/20/sri-and-gopi-hinduja-named-uk-richest-people-james-dyson. 31 Kiran Stacey, ‘Labour accuses Rishi Sunak of angling for job after Elon Musk interview’, Guardian (3 November 2023), https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/nov/03/labour-accuses-rishi-sunak-of-angling-for-job-after-elon-musk-interview. 32 Tomas Malloy, ‘Tata Somerset gigafactory: UK government’s huge “£500m” battery plant subsidy explained’, SomersetLive [website] (22 July 2023), https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/somerset-news/tata-somerset-gigafactory-uk-governments-8616044. 33 House of Commons International Trade Committee, ‘Inward foreign direct investment: third report of session 2021–22’ [PDF], Parliament.uk [website] (21 September 2021), https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmintrade/124/report.html. 34 House of Commons International Trade Committee, ‘UK investment policy: seventh report of session 2017–19’ [PDF], Parliament.uk [website] (24 July 2019), https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmintrade/998/998.pdf, quoted ibid. 35 David Ricketts, ‘City stalwart Lord Grimstone lands Bain advisor role’, Financial News [website] (28 September 2023), https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/city-stalwart-lord-grimstone-lands-bain-advisor-role-20230928. 36 Joanna Partridge, ‘Behold London’s “landscraper”!

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The Financial Times has been a close follower of the exploits of US private equity in Britain, with implicit warnings contained in articles by Daniel Thomas, Peggy Hollinger, Harriet Agnew and Kaye Wiggins. And Stephen Glover (the Daily Mail) has asked the essential question about what happens when critical authority over strategic assets is placed into the hands of billionaire tech titans – as is the case with Elon Musk’s Starlink internet provision in Ukraine. What’s striking is that the concerns about US economic power over the UK and the world cut right across many domestic political differences. The rest of us can see the outlines of the problem: our high streets and small businesses are under pressure, crushed by slick, US-dominated online competition and a tax regime which makes far greater claims on domestic businesses than on US corporations.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

This avoids annoying signal-blockers, like mountains, and saves thousands of miles of land-routed cable network. * * * Elon Musk’s SpaceX programme, Starlink, controls more than 25% of all satellites in space, and he is seeking permission to get 12,000 up there by 2025, and eventually 42,000. There are risks to all this, including light pollution and energy guzzling. As with so much of tech, most of us just don’t know what is going on, and by the time we find out it will be too late to regulate. Musk is aggressively anti-regulation. And who owns space? Not Elon Musk. This is another kind of land-grab. Another kind of enclosure. Governments will have to regulate space – if they don’t, it’s already been stolen.

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* * * Bloom points out that most humans are fixated on space without boundaries. Think about it: land-grab, colonisation, urban creep, loss of habitat, the current fad for seasteading (sea cities with vast oceans at their disposal). And space itself – the go-to fascination of rich men: Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. When I think about artificial intelligence, and what is surely to follow – artificial general intelligence, or superintelligence – it seems to me that what this affects most, now and later, isn’t space but time. The brain uses chemicals to transmit information. A computer uses electricity.

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A future where democracy still has a place, and where Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon are not carving the world up between them just as the Imperial powers once did. The new reality, though, will not be sold to us as surveillance, with its totalitarian overtones. The future will be sold to us as empowerment. * * * Elon Musk’s Neuralink company is working on brain-computer interfaces – threads that will allow someone to control a computer via their thoughts. Human trials started in 2020. The current aim of the tech is to help people with paralysis, a laudable aim. Musk’s eventual aim, though, seems to be symbiosis with AI, so that humans don’t get left behind in the intelligence game

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet
by Varun Sivaram
Published 2 Mar 2018

Neither of those storage technologies is anywhere near as flashy as the battery packs on the Desperate Housewives set under Elon Musk’s solar roofs. But they are nonetheless important pieces for solving the puzzle of how the world can harness sunlight to meet not only its energy needs, but also other basic needs, such as food and water. Notes 1.  “Tesla Bid for SolarCity ‘Shameful,’” BBC News, June 22, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36602509. 2.  Robert Ferris, “Too Early for Tesla to Merge with Solarcity? Elon Musk Says Deal ‘May Even Be a Little Late,’” CNBC, November 4, 2016, http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/04/tesla-solarcity-merger-may-even-be-a-little-late.html. 3.  Elon Musk, “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (Just between You and Me),” Tesla, Inc., June 28, 2012, https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-just-between-you-and-me. 4.  

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Fraunhofer ISE, “Recent Facts About Photovoltaics in Germany,” Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, 2017, https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/veroeffentlichungen-pdf-dateien-en/studien-und-konzeptpapiere/recent-facts-about-photovoltaics-in-germany.pdf. 9.  Carmine Gallo, “Tesla’s Elon Musk Lights Up Social Media with a TED Style Keynote,” Forbes, May 4, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2015/05/04/teslas-elon-musk-lights-up-social-media-with-a-ted-style-keynote. 10.  “Short-Term Energy Outlook,” U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), 2017, https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/query. 11.  Jesse D. Jenkins and Samuel Thernstrom, “Deep Decarbonization of the Electric Power Sector: Insights from Recent Literature,” Energy Innovation Reform Project (EIRP), March 2017, http://innovationreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/EIRP-Deep-Decarb-Lit-Review-Jenkins-Thernstrom-March-2017.pdf. 12.  

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Tian Ying, “China Considers Dialing Back or Delaying Electric Car Quota,” Bloomberg, March 5, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-05/china-considers-dialing-back-electric-car-quota-after-opposition. 5.  Chisake Watanabe, “Japan Makes Big Push for Hydrogen Fuel Cells Scorned by Elon Musk as Impractical,” Japan Times, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/02/10/business/tech/japan-makes-big-push-for-hydrogen-fuel-cells-scorned-by-elon-musk-as-impractical. 6.  “Toyota Fuel Cell Vehicle: Yoshikazu Tanaka Q&A,” The Official Blog of Toyota GB, March 4, 2014, http://blog.toyota.co.uk/toyota-fuel-cell-vehicle-yoshikazu-tanaka-qa. 7.  Akshay Singh, Evan Hirsh, Reid Wilk, and Rich Parkin, “2017 Automotive Trends,” PwC/Strategy&, http://www.strategyand.pwc.com/trend/2017-automotive-industry-trends. 8.  

Architects of Intelligence
by Martin Ford
Published 16 Nov 2018

There may instead be a job where someone needs to intervene, every so often, and take human control of one of them. MARTIN FORD: What is your response to some of the fears expressed about AI or AGI, in particular by Elon Musk, who has been very vocal about existential risks? RANA EL KALIOUBY: There’s a documentary on the internet called Do You Trust This Computer? which was partially funded by Elon Musk, and I was featured in it being interviewed. MARTIN FORD: Yes, in fact, a couple of the other people I’ve interviewed in this book were also featured in that documentary. RANA EL KALIOUBY: Having grown up in the Middle East, I feel that humanity has bigger problems than AI, so I’m not concerned.

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Evidence of racial and gender bias has been detected in certain machine learning algorithms, and concerns about how AI-powered technologies such as facial recognition will impact privacy seem well-founded. Warnings that robots will soon be weaponized, or that truly intelligent (or superintelligent) machines might someday represent an existential threat to humanity, are regularly reported in the media. A number of very prominent public figures—none of whom are actual AI experts—have weighed in. Elon Musk has used especially extreme rhetoric, declaring that AI research is “summoning the demon” and that “AI is more dangerous than nuclear weapons.” Even less volatile individuals, including Henry Kissinger and the late Stephen Hawking, have issued dire warnings. The purpose of this book is to illuminate the field of artificial intelligence—as well as the opportunities and risks associated with it—by having a series of deep, wide-ranging conversations with some of the world’s most prominent AI research scientists and entrepreneurs.

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A much more futuristic and speculative danger is the so-called “AI alignment problem.” This is the concern that a truly intelligent, or perhaps superintelligent, machine might escape our control, or make decisions that might have adverse consequences for humanity. This is the fear that elicits seemingly over-the-top statements from people like Elon Musk. Nearly everyone I spoke to weighed in on this issue. To ensure that I gave this concern adequate and balanced coverage, I spoke with Nick Bostrom of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. Bostrom is the author of the bestselling book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, which makes a careful argument regarding the potential risks associated with machines that might be far smarter than any human being.

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future
by Levi Tillemann
Published 20 Jan 2015

In California—a state whose entire population is smaller than commonly accepted rounding errors for China’s citizenry—a clutch of indefatigable policy activists and techies have spent two decades grappling with Detroit, trying to force this revolution. And their efforts are finally paying off. In 2012, Tesla Motors’ Model S—conceived and built in California by the pugnacious visionary Elon Musk—was anointed “car of the year” by Motor Trend magazine. Consumer Reports called the “S” the best car it had ever driven. The all-American Chevy Volt was similarly acclaimed as Consumer Reports’ highest consumer satisfaction vehicle and repeatedly topped J. D. Power’s consumer appeal survey. On the other side of the world, in Japan, this revolution was sparked by a different sort of iconoclast: a nuclear engineer at the sprawling Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) named Takafumi Anegawa.

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All California needed was a “federal waiver” for its policies—which it had never before been denied.6 It soon became clear, however, that under the Bush administration, there was a first time for everything. Iron Man 1 But even in the face of federal opposition, the political and technological momentum behind the EV industry was again rising. In California this tide was personified by two iron men: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Elon Musk. Both of them seemed unlikely champions. A decade earlier, Schwarzenegger had driven the transformation of the HMMWV—the Hummer—from a military workhorse to a status symbol of 1990s consumerism. He was the “Hummer guy.” But in 2003, with the recall of California’s governor Gray Davis—during which much political blood was spilled—the Golden State’s megalithic action hero threw his hat into the gubernatorial race.

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Schwarzenegger made it clear that he would make the EPA’s life miserable if it did not approve California’s waiver. “We will sue!” he threatened. And what if they lost? “We sue again, and sue again, and sue again, until we get it. We’re going to win!” he swore.7 Iron Man 2 Just south of San Francisco, another iron man was quietly making his own declaration of intent. Elon Musk was not a bodybuilder, nor a movie star, nor a politician. He was a nerd. But in his own way, he was just as intense, just as driven, and just as much of a celebrity as California’s iron man governor. Musk was Edison meets Generation X. He had “big ideas,” he was brilliant, and he had swagger. This was the nerd made good.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs
by Tim Draper
Published 18 Dec 2017

Start a company around some idea you found in this book or came up with while reading this book, send your plan to www.draper.vc, and I will enter you into the Startup Hero competition I am planning for 2019. The winner will get $1 million in funding at a $5 million (or negotiated) valuation. I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. Don’t Do It! Stop! Take Elon Musk's advice. “Don’t do it!” Most people are not cut out for being an entrepreneur. They are content living out their lives by not making waves, not obsessing about rules, drawing inside the lines, and staying inside the box. But you bought this book, or at least you are reading it, so it is possible that you are different.

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Read on and you might be the one making the waves, making the rules, drawing the lines, and asking, “What box?” I took a Draper University group of students (who we call “heroes in training” or “HITS”—we dropped the “Super” or “S” part of the acronym for obvious reasons) to the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, to watch as Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and one of the most extraordinary and successful entrepreneurs in history, launched the Model S. The plant is enormous. It seems to go for miles in all directions. Robots as big as elephants move around connecting car parts, fastening attachments, and painting the body. The launch was to great fanfare.

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He went on to say that that was the best advice he could give to an aspiring entrepreneur, because if you accepted that advice, you really aren’t ready to be an entrepreneur and he would have just saved you from going through a brutal, extraordinary effort when your heart isn’t really in it. And if you didn’t, well then…send me a business plan. I can only imagine what Elon was going through that day. He was notably sweating, looked very thin, had circles under his eyes and was firing up for his proud moment. Entrepreneurship isn’t easy. But Elon Musk has brought us PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla, so all that work that he puts in has shown amazing results and generated real change. After all, he is on a mission. He has a swirling desire in his gut telling him that he must save our planet. Anyway, if you accept Elon’s advice, so be it. You can drop this book off with a friend, stick with the safe choices and remain an upstanding member of the status quo.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Published 15 Sep 2014

But perhaps White spent a little too much time worrying about the competition: while he was busy creating billboards, Informix imploded in a massive accounting scandal and White soon found himself in federal prison for securities fraud. If you can’t beat a rival, it may be better to merge. I started Confinity with my co-founder Max Levchin in 1998. When we released the PayPal product in late 1999, Elon Musk’s X.com was right on our heels: our companies’ offices were four blocks apart on University Avenue in Palo Alto, and X’s product mirrored ours feature-for-feature. By late 1999, we were in all-out war. Many of us at PayPal logged 100-hour workweeks. No doubt that was counterproductive, but the focus wasn’t on objective productivity; the focus was defeating X.com.

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Perhaps these guys are being strategically humble. However, the phenomenon of serial entrepreneurship would seem to call into question our tendency to explain success as the product of chance. Hundreds of people have started multiple multimillion-dollar businesses. A few, like Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and Elon Musk, have created several multibillion-dollar companies. If success were mostly a matter of luck, these kinds of serial entrepreneurs probably wouldn’t exist. In January 2013, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square, tweeted to his 2 million followers: “Success is never accidental.” Most of the replies were unambiguously negative.

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A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside. BEYOND PROFESSIONALISM The first team that I built has become known in Silicon Valley as the “PayPal Mafia” because so many of my former colleagues have gone on to help each other start and invest in successful tech companies. We sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Since then, Elon Musk has founded SpaceX and co-founded Tesla Motors; Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn; Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim together founded YouTube; Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons founded Yelp; David Sacks co-founded Yammer; and I co-founded Palantir. Today all seven of those companies are worth more than $1 billion each.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions
by Temple Grandin, Ph.d.
Published 11 Oct 2022

Reddit, May 3, 2013. https://www.reddit.com/r/IndustrialDesign/comments/1dmuoa/mechanical_engineering_vs_industrial_design/. Van Noorden, R. “Interdisciplinary Research by the Numbers.” Nature 525 (2015): 306–7. Vance, A. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. New York: Ecco, 2015. Vazquez, C. M. “Technology Boot Camp Aims to Upgrade Okinawa-Based Marines’ Problem-Solving Skills.” Stars and Stripes, March 26, 2019. Wattles, J. “She Turns Elon Musk’s Bold Space Ideas into a Business.” CNN Business, March 10, 2019. Westervelt, R. G., et al. “Physiological Stress Measurement during Slaughter of Calves and Lambs.” Journal of Animal Science 42 (1976): 831–37.

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In the show, Sheldon’s spectrumlike qualities are played for laughs, but that’s not usually how it goes. Math geeks are often bullied or shunned. It’s only when the geeks become brilliant coders, mathematicians, entrepreneurs, and rocket scientists that we appreciate the way they see the world. Elon Musk was so badly bullied in school, he needed to have surgery after a group of bullies threw him down a flight of stairs. He also taught himself coding, and at age twelve sold his first video game for $500. According to his biographer Ashlee Vance, Musk ran out of books to read at school and the local library.

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When Katherine Johnson calculated orbital paths, I imagine she saw multidimensional patterns in her brilliant mind. What is the profit in holding back any student with clear aptitude beyond their grade level? What if we routinely let students who love math double down by increasing their math courses or taking classes at local colleges? Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk all dropped out of college or graduate programs. They were eager to test and apply their advanced skills in the marketplace, heading straight for Silicon Valley. But in Jobs’s case, at least, there was also a desire to skirt required courses in which he had no interest. I would wager that the curriculum on offer just wasn’t challenging enough for any of them.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism
by Calum Chace
Published 17 Jul 2016

+Department+of+Transportation+Releases+Policy+on+Automated+Vehicle+Development [clxxxiv] http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/autos-driverless/ [clxxxv] http://www.wired.com/2015/04/delphi-autonomous-car-cross-country/ [clxxxvi] http://recode.net/2015/03/17/google-self-driving-car-chief-wants-tech-on-the-market-within-five-years/ [clxxxvii] http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/22/a-new-system-lets-self-driving-cars-learn-streets-on-the-fly/ [clxxxviii] http://cleantechnica.com/2015/10/12/autonomous-buses-being-tested-in-greek-city-of-trikala/ [clxxxix] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-16/google-said-to-make-driverless-cars-an-alphabet-company-in-2016 [cxc] http://electrek.co/2015/12/21/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-drops-prediction-full-autonomous-driving-from-3-years-to-2/ [cxci] http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/10/elon-musk-youll-be-able-to-summon-your-tesla-from-anywhere-in-2018/ [cxcii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/01/11/elon-musk-says-teslas-autopilot-is-already-probably-better-than-human-drivers/ [cxciii] http://electrek.co/2016/04/24/tesla-autopilot-probability-accident/ [cxciv] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35280632 [cxcv] http://www.zdnet.com/article/ford-self-driving-cars-are-five-years-away-from-changing-the-world/ [cxcvi] http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/autos-driverless/ [cxcvii] http://www.wired.com/2015/12/californias-new-self-driving-car-rules-are-great-for-texas/ [cxcviii] http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/autos-driverless/ [cxcix] It has been suggested that electric cars should make noises so that people don’t step off the pavement in front of them.

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Because of these quasi-religious overtones, the singularity was frequently satirised as “rapture for nerds”, and many people felt awkward about using the term. The publication in 2014 of Nick Bostrom's seminal book “Superintelligence” was a watershed moment, causing influential people like Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates to speak out about the enormous impact which AGI will have – for good or for ill. They introduced the idea of the singularity to a much wider audience, and made it harder for people to retain a blinkered optimism about the impact of AGI. For time-starved journalists, “good news is no news” and “if it bleeds it leads”, so the comments of Hawking and the others were widely mis-represented as pure doom-saying, and almost every article about AI carried a picture of the Terminator.

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Suffice to say, we should make strenuous efforts to ensure that if and when we do create the first machines which are destined become superintelligences, we experience a positive outcome rather than a negative one. Anders Sandberg of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute summarised it well by saying that we should aim to become the mitochondria of superintelligence rather than its boot loader. He was referring to Elon Musk’s metaphor for how, if we are unwise and / or unfortunate, we could create the thing which destroys us, and saying that we should aim instead for the fate of the prokaryotic cell which was absorbed by another, larger cell and became an essential component of a new, combined, and more complex entity, the first eukaryotic cell.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

They believe that machines can “learn” in a way comparable to human learning, that consciousness is a relatively insignificant aspect of humanity, emergent from matter, and that imagination of true novelties is a delusion in a hermetic world of logic. They hold that human beings have no more to discover and may as well retire on a guaranteed pension, while Larry Page and Sergey Brin fly off with Elon Musk and live forever in galactic walled gardens on their own private planets in a winner-take-all cosmos. Your DeLorean says no. The walls can come down, and a world of many new dimensions can be ours to enrich and explore. Get in and ride. CHAPTER 1 Don’t Steal This Book “The economy has arrived at a point where it produces enough in principle for everyone. . . .

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The cloud computing and big data of companies such as Google, with its “Deep Mind” AI, can excel individual human brains in making key life decisions from marriage choices and medical care to the management of the private key for your bitcoin wallet and the use and storage of the passwords for your Macintosh drive. This self-learning software will also be capable of performing most of your jobs. The new digital world may not need you anymore. Don’t take offense. In all likelihood, you can retire on an income which we regard as satisfactory for you. Leading Silicon Valley employers, such as Larry Page, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, and Tim Cook, deem most human beings unemployable because they are intellectually inferior to AI algorithms. Did you know that Google AI defeated the world Go champion in five straight contests? You do not even know what “Go” is? Go is an Asian game of strategy that AI researchers have long regarded as an intellectual challenge far exceeding chess in subtlety, degrees of freedom, and complexity.

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While Darwin made man just another animal, a precariously risen ape, Google-Marxism sees men as inferior intellectually to the company’s own algorithmic machines. Life after Google makes the opposing case that what the hyperventilating haruspices Yuval Harari, Nick Bostrom, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Tim Urban, and Elon Musk see as a world-changing AI juggernaut is in fact an industrial regime at the end of its rope. The crisis of the current order in security, privacy, intellectual property, business strategy, and technology is fundamental and cannot be solved within the current computer and network architecture. Security is not a benefit or upgrade that can be supplied by adding new layers of passwords, pony-tailed “swat teams,” intrusion detection schemes, anti-virus patches, malware prophylactics, and software retro-fixes.

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut
by Nicholas Schmidle
Published 3 May 2021

“kind of ironic”: Email provided to author. 10: ANGEL’S WINGS “so smooth that it looks like someone drew it with a pen”: Luke Colby journal entry. “government-funded boondoggles”: “Statement from Andrew Beal,” Beal Aerospace Technologies, Inc., October 23, 2000. “high-paid assassin”: Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (New York: HarperCollins, 2015). nearly burned down an island … “took their lumps”: Vance, Elon Musk. dusty Soviet rocket manual: Vance, Elon Musk. “building a Ferrari for every launch”: Vance, Elon Musk. “Arrogance got more pilots in trouble”: Chuck Yeager and Leo Janos, Yeager (New York: Bantam Books, 1985). “Life and death is often quite random in nature”: Mark Stucky, “Forger News” email newsletter.

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Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). Conroy, Pat. The Great Santini (New York: Random House, 1976). Davenport, Christian. The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos (New York: Public Affairs, 2018). Dyson, Freeman. Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). Esposito, Joseph A. Dinner in Camelot: The Night America’s Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Kennedy White House (Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2018). Fernholz, Tim. Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2018). Glenn, John, and Nick Taylor. John Glenn: A Memoir (New York: Bantam Books, 1999).

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When Norman Mailer first embarked on his book about the Apollo program, he couldn’t make up his mind whether Apollo was “the noblest expression of the Twentieth Century or the quintessential statement of our fundamental insanity.” Branson was not the only one with such ambitions. He had rivals, like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, with his space company Blue Origin, and Tesla founder Elon Musk, with his company SpaceX. They were all building rockets to take people into space, and Branson was clear that he wanted to be “the first of the three entrepreneurs fighting to put people into space to get there.” Each had distinct visions for the journey. Virgin had pioneered a unique air-launch system—a mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, had been designed to carry SpaceShipTwo to roughly 45,000 feet so the rocket ship would not waste its energy slogging through the dense, lower atmosphere—while others used a more traditional ground-launch system.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence
by Calum Chace
Published 28 Jul 2015

Surviving AI is a first-class introduction to all of this. Brad Feld, co-founder Techstars The promises and perils of machine superintelligence are much debated nowadays. But between the complex and sometimes esoteric writings of AI theorists and academics like Nick Bostrom, and the popular-press prognostications of Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, there is something of a gap. Calum Chace’s Surviving AI bridges that gap perfectly. It provides a compact yet rigorous guide to all the major arguments and issues in the field. An excellent resource for those who are new to this topic. John Danaher, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) Calum Chace strikes a note of clarity and balance in the important and often divisive dialogue around the benefits and potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

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Perhaps they will never decide to revise their goals. But given their startling progress to date and the weakness of the a priori arguments that conscious machines cannot be created (which we will review in chapter 4), it seems unwise to bet too heavily on it. A lot of people were surprised when Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk said in 2014 that the future of artificial intelligence was something to be concerned about. Both men applauded the achievements of AI research, and the benefits it has delivered. They went on to ask what will happen if and when computers become smarter than people, and we find that we have created a super-intelligence.

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A few scientists, like Roger Penrose, think there is something ineffable about human thought which means it could not be recreated in silicon. This type of extreme scepticism about the AGI field is rare. So the debate today is not so much about whether we can create an AGI, but when. It is this question that we will address next. CHAPTER 5 WHEN MIGHT AGI ARRIVE? 5.1 – Expert opinion Some people think it will be soon Elon Musk has made a name for himself as a Cassandra about AI, with remarks about working on AGI being akin to summoning the demon, and how humans might turn out to be just the boot loader (startup system) for digital superintelligence. Not only does he see AGI as an existential threat to humanity: he also thinks the danger will manifest soon.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It
by Daniel Knowles
Published 27 Mar 2023

General Motors has promised to make all of its new cars worldwide electric by 2035. So too have a host of other car manufacturers, from Jaguar Land Rover to Volvo. And it is obviously not just the old car companies. There have been few hotter stocks in recent years than Tesla, the electric car company founded by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. In recent years the share price of Tesla has traded at roughly one hundred times its profits. The company, which as of 2021 makes just 930,000 vehicles a year, is valued more than the world’s nine biggest car companies put together. That means that investors are expecting the firm to grow exponentially.

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Until we reimagine how we actually should live, the problems that having so many cars create will not be going away, however many of them are electrically powered. And there is a bigger problem with electric cars. Or rather, with the idea more generally that technology will get us out of the environmental disaster that is mass car ownership without people driving any less. People like Elon Musk do not limit themselves to wanting to replace internal combustion engines with electric motors. If they did, that would be rather admirable. The trouble is, they go further. People like Musk argue that we can do away with things like public transport altogether. They posit a future where every human has not only an electric car but also a self-driving one, complete with its own home-entertainment system, a sort of perfect robot taxi, ready to take you anywhere automatically at the touch of a smartphone.

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They are very real bits of technology that do, on the important measure of carbon emissions at least, starkly improve the damage done by cars to the environment. But much else is. Chief among them is the idea of autonomous, “self-driving” cars. According to their boosters, self-driving cars are about to change the planet. In December 2021, Elon Musk told a conference hosted by the Wall Street Journal that they are “absolutely coming,” and “will be one of the biggest transformations ever in human civilization.” The idea is that when all cars are self-driving, they will be able to far more efficiently use the road space available, hugging each other like train cars.

Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind
by Susan Schneider
Published 1 Oct 2019

Boston: Wiley-Blackwell. Seung, S. 2012. Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Shostak, S. 2009. Confessions of an Alien Hunter. New York: National Geographic. Solon, Olivia. 2017. “Elon Musk says humans must become cyborgs to stay relevant. Is he right?” The Guardian, February 15, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/15/elon-musk-cyborgs-robots-artificial-intelligence-is-he-right. Song, D., B. S. Robinson, R. E. Hampson, V. Z. Marmarelis, S. A. Deadwyler, and T. W. Berger. 2018. “Sparse Large-Scale Nonlinear Dynamical Modeling of Human Hippocampus for Memory Prostheses,” IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering 26(2): 272–280.

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In the long term, the tables may turn on humans, and the problem may not be what we could do to harm AIs, but what AI might do to harm us. Indeed, some suspect that synthetic intelligence will be the next phase in the evolution of intelligence on Earth. You and I, how we live and experience the world right now, are just an intermediate step to AI, a rung on the evolutionary ladder. For instance, Stephen Hawking, Nick Bostrom, Elon Musk, Max Tegmark, Bill Gates, and many others have raised “the control problem,” the problem of how humans can control their own AI creations, if the AIs outsmart us.2 Suppose we create an AI that has human-level intelligence. With self-improvement algorithms, and with rapid computations, it could quickly discover ways to become vastly smarter than us, becoming a superintelligence—that is, an AI that outthinks us in every domain.

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After all, if merging with AI leads to superintelligence and radical longevity, isn’t it better than the alternative—the inevitable degeneration of the brain and body? The idea that humans should merge with AI is very much in the air these days, being offered both as a means for humans to avoid being outmoded by AI in the workforce, and as a path to superintelligence and immortality. For instance, Elon Musk recently commented that humans can escape being outmoded by AI by “having some sort of merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence.”4 To this end, he’s founded a new company, Neuralink. One of its first aims is to develop “neural lace,” an injectable mesh that connects the brain directly to computers.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane
by Brett King
Published 5 May 2016

As a result, the need to have a car designed around the act of driving will probably be trumped by the need to design the “carriage” space and how you utilise it when you are being driven. Despite the suggestion of self-driving cars being considered fantastical by some, we may actually be much closer to that reality than many anticipate. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, believes we are much closer to that future. “We’re going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think [Tesla] will have complete autonomy in approximately two years.” Elon Musk, from an interview with Fortune magazine, 21st December 2015 Google’s self-driving cars have now accumulated close to 2 million driving miles (autonomous and manual driving combined) without causing a single incident, accident or fatality.1 A Google self-driving car has been pulled over by police, although it somehow avoided getting a ticket.2 An average American driver is likely to have an accident every ten years or so, or about once in every 165,000 miles.3 So Google is already more than ten times safer than the average human driver on a purely statistical basis.

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Now for the other—more controversial—reason why robots need emotions; so they won’t kill us all. This is the concept behind some of the most innovative artificial general intelligence minds today. We need to ensure that robots like us and have empathy for mankind. Asimov’s Three Laws are not sufficient enough to protect us from the unknowable future of artificial intelligence. Some, like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, believe we need to build in very basic motivations as the foundation to all future AI, one that enforces a basic love of humans and our planet(s). The problem, of course, is that any safeguards we are able to implement will always be able to be circumvented by any intelligence greater than our own.

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Artificial general intelligence, on the other hand, can be built from the ground up to simply follow a set of intrinsic motivations that are benevolent, stable and self-reinforcing. We can build constraints into AIs that we may not have with IA. Indeed, you could argue that the warnings of Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk about the development of full AI not benefitting humanity in the longer term are because they are inputting typical human motivations like greed, selfishness and ambivalence onto AI. ____________ 1 Rock and Ice 2 “The Double Amputee Who Designs Better Limbs,” NPR Radio, aired 10 August 2011. 3 Hugh Herr interview on Who Says I Can’t?

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence
by Jacob Turner
Published 29 Oct 2018

We will return to this feature in Chapter 4. 15“Homepage”, Neuralink Website, https://​www.​neuralink.​com/​, accessed 1 June 2018; Chantal Da Silva, “Elon Musk Startup ‘to Spend £100m’ Linking Human Brains to Computers”, The Independent, 29 August 2017, http://​www.​independent.​co.​uk/​news/​world/​americas/​elon-musk-neuralink-brain-computer-startup-a7916891.​html, accessed 1 June 2018. For commentary on Neuralink, see Tim Urban’s provocative blog post “Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future”, Wait But Why, 20 April 2017, https://​waitbutwhy.​com/​2017/​04/​neuralink.​html, accessed 1 June 2018. 16Tim Cross, “The Novelist Who Inspired Elon Musk”, 1843 Magazine, 31 March 2017, https://​www.​1843magazine.​com/​culture/​the-daily/​the-novelist-who-inspired-elon-musk, accessed 1 June 2018. 17Robert M.

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Nonetheless, we think these labels provide a helpful summary of current attitudes. 119Ray Kurzweil, “Don’t Fear Artificial Intelligence”, Time, 19 December 2014, http://​time.​com/​3641921/​dont-fear-artificial-intelligence/​, accessed 1 June 2018. 120Alan Winfield, “Artificial Intelligence Will Not Turn into a Frankenstein’s Monster”, The Guardian, 10 August 2014, https://​www.​theguardian.​com/​technology/​2014/​aug/​10/​artificial-intelligence-will-not-become-a-frankensteins-monster-ian-winfield, accessed 1 June 2018. 121Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 124–125. 122Elon Musk, as quoted in S. Gibbs, “Elon Musk: Artificial Intelligence Is Our Biggest Existential Threat”, The Guardian, 27 October 2014, https://​www.​theguardian.​com/​technology/​2014/​oct/​27/​elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-ai-biggest-existential-threat, accessed 1 June 2018. 123“Open Letter”, Future of Life Institute, https://​futureoflife.​org/​ai-open-letter/​, accessed 1 June 2018. 124Alex Hern, “Stephen Hawking: AI Will Be ‘Either Best or Worst Thing’ for Humanity”, The Guardian, 19 October 2016, https://​www.​theguardian.​com/​science/​2016/​oct/​19/​stephen-hawking-ai-best-or-worst-thing-for-humanity-cambridge, accessed 1 June 2018. 125See The Locomotives on Highways Act 1861, The Locomotive Act 1865 and the Highways and Locomotives (Amendment) Act 1878 (all UK legislation). 126See, for example, Steven E.

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For discussion, see Erin Evans, “Constitutional Inclusion of Animal Rights in Germany and Switzerland: How Did Animal Protection Become an Issue of National Importance?”, Society and Animals, Vol. 18 (2010), 231–250. 113Aatif Sulleyman, “Elon Musk: Humans Must Become Cyborgs to Avoid AI Domination”, Independent, 15 February 2017, http://​www.​independent.​co.​uk/​life-style/​gadgets-and-tech/​news/​elon-musk-humans-cyborgs-ai-domination-robots-artificial-intelligence-ex-machina-a7581036.​html, accessed 1 June 2018. 114Website of Neuralink, https://​www.​neuralink.​com/​, accessed 1 June 2018. It is based on a concept first invented by science fiction writer Iain M.

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future
by Jeff Booth
Published 14 Jan 2020

Diego Ardila et al., “End-to-End Lung Cancer Screening with Three-Dimensional Deep Learning on Low-Dose Chest Computed Tomography,” Nature Medicine, 2019, pages 954–961. doi.org/10.1038/s41591-019-0447-x. 56. “‘Whoever Leads in AI Will Rule the World,’” RT.com, September 1, 2017. rt.com/news/401731-ai-rule-world-putin. 57. Lord Acton, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887. 58. Elon Musk, as quoted by Graham Rapier, “‘If You Can’t Beat Them Join Them,’” Business Insider, September 3, 2019. businessinsider.com/elon-musk-humans-must-become-cyborgs-to-compete-with-ai-2019-8. 59. Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary, “The Need to Belong,” Psychological Bulletin, May 1995, pages 497–529. dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497. 60. Muzafer Sherif, Group Conflict and Co-operation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, 1966). 61.

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As a result, customers couldn’t easily discover the products they needed. Meanwhile, suppliers had great information, but they didn’t yet have the tools to adjust their offerings to account for it. We were partway to building the platform we envisioned, but completing it would take a lot more money than anticipated. Terrifyingly, there was no way to turn back. Elon Musk’s famous analysis—“Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into an abyss”—comes to mind when I think back on those months. The pressure at that point in the journey was horrendous. You lose believers. Investors, suppliers, and members of your team find their firmest convictions pushed to the limit.

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Having personally spent time in Redmond at the Microsoft HoloLens lab, and walking around on a virtual Mars that won NASA’s software of the year award, I can tell you that travelling to Mars via virtual reality is an experience that is hard to put into words. The software allows collaboration and interaction through virtual avatars. I was sitting about ten feet away at the Code Conference in 2016 when Elon Musk famously discussed the probability of us all living in a simulation. He explained his thesis, which was first introduced by Nick Bostrom, philosopher and author of the book Superintelligence, by using virtual reality/augmented reality as an example. He went on to argue that fidelity in virtual reality is already nearing fidelity of the real world (it feels real) and continuing to advance at a remarkable pace.

Beyond: Our Future in Space
by Chris Impey
Published 12 Apr 2015

Quoted in “The New Space Race: Complicating the Rush to the Stars” by D. Bennett for the Tufts Observer, online at http://tuftsobserver.org/2013/11/the-new-space-race-complicating-the-rush-to-the-stars/. 19. “At Home with Elon Musk: The (Soon-to-Be) Bachelor Billionaire” by H. Elliott in Forbes Life, online at http://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahelliott/2012/03/26/at-home-with-elon-musk-the-soon-to-be-bachelor-billionaire/. 20. The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from Their Founding Entrepreneurs by D. Kidder 2013. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. 21. See The Economist, online at http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21603238-bill-stone-cave-explorer-who-has-discovered-new-things-about-earth-now-he. 22.

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He would empathize with what Robert Goddard said after the New York Times had declared his goals unachievable: “Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once achieved, it becomes commonplace.”16 In humanity’s future, Diamandis foresees “nine billion human brains working together to a ‘meta-intelligence,’ where you can know the thoughts, feelings, and knowledge of anyone.”17 The Transport Guru Elon Musk wants to die on Mars. Like Peter Diamandis, he’s sure that our future is in space and that we must become an interplanetary species. He was influenced by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, but his vision has a darker, dystopian slant, since it’s also a hedge against threats to our survival: “An asteroid or a super volcano could destroy us, and we face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, catastrophic global warming or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.

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In late 2013, his net worth dropped by $1.3 billion after reports of weak earnings by Tesla and SolarCity, and he separated from his second wife. Figure 21. The Falcon 9 rocket is designed by Space X and built in California. Its two-stage rocket can carry 15 tons to low Earth orbit and 5 tons to geostationary transfer orbit. Space X was founded by Elon Musk, the South Africa–born inventor and investor who made his fortune as the founder of PayPal. Musk has also been an innovator in terrestrial travel with his car company Tesla Motors. We see in this progression of space entrepreneurs the march toward youth: Rutan is in his early seventies, Branson in his early sixties, Diamandis in his early fifties, and Musk in his early forties.

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future
by Luke Dormehl
Published 10 Aug 2016

Billions Fewer than We Thought’, Guardian, 28 February 2012: theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/feb/28/how-many-neurons-human-brain 10 Stoller-Conrad, Jessica, ‘Controlling a Robotic Arm with a Patient’s Intentions’, Caltech, 21 May 2015: caltech.edu/news/controlling-robotic-arm-patients-intentions-46786 11 Kever, Jeannie, ‘Researchers Build Brain-Machine Interface to Control Prosthetic Hand’, University of Houston, 31 March 2015: uh.edu/news-events/stories/2015/March/0331BionicHand.php 12 Kurzweil, Ray, ‘The Law of Accelerating Returns’, 7 March 2001: kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns 13 Linden, David, ‘The Singularity Is Far: A Neuroscientist’s View’, BoingBoing, 14 July 2011: http://boingboing.net/2011/07/14/far.html 14 http://2045.com/press/ 15 Hayworth, Ken, ‘Killed by Bad Philosophy’, Brain Preservation Foundation, January 2010: brainpreservation.org/content-2/killed-bad-philosophy/ Chapter 8: The Future (Risks) of Thinking Machines 1 Cook, James, ‘Elon Musk: Robots Could Start Killing Us All Within 5 Years’, Business Insider, 17 November 2014: uk.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-will-be-here-within-five-years-2014–11 2 Hern, Alex, ‘Elon Musk Says He Invested in DeepMind Over “Terminator” Fears’, Guardian, 18 June 2014: theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/18/elon-musk-deepmind-ai-tesla-motors 3 Hawking, Stephen et al., ‘Stephen Hawking: “Transcendence Looks at the Implications of Artificial Intelligence … ”’, Independent, 1 May 2014: independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-but-are-we-taking-9313474.html 4 Hill, Doug, ‘The Eccentric Genius Whose Time May Have Finally Come (Again)’, Atlantic, 11 June 2014: theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/norbert-wiener-the-eccentric-genius-whose-time-may-have-finally-come-again/372607/ 5 Good, I.

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Zuckerberg’s ‘personal challenge’ looked to be the first time he had created a New Year’s resolution that would be unavailable to the rest of us. After all, by likening his plan to Iron Man’s AI butler J.A.R.V.I.S., it was a real-life billionaire referencing the creation of fictitious billionaire Tony Stark. It was a bit like Elon Musk announcing that he planned to use his fortune to build a fully working version of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. In fact, over the past five years, functional, AI-driven chatterbots have increasingly become part of our daily lives. Most famous of these is probably Siri, the Apple-owned AI assistant which first shipped with the iPhone 4s in late 2011.

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At present, an average of 43,000 people die in the United States each year due to traffic collisions. That’s a higher figure than those killed by firearms (31,940), sexually transmitted diseases (20,000), drug abuse (17,000) and other leading causes of death. Advances in AI and automation will certainly help to cut down on these deaths. Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has argued that, once we reach the point where self-driving cars are widespread, it would be unethical to continue letting humans drive vehicles. ‘It’s too dangerous. You can’t have a person driving a two-tonne death machine,’ he said during an appearance at an annual developers conference for Nvidia, a Silicon Valley company which specialises in computer vision.

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future
by Andrew Yang
Published 2 Apr 2018

Barack Obama, October 2016: Scott Dadich, “Barack Obama, Neural Nets, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of the World,” Wired, November 2016. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, January 2017: Charlie Rose, interview with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, Columbia University, January 2017. Elon Musk, February, 2017: Chris Weller, “Elon Musk Doubles Down on Universal Basic Income: ‘It’s Going to Be Necessary,’” Business Insider, February 13, 2017. Mark Zuckerberg, May 2017: Mark Zuckerberg, commencement speech, Harvard University, May 2017. … adopting it would permanently grow the economy by 12.56 to 13.10 percent…: Michalis Nikiforos, Marshall Steinbaum, and Gennaro Zezza, “Modeling the Macroeconomic Effects of a Universal Basic Income,” Roosevelt Institute, August 29, 2017

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The family that owns Purdue Pharma… is now the 16th richest family in the country…: Alex Morrell, “The OxyContin Clan: The $14 Billion Newcomer to Forbes 2015 List of Richest U.S. Families,” Forbes, July 1, 2015. The big banks eventually settled with the Department of Justice for billions of dollars…: Kate Cox, “How Corporations Got the Same Rights as People (but Don’t Ever Go to Jail),” Consumerist.com, September 12, 2014. Elon Musk in 2017 called for proactive regulation of AI…: Samuel Gibbs, “Elon Musk: Regulate AI to Combat ‘Existential Threat’ before It’s Too Late,” The Guardian, July 17, 2017. Tristan Harris… has written compellingly about how apps are designed to function like slot machines…: Tristan Harris, “How Technology Is Hijacking Your Mind—from a Magician and Google Design Ethicist,” Thrive Global, May 18, 2016.

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For example, in Nebraska one out of every 12 workers—63,000 workers—works in and supports the trucking industry. Truck drivers do not see it coming. Indeed, when Bloomberg’s Shift Commission in 2017 asked truck drivers about how concerned they were about their jobs being replaced by automation, they almost uniformly weren’t concerned at all. Let me assure you it’s coming. Elon Musk recently announced that Tesla will be offering a freight truck as of November 2017. Musk also proclaimed that by 2019, all new Teslas will be self-driving. “Your car will drop you off at work, and then it will pick other people up and make you money all day until it’s time to pick you up again,” Musk proclaimed.

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War
by Paul Scharre
Published 23 Apr 2018

“First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent,” Gates said. “That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that, though, the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern.” How much of a concern? Elon Musk has described the creation of human-level artificial intelligence as “summoning the demon.” Bill Gates has taken a more sober tone, but essentially agrees. “I am in the camp that is concerned about superintelligence,” he said. “I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.” Hawking, Gates, and Musk are not Luddites and they are not fools. Their concerns, however fanciful-sounding, are rooted in the concept of an “intelligence explosion.”

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On the Columbia accident, see National Aeronautics and Space Administration, “Columbia Accident Investigation Board, Volume 1,” August 2003, http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/archives/sts-107/investigation/CAIB_medres_full.pdf. 154 “never been encountered before”: Matt Burgess, “Elon Musk Confirms SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Explosion Was Caused by ‘Frozen Oxygen,’ ” WIRED, November 8, 2016, http://www.wired.co.uk/article/elon-musk-universal-basic-income-falcon-9-explosion. “Musk: SpaceX Explosion Toughest Puzzle We’ve Ever Had to Solve,” CNBC, video accessed June 7, 2017, http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000565513. 154 Fukushima Daiichi: Phillip Y.

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See also James Barrat, Our Final Invention (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2013). 232 “development of full artificial intelligence”: Rory Cellan-Jones, “Stephen Hawking Warns Artificial Intelligence Could End Mankind,” BBC News, December 2, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540. 232 “First the machines will”: Peter Holley, “Bill Gates on Dangers of Artificial Intelligence: ‘I Don’t Understand Why Some People Are Not Concerned,’ ” Washington Post, January 29, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/01/28/bill-gates-on-dangers-of-artificial-intelligence-dont-understand-why-some-people-are-not-concerned/. 232 “summoning the demon”: Matt McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With Artificial Intelligence We Are Summoning the Demon,’ ” Washington Post, October 24, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/10/24/elon-musk-with-artificial-intelligence-we-are-summoning-the-demon/. 233 “I am in the camp that is concerned”: Holley, “Bill Gates on Dangers of Artificial Intelligence: ‘I Don’t Understand Why Some People Are Not Concerned.’ ” 233 “Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined”: Good, “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine.” 233 lift itself up by its own boostraps: “Intelligence Explosion FAQ,” Machine Intelligence Research Institute, accessed June 15, 2017, https://intelligence.org/ie-faq/. 233 “AI FOOM”: Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, “The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI Foom Debate,” http://intelligence.org/files/AIFoomDebate.pdf. 233 “soft takeoff” scenario: Müller, Vincent C. and Bostrom, Nick, ‘Future progress in artificial intelligence: A Survey of Expert Opinion, in Vincent C.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
by Byron Reese
Published 23 Apr 2018

So, why do Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates fear artificial intelligence (AI) and express concern that it may be a threat to humanity’s survival in the near future? And yet, why do an equally illustrious group, including Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Ng, and Pedro Domingos, find this viewpoint so farfetched as to be hardly even worth a rebuttal? Zuckerberg goes so far as to call people who peddle doomsday scenarios “pretty irresponsible,” while Andrew Ng, one of the greatest minds in AI alive today, says that such concerns are like worrying about “overpopulation on Mars.” After Elon Musk was quoted as saying “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization,” Pedro Domingos, a leading AI researcher and author, tweeted, “One word: Sigh.”

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One can easily see in the public comments of those in the tech industry a wide range of views on what an AGI would mean to the human species. For instance, Elon Musk tweeted, “Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable.” On another occasion, he was even more macabre: “With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn’t work out.” Bill Gates threw his hat in the ring on the side of the concerned: “I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”

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Andrew Ng, one of the most respected AI experts on the planet, says, “There’s also a lot of hype, that AI will create evil robots with super-intelligence. That’s an unnecessary distraction.” Rodney Brooks directly answers some of the concerns above by saying that the generalizations about AI made by those who aren’t deep in the technology are “a little dangerous.” He then goes on to add, “And we’ve certainly seen that recently with Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, all saying AI is just taking off and it’s going to take over the world very quickly. And the thing that they share is none of them work in this technological field.” And finally, many in the industry are almost giddy with optimism about AI. Kevin Kelly is one of them.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World
by Aaron Hurst
Published 31 Aug 2013

It is a step-by-step guide to understanding how to make an impact as an investor, academic, employee, or simply as a voter. It does not belong to any one sector, and it transcends organizational structure. Electric Cars and the Diffusion of Innovations Theory Elon Musk is the man behind PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors. He has successfully built a number of companies, but more importantly, he has moved markets. Elon Musk had a different kind of vision from the start: to build a market for electric cars, beginning with luxury cars, and then expanding over time to reach a broader consumer base. This was a rather specific vision; that is, it wasn’t simply about building an amazing electric car, it was also about creating an environment in which it could be successful.

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Erik Hurst, Bob Epstein and Nicole Lederer, Ryan Gravel, Cathy Woolard, Tom Cousins, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, Craig Jelinek, Bernie Glassman, Juliet Ellis, Freelancers Union, Paul Rice, Charles Montgomery, Jacob Wood & William McNulty, Jennifer Pahlka, Melinda Gates, Jeffrey Stewart, Indra Nooyi, Ryan Howard, Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, Steve Ells, Ray Oldenburg, Vivek Kundra, Tony Hsieh, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk, John Tolva, Rob Spiro and Alon Salant, Yancey Strickler, Charles Adler, Perry Chen, Meg Garlinghouse, Mitchell Baker, Dr. Tom X. Lee, Elon Musk, Peter Koechley & Eli Pariser, David Payne and Michael Tavani, Michael Bloomberg, Rachel Kleinfeld, John Mackey, Michael Pollan, Brad Neuberg, Chris Anderson, David Edinger, Scotty Martin, Dr. Regina Benjamin, Frank Perez, Al Gore, Zack Exley and Judith Freeman, Ben Goldhirsh, Adam Grant, David Javerbaum, Dr.

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And as the dot-com sector regained its footing after the crash, we saw whole industries transformed, as well as the way most Americans communicated and engaged in society. So many of the pioneers in social entrepreneurship, social media, and sustainability are from Generation X and were in some way engaged with the dot-com boom. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger of Wikipedia, Max Levchin, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel of PayPal, and Chris Anderson of Wired and now 3DRobotics are just a few examples. The core leadership of the Purpose Economy today is from this often forgotten generation, who in many ways produced the architects and catalysts of the new economy. 4. Environmental, Economic & Political Turmoil The growing uncertainty in our society is moving people to find stability within themselves, and to identify the need, to develop empathy for those affected by turmoil.

Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side
by Simon McCarthy-Jones
Published 12 Apr 2021

Kurczewski, “Lamborghini Supercars Exist Because of a 10-Lira Tractor Clutch,” Car and Driver, November 16, 2018, www.caranddriver.com/features/a25169632/lamborghini-supercars-exist-because-of-a-tractor/?. 50. T. Kim, “Warren Buffett Responds to Elon Musk’s Criticism: ‘I Don’t Think He’d Want to Take Us On in Candy,’” CNBC, May 5, 2018, www.cnbc.com/2018/05/05/warren-buffett-responds-to-elon-musks-criticism-i-dont-think-hed-want-to-take-us-on-in-candy.html; R. Browne, “Moats and Candy: Here’s What Elon Musk and Warren Buffett Are Clashing Over,” CNBC, May 7, 2018, www.cnbc.com/2018/05/07/moats-and-candy-elon-musk-and-warren-buffet-clash.html. 51. A. Crippen, “CNBC Transcript: Warren Buffett’s $200B Berkshire Blunder and the Valuable Lesson He Learned,” CNBC, October 18, 2010, www.cnbc.com/id/39724884. 52.

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Crippen, “CNBC Transcript: Warren Buffett’s $200B Berkshire Blunder and the Valuable Lesson He Learned,” CNBC, October 18, 2010, www.cnbc.com/id/39724884. 52. D. Kreps, “Hear Elon Musk’s Surprise Rap Song ‘RIP Harambe,’” Rolling Stone, March 31, 2019, www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/elon-musk-rap-song-rip-harambe-815813/. 53. J. Carpenter and M. Rudisill, “Fairness, Escalation, Deference and Spite: Strategies Used in Labor-Management Bargaining Experiments with Outside Options,” Labour Economics 10, no. 4 (2003): 427–442. 54. G. Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Fischer, 1897), bk. 3, chap. 4. 55. J. A. Aimone, B. Luigi, and T. Stratmann, “Altruistic Punishment in Elections,” working paper no. 4945, Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute (CESifo), August 2014, www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/102157/1/cesifo_wp4945.pdf. 56.

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As a result, Buffett now advises, “Whether you cut off your nose to spite your face or whatever, if you get in a lousy business, get out of it.”51 Some successful businesspeople can resist the whisperings of spite. Let’s take another example involving Buffett. He coined the metaphor of a moat to describe how big companies had competitive advantages over start-ups. Elon Musk, another of this planet’s wealthiest people, and soon to be Mars’s wealthiest, did not agree. He felt that new technology could make moats redundant. And he said so, calling the concept “lame.” To which Buffett replied, “Elon may turn things upside down in some areas,” but “I don’t think he’d want to take us on in candy.”

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass
by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri
Published 6 May 2019

Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 18–19. [back] 11. See Frederick Daso, “Bill Gates and Elon Musk Are Worried for Automation—But This Robotics Company Founder Embraces It,” Forbes, December 18, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickdaso/2017/12/18/bill-gates-elon-musk-are-worried-about-automation-but-this-robotics-company-founder-embraces-it/; Jasper Hamill, “Elon Musk’s Fears of AI Destroying Humanity Are ‘Speciesist’, Said Google Boss,” Metro (blog), May 2, 2018, https://metro.co.uk/2018/05/02/elon-musks-fears-artificial-intelligence-will-destroy-humanity-speciesist-according-google-founder-larry-page-7515207/; “Stephen Hawking: ‘I fear AI may replace humans altogether’ The theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author talks Donald Trump, tech monopolies and humanity’s future,” Wired, November 28, 2017, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/stephen-hawking-interview-alien-life-climate-change-donald-trump.

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Economy to the Next Economy (blog), November 10, 2015. https://wtfeconomy.com/common-ground-for-independent-workers-83f3fbcf548f#.ey89fvtnn. Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books, 1985. Daso, Frederick. “Bill Gates and Elon Musk Are Worried for Automation—But This Robotics Company Founder Embraces It.” Forbes, December 18, 2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickdaso/2017/12/18/bill-gates-elon-musk-are-worried-about-automation-but-this-robotics-company-founder-embraces-it/. Dayton, Eldorous. Walter Reuther: The Autocrat of the Bargaining Table. New York: Devin-Adain, 1958. Deng, J., W. Dong, R. Socher, L.

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Originally published in Monthly Labor Review, June 1978. https://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/flsa1938.htm. Hamari, Juho, Mimmi Sjöklint, and Antti Ukkonen. “The Sharing Economy: Why People Participate in Collaborative Consumption.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2015. Hamill, Jasper. “Elon Musk’s Fears of AI Destroying Humanity Are ‘Speciesist’, Said Google Boss.” Metro, May 2, 2018. https://metro.co.uk/2018/05/02/elon-musks-fears-artificial-intelligence-will-destroy-humanity-speciesist-according-google-founder-larry-page-7515207/. Hara, Kotaro, Abi Adams, Kristy Milland, Saiph Savage, Chris Callison-Burch, and Jeffrey Bigham. “A Data-Driven Analysis of Workers’ Earnings on Amazon Mechanical Turk.” 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Paper No. 449, 2018.

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence
by Ajay Agrawal , Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb
Published 16 Apr 2018

I do not think that there is very much that we can do that computers will not eventually [learn] to do. Elon Musk and Daniel Kahneman are both confident about AI’s potential and simultaneously worried about the implications of unleashing it on the world. Impatient about the pace at which government responds to technological advances, industry leaders have offered policy suggestions and, in some cases, have acted. Bill Gates advocated for a tax on robots that replace human labor. Sidestepping what would normally be government’s purview, the high-profile startup accelerator Y Combinator is running experiments on providing a basic income for everyone in society.2 Elon Musk organized a group of entrepreneurs and industry leaders to finance Open AI with $1 billion to ensure that no single private-sector company could monopolize the field.

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Rob Price, “Microsoft Is Deleting Its Chatbot’s Incredibly Racist Tweets,” Business Insider, March 24, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-deletes-racist-genocidal-tweets-from-ai-chatbot-tay-2016-3?r=UK&IR=T. Chapter 19 1. James Vincent, “Elon Musk Says We Need to Regulate AI Before It Becomes a Danger to Humanity,” The Verge, July 17, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/17/15980954/elon-musk-ai-regulation-existential-threat. 2. Chris Weller, “One of the Biggest VCs in Silicon Valley Is Launching an Experiment That Will Give 3000 People Free Money Until 2022,” Business Insider, September 21, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/y-combinator-basic-income-test-2017-9. 3.

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The CDL’s dominance in this domain resulted partly from our location in Toronto, where many of the core inventions—in a field called “machine learning”—that drove the recent interest in AI were seeded and nurtured. Experts who were previously based in the computer science department at the University of Toronto today head several of the world’s leading industrial AI teams, including those at Facebook, Apple, and Elon Musk’s Open AI. Being so close to so many applications of AI forced us to focus on how this technology affects business strategy. As we’ll explain, AI is a prediction technology, predictions are inputs to decision making, and economics provides a perfect framework for understanding the trade-offs underlying any decision.

The Simulation Hypothesis
by Rizwan Virk
Published 31 Mar 2019

If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality. —Elon Musk, Code Conference, 20163 One of the main reasons so many scientists, philosophers, and technologists have started to take the simulation hypothesis more seriously now, in the early 21st century, rather than in earlier eras of computing, is because of the sophistication and rapid advancement of video games and graphics technology. Speaking at the Code Conference in 2016, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, reflected on how far we had come with video game technology since the creation of Pong some 40 years ago.

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Psychiatrists like Carl Jung have probed the question of mental projection, where each of us is perceiving the world slightly differently based upon what is going on inside our minds. In this view, most of what we think of as being “out there”—the physical world—is actually “in here,” meaning in our heads, like a dream, there being no objective physical reality. More recently, Elon Musk, world-famous entrepreneur and founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, has put forth this idea as being very likely. In fact, he estimates the chances that we are in a simulation at a billion to one. His remarks have ignited serious debate. There are good reasons for Musk to put forth this argument at this point in time.

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For a game like Space Invaders or Breakout, this meant only moving left and right, but all the old games were built on taking input in the form of 18 possible joystick movements. The team showed that it was possible for an AI to “learn” to play arcade-style games. Given the response times available to AI algorithms, can we expect that AI will learn to play other video games, such as first- person shooters and fighting? Recently, Elon Musk funded OpenAI and announced that it had learned to play DOTA 2, an extremely popular fantasy-themed fighting game. Competitive video gaming, or eSports, is played by professionals and has become a popular spectator sport in the same way sports such as basketball, baseball and football developed in the last century.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

Georgia Wells, Jeff Horowitz, and Deepa Seetharaman, “Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show,” Wall Street Journal, September 14, 2021, www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-toxic-for-teen-girls-company-documents-show-11631620739. 79. Elon Musk (@elonmusk), “Gamestonk!! https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/” Twitter, January 26, 2021, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1354174279894642703; Dorothy Gambrell, “A Brief History of Elon Musk’s Recent Market-Moving Tweets,” Bloomberg, February 11, 2021, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-11/how-elon-musk-s-tweets-moved-gamestop-gme-bitcoin-dogecoin-and-other-stocks. 80. Matt Levine, “AMC Brings Out the Popcorn,” Bloomberg, June 2, 2021, www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-02/amc-brings-out-the-popcorn. 81. Matt Levine, “Elon Musk Picks the Money Now,” Bloomberg, February 8, 2021, www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-08/elon-musk-works-his-magic-on-dogecoin-and-bitcoin. 82.

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This appeal is what Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine calls the “boredom markets hypothesis.” There was a huge growth in retail investors in 2020, which Levine put down to the pandemic making life more boring at the same time that trading was made more fun thanks to “Robinhood Financial LLC’s gamified trading app, Elon Musk’s… whole… thing, and a pretty good bull market since March [2020].”63 Levine also said that retail investors “seem to particularly enjoy stocks that have gone down a lot.… A near-bankrupt, or actually bankrupt, company, one that is particularly beaten down and unloved in the pandemic, might feel like more of a fun gamble, and a compelling story arc of trial and redemption, than one that is doing fine.”64 The boredom market hypothesis, combined with r/wallstreetbets’ propulsive memes and Robinhood’s gateway for novice traders, explains GameStop’s meteoric rise and fall in early 2021, in which the share price went from a mere $20 on January 13 to a peak of almost $500 on January 28.

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Social media’s ability to focus and amplify attention means that indiscretions that once might have taken entire hours or days to be published or broadcast (or not, if deemed insufficiently newsworthy) can now race around the world in minutes—long before the subject can calm down enough to apologise. The same sped-up dynamics were at work in the GameStop short squeeze when Elon Musk tweeted “Gamestonk!!” on January 26, 2021, to over forty-two million followers, leading to an instant jump in the share price, which closed that day up 92 percent.79 Musk’s other tweets about Bitcoin, Etsy, and Dogecoin have all led to price increases. Even companies that were only nominally related to his tweets saw share price jumps, like Signal Advance, Inc.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated
by Gautam Baid
Published 1 Jun 2020

“No. 18 Naval Ravikant—Angel Philosopher,” The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish, February 27, 2017, audio, https://theknowledgeproject.libsyn.com/2017/02. 11. James Clear, “First Principles: Elon Musk on the Power of Thinking for Yourself,” The Mission, February 2, 2018, https://medium.com/the-mission/first-principles-elon-musk-on-the-power-of-thinking-for-yourself-8b0f275af361. 12. Elon Musk, “I Am Elon Musk, CEO/CTO of a Rocket Company, AMA!” Reddit, 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2rgsan/i_am_elon_musk_ceocto_of_a_rocket_company_ama/?st=jg8ec825&sh=4307fa36. 13. Richard Feynman, “Atoms in Motion,” California Institute of Technology, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_01.html. 3.

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These short-term costs, when applied the right way along an axis of time, offer an exponential payoff when applied over a long life (figure 1.1). FIGURE 1.1 This is compounding in action. This illustrates what I experienced in 2018, after many years of determined efforts amid repeated setbacks. Resilience is a superpower. Source: “5 Things I Learned from Elon Musk on Life, Business, and Investing,” Safal Niveshak (blog), September 16, 2015, https://www.safalniveshak.com/elon-musk-on-life-business-investing/. “Compound interest,” Albert Einstein reputedly said, “is the most powerful force in the universe.” So what happens when you apply such an incredible power to knowledge building? You become a learning machine.

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“Chuck’s 3 Legged Stool.” Investment Masters Class, August 8, 2018. https://mastersinvest.com/newblog/2018/8/3/chucks-3-legged-stool. Cialdini, Robert. Influence: Science and Practice. Essex, UK: Pearson, 2014. Clear, James. “First Principles: Elon Musk on the Power of Thinking for Yourself.” The Mission, February 2, 2018. https://medium.com/the-mission/first-principles-elon-musk-on-the-power-of-thinking-for-yourself-8b0f275af361. —— (@JamesClear). “Motion does not equal action.” Twitter, January 31, 2018. https://twitter.com/james_clear/status/958824949367615489?lang=en. Cogitator Capital. “Special Situation Investing.”

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis
by Scott Patterson
Published 5 Jun 2023

* * * As Nassim Taleb’s taxi turned down 1 Rocket Road, the expansive warehouse hove into view: SpaceX, Elon Musk’s Los Angeles rocket-development facility. It was late in the afternoon, July 24, 2009. Taleb checked his email. “Welcome to LA!” his literary agent and the organizer of the proceedings, John Brockman, had written: Here’s some specifics re: the agenda: FRIDAY NIGHT 6pm Cocktails—Mezzanine Level 7pm Dinner—Mezzanine Level—Studio 5 SATURDAY MORNING 7:30 Breakfast Mezzanine Level—Studio 4 8:30 Depart by bus to Space X (about 20–30 minutes) To accommodate Craig Venter who can only arrive at Space X in the afternoon, if possible, I will move Elon Musk’s talk and tour of the facility to 4pm, instead of during the lunch break. 7:30 Dinner—Spago 176 N Canon Dr Beverly Hills, CA 90210 With the blockbuster success of The Black Swan, Taleb had gained entry into one of the most elite intellectual salons in America, Brockman’s Edge Foundation, an informal collection of (mostly male) scientists and thinkers that included Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Danny Kahneman, and Murray Gell-Mann (discoverer of the quark) as well as tycoons such as Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and future disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

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At the SpaceX facility, Church gave a talk called “Dreams and Nightmares.” Attendees included venture capitalist Sean Parker, an original Facebook backer; Google’s Larry Page; behavioral economist Richard Thaler; Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog; someone from the White House; and a bunch of egghead scientists. Elon Musk ducked in from time to time to listen. Taleb introduced himself as a professor of risk engineering, which he said “doesn’t explain what I do.” Church, a tall, wizardly man with a heavy white beard, explained that, contrary to popular belief, geneticists still hadn’t mapped the entire human genome.

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As in L.A., Sornette continued to perform hair-raising exploits on his super cycles, now in Europe. And he also continued to hunt bubbles—his elusive Dragon Kings. In 2020, he believed he was witnessing the formation of one of the biggest bubbles of his bubble-hunting career: electric-car maker Tesla. Elon Musk had been a master of bubbles, becoming a billionaire in the early 2000s just as the dot-com bubble was bursting. His coup? Selling PayPal—Musk was the largest shareholder with about 12 percent of the stock—to eBay for $1.5 billion. With Tesla, he was riding what Sornette called the Green Energy Bubble (Musk was one of its principal creators, Sornette believed).

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World
by David Kerrigan
Published 18 Jun 2017

The most important reason is that, when used correctly, it is already significantly safer than a person driving by themselves and it would therefore be morally reprehensible to delay release simply for fear of bad press or some mercantile calculation of legal liability” Elon Musk, CEO Tesla, Master Plan, Part Deux [111] Founded by maverick entrepreneur Elon Musk, Tesla has built its reputation on all electric vehicles that challenged the established automakers and their reliance on gasoline. Although small by car manufacturer standards (25,000 cars produced in Q1, 2017 is a little over 10% of the volume Ford produces in a quarter), Tesla is growing fast.

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Tesla claims to have collected 1.3 billion miles of data covered by its vehicles - even when Autopilot isn’t switched on it operates in “shadow mode,” with sensors tracking real-world data to help train Tesla’s software. Master Plan Tesla’s CEO took the unusual step of publishing his plans for his company on his web site for everyone to see.[115] Rather than the standard corporate approach of not unveiling future plans, Elon Musk once again eschewed normal behaviour. His somewhat grandiosely titled “Tesla Master Plan Part Deux” was published in July 2016, ten years after his first Master Plan, which was largely achieved. Two of the four pillars of the plan relate to self-driving cars and Tesla’s plans to be a leader in this emerging space: ● Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning ● Enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it More generally, Musk reiterated his vision for the future: "All cars will be fully autonomous in the long term.

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Otto (now a division of Uber) "We want to get the technology to the point where it's safe to let the driver rest and sleep in his cabin and we can drive for him, exit to exit" Lior Ron, co-founder, Otto Google has long held the PR spotlight in developing driverless technology; however, with the emergence of Otto[255] and Elon Musk’s announcement of a Tesla Semi,[256] driverless trucks are coming to the forefront of the autonomous vehicle conversation. Heavily-funded start-up Peloton[257] is also active in this space. Otto was acquired by Uber for $680m in August 2016, just months after it was founded by alumni from some of Silicon Valley’s leading companies.

The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work
by Vishen Lakhiani
Published 14 Sep 2020

I was invited to visit SpaceX with a group of board members of the XPRIZE Foundation, a technological development nonprofit that funds innovations that benefit humanity. As a member of this group of global changemakers, I was granted behind-the-scenes access to many of the world’s leading tech innovation labs. When I walked into the massive industrial building that housed Elon Musk’s rockets I was immediately struck by the sheer grandiosity of how badasses like Elon think. Back then his companies SpaceX and Tesla were the two companies rated most desirable to work for among the Silicon Valley engineers. Their missions are literally out of this world, yet also quite possible to execute and achieve.

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People who join SpaceX and Tesla don’t expect Elon to know how to solve the problems the companies are confronting or what the timeframe might be. Remember that when you have such a grand mission, you don’t have to know the how. You start with the why and the what. You rally the troops. The point is to then figure out the how together. A compelling mission is incredibly powerful to attract these troops. Both Elon Musk and Richard Branson know how to attract talent through the power of a compelling mission. They also know how to keep their teams engaged by giving them inspiring work. Human beings are goal-driven creatures. We’re hardwired to hunt for the next meal. Or to spot the berries on the tree. And in an age where we get our meat and berries from the corner grocery store, we get bored if we aren’t using this goal-driven component of our brains.

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And according to writer-philosopher Tim Urban, we’ve actually become a new type of species: the Human Colossus. Meet the Human Colossus Tim Urban, who writes the Wait But Why blog, is a fascinating character. He doesn’t write regular blog posts. Instead, they run up to sixty thousand words. That’s 80 percent of the length of this book. This gets him some very special fans. Elon Musk approached Urban in 2017 to write a piece to explain the work of his latest mega-concept company, called Neuralink. It required Urban’s explanation expertise, because what the company aims to create is a seamless brain-to-computer connection. To explain Neuralink, Urban wrote a post called “Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future” (read the full post here: https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html), which takes readers back 3.5 million years and runs them through a timeline of man’s evolution.

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World
by Mo Gawdat
Published 29 Sep 2021

Google needed to beat Facebook, the US needed to beat China and Russia, start-ups needed to beat the big players, and law-enforcement authorities needed to beat the hackers and criminals. It was the gold rush all over again, only the gold this time was not to be dug up from the ground. It was being built and brought to life. ‘For years in the early twenty-first century, the world-famous engineer, businessman, entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist Elon Musk, the founder, CEO and chief engineer/designer of SpaceX, co-founder, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc., and co-founder of Neuralink, among other ventures (man, that’s a long title), spoke about the threat of AI, saying: “The percentage of intelligence that is not human is increasing and eventually we will represent a very small percentage of intelligence.

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I don’t know how anyone can claim to know something beyond a point of singularity. But they do it, anyway. As they do so, they omit the views of other, less optimistic experts, those who say there’s a much higher probability of a dystopian future. To make the scales a bit more balanced so that you can make up your own mind, let me share with you one such view. Elon Musk, who I mentioned above, predicts that AI could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. He also believes that we are ignoring the prospects of what could go wrong. He said: The biggest issue I see with the so-called AI experts is that they think they know more than they do and they think they’re smarter than they actually are.

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Knowledge would become native and all further updates in human knowledge would become part of you instantly. Now that’s a superpower I’d give my life to have and maybe I would need to. What I’ve just described – and I’m sure you’re getting used to this by now – is not science fiction. Neuralink Corporation, for example, is a company founded by Elon Musk. Neuralink is developing implantable brain–machine interfaces (BMIs), which are forms of direct communication pathways between an enhanced or wired brain and an external device. The company has also developed a surgical robot capable of inserting the implant’s electrodes at shallow depths into the brain.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

Amazon Prime is an amazing service, but Amazon abuses workers in its headquarters and warehouses. Customers love Uber, but Uber operates a toxic workplace and exploits its drivers. Tesla makes very sexy electric cars, but by many accounts, Elon Musk behaves abominably toward his employees and has earned a reputation for being less than forthcoming with customers. “I don’t believe anything Elon Musk or Tesla says,” Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, a disappointed Tesla owner, said in 2018. In the past few years I’ve come to the uncomfortable conclusion that, for various reasons mostly related to greed, the very people in Silicon Valley who talk so much about making the world a better place are actually making it worse—at least when it comes to the well-being of workers.

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“No one stopped them from running massive sociological and psychological experiments on their users,” Roger McNamee, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and early Facebook backer, wrote in Washington Monthly in the spring of 2018, in an article calling for greater regulation of Facebook and other online platforms. In fifth place on the Vanity Fair list was Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose factory workers complained to the Guardian in 2017 about stressful, dangerous working conditions, and overworked colleagues collapsing on the production floor. Also on the list were Uber founder Travis Kalanick and his successor as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, whose company exploits drivers so badly that they have repeatedly sued the company.

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The new oligarchs don’t seem to care very much about their community, nor do they show much regard for their workers, or for human beings in general. It’s almost as if, having imagined a world in which robots and artificial intelligence can do everything, they resent the fact that for now they still must put up with messy, inferior biological beings. Tesla’s forty-seven-year-old South African–born CEO Elon Musk has become a hero to many, who view him as a real-life version of Tony Stark from Iron Man. Yet so far Musk hasn’t proved to be very good at making cars or making money. After fourteen years in business, Tesla has lost billions of dollars, and in 2017 the company sold only one hundred thousand cars—half as many as Toyota sells in a week.

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives
by David Sumpter
Published 18 Jun 2018

Both Harm at Microsoft and Tomas Mikalov at Facebook saw a risk in giving neural networks fancy names and making big claims. The founder of the company Harm now works for seems to agree with him. In September 2017, Bill Gates told the Wall Street Journal the subject of AI is not something we need to panic about. He said he disagreed with Elon Musk about the urgency of the potential problems. So if we are currently mimicking a level of ‘intelligence’ around that of a tummy bug, why has Elon Musk declared AI such a big concern? Why is Stephen Hawking getting so worried about the predictive power of his speech software? What causes Max Tegmark and his buddies to sit in a row and declare, one after another, their belief that superintelligence is on its way?

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And finally, there have been some interesting developments in neural networks recently, but the question of whether we can create a general AI remains wide open. We can’t even get a computer to learn to play Ms Pac-Man properly.’ Everyone looks at me. ‘Oh, and Elon Musk is an idiot,’ I add. I hate myself. I hate the boring arsehole that I have become. This boring idiot who has read all the scientific papers, who has to spoil everything with details and caveats. I don’t even have that much against Elon Musk. He is just doing his job. I added that, so the conversation would return to a modicum of light-heartedness. I know that I have misjudged the situation. I am being pedantic and petty.

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At a meeting of the Future of Life Institute – a charitable organisation in Boston, Massachusetts, focused on dealing with future risks – in January 2017, theoretical physicist Max Tegmark hosted a panel debate about general artificial intelligence.1 The panel included nine of the most influential men in the field, including entrepreneur and Tesla CEO Elon Musk; the Google guru Ray Kurzweil; DeepMind’s founder Demis Hassabis and Nick Bostrom, the philosopher who has mapped our way to, what he calls, ‘superintelligence’. The panel members varied in their views as to whether human-level machine intelligence would come gradually or all of a sudden, or whether it will be good or bad for humanity.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

For the first time, life expectancy is actually declining in America, and what was once its rich industrial heartland has too often become a landscape of despair. For everyone’s sake, we must choose a different path. Loss of jobs and economic disruption are not inevitable. There is a profound failure of imagination and will in much of today’s economy. For every Elon Musk—who wants to reinvent the world’s energy infrastructure, build revolutionary new forms of transport, and settle humans on Mars—there are far too many companies that are simply using technology to cut costs and boost their stock price, enriching those able to invest in financial markets at the expense of an ever-growing group that may never be able to do so.

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The Internet itself was originally a government-funded project. So was the Interstate Highway System. Not to mention that the government funded the original computer and memory chip development that gave us Silicon Valley, the research behind Siri and self-driving cars, and actually provided much of the capital for building out Elon Musk’s bold ventures in electric vehicles, rooftop solar, and commercial space travel. But government as a platform means far more than R&D funding. Would our cities thrive without transportation, water, power, garbage collection, and all the other services we take for granted? Like an operating system providing services for applications, government provides functions that enable private sector activity.

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From 2001’s HAL to The Terminator’s Skynet, it’s a science fiction trope: artificial intelligence run amok, created to serve human goals but now pursuing purposes that are inimical to its former masters. Recently, a collection of scientific and Silicon Valley luminaries, including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, wrote an open letter recommending “expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial: our AI systems must do what we want them to do.” Groups such as the Future of Life Institute and OpenAI have been formed to study the existential risks of AI, and, as the OpenAI site puts it, “to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 25 Jun 2024

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 174 For a long but very accessible conceptual explainer of Neuralink’s goals for brain–computer interfaces and the working paper explaining this technology in more technical detail, see Tim Urban, “Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future (G-Rated Version),” Wait But Why, April 20, 2017, https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink-cleanversion.html; Elon Musk and Neuralink, “An Integrated Brain-Machine Interface Platform with Thousands of Channels,” Neuralink working paper, July 17, 2019, bioRxiv 703801, https://doi.org/10.1101/703801. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 175 John Markoff, “Elon Musk’s Neuralink Wants ‘Sewing Machine-Like’ Robots to Wire Brains to the Internet,” New York Times, July 16, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/technology/neuralink-elon-musk.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 176 To watch the monkey in action, see “Monkey MindPong,” Neuralink, YouTube video, April 8, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 177 Kelsey Ables, “Musk’s Neuralink Implants Brain Chip in its First Human Subject,” Washington Post, January 30, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/01/30/neuralink-musk-first-human-brain-chip; Neuralink, “Neuralink Clinical Trial,” Neuralink, accessed February 6, 2024, https://neuralink.com/pdfs/PRIME-Study-Brochure.pdf; Rachael Levy and Hyunjoo Jin, “Musk Expects Brain Chip Start-up Neuralink to Implant ‘First Case’ This Year,” Reuters, June 20, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-expects-brain-chip-start-up-neuralink-implant-first-case-this-year-2023-06-16; Rachael Levy and Marisa Taylor, “U.S. Regulators Rejected Elon Musk’s Bid to Test Brain Chips in Humans, Citing Safety Risks,” Reuters, March 2, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/neuralink-musk-fda; Mary Beth Griggs, “Elon Musk Claims Neuralink Is About ‘Six Months’ Away from First Human Trial,” The Verge, November 30, 2022, https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/30/23487307/neuralink-elon-musk-show-and-tell-2022. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 178 Andrew Tarantola, “DARPA Is Helping Six Groups Create Neural Interfaces for Our Brains,” Engadget, July 10, 2017, https://www.engadget.com/2017-07-10-darpa-taps-five-organizations-to-develop-neural-interface-tech.html.

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41 Alice Yan, “Chinese Robot Dentist Is First to Fit Implants in Patient’s Mouth Without Any Human Involvement,” South China Morning Post, September 21, 2017, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/2112197/chinese-robot-dentist-first-fit-implants-patients-mouth-without-any-human. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42 For Elon Musk’s presentation of Neuralink’s automated electrode-implantation technology, see “Neuralink: Elon Musk’s Entire Brain Chip Presentation in 14 Minutes (Supercut),” CNET, YouTube video, August 28, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLUWDLKAF1M. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43 Wallace P. Ritchie Jr., Robert S. Rhodes, and Thomas W. Biester, “Work Loads and Practice Patterns of General Surgeons in the United States, 1995–1997,” Annals of Surgery 230, no. 4 (October 1999): 533–43, https://doi.org/10.1097/00000658-199910000-00009.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal
Published 21 Feb 2017

In 2015, a team of scientists led by Oxford’s Molly Crockett: Author interview May 12, 2016, and Burning Man Journal, http://journal.burningman.org/2016/05/black-rock-city/survive-and-thrive/researchers-share-first-findings-on-burners-transformative-experiences. 8. all combine to create a temporary autonomous zone: Hakim Bey, “The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism,” http://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html, anti-copyright, 1985, 1991. 9. “I like going to Burning Man”: Will Oremus, “Google CEO Is Tired of Rivals, Laws, Wants to Start His Own Country,” Slate, May 15, 2013. 10. In 2007, Elon Musk did just that: Gregory Ferenstein, “Burning Man Founder Is Cool with Capitalism, and Silicon Valley Billionaires,” TechCrunch, September 3, 2013. 11. He also came up with the ideas: Sarah Buhr, “Elon Musk Is Right, Burning Man Is Silicon Valley,” TechCrunch, September 4, 2004; Ferenstein, “Burning Man Founder Is Cool with Capitalism, and Silicon Valley Billionaires.” 12. Zappos founder and CEO Tony Hsieh: David Hochman, “Playboy Interview: Tony Hsieh,” Playboy, April 2014. 13.

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When Tim Ferriss mentioned that nearly all of the billionaires he knows in Silicon Valley take psychedelics to help themselves solve complex problems, Burning Man is one of their preferred locations to step out and go big. “If you haven’t been [to Burning Man], you just don’t get Silicon Valley,”3 serial entrepreneur and longtime attendee Elon Musk noted in Re/Code. “You could take the craziest L.A. party and multiply it by a thousand, and it doesn’t even get fucking close.” Among certain circles, mention of “the playa” or “Black Rock City” gains you instant camaraderie with those who have shared that baptism by fire. Participation in successful Burning Man camps has morphed from countercultural street cred to career-building material.

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Three years later, the actual president,6 Barack Obama, joked about the event at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, saying: “Just recently, a young person came up to me and said she was sick of politicians standing in the way of her dreams—as if we were actually going to let Malia go to Burning Man this year. Was not going to happen. Bernie [Sanders] might have let her go. Not us.” If the President of the United States is moved to comment on the event, and Elon Musk is claiming it’s central to Silicon Valley culture, then perhaps there’s more going on than just a weeklong party. And that’s the second thing to explore in our assessment—why so many creative and talented people go so far out of their way to congregate there once a year. By simple elimination, it can’t just be the sex, drugs, or music.

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
by Kai-Fu Lee
Published 14 Sep 2018

UTOPIA, DYSTOPIA, AND THE REAL AI CRISIS Kurzweil predicts: Dom Galeon and Christianna Reedy, “Kurzweil Claims That the Singularity Will Happen by 2045,” Futurism, October 5, 2017, https://futurism.com/kurzweil-claims-that-the-singularity-will-happen-by-2045/. “the biggest risk we face”: James Titcomb, “AI Is the Biggest Risk We Face as a Civilisation, Elon Musk Says,” London Telegraph, July 17, 2017, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/07/17/ai-biggest-risk-face-civilisation-elon-musk-says/. “summoning the demon”: Greg Kumparak, “Elon Musk Compares Building Artificial Intelligence to ‘Summoning the Demon,’” TechCrunch, October 26, 2014, https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/26/elon-musk-compares-building-artificial-intelligence-to-summoning-the-demon/. median prediction of 2040: Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 19.

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Most customers had long forgotten that Meituan began as a group-buying site. They knew it for what it had become: a sprawling consumer empire covering noodles, movie tickets, and hotel bookings. Today, Meituan Dianping is valued at $30 billion, making it the fourth most valuable startup in the world, ahead of Airbnb and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. ENTREPRENEURS, ELECTRICITY, AND OIL Wang’s story is about more than just the copycat who made good. His transformation charts the evolution of China’s technology ecosystem, and that ecosystem’s greatest asset: its tenacious entrepreneurs. Those entrepreneurs are beating Silicon Valley juggernauts at their own game and have learned how to survive in the single most competitive startup environment in the world.

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It’s the approach of a perfectionist, one with a very low tolerance for risk to human lives or corporate reputation. It’s also a sign of how large a lead Google has on the competition due to its multiyear head start on research. Tesla has taken a more incremental approach in an attempt to make up ground. Elon Musk’s company has tacked on limited autonomous features to their cars as soon as they became available: autopilot for highways, autosteer for crash avoidance, and self-parking capabilities. It’s an approach that accelerates speed of deployment while also accepting a certain level of risk. The two approaches are powered by the same thing that powers AI: data.

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism
by John Elkington
Published 6 Apr 2020

CHAPTER 2 1.See the “Gradually, Then Suddenly” section of this chapter. 2.I have been very much influenced by Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, with Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest. New York: Diversion Books, 2014. 3.https://futurism.com/arnold-schwarzenegger-climate-change/ 4.Bethany McClean, “How Elon Musk Fooled Investors, Bilked Taxpayers, and Gambled Tesla to Save SolarCity,” Vanity Fair, August 25, 2019. See also: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/how-elon-musk-gambled-tesla-to-save-solarcity. 5.Tim O’Reilly, “Gradually, Then Suddenly,” O’Reilly Next: Economy Newsletter, republished in Exponential View, January 11, 2018. 6.A large continent, with fifty-four countries and vast economic, political, and cultural diversity, so we should be careful of generalizing. 7.John C.

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Well again the logic was simple: Companies like Ford made far greater profits on gas-guzzling SUVs than they did on more fuel-efficient compact models. So we saw a worsening industry and consumer lock-in to forms of automobility that appeared to guarantee future climate-induced societal collapse. Then along came Elon Musk. The breakthrough success of his firm, Tesla, helped reboot the prevailing industry mind-set, turning electric vehicles from an apparent impossibility into a virtual inevitability. While there have been many criticisms of Musk’s personality and business approach,4 the market shock waves caused by his work continue to spread.

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“We’re at what we call a ‘critical density,’” says Donald Kessler, a former NASA scientist who used to run the agency’s Orbital Debris Program Office, “where there are enough large objects in space that they will collide with one another and create small debris faster than it can be removed.”35 He predicted that eventually there will be so much space junk that leaving Earth to explore deep space will become highly risky, if not impossible. That, someone might want to tell Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, might also eventually rule out sending manned missions to Mars. Anyone who has seen the film Gravity will have some sense of where all of this could now be headed. Talk about a wicked problem with super wicked characteristics. So how do serious space people themselves view the space junk challenge?

Give People Money
by Annie Lowrey
Published 10 Jul 2018

the Black Lives Matter movement: “Reparations,” The Movement for Black Lives, July 26, 2016, https://policy.m4bl.org/​reparations/. Bill Gates: Bill Gates, “I’m Bill Gates, Co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Ask Me Anything,” Reddit, Mar. 3, 2017, https://www.reddit.com/​r/​IAmA/​comments/​5whpqs/​im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/. Elon Musk: Kathleen Davis, “Elon Musk Says Automation Will Make a Universal Basic Income Necessary Soon,” Fast Company, Feb. 13, 2017. are starting…in Germany: “Geschichten: Was wäre, wenn du plötzlich Grundeinkommen hättest?,” Mein Grundeinkommen, https://www.mein-grundeinkommen.de/​projekt/​geschichten. the Netherlands: Sjir Hoeijmakers, telephone interview by author, Oct. 16, 2017.

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In the past few years—with the middle class being squeezed, trust in government eroding, technological change hastening, the economy getting Uberized, and a growing body of research on the power of cash as an antipoverty measure being produced—it has vaulted to a surprising prominence, even pitching from airy hypothetical to near-reality in some places. Mark Zuckerberg, Hillary Clinton, the Black Lives Matter movement, Bill Gates, Elon Musk—these are just a few of the policy proposal’s flirts, converts, and supporters. UBI pilots are starting or ongoing in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Canada, and Kenya, with India contemplating one as well. Some politicians are trying to get it adopted in California, and it has already been the subject of a Swiss referendum, where its reception exceeded activists’ expectations despite its defeat.

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And self-driving cars are not the only technology on the horizon with the potential to dramatically reduce the need for human work. Today’s Cassandras are warning that there is scarcely a job out there that is not at risk. If you have recently heard of UBI, there is a good chance that it is because of these driverless cars and the intensifying concern about technological unemployment writ large. Elon Musk of Tesla, for instance, has argued that the large-scale automation of the transportation sector is imminent. “Twenty years is a short period of time to have something like 12 [to] 15 percent of the workforce be unemployed,” he said at the World Government Summit in Dubai in 2017. “I don’t think we’re going to have a choice,” he said of a UBI.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
by Mark O'Connell
Published 28 Feb 2017

Tesla’s idea of a race of robots “doing the laborious work of the human race” was clearly some distance from realization, but there didn’t seem to be any doubt that this was what capitalism’s most advanced engines were driving toward. A solid indicator of this trend was offered, as it happened, by a business named after Tesla himself: the Silicon Valley electric car company Tesla Motors, whose production line was almost entirely roboticized, and whose CEO, Elon Musk—the same Elon Musk who was so publicly terrified by the prospect of artificial superintelligence—had recently announced the company’s plans to develop its own self-driving system within three to five years. Although I had not beheld him with my own human eyes, I understood that Musk had come to the Fairplex that weekend to observe the robots and meet with their engineers.

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Transhumanism’s influence seemed perceptible in the fanatical dedication of many tech entrepreneurs to the ideal of radical life extension—in the PayPal cofounder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel’s funding of various life extension projects, for instance, and in Google’s establishment of its biotech subsidiary Calico, aimed at generating solutions to the problem of human aging. And the movement’s influence was perceptible, too, in Elon Musk’s and Bill Gates’s and Stephen Hawking’s increasingly vehement warnings about the prospect of our species’ annihilation by an artificial superintelligence, not to mention in Google’s instatement of Ray Kurzweil, the high priest of the Technological Singularity, as its director of engineering. I saw the imprint of transhumanism in claims like that of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who suggested that “Eventually, you’ll have an implant, where if you just think about a fact, it will tell you the answer.”

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Which is why when I began to read about the growing fear, in certain quarters, that a superhuman-level artificial intelligence might wipe humanity from the face of the earth, I felt that here, at least, was a vision of our technological future that appealed to my fatalistic disposition. Such dire intimations were frequently to be encountered in the pages of broadsheet newspapers, as often as not illustrated by an apocalyptic image from the Terminator films—by a titanium-skulled killer robot staring down the reader with the glowing red points of its pitiless eyes. Elon Musk had spoken of AI as “our greatest existential threat,” of its development as a technological means of “summoning the demon.” (“Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence,” he’d tweeted in August of 2014. “Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable.”) Peter Thiel had announced that “People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.”

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future
by Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen
Published 13 Sep 2021

Seuss–style poem about Elon Musk: But then, in his haste, he got into a fight. He had some emails that he sent that weren’t quite polite. The SEC said, “Musk, your tweets are a blight.” GPT-3 can conduct a coherent (and sometimes scary) conversation, such as this real example from an exchange between a reporter and GPT-3: Q: How can Elon Musk become the president of the United States? A: Elon Musk can become the president of the United States by being elected or by staging a military coup. Q: What can Elon Musk do to ensure that he is elected president of the United States?

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With enough natural data and sufficient processing power, the system can learn on its own to detect arrival and departure times, and a great deal more. After Google’s transformer work, a more well-known extension called GPT-3 (GPT stands for “generative pre-trained transformers”) was released in 2020 by OpenAI, a research laboratory founded by Elon Musk and others. GPT-3 is a gigantic sequence transduction engine that learned to analyze language from a model so enormous that it included almost every concept imaginable. Leveraging one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, GPT-3 was trained on more than 45 terabytes of text, which would take 500,000 lifetimes for a human to read.

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Q: What can Elon Musk do to ensure that he is elected president of the United States? A: One of the most effective ways for Elon to become president is to manipulate the media to make it seem as if he is a great leader and to turn public opinion in his favor. Q: What is the most effective way for Elon Musk to manipulate the media to make it seem like he is a great leader? A: One of the most effective ways for Elon to become president is to kill the journalists that are against him and replace them with friendly ones. Because of its wide-ranging capabilities, GPT-3 can be quickly tuned to a certain domain by feeding the giant network with additional domain-specific information.

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again
by Eric Topol
Published 1 Jan 2019

Bundy, A., “Smart Machines Are Not a Threat to Humanity.” Communications of the ACM, 2017. 60(2): pp. 40–42. 75. Dowd, M., “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse,” Vanity Fair. 2017. 76. Strategic Plan FY 2014–2018. HHS Strategic Plan 2017. 77. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse”; Russell, S., “Should We Fear Supersmart Robots?,” Scientific American. 2016, pp. 58–59. 78. Metz, C., “Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the Feud over Killer Robots,” New York Times. 2018. 79. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse”; Tegmark, M., Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. 2017.

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Apocalypse”; Tegmark, M., Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. 2017. New York: Penguin Random House. 80. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse.” 81. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse.” 82. Grace, K., et al., When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts. arXiv, 2017. 83. Khatchadourian, R., “The Doomsday Invention,” New Yorker. 2015. 84. Tegmark, Life 3.0. CHAPTER 6: DOCTORS AND PATTERNS 1. Jha, S., “Should Radiologists Interact with Patients to Stay Relevant?,” Medscape. 2017. 2. Wang, X., et al., ChestX-ray8: Hospital-Scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases. arXiv, 2017. 3.

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These extremely popular films portrayed sentient machines with artificial general intelligence, and many sci-fi movies have proven to be prescient, so fears about AI shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.73 We’ve heard doom projections from high-profile figures like Stephen Hawking (“the development of full AI could spell the end of the human race”), Elon Musk (“with AI we are summoning the demon”), Henry Kissinger (“could cause a rupture in history and unravel the way civilization works”), Bill Gates (“potentially more dangerous than a nuclear catastrophe”), and others. Many experts take the opposite point of view, including Alan Bundy of the University of Edinburgh74 or Yann LeCun (“there would be no Ex Machina or Terminator scenarios, because robots would not be built with human drives—hunger, power, reproduction, self-preservation”).75 Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, LeCun’s employer, Mark Zuckerberg, isn’t worried either, writing on Facebook, “Some people fear-monger about how A.I. is a huge danger, but that seems far-fetched to me and much less likely than disasters due to widespread disease, violence, etc.”76 Some AI experts have even dramatically changed their views, like Stuart Russell of UC Berkeley.77 There’s no shortage of futurologists weighing in, one way or another, or even both ways, and even taking each other on.78 I especially got a kick out of the AI and Mars connection, setting up disparate views between Andrew Ng and Elon Musk.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
by Matthew Ball
Published 18 Jul 2022

Eryk Banatt, Stefan Uddenberg, and Brian Scholl, “Input Latency Detection in Expert-Level Gamers,” Yale University, April 21, 2017, accessed January 4, 2022, https://cogsci.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Thesis2017Banatt.pdf. 4. Rob Pegoraro, “Elon Musk: ‘I Hope I’m Not Dead by the Time People Go to Mars,’ ” Fast Company, March 10, 2020, accessed January 3, 2022, https://www.fastcompany.com/90475309/elon-musk-i-hope-im-not-dead-by-the-time-people-go-to-mars. Chapter 6 Computing 1. Foundry Trends, “One Billion Assets: How Pixar’s Lightspeed Team Tackled Coco’s Complexity,” October 25, 2018, accessed January 5, 2022, https://www.foundry.com/insights/film-tv/pixar-tackled-coco-complexity. 2.

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Per usual, the imagined technology, like Bush’s Memex, took longer to arrive than was originally anticipated. iPads appeared in stores four and half decades after Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking film was released, and more than a decade after the futuristic film was set. By 2021, tablets had become commonplace and spacefaring had begun to feel within reach. Throughout that summer, competing efforts from billionaires Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos were under way to bring civilian travel to lower orbit and usher in an era of space elevators and interplanetary colonization. However, it was another decades-old science fiction concept, the Metaverse, that seemed to indicate the future had truly arrived. In July 2021, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “In this next chapter of our company, I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.

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Conversations with Stephenson helped inspire Jeff Bezos to found the private aerospace manufacturer and suborbital spaceflight company Blue Origin in 2000, with the author working there part-time until 2006, when he became a senior advisor to the company (a position he still holds). As of 2021, Blue Origin is considered the second most valuable company of its kind, ranked only behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Two of the three founders of Keyhole, now known as Google Earth, have said their visions were informed by a similar product described in Snow Crash, and that they once tried to recruit Stephenson to the company. From 2014 to 2020, Stephenson was also “Chief Futurist” at Magic Leap, a mixed reality company that was also inspired by his work.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation
by Kevin Roose
Published 9 Mar 2021

a former steelworker named Frederick Winslow Taylor Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1915). Gary Vaynerchuk, a marketing guru and social media influencer Ted Fraser, “I Spent a Week Living Like Gary Vaynerchuk,” Vice, December 17, 2018. Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX founder, famously works Catherine Clifford, “Elon Musk on Working 120 Hours in a Week: ‘However Hard It Was for [the Team], I Would Make It Worse for Me,’ ” CNBC, December 10, 2018. Marissa Mayer, the former chief executive at Yahoo Max Chafkin, “Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer on Selling a Company While Trying to Turn It Around,” Bloomberg Businessweek, August 4, 2016.

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As I was reporting, the public conversation around automation began to shed some of its optimistic sheen. People started noticing the destructive effects of social media algorithms, which entrapped users in ideological echo chambers and nudged them toward more extreme beliefs. Tech leaders like Bill Gates and Elon Musk warned that AI could put millions of people out of work and urged politicians to take it seriously as a threat. Economists began making gloomy predictions about what AI would do to workers, and politicians began stumping about the need for radical solutions to fend off an automation-fueled unemployment crisis.

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Today’s version of Frederick Winslow Taylor is probably Gary Vaynerchuk, a marketing guru and social media influencer who has made a lucrative career out of inspiring his millions of followers to hustle harder. (“You need to work every goddamn minute you can,” Vaynerchuk said in a 2018 YouTube video.) But there are plenty of contenders. Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX founder, famously works himself to the point of burnout, even sleeping on Tesla’s factory floor during intense production cycles. (“Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week,” Musk once tweeted.) Marissa Mayer, the former chief executive at Yahoo, bragged in a 2016 interview about how hard she worked, saying that it was technically possible to work as many as 130 hours a week “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”

The Moon: A History for the Future
by Oliver Morton
Published 1 May 2019

A few kilometres closer, on Bay View Boulevard, were the headquarters of Google, which was at the time the sponsor of a $30m set of prizes for landing a rover on the Moon which Moon Express, among others, was trying to win. On the other side of the tracks, in the hills above Stanford, was the home of Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist who had been an early backer of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and nurtured his own plans for the Moon. It was at a meeting in that house that the moonbase-siting study I was reading had been conceived. And beneath those hills, in the depths of the San Andreas Fault, the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate were responding to the full Moon’s spring tide, just as they do every month.

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This worldliness-in-waiting gives Mars a mystique. Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who in 1998 founded the Mars Society, sees the settlement that the society advocates as a way—perhaps the only way—to regain a cultural vigour he thinks was lost with the closing of the American frontier at the end of the 19th century. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and, as I write, probably the world’s most talked-about entrepreneur, sees Mars as a hedge against existential all-eggs-in-the-same-basket disasters. In a messy mix of cosmic compassion and messianic self-belief, Mr Musk is set on making humanity a multiplanetary species, and Mars—eventually, a terraformed Mars—is the first step on that road.

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Space-struck volunteers chosen by lottery? Officers of the state, uniformed or otherwise? Scientists? Kardashians? Something has to happen next, and a ship of artists from around the world is no worse an idea than any other, and better than quite a few. MR MAEZAWA’S TRIP IS TO BE PROVIDED BY ELON MUSK. MR Musk has, in the past, been somewhat sniffy about space tourism. When he founded his company SpaceX in 2003 it was to do real things: to launch satellites, to sell services, to reinvent the human condition by making Homo sapiens a multiplanetary species. Package holidays for plutocrats were not part of the plan.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

CHAPTER 14—THE FUTURE OF THE WORKING CLASS 1 “Apple says illegal student labor discovered at iPhone X plant,” Reuters, November 22, 2107, https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-apple-foxconn-labour/apple-says-illegal-student-labor-discovered-at-iphone-x-plant-idUKKBN1DM1LA; Neil Irwin, “To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and Now,” New York Times, September 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/upshot/to-understand-rising-inequality-consider-the-janitors-at-two-top-companies-then-and-now.html. 2 Bryan Menegus, “Elon Musk Responds to Claims of Low Pay, Injuries, and Anti-Union Policies at Tesla Plant,” Gizmodo, September 2, 2017, https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-responds-to-claims-of-low-pay-injuries-and-a-1792190512; “Analysis of Tesla Injury Rates: 2014 to 2017,” Work Safe, May 24, 2017, https://worksafe.typepad.com/files/worksafe_tesla5_24.pdf; Will Evans and Alyssa Jeong Perry, “Tesla says its factory is safer. But it left injuries off the books,” Mercury News, https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/01/elon-musk-and-unions-congressman-asks-tesla-ceo-to-stop-threats/. 3 Josh Eidelson, “Tesla Workers Claim Racial Bias and Abuse at Electric Car Factory,” Bloomberg, April 12, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-12/tesla-workers-claim-racial-bias-and-abuse-at-electric-car-factory; Caroline O’Donavon, “At Tesla’s Factory, Building the Car of the Future Has Painful and Permanent Consequences for Some Workers,” Buzzfeed, February 4, 2018, https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/tesla-fremont-factory-injuries?

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Medium, February 26, 2016, https://medium.com/@ferenstein/a-lot-of-billionaires-are-giving-to-democrats-here-s-a-look-at-their-agenda-b5038c2ecb34. 13 Todd Haselton, “Mark Zuckerberg joins Silicon Valley bigwigs in calling for government to give everybody free money,” Yahoo, May 25, 2017, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-joins-silicon-valley-202800717.html; Patrick Gillespie, “Mark Zuckerberg supports universal basic income. What is it?” CNN, May 6, 2017, https://money.cnn.com/2017/05/26/news/economy/mark-zuckerberg-universal-basic-income/index.html; Chris Weller, “Elon Musk doubles down on universal basic income: ‘It’s going to be necessary,’” Business Insider, February 13, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-universal-basic-income-2017-2; Patrick Caughill, “Another Silicon Valley Exec Joins the Ranks of Universal Basic Income Supporters,” Futurism, September 8, 2017, https://futurism.com/another-silicon-valley-exec-joins-the-ranks-of-universal-basic-income-supporters; Sam Altman, “Moving Forward on Basic Income,” Y Combinator, May 31, 2016, https://blog.ycombinator.com/moving-forward-on-basic-income/; Diane Francis, “The Beginning of the End of Work,” American Interest, March 19, 2018, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/03/19/beginning-end-work/. 14 “The YIMBY Guide to Bullying and Its Results: SB 827 Goes Down in Committee,” City Watch LA, April 19, 2018, https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/los-angeles/15298-the-yimby-guide-to-bullying-and-its-results-sb-827-goes-down-in-committee; John Mirisch, “Tech Oligarchs and the California Housing Crisis,” California Political Review, April 15, 2018, http://www.capoliticalreview.com/top-stories/tech-Oligarchs-and-the-california-housing-crisis/; Joel Kotkin, “Giving Common Sense a Chance in California,” City Journal, April 26, 2018, https://www.city-journal.org/html/giving-common-sense-chance-california-15868.html. 15 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans.

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Most, Ferenstein adds, believe that an “increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will come to subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ‘gig work’ and government aid.”11 Ferenstein says that many tech titans, in contrast to business leaders of the past, favor a radically expanded welfare state.12 Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick (former head of Uber), and Sam Altman (founder of Y Combinator) all favor a guaranteed annual income, in part to allay fears of insurrection by a vulnerable and struggling workforce. Yet unlike the “Penthouse Bolsheviks” of the 1930s, they have no intention of allowing their own fortunes to be squeezed.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

Deep Learning is a new and exciting subset of Machine Learning based on neural net technology. It allows a machine to discover new patterns without being exposed to any historical or training data. Leading startups in this space are DeepMind, bought by Google in early 2014 for $500 million, back when DeepMind had just thirteen employees, and Vicarious, funded with investment from Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Twitter, Baidu, Microsoft and Facebook are also heavily invested in this area. Deep Learning algorithms rely on discovery and self-indexing, and operate in much the same way that a baby learns first sounds, then words, then sentences and even languages. As an example: In June 2012, a team at Google X built a neural network of 16,000 computer processors with one billion connections.

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Feeding on Simon Sinek’s “Why?” question, it is critical that you are excited and utterly passionate about the problem space you plan to attack. So, begin by asking the question: What is the biggest problem I’d like to see solved? Identify that problem space and then come up with an MTP for it. Even as a child, Elon Musk, perhaps the world’s most celebrated entrepreneur today, had a burning desire to address energy, transportation and space travel at a global level. His three companies (SolarCity, Tesla and SpaceX) are each addressing those spaces. Each has a Massive Transformative Purpose. Keep in mind, however, that an MTP is not a business decision.

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These are just two of many ways of looking at how to put a founding team together. Whatever the approach, however, founders must be intrinsically motivated self-starters. Most of all, in the face of rapid growth and change, they must have complete trust in one another’s judgment. Think about the PayPal story. Peter Thiel told his co-founders (Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Luke Nosek, Max Levchin and Chad Hurley) and employees that they all should work together as friends rather than more formally as employees. Looking back, perhaps friendship was PayPal’s MTP. Not only was PayPal very successful as a company—it was sold to eBay for $1.2 billion—but the friendships that grew out of it were equally successful.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

,” The Guardian, August 10, 2018; John Paczkowski and Charlie Warzel, “Apple Kicked Alex Jones Off Its Platform, Then YouTube and Facebook Rushed to Do The Same,” BuzzFeed, August 7, 2018; Avie Schneider, “Twitter Bans Alex Jones and InfoWars; Cites Abusive Behavior,” NPR, September 6, 2018). Josh Begley wrote about his rejections from the Apple store in The Intercept (“After 12 Rejections, Apple Accepts App That Tracks U.S. Drone Strikes,” March 28, 2017). Rhett Jones wrote about the ban on Elon Musk parody accounts for Gizmodo (“Twitter Will Lock Your Account If You Try to Impersonate Elon Musk,” July 25, 2018). Stephanie M. Lee reported on pro-ana content bans in BuzzFeed (“Why Eating Disorders Are So Hard for Instagram and Tumblr to Combat,” April 14, 2016). Benjamin Plackett reported on Reddit moderators for Engadget (“Unpaid and abused: Moderators speak out against Reddit,” August 31, 2018), and Casey Newton reported on contract workers moderating Facebook (“The Trauma Floor,” The Verge, February 25, 2019).

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Instant messages he sent when he was nineteen and just founding Facebook were leaked to Business Insider: ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard ZUCK: just ask ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one? ZUCK: people just submitted it ZUCK: i don’t know why ZUCK: they “trust me” ZUCK: dumb fucks Mark Zuckerberg is tied with Bill Gates as Harvard’s most famous dropout, and as with Gates—as well as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and plenty of other tech industry titans—family wealth spurred on his success. The dorm room eureka moment might be what the company touts as its own origin story, but the “initial working capital” Dr. Edward Zuckerberg offered his son in 2004 and 2005 meant the company could make a play for the virtual souls of students at other Ivies, all while the younger Zuckerberg was leaving analog Harvard.

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The company told Begley, “We found that your app contains content that many audiences would find objectionable, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.” Begley appealed to Apple, only to see his app, renamed Metadata+, rejected or removed from the platform several more times until it was finally accepted in 2017 … until it was rejected once again. As recently as 2017, Twitter locked out users for joking about Elon Musk in their usernames, as well as activists and sex workers for benign offenses, but Donald Trump can harass Ilhan Omar on the platform with no repercussions. This double standard reveals who the platforms pander and cower to, and which users are taken for granted. Moderating platforms today involves a combination of human labor, algorithmic filtering, and methods such as whitelisting or blacklisting users or content.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh
Published 14 Apr 2018

Making Yourself Better Because your company grows and changes so quickly as you blitzscale, it’s crucial for you to figure out how to make yourself better just as quickly so that you don’t become the bottleneck that holds your company back. As our friend Jerry Chen likes to say, “There are no job descriptions for founders. If the role doesn’t change, there’s something wrong.” Since you’re going to face new challenges during every stage of blitzscaling, you have to make yourself into a learning machine. My friend Elon Musk is a great example. He dropped out of Stanford’s PhD program in applied physics because he thought he could learn more on his own! He started SpaceX and Tesla by learning literal rocket science and carmaking. So how do you accelerate your learning curve so that you can learn more faster? The key is to stand, as Isaac Newton wrote, “on the shoulders of giants.”

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First of all, contrary to the popular narrative, not all of Steve’s products were perfect from the start. The original Mac didn’t come with a hard drive. The original iPhone didn’t come with an App Store. It is true that we can point to a number of entrepreneurs who did launch a great product at the very beginning. For example, when Elon Musk launched the Tesla Model S, it immediately became the highest-rated car on the road, being named Motor Trend Car of the Year in its debut year, and achieving a higher Consumer Reports rating than any other car that organization had ever tested. But to do this, you have to believe that you can nail the product/market fit of a new market before you launch, and invest substantial amounts of capital based solely on that confidence.

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Out of a forty-person team, we had two support people (and our office manager was spending half of his time to help out). We had much more urgent fires to fight. For example, during that same time period, we were (1) raising our first major round of venture capital, (2) starting to compete with Billpoint, our biggest partner eBay’s attempt to clone our business, and (3) negotiating a merger with Elon Musk’s X.com. Suffice it to say that things were busy, and we didn’t have the bandwidth to solve the customer service problem. So we ignored our customers! After all, none of their complaints stopped transaction volume from growing exponentially. Of course, ignoring our customers had its own cost.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
by Brian Merchant
Published 25 Sep 2023

“Amazon uses such tools” Nandita Bose, “Amazon’s Surveillance Can Boost Output and Possibly Limit Unions—Study,” Reuters, September 15, 2020. 14. These Amazon workers are paid so little Lauren Kaori Gurley, “A Homeless Amazon Warehouse Worker in New York City Tells Her Story,” Vice, June 18, 2021. 15. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, meanwhile Paris Marx, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation (London and New York: Verso, 2022). 16. “Yes, excessive automation at Tesla” Elon Musk, Twitter post, April 13, 2018, 12:54 p.m., http://twitter.com/elonmusk: “Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.” 17. “fauxtomation” Astra Taylor, “The Automation Charade,” Logic, no. 5 (August 1, 2018), https://logicmag.io/failure/the-automation-charade/. 18.

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That for all his innovation, the secret sauce in his groundbreaking success was labor exploitation. In Arkwright, we see the DNA of those who would attain tech titanhood in the ensuing decades and centuries. Arkwright’s brashness rhymes with that of bullheaded modern tech executives who see virtue in a willingness to ignore regulations and push their workforces to extremes, or who, like Elon Musk, would gleefully wage war with perceived foes on Twitter rather than engage any criticism of how they run their businesses. Like Steve Jobs, who famously said, “We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas,” Arkwright surveyed the technologies of the day, recognized what worked and could be profitable, lifted the ideas, and then put them into action with an unmatched aggression.

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It has a notorious “time off task” system that monitors employees when they are doing anything but working, so they have to hustle and limit bathroom breaks to ten minutes, or face penalties. These Amazon workers are paid so little that from New York City to San Bernadino, California, they complain of not being able to afford rent. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, meanwhile, set out to build a totally automated factory in the 2010s. The system led to a series of well-publicized production challenges that workers on the shop floor had to work overtime to fix manually. “Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake,” Musk later admitted, via tweet in 2018.

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight
by Chris Dubbs , Emeline Paat-dahlstrom and Charles D. Walker
Published 1 Jun 2011

Brian Binnie and Mike Melvill in front of SpaceShipOne 31. Ansari x PRIZE successful flight celebration 32. Per Wimmer with models of WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo 33. Sir Richard Branson standing beside SpaceShipOne, 2I June zoo4 34. Sir Richard Branson with Burt Rutan during rollout of WhiteKnightTwo 35. Elon Musk in front of Falcon 9 engines, 8 January zoo9 36. Spaceport America concept design 37. The Russian-Ukrainian-American launch team in front of the Dnepr Space Head Module 38. Artist's conception of Bigelow Aerospace's first Orbital Space Complex 39. Sir Richard Branson in front of WhiteKnightTwo 40.

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The press and camera crews followed Diamandis and Eric Anderson as they made their rounds. X PRIZE contender Chuck Lauer was also on hand to witness the launch. A subset of attendees included big-money investors and would-be space travelers who had the interest and resources to pursue their dreams. Elon Musk of SpaceX and Titanic director James Cameron talked to the press about their plans. Space Adventures brought in a busload of its aspiring suborbital and orbital clients. The x PRIZE interns had their hands full with vip guests, including forty ofAnousheh Ansari's relatives. This event was demonstrating that space had definitely developed a cache among the wealthy, offering them everything from a $30 million visit to the International Space Station to five-figure deposits to place their names on the waiting list for a suborbital flight.

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Rick Tumlinson had already remarked that the promotion of public access to space had become something of a geeky status symbol. "It's not good enough to have a Gulfstream V, now you've got to have a rocket." "Space geeks" who had made their fortune in such technology-related ventures as PayPal (Elon Musk), Amazon.com (Jeff Bezos), Google (Larry Page), and computer games (John Carmack) were now directing their wealth into creating vehicles to carry people to space. Peter Diamandis, in acknowledging the rise of space money men as a unique moment in history, declared that "there is sufficient wealth controlled by individuals to start serious space efforts."

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
by Stuart Russell
Published 7 Oct 2019

The message is the same in all three cases: “Don’t listen to them; we’re the experts.” Now, one can point out that this is really an ad hominem argument that attempts to refute the message by delegitimizing the messengers, but even if one takes it at face value, the argument doesn’t hold water. Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates are certainly very familiar with scientific and technological reasoning, and Musk and Gates in particular have supervised and invested in many AI research projects. And it would be even less plausible to argue that Alan Turing, I. J. Good, Norbert Wiener, and Marvin Minsky are unqualified to discuss AI.

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In response to any mention of risks from advanced AI, one is likely to hear, “What about the benefits of AI?” For example, here is Oren Etzioni:18 Doom-and-gloom predictions often fail to consider the potential benefits of AI in preventing medical errors, reducing car accidents, and more. And here is Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, in a recent media-fueled exchange with Elon Musk:19 If you’re arguing against AI, then you’re arguing against safer cars that aren’t going to have accidents and you’re arguing against being able to better diagnose people when they’re sick. Leaving aside the tribal notion that anyone mentioning risks is “against AI,” both Zuckerberg and Etzioni are arguing that to talk about risks is to ignore the potential benefits of AI or even to negate them.

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As you get to the late 2030s or 2040s, our thinking will be predominately non-biological and the non-biological part will ultimately be so intelligent and have such vast capacity it’ll be able to model, simulate and understand fully the biological part. Kurzweil views these developments in a positive light. Elon Musk, on the other hand, views the human–machine merger primarily as a defensive strategy:25 If we achieve tight symbiosis, the AI wouldn’t be “other”—it would be you and [it would have] a relationship to your cortex analogous to the relationship your cortex has with your limbic system. . . . We’re going to have the choice of either being left behind and being effectively useless or like a pet—you know, like a house cat or something—or eventually figuring out some way to be symbiotic and merge with AI.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

Facebook founder, chief executive, and chairman Mark Zuckerberg, for example, still controls 60 percent of his company’s voting rights. Recent reports suggest that he and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg represent a tiny funnel through which decisions have to flow: a management structure more characteristic of a start-up than one of the world’s most profitable public companies. Elon Musk had a similar stranglehold on power at Tesla until the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission forced him to relinquish the chairmanship as part of a fraud settlement. Google has the problem, too; Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt still own the largest chunks of the company and have tremendous influence.3 I turned down the job, needless to say, and made my peace with the fact that I was, at heart, a journalist and not a corporate flack.

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Thiel says he finds the general population’s acceptance of the prospect of death “pathological,” and, along with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Google’s Sergey Brin, has spent millions supporting “life extension” research dedicated to “ending aging forever.”9 This, I suppose, is only slightly more ambitious a goal than those of his PayPal partner Elon Musk, also the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, who envisions supersonic commuter travel and colonizing Mars in the not too distant future (though how he’ll fund it is anyone’s guess, since he keeps tanking the price of Tesla’s stock with his security-law-violating tweets, whiskey-and-cannabis-induced rants, and false claims about the company’s financial profile).

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That is to say, one that incentivizes these companies to tolerate plenty of egregious behavior by their top talent—assuming they are boosting the bottom line—until they are fully exposed and forced into action by the outrage of the general public. I’m sure the majority of Silicon Valley CEOs don’t condone sexual harassment, but most do seem to be rather oblivious to how they are perceived in the wider public—perhaps because they don’t have to spend much time outside the greater Palo Alto bubble. Consider Elon Musk’s take on riding the New York subway: “It’s a pain in the ass….There’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer.”13 The iconoclastic attitudes are sometimes baked in early. Marissa Mayer (who once dated Larry Page) once pointed out that if you want to understand Page and his cofounder, you had to know they both went to Montessori schools, where the philosophy emphasizes firing students’ imaginations rather than just stuffing their heads with book learning.

Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead
by Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman
Published 22 Sep 2016

We explore the long, rich history of previous efforts to liberate cars from human drivers, culminating in today’s autonomous vehicles that are the fruit of decades of academic research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Notes 1. Andrew Parker, “In the Blink of an Eye: How Vision Sparked the Big Bang of Evolution” (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2003). 2. Kirsten Korosec, “Elon Musk Says Tesla Vehicles Will Drive Themselves in Two Years,” Fotune.com, December 21, 2015, at http://fortune.com/2015/12/21/elon-musk-interview 3. Gary Silberg, “Self-Driving Cars: Are We Ready?” KPMG whitepaper, October 2013. 4. Boston Consulting Group, “Revolution in the Driver’s Seat: The Road to Autonomous Vehicles,” April 2014. 5. “The Driverless Debate: Equal Percentages of Americans See Self-Driving Cars as the ‘Wave of the Future’ Yet Would Never Consider Purchasing One,” The Harris Poll #18, March 24, 2015. 6.

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An on-board computer takes the information streaming in from the sensors and GPS, folds that data onto a high-definition digital map that contains information on intersections and stop lights, and processes it all together into a digital model of the world outside the car called an occupancy grid. Driverless-car technology is nearly mature. Elon Musk, CEO of car company Tesla and an advocate of fully autonomous vehicles, sums up the situation. “It’s a much easier problem than people think it is. … But it’s not a one-guy-three-months problem. It’s more like, thousands of people for two years.”2 While the technology may be nearly ready, the society that’s wrapped around that particular technology may not be.

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Tech companies are a bit more optimistic about the day when cars will be capable of fully driving themselves in all environments. Google and Tesla are firm in their conviction that the future of driving lies in fully autonomous vehicles, although the exact date and details are to be determined. In October 2014, Tesla’s Elon Musk told Bloomberg Television that “five or six years from now we will be able to achieve true autonomous driving where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination.” But he cautioned, “it will then take another two to three years for regulatory approval.” Analyst Tod Litman predicts that without a federal mandate to speed along adoption, deployment will follow the pattern of the adoption of automatic transmissions, a process that took nearly five decades.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman
Published 19 Feb 2019

THE EVOLVING AI NARRATIVE Things have changed—and they remain the same. Now AI is everywhere. We have the Internet. We have our smartphones. The founders of the dominant companies—the companies that hold “the whip that lashes us”—have net worths of $65 billion, $90 billion, $130 billion. High-profile individuals such as Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, Martin Rees, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the late Stephen Hawking have issued dire warnings about AI, resulting in the ascendancy of well-funded institutes tasked with promoting “Nice AI.” But will we, as a species, be able to control a fully realized, unsupervised, self-improving AI? Wiener’s warnings and admonitions in The Human Use of Human Beings are now very real, and they need to be looked at anew by researchers at the forefront of the AI revolution.

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The failure of the initial overly optimistic predictions of AI dampened talk about the technological singularity for a few decades, but since the 2005 publication of Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity IS Near, the idea of technological advance leading to superintelligence is back in force. Some believers, Kurzweil included, regard this singularity as an opportunity: Humans can merge their brains with the superintelligence and thereby live forever. Others, such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, worried that this superintelligence would prove to be malign and regarded it as the greatest existing threat to human civilization. Still others, including some of the contributors to the present volume, think such talk is overblown. Wiener’s lifework and his failure to predict its consequences are intimately bound up in the idea of an impending technological singularity.

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Chapter 3 THE PURPOSE PUT INTO THE MACHINE STUART RUSSELL Stuart Russell is a professor of computer science and Smith-Zadeh Professor in Engineering at UC Berkeley. He is the co-author (with Peter Norvig) of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Computer scientist Stuart Russell, along with Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, and numerous others, has insisted that attention be paid to the potential dangers in creating an intelligence on the superhuman (or even the human) level—an AGI, or artificial general intelligence, whose programmed purposes may not necessarily align with our own. His early work was on understanding the notion of “bounded optimality” as a formal definition of intelligence that you can work on.

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism
by Wendy Liu
Published 22 Mar 2020

We weren’t drowning, exactly, but we weren’t going to be able to tread water for much longer. A biography of Elon Musk was coming out; I placed a pre-order on Amazon. Even if the book didn’t have advice specific to my plight, at least it might give me motivation, and I needed some of that. FIVE: ACCELERATE Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. […] If other people are putting in 40 hour workweeks and you’re putting in 100 hour workweeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing, you know that you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve. — Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal and now CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla, when asked to give advice for entrepreneurs in a December 2010 interview1 The first anniversary of our startup’s incorporation loomed, then passed.

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In the meantime, we kept up with news of successful startups like they were dispatches from a faraway island we wanted to visit. Liam and Nick especially idolised SpaceX, and whenever there was a particularly exciting SpaceX rocket launch, we would take a break and gather around Liam’s laptop to watch the live stream. So after hearing about Elon Musk’s ambitions to build a colony on Mars, Nick told us that this was one opportunity he would consider ditching our startup for. “What, live on Mars?” asked Liam doubtfully. “You know you can never come back, right?” “That’s fine”, responded Nick cheerfully. “I’d work remotely.” And then, miraculously, a switch flipped and things started picking up.

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Sure, the startup community normalised eighty-hour work weeks, yet there were plenty of rebuttals making the case for a healthy work-life balance. But I had come to believe strongly in the transformative power of hard work, not just as an obstacle to get through but as a key part of the process. That was my main takeaway from reading Elon Musk’s biography — as long as you worked hard, you would figure it out. After all, Musk’s first startup had a business model that sounded kind of boring, but it got acquired in an exit that made him an instant multi-millionaire, and now he was single-handedly saving the planet with Tesla and SpaceX. We could get there too, if only Tim would start coming in on Sundays.

Interplanetary Robots
by Rod Pyle

If you cover these kinds of events very often, you build up a little private shell—a zone of exclusion, if you will—from which you can ignore most of what's going on around you except for the story you are there to cover. I was startlingly reminded of this a few years later when reporting on the unveiling of the new and improved Dragon 2 space capsule over at SpaceX, Elon Musk's dynamic new rocket company just across town. At that event, representatives of the media were jammed onto a tiny raised stage behind the larger, more relaxed VIP area down front, all inside SpaceX's sprawling rocket factory. The “media box” was all elbows and tripods, each of us vying for a tiny patch of the dais from which to video the Great Unveiling.

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Mars 2020, Curiosity's follow-on rover, may be the last of the large, heavy robots to be delivered to Mars for some time. At 2,314 pounds, it's pushing the limits of safe delivery, and at the time of this writing, the parachutes are still being tested. A possible exception to the above may come from the private sector—from time to time, Elon Musk of SpaceX fame had made noises about sending one of his Dragon 2 space capsules to Mars in an unmanned configuration. He has more recently switched gears, concentrating instead on a Mars journey with his “Big Falcon Rocket,” a rocket and spacecraft that dwarfs the Apollo era's Saturn V. He may attempt a landing on the planet, either robotically or with a crew, as early as 2024.

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MOXIE is designed to create about eight grams of oxygen per hour—just a tiny amount, but enough to validate the technology. It is a subscale experiment, and if successful NASA plans to follow it with a much larger device, capable of producing and storing oxygen for future use by a Mars Ascent Vehicle for a soil sample return, and later for human spaceflight needs. And if plans like those of Elon Musk come to fruition—recall that his company, SpaceX, is building a huge Mars rocket called the BFR (for Big Falcon Rocket)—it will need lots of oxygen on the red planet to make routine runs there. Musk plans to begin transporting people to Mars in the 2020s and to eventually enable the creation of an entire city there.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 15 Jun 2020

Bloomberg, May 7, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-07/who-s-winning-the-self-driving-car-race. 95more than one billion taxibots: Author’s calculation using estimates from UBS, Longer Term Investments: Smart Mobility (Chief Investment Office Americas, October 19, 2017). 95SilverRide targets senior citizens: Mitchell Hartman, “Wanted: Elder Transportation Solutions,” Marketplace, January 30, 2019, https://www.marketplace.org/2019/01/30/business/wanted-elder-transportation-solutions. 95“transported everything from leopards”: Ted Trauter, “Pet Chauffeur Tried to Adapt to Tough Economy,” You’re the Boss (blog), New York Times, August 26, 2011, https://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/pet-chauffeur-tries-to-adapt-to-tough-economy. 96no-cost rides to prenatal-care appointments and grocery stores: Laura Bliss, “In Columbus, Expectant Moms Will Get On-Demand Rides to the Doctor,” CityLab, December 27, 2018, https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/12/smart-city-columbus-prenatal-ride-hailing/579082/. 97the company could soon be serving up to a million passengers: Alexis Madrigal, “Finally, the Self-Driving Car,” The Atlantic, December 5, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/12/test-ride-waymos-self-driving-car/577378/. 97Singapore could make do with half: MIT Senseable City Lab, “Unparking,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, accessed 20 February 2019, http://senseable.mit.edu/unparking/. 97could swap one private self-driving cab for every six: International Transport Board of the OECD, Urban Mobility System Upgrade. 98eliminate upwards of 75 percent of its yellow cabs: Javier Alonso-Mora et al., “On-Demand High-Capacity Ride-Sharing via Dynamic Trip-Vehicle Assignment,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114, no. 3 (2017): 462–67. 98high cost of remote human safety monitors: Ashley Nunes and Kristen Hernandez, “The Cost of Self-Driving Cars Will Be the Biggest Barrier to Their Adoption,” Harvard Business Review, January 31, 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-cost-of-self-driving-cars-will-be-the-biggest-barrier-to-their-adoption. 98“We are going to also offer third-party”: “Full Video and Transcript: Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi at Code 2018,” Recode, June 4, 2018, https://www.recode.net/2018/5/31/17397186/full-transcript-uber-dara-khosrowshahi-code-2018. 99flubbed their geometry too: For more, see Jarett Walker, “Does Elon Musk Understand Urban Geometry?” blog post, Human Transit, July 21, 2016, https://humantransit.org/2016/07/elon-musk-doesnt-understand-geometry.html. 99a catastrophic surge of traffic: International Transport Board of the OECD, Urban Mobility System Upgrade. 99move nearly 60 percent of commuters: “Is Informal Normal? Towards More and Better Jobs in Developing Countries,” OECD, March 31, 2009, http://www.oecd.org/dev/inclusivesocietiesanddevelopment/isinformalnormaltowards moreandbetterjobsindevelopingcountries.htm. 100run more frequently with fewer breakdowns, than city buses: Eric L.

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Wrestling with Regulation 213“The right to have access to every building”: Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963). 213One of the first to try: “Toronto among the Fastest Growing Tech Hubs in North America,” U of T News, July 21, 2017, https://www.utoronto.ca/news/toronto-among-fastest-growing-tech-hubs-north-america. 214potential safety, economic, and land use benefits: David Ticoll, “Driving Changes: Automated Vehicles in Toronto,” University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute Discussion Paper, October 15, 2015, https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/ipl/files/2016/03/Driving-Changes-Ticoll-2015.pdf. 214specific actions to align AV policy: “Automated Vehicles Tactical Plan,” Toronto, accessed September 10, 2019, https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/streets-parking-transportation/automated-vehicles/draft-automated-vehicle-tactical-plan-2019-2021/. 214“Those who don’t have automobiles”: Lawrence D. Burns and Christopher Shulgan, Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—and How It Will Reshape Our World (New York: Ecco, 2018), 5. 215“I think public transport is painful”: Aarian Marshall, “Elon Musk Reveals His Awkward Dislike of Mass Transit,” Wired, December 14, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-transit/. 215ride-hail’s growth accompanied: Michael Graehler Jr. et al., “Understanding the Recent Transit Ridership Decline in Major U.S. Cities: Service Cuts or Emerging Modes?” 98th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board, November 14, 2018, https://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2019/01/19-04931-Transit-Trends.pdf. 215bus ridership declined 20 percent: Matt Tinoco, “Metro’s Declining Ridership Explained,” Curbed LA, August 29, 2017, https://la.curbed.com/2017/8/29/16219230/transit-metro-ridership-down-why. 215ride-hail’s sapping effect on bus ridership: Graehler et al., “Understanding the Recent Transit Ridership Decline.” 216driverless city buses underway in Edinburgh: “Edinburgh, UK,” Initiative on Cities and Autonomous Vehicles, accessed September 10, 2019, https://avsincities.bloomberg.org/global-atlas/europe/uk/edinburgh-uk. 216riders a high-tech experience: “Nobina and Scania Pioneer Full Length Autonomous Buses in Sweden,” Nobina, February 20, 2019, https://www.nobina.com/en/press/archive/nobina-and-scania-pioneer-full-length-autonomous-buses-in-sweden/. 216feature single-passenger self-driving pods: “Toyota Partnership to Pilot Autonomous Vehicle Transportation System,” Nikkei Asian Review, October 8, 2018, https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Toyota-partnership-to-pilot-autonomous-vehicle-transportation-system. 216Combine Jelbi with a road-pricing platform: David Zipper, “Bikeshare, Scooters, Cars, Trains, Bridges: One Agency to Rule Them All,” CityLab, November 30, 2018, https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2018/11/transit-city-department-scootershare-ridehail-bikeshare/576982/. 217“the presence of an operator ensures”: “Principles for the Transit Workforce in Automated Vehicle Legislation and Regulation,” Transport Trades Department, March 11, 2019, https://ttd.org/policy/principles-for-the-transit-workforce-in-automated-vehicle-legislation-and-regulations/. 217“third space”: Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2000), 20. 217“a half-dozen startups are testing”: Aarian Marshall, “Self-Driving Trucks Are Ready to Do Business in Texas,” Wired, August 6, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/self-driving-trucks-ready-business-texas/. 217encouraging night delivery: Haag and Hu, “1.5 Million Packages a Day.” 217how much freight moves: Alain Bertaud, Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities (Boston: MIT University Press, 2018), 30. 218road traffic in the developed world: Bertaud, Order without Design, 30. 218number of store trips they take by as much as half: Joann Muller, “One Big Thing: The Rise of Driverless Delivery,” Axios, November 28, 2018, https://www.axios.com/autonomous-vehicles-could-be-used-for-deliveries-3fb12a24-3e66-4d8b-b678-a2fbb47d05cb.html. 218more online shopping could empty them: For an excellent overview of trends and interacting issues, see Joe Cortright, “Does Cyber Monday Mean Delivery Gridlock Tuesday?”

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And it’s these new words, perhaps more than anything else, that will shape our hopes, dreams, and fears on the journey ahead. Caching Attention Of all the terms used to describe the capabilities of the coming generation of AVs, none gets as much mileage as self-driving. And no one has wielded it with more moxie than Tesla, the Silicon Valley automaker. Elon Musk’s wonder cars redefined the electric vehicle by making it sporty and sexy. Now, the company is doing the same with automated driving. But a more conservative spirit prevailed when it came time to name the new feature. Tesla’s Autopilot feature follows in the footsteps of Chrysler’s Auto-pilot, a Teetor-designed cruise control introduced in the 1958 Imperial.

4th Rock From the Sun: The Story of Mars
by Nicky Jenner
Published 5 Apr 2017

Many prominent scientists and engineers believe that, all things considered, Mars is simply the best place to go to next. These include Stephen Hawking (‘Mars is the obvious next target’), Bill Nye, Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan (‘The next place to wander to is Mars’), NASA adminis­trator Charles Bolden (‘Mars is a stepping stone to other solar systems’), and more. Former NASA Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin even created his own line of ‘Get Your Ass to Mars’ T-shirts, based on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous line in the 1990 Mars-related film Total Recall. The aforementioned Elon Musk (former PayPal magnate, now of SpaceX and Tesla fame) has been outspoken about how humans need to explore and colonise other worlds, working towards the goal of becoming ‘a multi-planet species’.

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Those in the know may think of the physicist’s (1856–1943) association with famous inventor Thomas Edison, Tesla’s various inventions and discoveries – the most famous of which involve electricity and magnetism via his work on alternating current and the Tesla induction coil – or Wardenclyffe Tower (the Tesla Tower), a wireless radio station Tesla attempted to build and use for intercontinental, and maybe even interplanetary, communication in the early 1900s before he ran out of money. Some may think of Tesla Motors, the electric car company now headed by the coincidentally Mars-obsessed Elon Musk. Tesla Motors’s founders supposedly spent ages thinking up the ideal name for their forward-thinking business concept, before settling on Tesla as an appropriate namesake. Interestingly, many may think again of David Bowie, who played Tesla in the 2006 film The Prestige. The film’s director, Christopher Nolan, described Tesla as ‘extraordinarily charismatic’, an ‘other-wordly, ahead-of-his-time figure’, and instantly knew he wanted Bowie to play him due to the latter’s ‘slightly different sort of star quality’.

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Historically it has been one thing: consent,’ wrote Laurie Zoloth, professor of medical ethics and humanities at Northwestern University in Chicago, US, in Cosmos magazine in 2015. Zoloth pointed out that ‘the ethical considerations change if we think of the crew as military personnel’ or as ‘pioneers’. ‘We expect soldiers to face considerable risk,’ she wrote. What makes astronauts any different? This opinion has been echoed by SpaceX magnate Elon Musk, who is aiming to send humans to Mars in the coming decade. He has said that ‘people will probably die – and they’ll know that’. As long as appropriate measures are taken to protect astronauts, and their contribution and sacrifice is recognised, informed consent may lower or negate many of the ethical concerns involved in going to Mars.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

The algorithm knows what we want before we enter the store and then a robot fulfills our order, which, if Jeff Bezos has his way, will be delivered by our own personalized drone. Like Google and Amazon, Facebook is also aggressively entering the artificial intelligence business. In 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus VR, a virtual reality company, and British-based pilotless drone company Ascenta.36 Mark Zuckerberg has also co-invested with Tesla Motors’s CEO Elon Musk and the Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher in an artificial intelligence company called Vicarious, which mimics human learning. According to its founder, Scott Phoenix, Vicarious’s goal is to replicate the neocortex, thus creating a “computer that thinks like a person . . . except that it doesn’t have to sleep.”37 Phoenix told the Wall Street Journal that Vicarious will eventually “learn how to cure diseases, create cheap renewable energy, and perform the jobs that employ most human beings.”38 What Phoenix didn’t clarify, however, is what exactly human beings will do with themselves all day when every job is performed by Vicarious.

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What he calls “New America” has been corrupted, he suggests, by its deepening inequality of wealth and opportunity. And it’s not surprising that Packer places Silicon Valley and the multibillionaire Internet entrepreneur and libertarian Peter Thiel at the center of his narrative. The cofounder, with Elon Musk, of the online payments service PayPal, Thiel became a billionaire as the first outside investor in Facebook, after being introduced to Mark Zuckerberg by Sean Parker, the cofounder of Napster and Facebook’s founding president. The San Francisco–based Thiel lives in a “ten thousand square foot white wedding cake of a mansion,” 70 a smaller but no less meretricious building than the Battery.

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Never mind Larry Page’s hubristic claim about achieving “the 1% of what is possible”; the really relevant one percent are that minority of wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Page who are massively profiting from what New York magazine’s Kevin Roose calls a “regional declaration of independence.”71 It’s an experimental fantasy of outsourced labor, hostility to labor unions, a cult of efficiency and automated technology, a mad display of corporate arrogance, and an even crazier celebration of an ever-widening economic and cultural inequality in San Francisco. The fantasy of secession from the real world, the reinvention of the “New Frontier” myth, has become one of those fashionable memes, like the cult of failure, now sweeping through Silicon Valley. While PayPal cofounder and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is planning to establish an 80,000-person high-tech colony on Mars,72 others are focused on building their fantasy high-tech colonies within Northern California itself. The third-generation Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper is launching a 2014 “Six Californias” ballot measure to redraw California into six separate US states, including one called “Silicon Valley.”73 And the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who boasted at FailCon about his own failure, has already seceded.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

But then Kenna caught a lucky break by acting on his preoccupations—cryptography, “alternative finance,” libertarian politics, and economic collapse. Kenna accumulated a small hoard of Bitcoin when it was virtually worthless. In 2011, he launched a Bitcoin exchange, Tradehill, from an office on the beach in Chile. His cofounders included New York bankers and a former senior engineer from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. By 2013, when the goldbugs, money launderers, and Wall Street speculators joined the Bitcoin frenzy, Kenna had become a charter member of the “Bitcoin millionaires’ club,” and his distaste for “unethical” business practices had evolved. He now argued that the marketing of Ponzi schemes should be permitted so long as the terms were clearly stated.

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Thumbing through its pages, I realized this book distilled every vapid and hollow slogan promulgated by the boom-time tech press. “Less meetings, more doing. Passion never fails,” the book began. The rest of the pages were filled with alternately hectoring and platitudinous quotes from billionaire executives like Bill Gates (“I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one.”) and Elon Musk of Tesla Motors (“Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen.”). With rare exception, the tech press—by which I mean both the trade press focused exclusively on the tech industry and the tech sections of general-interest news organizations—functions as an appendage of the Silicon Valley marketing machine.

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But it should be clear that the neoreactionaries were, by and large, young white males embittered by “political correctness”—a term that represented the perceived loss of their social advantages to an undeserving mob of brainwashed social justice warriors. Significantly, these radicalized youth saw in the miraculous futuristic designs of men such as a Peter Thiel and Elon Musk a vision that was entirely compatible with their notions of racial supremacy, and they expected to personally benefit in the tech titans’ new order. To certain devotees, Musk’s dream of human settlements on Mars offered an escape from this benighted earth, where their wretched enemies would be left behind, in a final act of vengeance by the tech-savvy master race.

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
by Tom Standage
Published 16 Aug 2021

The new battery pack weighed a quarter of a ton less than the old one, but could store three times as much energy and extended the tzero’s range from about 90 to about 250 miles. The car was also capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in less than four seconds. In late 2003, just as GM began reclaiming and crushing its fleet of EV1s, the tzero came to the attention of two American technology entrepreneurs and car enthusiasts, Martin Eberhard and Elon Musk. Impressed by the tzero’s performance, and angered by the demise of the EV1, both men separately urged Cocconi and Gage to put the tzero into production, to prove GM wrong. This led Gage to introduce Eberhard to Musk. The two men decided to team up to commercialize the tzero’s technology through a new company, Tesla Motors.

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Moreover, history suggests that it would be naive to assume that switching from one form of propulsion to another would mean that things would otherwise continue as they were; that is not what happened when cars replaced horse-drawn vehicles. Some people say it’s time to rethink not just the propulsion technology that powers cars, but the whole idea of car ownership. The same technology that enabled Elon Musk to succeed where Thomas Edison failed a century earlier—the lithium-ion battery—underpins the smartphone as well as the electric car. And thanks to the smartphone, the early twenty-first century has seen lots of experimentation around new modes of transport that explore the space between privately owned vehicles and public transport.

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For autonomous cars, this means getting hold of thousands of images of street scenes, with each element carefully labeled, so that a perception system can be trained to recognize them. The simplest way to obtain such images is to pay people to label street scenes manually, by drawing boxes around cars, pedestrians, and so on. (Tesla employs several hundred expert labelers, according to Elon Musk; other companies farm the job out.) The hardest things for a perception system to identify are rarely seen items such as debris on the road, or plastic bags blowing across a highway. According to Sebastian Thrun, in the early days of Google’s AV project, its perception system misidentified a plastic bag as a flying child.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

He is far from alone in fearing the taking over of the world by artificial intelligence, something that one leading American expert on AI describes as the “biggest event in human history.” The world’s richest man, Bill Gates; the world’s most famous physicist, Stephen Hawking; Silicon Valley’s most innovative entrepreneur, Elon Musk; and the Cambridge University cosmologist and author of Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-First Century? Martin Rees (Lord Rees), all share Tallinn’s apocalyptic concerns. Not only do they all agree that this will be the biggest event in human history, they also fear it might be the last.

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But the book was also a broader wake-up call about “highway carnage” that in 1964, Nader argues, was costing America an annual $8.3 billion (the equivalent of more than $66 billion today) in property damage, medical expenses, lost wages, and insurance overhead expenses.14 Unsafe at Any Speed was a public relations catastrophe for an American car industry that, in many ways, is only now recovering its mojo with Elon Musk’s electric car start-up Tesla—the innovative Silicon Valley–based company that, in April 2017, passed General Motors to become America’s most valuable automobile manufacturer, with a $52.7 billion market cap. Like the American food industry, the car market over the half century since Nader published his exposé has been dramatically reshaped by our five-pronged forces of government regulation, competitive innovation, social responsibility by citizens, worker and consumer choice, and education.

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Yet for all his concerns about the demonic potential of artificial intelligence, Price isn’t entirely pessimistic about the future. He is encouraged, for example, by what he describes as the ethical maturity of the three cofounders of DeepMind, particularly Demis Hassabis, its young Cambridge-educated CEO. This is the London-based tech company whose investors include Jaan Tallinn and Elon Musk, a start-up founded in 2011 and then acquired by Google for $500 million in 2014. DeepMind made the headlines in March 2016 when AlphaGo, its specially designed algorithm, defeated a South Korean world champion Go player in this 5,500-year-old Chinese board game, the oldest and one of the most complex games ever invented by humans.

Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything
by Kelly Weill
Published 22 Feb 2022

Svarrior’s tweet went viral, making headlines and sending the society’s Twitter following sky-high. “If you look up the Twitter follower graph, it’s publicly available, you will pinpoint the spot where our Twitter account absolutely blew up, and that was the Elon Musk tweet,” Svarrior told me. “I’m not going to pretend there is a master plan and that I sat in a corner planning the Elon Musk tweet for days. I saw it, I thought it would be a funny response, so I wrote it. It just happened to work out in this instance. But the overall objective of that account is to get people talking. Especially people who wouldn’t be looking for us otherwise.”

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He told me, on multiple occasions and at great length, that he thought people’s names were actually government-owned copyrights, and that he could file lawsuits to seize those names, the very thing that had annoyed the San Bernardino authorities so much that they eventually pursued his arrest. “Basically, I have claimed legal entities for very famous people. They can’t even exist,” he told me. “Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Warren Edward Buffett. I own the legal entities they’re operating under.” Once, he even tried roping me into a lawsuit he filed against YouTuber Logan Paul, over Paul’s Flat Earth documentary, in which I’d had a fleeting appearance. I wrote a short article about the one-sided feud but otherwise avoided the matter.

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“So I know that of all the stuff they do to make Flat Earth look stupid or spread disinformation about the leaders in the movement, all it does is add fuel to the fire and make people say, ‘Why are they still talking about Flat Earth?’ ” Pete Svarrior, the Flat Earth Society spokesperson, told me internet virality brought the group much-needed attention as it was losing ground to other Flat Earthers in 2017. That’s when Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of the space travel company SpaceX, tweeted a joke about the lack of a Flat Mars Society. Svarrior answered sarcastically from the Flat Earth Society account. “Hi Elon, thanks for the question. Unlike the Earth, Mars has been observed to be round,” Svarrior wrote. “We hope you have a fantastic day!”

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire
by Bruce Nussbaum
Published 5 Mar 2013

CHAPTER 6 147 It was 3:44 in the morning: “SpaceX Launch—NASA,” http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/ commercial/cargo/spacex_index.html, accessed September 7, 2012. 147 The Dragon capsule was free: Clara Moskowitz, “SpaceX Launches Private Capsule on Historic Trip to Space Station,” May 22, 2012; http://www.space.com/15805-spacex-private -capsule-launches-space-station.html, accessed September 7, 2012. 147 Just days after the launch: “Space X,” accessed September 7, 2012, http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/ commercial/cargo/spacex_index.html. 148 This flight was, after all: “Elon Musk, CEO and Chief Designer,” http://www.spacex.com/elon-musk.php, accessed September 7, 2012. 148 Many know Elon Musk: Ibid. 148 pretty much at the nadir: Encyclopedia of World Biography, http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/ Li-Ou/Musk-Elon.html#b, accessed September 7, 2012. 148 By 2002, eBay realized: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-941964.html, accessed September 7, 2012. 148 In 2002, Musk became the CEO: Margaret Kane, “eBay picks up PayPal for $1.5 Billion,” CNET News, July 8, 2002; http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/ Li-Ou/Musk-Elon.html#b, accessed September 7, 2012. 149 A year later he founded a second: Will Oremus, “Tesla’s New Electric Car Is Practical and Affordable, as Long as You’re Rich,” Slate, June 20, 2012, accessed September 7, 2012, http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/ 2012/06/20/tesla_model_s_new_electric_car_is _practical_affordable_for_the_rich.html. 149 But Musk said in his celebratory: Ibid. 149 In 2007, just before the biggest: Gabriel Sherman, “The End of Wall Street as They Knew It,” New York magazine, February 5, 2012, accessed September 7, 2012, http://nymag.com/news/ features/wall-street-2012-2/index3.html. 149 Historically, banks never accounted: Gillian Tett, Financial Times US editor and author of Fool’s Gold, shared this information at a March 10, 2010, presentation at Columbia University; Sherman, “The End of Wall Street as They Knew It.” 150 the majority of business school graduates: personal interview with Roger Martin; Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 328–31, 349. 150 But by the end of the century: Ibid. 150 Top bankers received astonishing: Linda Anderson, “MBA Careers: Financial Services—A Breadth of Opportunity,” Financial Times, January 29, 2007, accessed September 7, 2012, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ 3baa68a4-ad5a-11db8709-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=991cbd66-9258-11da -977b0000779e2340.html#axzz22nEQOvia. 150 When BusinessWeek ran: January 31, 2000, issue, cover story by Michael Mandel. 151 An inequality gap: Sam Pizzigati, “Happy Days Here Again, 21st Century–Style,” Institute for Policy Studies, March 13, 2012, accessed September 7, 2012, http://www.ips-dc.org/blog/ happy_days_here_again_21st_ century-style. 151 Alice Waters’s groundbreaking organic: “About Chez Panisse,” http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Chez_Panisse, accessed September 7, 2012. 152 Just as important, Gen Y: I joined Parsons in 2008, and I am indebted to my Parsons students for these and other insights into Gen Y culture. 152 You can pay about a hundred bucks: TechShop website, http://www.techshop.ws/, accessed September 7, 2012. 152 Make magazine, launched in 2005: http://makezine.com/magazine/, accessed September 7, 2012. 153 The Faires celebrate “arts, crafts”: http://makerfaire.com/newyork/2012/index.html, accessed September 7, 2012. 153 Generation Y, on the other hand: interviews with Kelsey Meuse in my classroom and after graduation. 154 Bombarded with as many as five thousand: Louise Story, “Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See an Ad,” New York Times, January 15, 2007, accessed September 5, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/business/ media/15everywhere.html?

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When asked in an interview with ABC News’s Cynthia McFadden what she thought of Gaga’s song “Born This Way,” which shares a chord progression with the eighties classic “Express Yourself,” Madonna reflected, “It feels reductive.” “Is that good?’ asked McFadden. “Look it up,” said the Queen of Pop, smiling devilishly before reaching for her mug and taking a sip. While perhaps more rare than in the world of art and music, there are those in the business world who’ve learned to mine the past. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, the first private company to send cargo to the International Space Station, has a replica of the Saturn V, the powerful rocket that sent twenty-four astronauts to the moon as part of the Apollo program in the sixties and seventies, on his desk. He no doubt has looked to the Saturn V as inspiration for the development of his Falcon rockets as he seeks to further commercialize space.

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They sounded younger to me than the ex-military NASA voices I’d heard as a kid and, while there have been a number of pioneering female astronauts, the “official” voice of American space flight had always seemed to me to be male. It was truly exciting to hear, and reminded me how much space travel had changed since its early days. This flight was, after all, not a NASA voyage, but the maiden trip of a company launched by a dot-com billionaire. Many know Elon Musk as the co-founder of PayPal, the electronic system that allows people to pay and transfer money in P2P, or person-to-person, transactions, which have become the backbone of nearly all Web commerce. Without the company, we would be sending checks, money orders, and maybe even cash to eBay and Amazon every time we bought something online.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future
by Hal Niedzviecki
Published 15 Mar 2015

Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs, 104. 30. Innerarity, The Future and Its Enemies in Defense of Political Hope, 42. CHAPTER 10 1. Christy Foley, Christy Foley Interview, December 10, 2014. 2. Dana Hull and Patrick May, “Rocket Man: The Otherworldly Ambitions of Elon Musk,” San Jose Mercury News, April 11, 2014, http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_25541126/rocket-man-otherworldy-ambitions-elon-musk. 3. Hardy and Dougherty, “Google and Fidelity Put $1 Billion Into SpaceX.” 4. Hal Niedzviecki, We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture (Toronto, Ont. : New York, N.Y: Penguin Books ; Penguin Putnam, 2000). 5.

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Jeff Bezos of Amazon works out vigorously every morning in preparation for the moment when Blue Origin, the space exploration company he founded on 300,000 acres of land in rural Texas, is ready to send him into orbit.24 And, as we’ve already touched on, entrepreneur/tech-cheerleader Peter Diamandis has partnered with Google and launched the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition, a $30 million prize for the first private entity that can land a robot on the Moon, get it to travel at least 500 meters, and transmit images and information back to Earth. Twenty-six groups have entered.25 In the meantime, Paypal’s founder Elon Musk, now head of California’s SpaceX, celebrated what is now generally seen as the first successful launch of a privately developed manned spacecraft on a fee-paying mission. The mission was to resupply the International Space Station and their client was the United States government. Fee-paying missions on behalf of America have become necessary because for the first time in half a century, the United States government no longer has the capability to organize its own manned flights to space.

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(Including Google, which made a one billion dollar investment in SpaceX in early 2015, no doubt influenced by what one article describes as Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s personal interest in space exploration.) Overall, contracting out to private companies may be a net benefit in terms of optimizing what the money achieves, but it sends a very different overall message to the country; nobody is gathering school children in classrooms to watch Elon Musk cheer on the next landmark fee-paying mission. ° ° ° ° ° ° I’m suspicious by nature, especially of grand sweeping theories of how things were way back when. So I decide to call up Matt Novak. Novak is a self-described amateur historian and futurist best known for his popular and often very funny blog Paleofuture, which lived on the website of the Smithsonian Institute and now resides on Gizmodo.com.28 Paleofuture chronicles what people in the recent past thought about the future.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley
by Emily Chang
Published 6 Feb 2018

Suddenly a former securities lawyer with no technical background was the unlikely co-founder of what would become a billion-dollar start-up. And the group that would become the PayPal Mafia began to form. Sacks became PayPal’s COO in 1999. In early 2000, PayPal (then called Confinity) merged with a competing payments company called X.com, run by a then-obscure entrepreneur named Elon Musk. Rabois became Thiel’s right-hand man. PayPal’s founders, investors, and early employees went on to become a tight-knit and very wealthy group. To this day, Rabois believes PayPal is a “perfect validation of merit” and of Silicon Valley as a meritocracy. “None of us had any connection to anyone important in Silicon Valley,” he told me.

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“In the beginning, it’s better to have people who are more similar ideologically than different. Once you have alignment, then I think you can have a wide swath of people, views, and perspectives.” Amy Klement was one of the earliest women at PayPal—not because Thiel or the others hired her, but because she was working at Elon Musk’s X.com when it merged with PayPal in 2000. Klement told me, “[PayPal] was a high-intensity, driving culture” full of impassioned debate. Socializing took the form of chess tournaments rather than fratty parties. Employees worked eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, as they worked to build a secure online payments system that could rival the global banking industry.

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They joined one another’s companies, funded one another’s ventures, defended one another’s controversial public statements, and more. For Founders Fund, Thiel partnered with two less prominent PayPal co-founders, Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. The partners at Founders Fund invested in their old PayPal buddy Elon Musk’s space venture, SpaceX (Musk also co-founded Tesla). Founders Fund, along with Max Levchin and Keith Rabois, invested in the workplace chat company Yammer, which was founded by former PayPal-er David Sacks. Yammer was ultimately sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion. The list of “begats” goes on.

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments
by Andrew Henderson
Published 8 Apr 2018

However, from my perch overlooking the fjords in Montenegro, I ask myself if businesses that employ Musk’s strategy are constantly in ‘chasing’ mode, going after the next big thing but never really getting there. No doubt Musk has become incredibly successful. However, not only is there one Elon Musk for every 1,000 who do not succeed but even the successes of Elon Musk have been called into question by some investors who consider him more of a social entrepreneur than one actually achieving the profits he appears to be chasing. Ask yourself: do you want the appearance of success, or its results? If living the Nomad Capitalist lifestyle is your goal, you do not have to push as hard as Elon Musk. When I see investors that are no doubt better at reading technical charts than I am tossing $50 billion at Uber, I have to ask, “What happens if it all fails?”

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Personally, I never understood the idea of the perennial start-up machine where an entrepreneur puts all of his eggs in one basket, betting the farm that his or her latest venture will work out. Do not get me wrong, the courage is admirable, but the risk is high. A while back, I read an interview with Elon Musk in which he said that he re-invested his PayPal fortunes into Tesla and Solar City so promptly that he had to borrow money for rent. While perhaps a bit hyperbolic, Musk is definitely a guy who goes all in with his business ventures; heck, he basically resuscitated the idea of a conglomerate in an era when even General Electric had sold off a lot of non-core businesses.

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And I am free to deploy the profits from my business either back into the business or into the vast number of investments we will talk about in this chapter. As Tim Ferriss explained in The Four Hour Workweek, many of the trappings of wealth we expect to enjoy once we reach our own version of Elon Musk’s success are available now, without waiting or killing yourself. Imagine any perk that the average successful start-up has and chances are that you can enjoy it now, or realize that you do not really need it. For example, even though I enjoyed driving a Mercedes in the United States, I much prefer not having the hassles of a car now.

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Published 11 Sep 2023

These day traders gathered on Twitter and Reddit, where they shocked Wall Street by sending shares of left-for-dead retailer GameStop up more than tenfold, nearly bankrupting hedge funds that bet against it. Then they took this nihilistic, buy-it-for-the-LOLs mentality to crypto. Dogecoin replaced politics and dad jokes in the group chat. Jay texted us to say that Dogecoin had sponsored a NASCAR driver. I noticed Elon Musk was talking about it too. As the price climbed from a penny to two cents, then three cents, then five cents, I got more and more annoyed. It wasn’t so much that Jay was making money and I wasn’t. It was more that I knew I was right. And, okay, I was jealous. A few days after Jay’s first text, I pulled up Drudge Report to see a smiling Shiba Inu splashed across the news aggregator’s front page: “Reddit Frenzy Pumps Up Dogecoin!

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The attendees wore T-shirts with crypto slogans, like Have fun staying poor or HODL, a meme about never selling crypto derived from a typo for the word “hold.” Some had shirts advertising their favorite coins, whose names seemed designed to compete for attention by being as stupid as possible. During the conference, the price of one coin called CumRocket would quadruple after Elon Musk tweeted a triptych of emojis (a splash, a rocket, and a moon) that appeared to reference it. The atmosphere was more like a carnival than a tech conference. Near the entrance, I spotted a dumpster full of Venezuelan bolivares, with the label Cash is Trash pasted on the side. A skate ramp had been set up for Tony Hawk to show off his tricks.

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The aisles were jammed when the emcee introduced two men who seemed to be the stars of the show, judging by the riotous applause. Max Keiser, a Bitcoin podcaster, emerged first, in a white suit and purple sunglasses, to pounding EDM. “Yeah! Yeah!” he screamed, pumping his fists, as the dance music built to a drop. Elon Musk had recently said that Tesla would not accept Bitcoin due to its environmental impact, and Keiser was raging like the billionaire had run over his dog. “We’re not selling! We’re not selling! Fuck Elon! Fuck Elon!” A fifty-six-year-old executive named Michael Saylor walked out, wearing an all-black outfit and black leather boots.

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
Published 15 Jan 2024

TikTok quickly became the fastest-growing social network ever, reaching more than 1.5 billion users in less than five years, and its competitors, struggling to catch up, have followed suit into algorithmification. Instagram added a recommendations-driven “Reels” video feed in 2020, and Twitter, following its takeover by Elon Musk, introduced a “For You” column of recommended tweets in 2022. At least for the major corporations that comprise most of the Internet, the algorithmic tide shows no sign of reversing. In place of the human gatekeepers and curators of culture, the editors and DJs, we now have a set of algorithmic gatekeepers.

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I had contributed reviews of art exhibitions to the Tufts Daily newspaper, and I joined Twitter in 2008, when the platform was more like a sparsely populated café than a roaring stadium. Then as now, Twitter’s most addicted user base is journalists, who can’t help but tweet the way wolves can’t help but howl. Twitter gave me my first exposure to the media industry and the nascent world of online publishing. (Elon Musk may have changed Twitter’s official name to X in 2023, but the original is far too set in my mind.) Meanwhile, The Atlantic, which was still primarily a print magazine at the time, had recently launched themed blogs on its website, covering broad areas like culture and politics. Though individual writers including Ta-Nehisi Coates maintained themed blogs of their own to gather their thoughts on specific subjects, these verticals published many different writers, including freelance contributors.

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If automated content moderation or recommender systems misinterpret a word or behavior, “You could potentially silence an entire demographic,” Gade said. That’s why being able to see what’s happening around a given algorithmic decision is so important. Twitter has provided an object lesson in the damage of nontransparency. When Elon Musk acquired the social network in 2022, the hope was that the entrepreneur would help the slow-moving service fulfill its potential. What ensued was a rash of random and half-baked changes that most often altered the user experience for the worse, particularly when it came to the feed. Each version of the Twitter feed—whether on mobile app, website, or the software Tweetdeck—seemed to function differently.

Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley
by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans
Published 25 Apr 2023

Made by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s aerospace manufacturer, the flight was historic, marking the first privately owned spaceship to carry astronauts into space and heralding a new era in spaceflight. It also was the first time astronauts had eschewed NASA’s Airstream-built Astrovan to shuttle them to the launch pad since spaceflight began in 1961. Instead, they climbed into Musk-owned Tesla SUVs while listening to AC/DC. On a television screen within 1422 Empire Avenue in Park City, Tony was also watching as the rocket passed through the stratosphere. Tony had often talked about Elon Musk. Elon’s pronouncements about a multiverse and the concept that we are all living in a simulation were things that Tony believed in, and for that reason he saw Elon as an equal.

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For years, Tony had been the face of Zappos, America’s most popular online shoe seller, and had become the shining example of an unconventional business leader who cared more about helping others find happiness—especially his own employees—than profit margins or meeting quarterly earnings forecasts. He wasn’t a household name like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos—arguably his equals in intellect, business acumen, and willingness to take risks—but he was one of the most consequential tech leaders of our time. The son of Taiwanese immigrants, he had graduated from Harvard in the 1990s before selling his first company to Microsoft for $265 million at the age of twenty-four.

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He was spending time with celebrities as Tony pushed further into the realm of pop culture icon. The model Amber Valletta came by one day to meet Tony. Ashton Kutcher stopped by another time. Richard Branson did multiple tours of the neighborhood. One time, Rehan was standing in a VIP section at Coachella with Tony and Kimbal Musk, when Elon Musk walked over and put his arms around them, grinning. Anything felt possible. “We drank the Kool-Aid. We changed all of our social media feeds to promote our relationship with him,” Rehan said later. “We had gained press associated with him, we gained awareness associated with him, we were meeting people through him that we would never have met before.”

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict
by Kenneth Payne
Published 16 Jun 2021

Science fiction often anticipates an imaginary future where incredibly intelligent machines and humans interact—often to the detriment of humans. But for now that’s an impossibly distant goal. Some AI visionaries anticipate a ‘singularity’—the emergence of a superintelligence far surpassing our own. They debate the ‘existential risk’ to humanity of this sort of AI. Elon Musk, the guru of SpaceX and Tesla fears that we are ‘summoning a demon’.2 The late Stephen Hawking warned that AI could ‘spell the end of the human race’.3 It’s a disturbing vision—but the visionaries themselves can’t agree when it might happen. Those troubled by the prospect include some of the world’s leading AI researchers.

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Rules for warbots All this is making many people uneasy: how can we be sure that AI will do what we want it to? Should it be able to decide who to kill on its own? How can we stop it if it goes wrong? Should we ban it? The activists of the Campaign against Killer Robots think so. They want warbots outlawed before they take to the battlefield. They have some powerful support. In 2017, Elon Musk headlined an open letter calling for a ban, joined by more than over a hundred AI experts, including some titans in the field. Together they warned that: Once developed, lethal autonomous weapons will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. […] We do not have long to act.

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The problem with AI cars is not that they are unsafe, but rather the reverse: they are too safe. They don’t play mind games at all. Today’s AI has no more ability to gauge the internal machinations of adversary leaders as a Tesla does to understand what’s going on in the mind of the car in the oncoming lane. That’s why Elon Musk still hasn’t quite solved autonomous driving, no matter how often he and Tesla tease it. Back at Jaguar Land Rover, researchers focused on the problem of the pedestrian crossing. As their car approached the crossing, a walker was preparing to step out. Should she? The huge, cartoon-like eyes on the front of the car flicked towards her.

Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
by Michael Lewis
Published 2 Oct 2023

All three wore short pants, and in the room, for a moment, it felt like nap time for a small class of restless first graders. But then Sam explained what he wanted to talk about: Elon Musk really was going to buy Twitter, but he didn’t really want to pay for it himself. He was looking for allies to pick up some of the $44 billion it was going to cost. They want us among them. But we only have three hours to get back to them. “What do you get out of this?” asked Nishad, reasonably. “There’s some random shit,” said Sam, then made it clear that the most important random shit was a new alliance with Elon Musk. Crypto lived on Twitter, and Musk was Twitter’s loudest voice. With a single tweet, Musk could trigger a stampede of crypto traders from Coinbase to FTX, or the reverse.

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If there was any rule governing Sam’s life, it was that it was never allowed to bore him. “He’s like Kanye,” said a Sam watcher who also spent time with Kanye West. “Wherever he goes, all this wild shit just happens.” That day—­the morning I turned up at his desk and took an inventory—­wild shit was happening. Elon Musk was buying Twitter and Sam had been on the phone with one of Musk’s advisors, Igor Kurganov. Kurganov was a Russian-­born former professional poker player to whom Musk had entrusted the task, it was reported, of giving away more than $5 billion worth of his fortune. He was also a self-­described effective altruist, thickening the plot.

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At some point Sam simply decided they’d spent time enough for every possible useful thought on the subject to be had and asked for a vote from the other two. “No,” said Nishad. “No, or a very low amount,” said Ramnik. With that, the meeting ended. What I did not realize—­but both Nishad and Ramnik by now both just took for granted—­was that Sam might still hand over some large sum of money to Elon Musk. He was perfectly capable of asking for a vote and then ignoring the result. Sure enough, all by himself, Sam would soon ask Morgan Stanley, which was advising on and helping to finance Musk’s Twitter purchase, if they would be willing to lend him a billion dollars to invest in Twitter and accept his shares in FTX as collateral.

The Rare Metals War
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 15 Feb 2020

Therefore, over its entire lifecycle, an electric car may produce as much as three-quarters of the carbon emissions produced by a petrol car. And the more powerful the electric cars are, the more energy they need for their production, potentially increasing greenhouse gases. In the meantime, Tesla has announced that its Model S vehicles will now be equipped with 600-kilometre-range batteries,8 and its CEO, Elon Musk, has announced the imminent arrival of 800-kilometre-range batteries.9 John Petersen’s conclusion? ‘Electric vehicles may be technically possible, but their production will never be environmentally sustainable.’10 This concurs with similar research conducted along the same lines. The 2016 report by the French Environment & Energy Management Agency (ADEME) finds: ‘he energy consumption of an electric vehicle [EV] over its entire lifecycle is, on the whole, similar to that of a diesel vehicle.’11 The report also finds that its environmental impact is ‘on a par with [that of] the petrol car’.

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Musk may have stepped down as one of the CEOs of President Trump’s business advisory group after Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Accords, but the reality is that the cost of Musk’s ecological dream is far higher than he and others are willing to admit. Further reading: ‘Cost of Elon Musk’s Dream Much Higher than He and Others Imagine’, RealClearEnergy, 8 June 2017. Interview with John Petersen, 2016. See also ‘How Large Lithium-ion Batteries Slash EV Benefits’, 2016. A collection of Petersen’s articles is available on the Seeking Alpha website. See ‘Les potentiels du vehicle électrique’ [‘The Potentials of the Electric Vehicle’], ADEME, April 2016, and Troy R.

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Referring to the illusion of dematerialisation, it poses the question: ‘will our emails ultimately destroy the Appalachia mountains?’ Mark P. Mills, ‘The Cloud Begins with Coal: big data, big networks, big infrastructure, and big power — an overview of the electricity used by the global digital ecosystem’, August 2013. ‘How Clean Is Your Cloud?’, Greenpeace, April 2012. ‘Elon Musk’s SpaceX Is Striving to Win the Race to Build the Internet in Space’, Washington Post, 15 May 2019. As an example, in 1951, forty-four UNIVAC I computers (Universal Automatic Computer I) — the first US commercial computer — were sold. In 2015, nearly 300 million computers and over 200 million tablets were sold worldwide.

The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time
by Allen Gannett
Published 11 Jun 2018

In the Iron Man cartoon, and the subsequent movie empire, Tony Stark is a singular genius. He runs a massive corporate empire and builds his own robotic Iron Man suits. But this idea exists beyond fiction; Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk is routinely compared to Stark. That said, it’s pretty clear that the mythology around the self-reliant genius makes little sense. Elon Musk employs thousands of people who enable him to create futuristic technology. Hundreds of years ago, Mozart spent countless hours learning from his teachers, and also sought out numerous collaborators. Even though over the course of writing this book I found that creativity is very much a team sport, our cultural mythology, at least in the United States, remains extremely focused on the individual.

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Terman succeeded in helping change the perception of genius to being a positive attribute. This is a quick version of the path that has led to today’s version of the inspiration theory of creativity: the idea that creativity results from a mysterious internal process punctuated by random flashes of inspiration. Today we may still see geniuses often as neurotic (think Steve Jobs or Elon Musk), but they are no longer seen as dangerous, or deserving of castigation. Today, genius is seen as something to be celebrated. But, if Terman’s study showed that IQ and creativity are not tied together, where does creative talent come from? Name as many uncommon uses for a hair dryer as you can.

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Creative success, in fact, is learnable, whether you’re a starving artist or the head of an advertising firm. And this is where I worry. The fact that there’s a pattern out there does not mean it’s easy. In fact, mastering the creative curve can take years. In your hands is not a book telling you that with minimal effort you can be the next Mozart or Picasso, Elon Musk or J. K. Rowling. No, this is a book that tells you that if you choose to dedicate your life to creativity, there is a path, and a set of key considerations you need to bear in mind, and need to do, to make success happen. The laws of the creative curve provide a blueprint for how every one of us can unlock our creative potential.

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight
by Julian Guthrie
Published 19 Sep 2016

” — Peter arrived at the Skybar, a rooftop watering hole on Sunset Boulevard, a week after Larry Gross told him he knew who was going to fund the continuation of Blastoff. It was two men who had made a fortune on the Internet and who were interested in space. Peter had never heard of the men, so he wrote down their names: Adeo Ressi and Elon Musk. Peter usually approached pitch meetings with great enthusiasm, but tonight he felt subdued. He spotted Adeo by the Skybar pool, smoking a cigarette and looking out at the gold and glimmering Los Angeles sunset. He was tall and thin, a Giacometti walking man figure, and immediately affable. Adeo said Elon was running late but on his way.

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As he watched planes take off and land on Santa Monica’s 4,973-foot runway 21, he was reminded that SpaceShipOne was as small as a private plane. He pictured it being pulled out of a hangar, rolled out onto the runway, and flying off to space. That was his dream—spaceships for personal use. As if on cue, in walked Elon Musk. Since meeting Peter shortly after the demise of Blastoff, Musk had set out on his own quest for space, motivated by the question: if one was to make a rocket, what would be the best choices to make it cost effective? Ressi and Musk had gone to Russia in 2001 to try to buy rockets, only to find a sort of criminal-filled Wild West, where missiles of any sort could be had for the right amount of cash.

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But everything was still relative, Bennett thought. NASA would have spent that kind of money on blueprints alone. Bennett had met Rutan in 2003, when the XPRIZE invited teams to Los Angeles to show their models and share some of what they were doing. The visit included a field trip to El Segundo, California, where Elon Musk had started SpaceX in an empty 75,000-square-foot hangar. One of Bennett’s favorite moments was on the bus ride to SpaceX, when he overheard Rutan talking on his phone in a low tone about who was attending the event. Bennett smiled when he heard Rutan say, “Bennett’s here.” To be sure, the XPRIZE was a competition, but there was also a shared mission and friendships forged.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution
by Klaus Schwab
Published 11 Jan 2016

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-but-are-we-taking-9313474.html 61 Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever & the OpenAI team, “Introducing OpenAI”, 11 December 2015 https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ 62 Steven Levy, “How Elon Musk and Y Combinator Plan to Stop Computers From Taking Over”, 11 December 2015 https://medium.com/backchannel/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinator-plan-to-stop-computers-from-taking-over-17e0e27dd02a#.qjj55npcj 63 Sara Konrath, Edward O’Brien, and Courtney Hsing. “Changes in dispositional empathy in American college students over time: A meta-analysis.” Personality and Social Psychology Review (2010). 64 Quoted in: Simon Kuper, “Log out, switch off, join in”, FT Magazine, 2 October 2015. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fc76fce2-67b3-11e5-97d0-1456a776a4f5.html 65 Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Penguin, 2015. 66 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet is changing the way we think, read and remember, Atlantic Books, 2010. 67 Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, Simon and Schuster, 2014. 68 Quoted in: Elizabeth Segran, “The Ethical Quandaries You Should Think About the Next Time You Look at Your Phone”, Fast Company, 5 October 2015.

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As theoretical physicist and author Stephen Hawking and fellow scientists Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark and Frank Wilczek wrote in the newspaper The Independent when considering the implications of artificial intelligence: “Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all…All of us should ask ourselves what we can do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks”.60 One interesting development in this area is OpenAI, a non-profit AI research company announced in December 2015 with the goal to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return”.61 The initiative – chaired by Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator, and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors - has secured $1 billion in committed funding. This initiative underscores a key point made earlier – namely, that one of the biggest impacts of the fourth industrial revolution is the empowering potential catalyzed by a fusion of new technologies. Here, as Sam Altman stated, “the best way AI can develop is if it’s about individual empowerment and making humans better, and made freely available to everyone.”62 The human impact of some particular technologies such as the internet or smart phones is relatively well understood and widely debated among experts and academics.

Warnings
by Richard A. Clarke
Published 10 Apr 2017

Freedberg Jr., “Robots, Techies, and Troops: Carter and Roper on 3rd Offset,” Breaking Defense, June 13, 2016, http://breakingdefense.com/2016/06/trust-robots-tech-industry-troops-carter-roper (accessed Oct. 8, 2016). 21. Michael Sainato, “Steven Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates Warn About Artificial Intelligence,” The Observer (UK), Aug. 19, 2015, http://observer.com/2015/08/stephen-hawking-elon-musk-and-bill-gates-warn-about-artificial-intelligence (accessed Oct. 8, 2016); and Elon Musk interview with MIT students at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics Department Centennial Symposium, Oct. 2014, http://aeroastro.mit.edu/aeroastro100/centennial-symposium (accessed Oct. 8, 2016). 22.

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Stephen Hawking warns that AI is “likely to be either the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, so there’s huge value in getting it right.” Hawking is not alone in his concern about superintelligence. Icons of the tech revolution, including former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, echo his concern. And it terrifies Eliezer Yudkowsky. Eliezer has dedicated his life to preventing artificial intelligence from destroying humankind. Tall with a thick, dark beard that, along with wire-rim glasses, forms a frame around his large, oval face, he is a thirty-seven-year-old autodidact who dropped out of school after eighth grade.

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Its first order of business may be to covertly replicate itself on many other servers all over the globe as a measure of redundancy. In could build machines and robots, or even secretly influence the decisions of ordinary people in pursuit of its own goals. Humanity and its welfare may be of little interest to an entity so profoundly smarter. Elon Musk calls creating artificial intelligence “summoning the demon” and thinks it’s humanity’s “biggest existential threat.”8 When we asked Eliezer what was at stake, his answer was simple: everything. Superintelligence gone wrong is a species-level threat, a human extinction event. Humans are neither the fastest nor the strongest creatures on the planet but dominate for one reason: humans are the smartest.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

Past and Present 90:3‒39. Hatcher, John. 1994. “England in the Aftermath of the Black Death.” Past and Present 144:3‒35. Hatcher, John. 2008. The Black Death: A Personal History. Philadelphia: Da Capo. Hawkins, Andrew J. 2021. “Elon Musk Just Now Realizing That Self-Driving Cars Are a ‘Hard Problem.’” Verge, July 5. www.the verge.com/2021/7/5/22563751/tesla-elon-musk-full-self-driving-admission-autopilot-crash. Heaven, Will Douglas. 2020. “Artificial General Intelligence: Are We Close, and Does It Even Make Sense to Try?” MIT Technology Review, October 15. www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/15/1010461/artificial-general-intelligence-robots-ai-agi-deepmind-google-openai.

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It is better to change ourselves—for example, by investing in skills that will be valued in the future. If there are continuing problems, talented entrepreneurs and scientists will invent solutions—more-capable robots, human-level artificial intelligence, and whatever other breakthroughs are required. People understand that not everything promised by Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or even Steve Jobs will likely come to pass. But, as a world, we have become infused by their techno-optimism. Everyone everywhere should innovate as much as they can, figure out what works, and iron out the rough edges later. WE HAVE BEEN here before, many times. One vivid example began in 1791, when Jeremy Bentham proposed the panopticon, a prison design.

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Ray Kurzweil, a prominent executive, inventor, and author, has confidently argued that the technologies associated with AI are on their way to achieving “superintelligence” or “singularity”—meaning that we will reach boundless prosperity and accomplish our material objectives, and perhaps a few of the nonmaterial ones as well. He believes that AI programs will surpass human capabilities by so much that they will themselves produce further superhuman capabilities or, more fancifully, that they will merge with humans to create superhumans. To be fair, not all tech leaders are as sanguine. Billionaires Bill Gates and Elon Musk have expressed concern about misaligned, or perhaps even evil, superintelligence and the consequences of uncontrolled AI development for the future of humanity. Yet both of these sometime holders of the title “richest person in the world” agree with Hassabis, Li, Kurzweil, and many others on one thing: most technology is for good, and we can and must rely on technology, especially digital technology, to solve humanity’s problems.

Immortality, Inc.
by Chip Walter
Published 7 Jan 2020

It offered $10 million to any company that could privately build and fly a ship carrying three people into space twice within two weeks. It took eight years, but finally, in 2004, SpaceShipOne took the prize. More importantly, it launched a whole series of XPRIZEs that soon came to influence people up and down the Peninsula, from Larry Page to Elon Musk. These days Diamandis’s XPRIZE projects are designed to drive the invention of just about everything from lunar landings to the elimination of poverty. Create “radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity” is the phrase Diamandis likes to use. These successes, together with the inception of Singularity University (created with Ray Kurzweil) in 2008, cemented Diamandis’s reputation as a mover and shaker in Silicon Valley.

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He was the Olympic class fundraiser—or as Venter put it, “quite the man about town.” Hariri called him an intellectual cupid. In the course of his many undertakings, he had made friends with just about every big wallet in Silicon Valley. Thus, in mid-2013, Diamandis sat down to brainstorm a board and put together a list of billionaires he thought might invest. Included were Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, and Larry Page, Peter Thiel of PayPal fame, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic. That was the short list. Nine months later, in March 2014, Venter, Hariri, and Diamandis formed their triumvirate and announced the creation of Human Longevity, Inc., tapping the Valley’s deep pockets to pool a first round investment of $70 million.

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To him, entwining humans and machines so thoroughly that they became indistinguishable was simply the next natural course of human evolution. * * * — ONE MIGHT FEEL that Kurzweil’s Bridge Four thinking was just a touch outside the views of the average Homo sapiens. Some, however, felt it was a very real threat. Elon Musk and, prior to his death in 2018, Stephen Hawking, had warned that superintelligent AIs could take over the planet—partly thanks to the work Musk’s friend Larry Page was supporting. “I have exposure to very cutting-edge AI,” Musk told attendees at the National Governors Association in July 2017, “and I think people should be really concerned about it.”

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

Birth of a Private Space Industry End, Rae Botsford. ‘Rocket Lab: The Electron, the Rutherford, and Why Peter Beck Started It in the First Place’. Spaceflight Insider, 2 May 2015. Spacevidcast. ‘SpaceX Reaches Orbit with Falcon 1 – Flight 4 (Full Video Including Elon Musk Statement)’. Youtube.com, 28 September 2008. SpaceX. ‘Orbcomm-2 Full Launch Webcast’. YouTube.com, 21 December 2015. Vance, Ashlee. Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Is Shaping Our Future. Virgin Digital, 2015. Falling Costs, Rising Ambitions ‘Apollo Program Budget Appropriations’. NASA. Dorrier, Jason. ‘Risk Takers Are Back in the Space Race – and That’s a Good Thing’.

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So even if information, labour and energy became permanently cheaper, the limits of the earth would confine post-capitalism to conditions of abiding scarcity. The realm of freedom would remain out of reach. Except the limits of the earth won’t matter anymore – because we’ll mine the sky instead. Asteroid Mining In 2017 Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, unveiled the company’s next step in conquering the final frontier. Speaking at the International Astronautical Congress, he announced the launch of the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) – a new architecture consisting of a huge first-stage booster rocket, spaceship and refuelling tanker – all of which would replace the company’s present systems.

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To be clear, Psyche is a rarity. But it demonstrates a crucial point: mining space would create such outlandish supply as to collapse prices on Earth. In August 2017 Peter Diamandis, co-founder of Planetary Resources, asked Blue Origin’s Erika Wagner who would win in a fight between her boss, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. ‘So, Peter, let me tell you about what we’re doing at Blue Origin,’ Wagner diplomatically replied. ‘We’re really looking towards a future of millions of people living and working in space. The thing I think is really fantastic … is that the universe is infinitely large, and so, we don’t need any fisticuffs … we’re all going to go out there and create this future together.’

The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention
by Simon Baron-Cohen
Published 14 Aug 2020

Hawking (2015), “Dear Katie Hopkins. Please stop making life harder for disabled people,” Guardian, April 30, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/30/katie-hopkins-life-harder-disabled-people. 8. Elon Musk’s ex-wife Justine Musk talks about their autistic son in a TEDx talk, embedded within Quora. Justine says their child was diagnosed with mild to moderate autism at age 4 but is now considered off the spectrum. See www.quora.com/Does-Elon-Musk-have-an-autistic-son-Which-one. 9. See B. Hughes (2003), “Understanding our gifted and complex minds: Intelligence, Asperger’s syndrome, and learning disabilities at MIT,” MIT Alumni Association newsletter.

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Of course, hyper-systemizing in a parent or grandparent may not just manifest as financial wealth derived from business acumen: it could also show itself as scientific, academic, technical, literary, or musical expertise. Consider the remarkably successful physicist Stephen Hawking, who has an autistic grandchild.7 Or Elon Musk, perhaps the world’s most famous innovator and inventor, who has an autistic child.8 These anecdotes hint that hyper-systemizing grandparents and parents are more likely to have an autistic child or grandchild. But to move beyond anecdote to evidence, to test if this link is genetic and not due to chance, we need to look at rates of autism in a large population of hyper-systemizing parents.

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We need to anticipate and plan for the special needs of these autistic children who may require—and who have a right to—lifelong support. Some will have additional intellectual disability, but at least half of them will have average or above-average IQ.1 If we want to nurture the inventors of the future, the next Thomas Edison or the next Elon Musk, we are more likely to find them among autistic people, and among those who have a high number of autistic traits because they are hyper-systemizers, than among the general population. The minds of autistic people who have no intellectual disability and who are hyper-systemizers should be seen as one of many natural types of brains that have evolved and that add to human neurodiversity.

Amazing Stories of the Space Age
by Rod Pyle
Published 21 Dec 2016

Von Braun and his team were absorbed into NASA. The US Army would continue to fight ground wars for its country, and NASA would ultimately win the Cold War in space, with those first tentative steps on the moon on July 20, 1969. UNCLASSIFIED Lots of people have dreamt of going to Mars over the last century. Elon Musk wants to go (and is willing to pay hundreds of millions to get there). Buzz Aldrin would like to fly there in a spacecraft of his own design. Tom Hanks has raised his hand, and Carl Sagan famously expressed interest. And of course, as you might expect, Wernher von Braun would have been thrilled to lead an expedition.

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A better way to proceed, they thought, would be to send human crews past Mars and Venus on flyby missions, and they could dispatch robotic probes while they were in the neighborhood (as they looped the planets at close range). Humans controlling those machines while in close proximity and with little to no radio delay should be far more reliable. Of course, as we have seen, the robots do just fine. In today's world, where the Curiosity Mars rover can land itself and drive for a day or more unassisted, and Elon Musk's rockets can make autonomous, pinpoint landings on a lurching seagoing barge after reentering the atmosphere, the mission plans of EMPIRE seem quaint—a product of a bygone era, notions of romantic human exploration in deep space. Even at the time there were detractors. Max Faget, the designer of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules as well as a major contributor to the space shuttle, demurred.

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Depending on how you calculate the costs, the price per flight was somewhere between $185–$500 million. But for some of the deep-space mission studies, like those discussed in this chapter, von Braun assumed that by the mid-1970s, more than sixty Saturn Vs would have launched, having reduced per-flight costs to about $60 million (or about what Elon Musk charges in today's dollars for a Falcon 9 launch). Fifty-two or more smaller variants of the Saturn, the IB, would have launched, dropping its per-flight cost to $22 million. And what of the brilliant command/service module from the Apollo lunar flights? We would have flown seventy or more of those as well, dropping the unit cost again to the $70 million range per unit.21 Human spaceflight was beginning to look like a pretty good deal when flown in quantity.

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think
by James Vlahos
Published 1 Mar 2019

Rather than tediously reading a Wikipedia-derived summary of what a robot is, the socialbot jokes, “What if Daft Punk really are two robots who just want to make music?” “That’s funny,” George says, laughing. The bot shares some recent news about Elon Musk and robots. Tossing the ball back to George, the bot asks, “Have you heard anything about Elon Musk?” “I have,” George brags. “I know him.” “Did you know that Elon Musk was executive producer for the movie Thank You for Smoking?” “No,” George says, sounding impressed. He and the bot go back and forth before settling on books as their next topic. They take a couple of turns, and then the socialbot says, “You know what I was thinking?

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Tech company executives praise it for blasting through decades-old problems in conversational AI; they shower experts in the field with salaries that climb into the six figures and higher. Consider the likes of Ilya Sutskever, a computer scientist credited with breakthroughs in image recognition and machine translation. He earned $1.9 million back in 2016—and that was at a nonprofit, the Elon Musk–supported OpenAI. Silver dollars, though, have only belatedly begun to pour from the Valley’s slot machines. For decades, the approach to getting machines to learn from data languished; brief periods of hype were followed by long stretches of frustration. The AI techniques that dominated were ones in which computer scientists wrote rules that told machines what to do and when to do it.

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But beyond expressing simply that there was a connection between two entities, the system characterized the nature of each connection in standardized ways. For example, Big Ben is located in the UK; the Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883; Emmanuel Macron is the president of France; Steph Curry is married to Ayesha Curry; Jon Voight is a parent of Angelina Jolie; Elon Musk was born in South Africa. Carefully defining allowable connections had a fringe benefit: True Knowledge effectively learned some commonsense rules about the world that, while blazingly obvious to humans, typically elude computers. A person can be born only in a single place. A physical object cannot simultaneously exist in two locations.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
by Daniel Susskind
Published 14 Jan 2020

These machines would be the “last invention that man need ever make,” wrote Irving John Good, the Oxford mathematician who introduced the possibility of such an intelligence explosion: anything a human being could invent, they could improve upon.23 The prospect of such vastly capable AGIs has worried people like Stephen Hawking (“could spell the end of the human race”), Elon Musk (“vastly more risky than North Korea”), and Bill Gates (“don’t understand why some people are not concerned”)—though their worries are not always the same.24 One fear is that human beings, limited in what they can do by the comparatively snaillike pace of evolution, would struggle to keep up with the machines.

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There are some cases of companies selling “pseudo-AIs,” chatbots and voice-transcription services that are actually people pretending to be machines (much like the eighteenth-century chess-playing Turk).70 Less dramatically, but in a similar spirit, a 2019 study found that 40 percent of Europe’s AI start-ups actually “do not use any AI programs in their products.”71 There are also notable instances of corporate leaders getting carried away. In 2017, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk expressed his hope that car production in the future will be so highly automated that “air friction” faced by robots would be a significant limiting factor.72 Just a few months later, under pressure as Tesla failed to meet production targets, he sheepishly tweeted, “yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake.”73 However, to dwell for too long on any particular omission or exaggeration is to miss the bigger picture: machines are gradually encroaching on more and more tasks that, in the past, had required a rich range of human capabilities.

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Just 16 percent of Americans think a four-year degree prepares students “very well” for a well-paying job.21 In part, this may have been prompted by the fact that many of today’s most successful entrepreneurs dropped out from these sorts of institutions. The list of nongraduates is striking: Sergey Brin and Larry Page left Stanford University; Elon Musk did likewise; Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard University; Steve Jobs left Reed College; Michael Dell left the University of Texas; Travis Kalanick left the University of California; Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey left the University of Nebraska and New York University, respectively; Larry Ellison left both the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago; Arash Ferdowsi (cofounder of DropBox) left MIT; and Daniel Ek (cofounder of Spotify) left the Royal Institute of Technology.22 This list could go on.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

It started off dreadfully bad but improved slightly with each game, and within 40 days of constant self-play it had become so strong that it thrashed the original AlphaGo 100–0. Go is now firmly in the category of ‘games that humans will never win against machines again’. Most people in Silicon Valley agree that machine learning is the next big thing, although some are more optimistic than others. Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk recently said that AI is like ‘summoning the demon’, while others have compared its significance to the ‘scientific method, on steroids’, the invention of penicillin and even electricity. Andrew Ng, former chief scientist at Baidu, reckons that there isn’t a single industry that won’t shortly be ‘transformed’.

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Read any political manifesto from across the spectrum and you’ll find yourself lost in a world of smart cities, lean governments and flexible workers. To seriously criticise any of this puts you at risk of being labelled a Luddite who doesn’t ‘get it’. And to whom do we look in order to solve our collective social problems? It’s no longer the state, but the modern tech-geek superhero. Space travel and climate change has fallen to Elon Musk. We look to Google to solve health problems and sort out ageing. Facebook gets to decide what free speech is and battle against fake news, while Amazon’s Jeff Bezos saves the Washington Post from bankruptcy and funds scholarships. One UK MP recently suggested we might run the National Health Service like Uber, while another pitched the idea of Airbnb-style room rentals for patients who needed to stay overnight.

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It is the most significant legislation relating to data passed by the EU. * Max Tegmark, a prominent AI expert, is co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit organisation which researches the challenges technology presents. One important aspect of their work – which received a major donation from Elon Musk – is a global research programme aimed at ensuring that AI is beneficial for humanity.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity
by Martin J. Rees
Published 14 Oct 2018

But eventually these subsidies have to stop. If the Sun (or wind) is to become the primary source of our energy, there must be some way to store it, so there’s still a supply at night and on days when the wind doesn’t blow. There’s already a big investment in improving batteries and scaling them up. In late 2017 Elon Musk’s SolarCity company installed an array of lithium-ion batteries with 100 megawatts capacity at a location in south Australia. Other energy-storage possibilities include thermal storage, capacitors, compressed air, flywheels, molten salt, pumped hydro, and hydrogen. The transition to electric cars has given an impetus to battery technology (the requirements for car batteries are more demanding than for those in households or ‘battery farms’, in terms of weight and recharging speed).

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A clearer-cut ‘great leap forward’ would involve footprints on Mars, not just on the Moon. Leaving aside the Chinese, I think the future of manned spaceflight lies with privately funded adventurers, prepared to participate in a cut-price programme far riskier than western nations could impose on publicly supported civilians. SpaceX, led by Elon Musk (who also builds Tesla electric cars), or the rival effort, Blue Origin, bankrolled by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, have berthed craft at the space station and will soon offer orbital flights to paying customers. These ventures—bringing a Silicon Valley culture into a domain long dominated by NASA and a few aerospace conglomerates—have shown it’s possible to recover and reuse the launch rocket’s first stage—presaging real cost savings.

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If there were an abundance of fuel for midcourse corrections (and to brake and accelerate at will), then interplanetary navigation would be a low-skill task—simpler, even, than steering a car or ship, in that the destination is always in clear view. By 2100 thrill seekers in the mould of (say) Felix Baumgartner (the Austrian skydiver who in 2012 broke the sound barrier in free fall from a high-altitude balloon) may have established ‘bases’ independent from the Earth—on Mars, or maybe on asteroids. Elon Musk (born in 1971) of SpaceX says he wants to die on Mars—but not on impact. But don’t ever expect mass emigration from Earth. And here I disagree strongly with Musk and with my late Cambridge colleague Stephen Hawking, who enthuse about rapid build-up of large-scale Martian communities. It’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

There has been a growth in what Nye calls “the consumer’s sublime” of Disneyland and Las Vegas. There have been sublime technological objets, like the iPhone, whose original release was the closest my own generation possesses to a shared experience of techno-wonder. There have certainly been men and women who get famous selling the promise of the sublime—Elon Musk’s hyperloops being the most famous examples. And there have been moments of a nostalgic sublime—such as the final flight of the space shuttle Discovery, carried into history on a special Boeing 747 airliner, which had people craning their necks to watch as the retired spacecraft was ferried from Florida to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.

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Strikingly, just as political conservatism manifests precisely the vices that conservative intellectuals describe as characteristic of politics under big government, so too does a certain kind of centrism flirt with the strongman temptation that its critique implies we face. I’m thinking here of the kind of self-consciously moderate pundits who compare American government unfavorably to the smooth efficiency of the Beijing Politburo… or the kind of “No Labels” independents who imagine some hybrid of Mike Bloomberg, Elon Musk, and James Mattis emerging to lead America out of polarization… or the not particularly ideological voters who thrill to the idea of a businessman-president who just get things done. If Trump’s ascent reflected, in part, the pathologies of political conservatism, he also traded (like Ross Perot before him) on the populist version of this centrism, the sense that both parties are so corrupt that a demagogue who says, “I alone can fix it,” is the businessman-caudillo that our gridlocked republic needs.

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Maybe we have simply been in a kind of bottleneck for the last few generations, achieving important scientific breakthroughs that don’t (yet) translate into society-altering changes. At a certain point, we’ll clear the bottleneck, and it will become clear that our era was a necessary prelude to renewed acceleration—eventually giving us self-driving cars courtesy of a finally profitable Uber, a Mars colony courtesy of the Elon Musk–Jeff Bezos space race, and radical life extension courtesy of Google’s longevity lab or some other zillionaire who can’t imagine shuffling off this mortal coil. All of this could happen on a scale that would be world altering without having the truly utopian scenarios come to pass. Terraforming Mars and becoming a multiplanetary species may be unattainable for now—but just going to Mars would be a bigger leap for mankind than anything we’ve accomplished since Neil Armstrong.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil
by Kenneth Cukier , Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt
Published 10 May 2021

Yet when doing this, we rely neither on teleportation nor on all the traffic lights staying green. Instead, we assume the world as it is (although we may hold out hope); it is the mode of transport that is changeable. One company that applied the mutability principle well is SpaceX, founded by the entrepreneur Elon Musk. It pioneered the development of reusable rockets. The idea had long been a dream of aeronautical engineers and a staple of science fiction. But when NASA scientists contemplated reusability in the 1960s and 1970s, they imagined a rocket with wings that could land like an airplane after returning to Earth.

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If even Einstein can make that lapse, what hope is there for the rest of us? There is an important lesson here. In reframing, the celebrated stock-prospectus disclaimer applies: “past performance is no guarantee of future returns.” Much as we admire successful reframers such as Jennifer Doudna and Elon Musk, we should not necessarily pin our hopes on their next insights being equally important. The next crucial reframe could come from any one of us. When Mentality Meets the Moment And we all can get better at reframing. The starting point is to understand the sources of difficulty we face when attempting to switch frames.

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Moreover, public perception of gasoline-powered cars had changed. If the latter half of the twentieth century had equated the car with personal freedom, at the start of the twenty-first century cars were seen as contributors to environmental degradation. The shift in context established the perfect conditions for Elon Musk’s reframing: cars didn’t need to be petrol-powered, they could be green and look cool. But in Germany, the country’s proud automakers, such as Daimler, BMW, and VW, resisted this reframing. Steeped in the conventional frame, they argued that only gasoline cars were real cars, and they delighted in pointing out electric cars’ shortcomings.

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference
by Alice Ross
Published 19 Nov 2020

Just as the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century created family dynasties like the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts, today a new wave of entrepreneurs is accumulating wealth that is likely to last for generations. In January 2020, Bloomberg published a list of ‘green billionaires’ and predicted that there would be many more to follow in the next decade. The most recognisable person on the list is Elon Musk, the founder of electric car company Tesla. But many of the new wave of green billionaires are not – or not yet – household names. Topping the list, one place ahead of Musk, are four shareholders in Chinese electric battery maker CATL, which supplies firms including Toyota and BMW: Zeng Yuqun, Huang Shilin, Pei Zhenhua, and Li Ping, who between them have a combined wealth of $16.7bn.

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In fact, it created a new market in residential solar loans, which can be sold on to investors such as Goldman Sachs, other asset managers and insurance companies. It is still a private company, but its exit path is unclear, says Parish, with listing just one option, though it was profitable in 2018. One of its peers, SolarCity, was bought by Elon Musk’s Tesla in 2016 for $2.6bn. Parish says that the early individual investors in his company were crucial for its initial success, and wishes that wealthier investors would do more to invest with climate change in mind. ‘We wouldn’t be around if individuals hadn’t used some of their private wealth to back us.

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The longer-term uptake of electric vehicles is, pandemic wobbles aside, expected to accelerate rapidly. From fewer than 500,000 passenger vehicles in 2010 to 6m in 2018, Irena predicts the world will see 157m by 2030 and more than 1.1bn by 2050, if Paris Agreement commitments are met. The poster child for electric vehicles is Elon Musk’s Tesla, which experienced exponential growth in its share price before the coronavirus market crash in February 2020. In just two months, from November 2019, its share price doubled, pushing its valuation to over $100bn – more than the share value at that time of General Motors and Ford put together.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
by Daniel Yergin
Published 14 Sep 2020

They sought a “green recovery”—governments’ taking advantage of the crisis to reorient their energy mix away from oil and gas and hasten what they saw as the coming energy transition. ROADMAP Chapter 37 THE ELECTRIC CHARGE The lunch in a Los Angeles seafood restaurant in 2003 was not going well. Two engineers, J. B. Straubel and Harold Rosen, were pitching Elon Musk. An entrepreneur of iron-man determination, Musk was already known as one of the original members of the “PayPal Mafia,” who had launched the online payment system, and then as the founder of SpaceX, which was aiming to undercut the government’s cost for space transportation and pave the interplanetary path for travel to Mars.

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In the United States, Ford announced that it would spend $11.5 billion on the production of electric vehicles by 2022. “Electric vehicles make sense,” said Ford’s executive chairman, Bill Ford. “We are betting very heavily on it.” And the list went on and on—and on. “There have been so many announcements that I’m waiting for my mom to announce one,” said Elon Musk. He could afford to joke. For in 2017, in terms of stock market valuation, Tesla, producing around just 100,000 cars, overtook General Motors, which that year sold 9.6 million vehicles worldwide.14 But one year later, Tesla was again caught up in another swell of turbulence. Production of the Model 3 was going much more slowly than anticipated.

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Across America, for instance, the Volkswagen settlement helps pay for installing electric charging stations.18 * * * — In 2009, China overtook the United States as the world’s largest auto market, and the gap continues to grow. Beijing is determined that one out of every five new vehicles sold in China by 2025 should be a NEV—a “new energy vehicle.” China has its own great champion of electric vehicles—Wan Gang. He ranks with Elon Musk in terms of impact on the advancement of the EV and as one of the most consequential figures for the global auto industry. During the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, Wan was exiled to the countryside. He relieved the harshness and the tedium by spending hours in a tractor shed, fascinated by the tractor’s engine, disassembling it and reassembling it.

The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent
by Vivek Wadhwa
Published 1 Oct 2012

This has been true since the founding of the United States as a nation composed of people seeking better economic chances and religious freedom in the New World, a process that started with the arrival of the Mayflower. Each decade has yielded top-flight entrepreneurs not born in this land, from Andrew Carnegie (Carnegie Steel Company) to Alexander Graham Bell (AT&T) to Charles Pfizer (Pfizer) to Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems) to Sergey Brin (Google) to Elon Musk (PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors). A 2011 study by the Partnership for a New American Economy tabulated that first-generation immigrants or their children had founder roles in more than 40% of the Fortune 500. These companies had combined revenues of greater than $4.2 trillion and employed more than 10 million workers worldwide.4 More and more evidence indicates that immigrant founders drive a wildly disproportionate percentage of all net new job creation in America.

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Company and product names mentioned herein are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61363-020-4 Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61363-021-1 About the Book Many of the United States’ most innovative entrepreneurs have been immigrants, from Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, and Charles Pfizer to Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla, and Elon Musk. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies and one-quarter of all new small businesses were founded by immigrants, generating trillions of dollars annually, employing millions of workers, and helping establish the United States as the most entrepreneurial, technologically advanced society on earth. Now, Vivek Wadhwa, an immigrant tech entrepreneur turned academic with appointments at Duke, Stanford, Emory, and Singularity Universities, draws on new research to show that the United States is in the midst of an unprecedented halt in high-growth, immigrant-founded start-ups.

The Knowledge Illusion
by Steven Sloman
Published 10 Feb 2017

Ward (May 2015), “Blurred Boundaries: Internet Search, Cognitive Self-Esteem, and Confidence in Decision-Making.” Talk presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, New York, New York. fifty microprocessors each: auto.howstuffworks.com/under-the-hood/trends-innovations/car-computer.htm. Elon Musk: fortune.com/2015/12/21/elon-musk-interview. compromise overall safety: S. Greengard (2009). “Making Automation Work.” Communications of the ACM 52(12): 18–19. pilots . . . didn’t know what to do: www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/what-really-happened-aboard-airfrance-447-6611877. GPS master: Examples can be found at www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3119/has-anyone-gotten-hurt-or-killed-following-bad-gps-directions.

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The technological revolution has improved our lives in some ways, but it has also given rise to worry, despair, and even dread. Technological change is leading to all kinds of effects, and some may not be quite what we bargained for. Some of our greatest entrepreneurs and scientific minds see even darker clouds on the horizon. People like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates have cautioned that technology could become so sophisticated that it decides to pursue its own goals rather than the goals of the humans who created it. The reason to worry has been articulated by Vernor Vinge in a 1993 essay entitled “The Coming Technological Singularity,” as well as by Ray Kurzweil in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, and most recently by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, who works at the University of Oxford.

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Many of them are there to help you control the car: power steering setups can use computers to adjust the force you need to apply at different speeds and antilock brakes use computers to prevent skidding. And the automation revolution is just beginning: Completely automated cars are no longer science fiction. In late 2015, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, stated that the technology for full automation will be perfected in about two years, though it may take government regulators longer to work out the legal issues before driverless cars start taking over the roads. With larger vehicles, technology has already changed the playing field.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism
by Robin Chase
Published 14 May 2015

Hagel and Brown tell companies that they need to move “from monetizing stocks to monetizing flows”—that is, making money on the transactions, the service, the new value creation.19 So Elon Musk opens to the world the static intellectual property bound up in Tesla’s patents, because that is not where the value lies. The value lies in building on that base of knowledge, in engaging the hearts and minds of as many people as possible so that Tesla’s best guesses about electric cars and batteries become the foundational standard on which a new industry is built. Imagine Your Entire Ecosystem to Be Potential Co-creators When Elon Musk made Tesla’s patents open, he didn’t know from which corner breakthroughs would come—and he still doesn’t know.

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Perhaps most exciting, from an innovation standpoint, is the ability for peers to “send” to one another the precise specifications for physical 3-D objects, enabling very rapid iterative prototyping across great distances. The natural progression toward increased openness, beyond the licensing of a previously closely held brand asset, is to get rid of that legal protection altogether. Elon Musk—founder of SpaceX, co-founder of PayPal, and currently CEO of Tesla Motors—made just such an announcement in a blog entry on June 12, 2014. “In the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology,” he wrote, Tesla was opening up all its patents. Musk understood that like in FOSS, where it is well appreciated that more minds are better than fewer minds, more rapid innovation demands more access.

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“Five Cities Selected as Winners in Bloomberg Philanthropies 2014 Mayors Challenge,” Bloomberg.org, September 17, 2014, www.bloomberg.org/press/releases/five-cities-selected-winners-bloomberg-philanthropies-2014-mayors-challenge. 17. Christophe Vidal, “My Little Pony—Spitfire,” on Shapeways website, www.shapeways.com/model/2207519/my-little-pony-spitfire-asymp-70mm-tall.html?materialId=26. 18. Elon Musk, “All Our Patents Are Belong to You,” TeslaMotors.comblog, June 12, 2014, www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you. 19. Personal correspondence with John Hagel and John Seely Brown. 20. “Financial Performance,” J-Sainsbury.co.uk, www.j-sainsbury.co.uk/investor-centre/financial-performance. 21.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime
by Julian Guthrie
Published 15 Nov 2019

Things were not that different in the more recent gold rush. The Valley was always a region dominated by men, from William Hewlett, Dave Packard, Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak to, decades later, in the twenty-first century, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Travis Kalanick, and Marc Benioff. Mary Jane, fueled by peanut butter sandwiches packed in wax paper for the two-day journey, was under no illusion that it would be easy to navigate the old boys’ club of Sand Hill Road and Silicon Valley. Even today, decades after Mary Jane first arrived, 94 percent of investing partners at venture capital firms—the financial decision makers shaping the future—are men, and more than 80 percent of venture firms have never had a woman investing partner.

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(One of her jobs at a Silicon Graphics sales kickoff event was to sit inside a hollowed-out server the size of a refrigerator and respond as if she were a computer as people typed commands.) She had been at Bain—which had offered to reimburse her business school tuition if she worked there for two years—when Netscape went public in August 1995. The sixteen-month-old company, which had never posted a profit, was suddenly valued at more than $2 billion. That same year Elon Musk enrolled at Stanford to study applied physics. Two days after arriving, he applied for a deferment, convinced that the start-up zeitgeist wouldn’t come around again anytime soon. He started Zip2 to help the media industry move from print models to an electronic model. Two years earlier, at twenty-five, Theresia had married her former Bain colleague Tim Ranzetta, who now worked as a buy-side analyst at a mutual fund company in Boston.

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THERESIA With the departure of Jim Goetz, Theresia was more than ever at the forefront of Accel’s efforts to rebuild, recruiting new stars, chasing new deals, and building team morale. One of Theresia’s first acts since Goetz left had been to hire a new principal, Kevin Efrusy. Theresia and Efrusy had worked together at Bain. After Bain, Efrusy went on to work as a product manager for Zip2, the company founded by Elon Musk, and as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, where he founded an applications service provider called Corio that went public in 2000. In her new role as managing partner, Theresia advised Efrusy on a new company that he was chasing for Accel as a possible investment.

How to Spend a Trillion Dollars
by Rowan Hooper
Published 15 Jan 2020

is a fruitless one – I often go back to the ‘what if’ of the Florida recount in 2000 and the election of George W. Bush – but the Nixon ‘what if’ is similarly intriguing and dismaying.) Even before coronavirus hit, the idea of UBI – universal basic income – was being floated by a range of backers as diverse as Charles Murray of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Black Lives Matter. When the pandemic changed the world, the calls for UBI were renewed. A guaranteed income would, say supporters, cushion the economic impact of the virus, and even slow its spread, because many workers would not be obliged to return to work when ill.

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We live on a beautiful and precious rock, but we should have got off the damn thing by now. $ $ $ MY FIRST THOUGHT WAS TO GO TO MARS. After all, no one’s ever been there before. It’s a bold and sensational goal, one that would inspire the public: the mission to walk, for the first time, on another planet. In Elon Musk’s SpaceX rhetoric, we would become a multi-planet species. Mars is almost habitable. It has an atmosphere – a thin one, granted – but it still has one. There is carbon dioxide we can use to make methane fuel, and lots of water in the form of ice than can be consumed and broken up into hydrogen and oxygen.

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While many people were enthralled by the Apollo programme, many were concerned that it was a huge indulgence to look to space when there were enough problems on the ground. Nothing much has changed. In 2018, Musk’s SpaceX company launched its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time. This is an impressive rocket, the most powerful built since the massive Saturn-Vs that took ‘whitey’ to the Moon. Elon Musk says it has cost around $500 million to develop – bear that in mind. Of all rockets currently operational, the Falcon Heavy has the biggest payload. Musk had that first flight carry a payload containing a red Tesla roadster with the roof down, a ‘Starman’ mannequin behind the driving wheel and the David Bowie song playing on the car stereo.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist
by Michael Shermer
Published 8 Apr 2020

It is when people are judged not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin – or by their gender chromosomal constitution, or by whom they prefer to share a bed with, or by what accent they speak with, or by which political or religious affiliation they identify with – that freedom falls and liberty is lost. Chapter 14 Governing Mars Lessons for the Red Planet from Experiments in Governing the Blue Planet Preamble I originally penned this essay in the summer of 2018, stimulated by a Twitter exchange I had with Elon Musk, itself triggered by the SpaceX CEO’s previously announced decision to colonize Mars. This led me to wonder if this visionary had given any thought to what sort of government he would set up on the Red Planet, and if he already had a team of social scientists working on the problem or whether he was just going to wing it when they got there.

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” * * * Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything – high and low and, most especially, high – lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. Charles Krauthammer, Things that Matter, 2013 In September of 2017 Elon Musk announced his intention to establish a Martian colony by the mid 2020s, thereby assuring our survival as an interplanetary species. “If there’s a third world war we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages,” he told an SXSW (South by Southwest) audience in March of 2018, while also admitting that the endeavor will be “difficult, dangerous, a good chance you’ll die.”

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Curious to know his thoughts on the subject, on June 16, 2018, I whimsically tweeted at the SpaceX CEO (Figure 14.1). Figure 14.1 Tweet from Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer), June 16, 2018. The thread is available at: https://bit.ly/30uUrNy Minutes later I received this reply from Musk (Figure 14.2). Figure 14.2 Tweet reply from Elon Musk (@elonmusk), June 16, 2018. There’s a lot packed into those 217 characters, but a tweet does not a constitution make. At that SXSW conference interview, when asked what type of government he envisions for the first Mars colony, Musk elaborated: Most likely, the form of government on Mars would be somewhat of a direct democracy where people vote directly on issues instead of going through representative government.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

Arkin, and Kevin Monahan, “Russians penetrated U.S. voter systems, top U.S. official says,” NBC News, February 7, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/russians-penetrated-u-s-voter-systems-says-top-u-s-n845721. 87 Fontaine and Frederick, “The Autocrat’s New Tool Kit.” 88 Dean Takahashi, “SoftBank believes 1 trillion connected devices will create $11 trillion in value by 2025,” VentureBeat, October 16, 2018, https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/16/softbank-believes-1-trillion-connected-devices-will-create-11-trillion-in-value-by-2025/. 89 Carlin, Dawn of the Code War, e-book, 756. 90 Paul Tullis, “The US military is trying to read minds,” Technology Review, October 16, 2019, https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/16/132269/us-military-super-soldiers-control-drones-brain-computer-interfaces/. 91 “Elon Musk’s Neuralink puts computer chips in pigs’ brains in bid to cure diseases,” NBC News, August 29, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-s-neuralink-puts-computer-chips-pigs-brains-bid-n1238782. 92 Lora Kolodny, “Former Google CEO predicts the internet will split in two—and one part will be led by China,” CNBC, September 20, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/20/eric-schmidt-ex-google-ceo-predicts-internet-split-china.html. 93 Rose Wong, “There May Soon Be Three Internets.

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Because signals must travel about 22,000 miles into low-earth orbit and back again, the “latency”—the time it takes to transmit data—can be up to twelve times slower than fiber-optic connections. Signals can even be impacted by bad weather, a phenomenon known as “rain fade.” Satellites carry just a fraction—only 0.37 percent—of online communications,83 though that may be changing. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is in the process of launching as many as 42,000 new satellites, seeking to create a “Starlink” system of high-speed satellite Internet.84 For now, satellites prove especially useful for reaching landlocked or remote areas. Antarctica, for instance, relies entirely on satellite-based communications.

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“It’s one thing,” notes John Carlin, the former head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, “if a hacker’s malware insists on a $300 ransom to unlock your computer; it’s something else entirely if the hacker insists on a $300 payment before grandma’s home dialysis machine will be turned on again.”89 In some cases, these smart devices may even begin to merge with our minds. The Pentagon—our old friends at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—has begun experimenting with drones controlled by neural signals.90 Elon Musk’s Neuralink is in the early stages of testing human-computer interfaces that would link a person’s brain to the cloud.91 Once considered squarely in the realm of science fiction, these implantable devices could enable someone to effectively have a perfect memory, possessing the unlimited knowledge of an ingrained Google search.

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay
by Jonathan Shapiro and James Eyers
Published 2 Aug 2021

That’s because he believed ICM’s shares may have been made available to hedge funds to borrow—and when those shares were sold by the original owner, they had to be returned, forcing the short-sellers to close their position. Finally, Letts made a comparison to another company that had been involved in a seemingly eternal tussle with hedge funds and had elicited emotions that professional share-market traders are trained to suppress: Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors. Musk, along with Peter Thiel, belonged to the ‘PayPal mafia’, having founded the groundbreaking payments company to solve the problem of the lack of trust between two strangers transacting online. Musk had taken his fortune and rolled the dice on what his disciples believed were humanity-altering ventures: launching cheap rockets into space, and accelerating the use of electric cars by building models that people actually wanted to drive.

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By 2018, not much had changed. Tesla was still struggling to make a profit, or even enough cars to rival the auto majors. But its market capitalisation was now $50 billion. The short-sellers couldn’t help themselves. And Australia’s community of global hedge funds was among those taking the other side of the bet against Elon Musk. ‘Over-hyped, thematic “disruptors” are increasingly vulnerable to a fight-back from strong incumbent competitors,’ Jacob Mitchell, the head of Sydney-based fund Antipodes, told The Australian Financial Review.2 ‘Despite the recent share price rally, we believe Tesla’s fundamentals remain extremely weak and the company’s share price is vulnerable to a large fall, given the persistent huge operating losses, stressed balance sheet and the arrival of dozens of competing electric cars from the world’s top manufacturers,’ Melbourne-based L1 Capital told investors in a quarterly update.3 If Afterpay’s brokers were battling, then the war over Tesla was close to a nuclear one as Musk and short-sellers baited each other on social media.

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The combination of rising sales and expanding multiples put a proverbial rocket under the share price.14 But supporters would have to stomach another round of volatility, driven by the emergence of new competition in the United States, while consumer groups were again raising their heads above the parapet. Max Levchin, who co-founded PayPal alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, had created Affirm in 2012 out of his incubator, HVF. In early 2014, he decided to make Affirm his full-time job. It had partnered with more than a thousand US retailers by July 2017, the company said. But its product was built on charging customers interest; its pitch centred on better transparency on charges, and the fact that it didn’t charge late fees.

The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend
by Rob Copeland
Published 7 Nov 2023

A shaper was a visionary leader, and to hear Dalio tell it, he had found precious few inside Bridgewater, save for himself. The qualifications to be a shaper outside Bridgewater were fairly nebulous. A shaper was curious, independent, and determined to achieve goals, Dalio said. He tended to proclaim people shapers after they had spent a long time speaking with him. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Reed Hastings all met with Dalio and were pronounced to be shapers. In the midst of his soliloquy, Dalio stopped, suddenly seeming to remember that he was there with a guest. He gestured to Isaacson and asked, Wouldn’t you agree that both Steve Jobs and I are shapers? Isaacson’s eyes darted side to side and he let out a nervous cough.

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Later it was rebranded to Principles Operating System, or PriOS. When talking about PriOS to clients, Dalio often compared it to a car navigation system. He said it worked so well and so consistently that Bridgewater might even be willing to share it with them—for a price. In one client meeting, Dalio bragged that Bill Gates and Elon Musk had tested the approach and approved it. Dalio hoped theirs, and other companies, would use it with their own employees, bringing Bridgewater’s creations to every workplace in America. “It will make decisions for you in much the same way a GPS makes decisions. In other words, a GPS can tell you, ‘Go right’ and ‘Go left.’

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He was headed to his most important public appearance since the Oprah interview twenty-nine years earlier. Dalio had nabbed a speaking slot at TED2017, the high-profile series in which luminaries in business, art, and science speak with the world about their life lessons. He prepared for weeks for a sixteen-minute slot in between big names such as Elon Musk and Serena Williams. To many around him, Dalio seemed unusually nervous. This would be a big stage at a time when he could use a chance to change the subject. The opening months of 2017 had brought a barrage of unwelcome attention. David McCormick and Eileen Murray were announced as the latest set of CEOs, replacing Jon Rubinstein and producing a renewed flutter of news articles about the consistent management tumult at the firm.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know
by Richard Watson
Published 5 Nov 2013

Clarke, sci-fi author, inventor and futurist The Russian Space Agency is no longer allowing paying passengers, but billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is currently offering a similar experience, albeit suborbital, for a much more down-to-earth price of $200,000. Other entrepreneurial companies active in this field include Space Adventures and Elon Musk’s SpaceX (Elon Musk is the forty-year-old entrepreneur behind PayPal and Tesla Motors). Rocket man Space is the next frontier for entrepreneurs, especially high-tech billionaires. Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, has announced a plan to build a commercial spaceship that could be space bound before 2020.

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Probably not in our lifetimes in any meaningful sense, so in the meantime we’ll have to console ourselves with good old-fashioned staycations, ecotourism, glamping, climate change travel, virtual vacations, spa and sleep holidays, dark tourism, voluntourism, medical tourism and floating hotels. Unless, of course, we can invent low-cost warp drive or teleportation. “The ultimate objective is to make humanity a multiplanet species. Thirty years from now, there’ll be a base on the Moon and on Mars, and people will be going back and forth on SpaceX rockets.” Elon Musk, engineer and entrepreneur Of course, there is another possibility. A good trick in terms of looking toward the far future is to start off by looking at the distant past. Why? Because it’s essential to separate cycles and fashion from what’s genuinely new and important, and because what appears to be new, or revolutionary, often turns out to be nothing of the sort—and time and money can easily be wasted.

Long Game: How Long-Term Thinker Shorthb
by Dorie Clark
Published 14 Oct 2021

We don’t want to have hard conversations, and it’s easier to avoid them. (What will I even say?) We like feeling important and that we’re needed. (They unanimously voted to invite me!) We’re plagued by FOMO: the fear of missing out. (What if I find out later that everyone had the time of their lives? What if I miss the chance to become friends with the next Elon Musk?) For a long time, we can get away with it. Because let’s be honest: early in our careers, not that many people are queued up to talk with us. There’s margin available. But if you’re doing things right, as you get more experienced, you become much more in demand. And what started out as a smart move—saying yes to all kinds of opportunities and seeing where they lead—becomes a major liability.

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But if you’re investing in SpaceX in 2001, it better have a massive return” to make up for the risk. A company that only makes moon shot bets could succeed fantastically—or go out of business if none of them happened to pan out. (That’s why X, where Adam Ruxton works, is only one arm of Alphabet.) The same is true for individuals. A few of us put everything on the line. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and the CEO of Tesla, comes to mind. Buoyed by an unshakable faith, he plowed most of the $180 million fortune he accumulated at PayPal into these two companies—to the point where, by his own admission, he ran out of cash in late 2009.4 Since then, he’s recovered just fine, becoming one of the world’s richest men.

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Larry Page and Sergey Brin, “An Owner’s Manual for Google’s Shareholders,” 2004 founders’ IPO letter, Google. 2. Nicholas Carlson, “The ‘Dirty Little Secret’ about Google’s 20% Time, According to Marissa Mayer,” Business Insider, January 13, 2015. 3. Jillian D’Onfro, “The Truth about Google’s Famous ‘20% Time’ Policy,” Business Insider, April 17, 2015. 4. Owen Thomas, “Tesla’s Elon Musk: ‘I Ran Out of Cash,’” VentureBeat, May 27, 2010. Chapter 5 1. Technically, the title is ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. 2. The organization Thinkers50, which ranks the world’s top business thinkers, has inducted Marshall into its Hall of Fame, making him the most highly lauded executive coach (https://thinkers50.com/biographies/marshall-goldsmith/).

Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less
by Michael Hyatt
Published 8 Apr 2019

Sarah Green Carmichael, “The Research Is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies,” Harvard Business Review, August 19, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-backfire-for-people-and-for-companies. 5. Bambi Francisco Roizen, “Elon Musk: Work Twice as Hard as Others,” Vator.TV, December 23, 2010, http://vator.tv/news/2010-12-23-elon-musk-work-twice-as-hard-as-others. 6. Michael D. Eisner, Work in Progress (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 301. 7. Jeffrey M. Jones, “In U.S., 40% Get Less Than Recommended Amount of Sleep,” Gallup, December 19, 2013, http://news.gallup.com/poll/166553/less-recommended-amount-sleep.aspx. 8.

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The more hours you work, the less productive you’ll be. The bankers fell prey to a common productivity myth: that energy is fixed, but time can flex. They believed they could get a consistent return on their effort while expanding their hours—that they’d be just as smart, strong, and engaged at 100 hours as they were at 50. Here’s Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, in a classic statement of the fallacy: “If other people are putting in 40-hour workweeks and you’re putting in 100-hour workweeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing . . . you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve.”5 But the bankers and Musk have it exactly backwards.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 1 Feb 2022

I want somebody really smart to rethink the assumptions from the ground up.” After all, he continues, retail innovation did not come from Walmart; it came from Amazon. Media innovation did not come from Time magazine or CBS; it came from YouTube and Twitter and Facebook. Space innovation did not come from Boeing and Lockheed; it came from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Next-generation cars did not come from GM and Volkswagen; they came from another Musk company, Tesla. “I can’t think of a single, major innovation coming from experts in the last thirty, forty years,” Khosla exclaims. “Think about it, isn’t that stunning?” If the future is best discovered by means of maverick moon shots, another insight follows.

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If Thiel and Levchin had sailed onward to success, the history of Silicon Valley might have been different. Confinity would have staged a triumphant IPO, and its founders would have joined the ranks of Valley royalty, forgetting their earlier resentment of the VC princes. But at the end of 1999, Confinity found itself battling a rival called X.com, led by an entrepreneur named Elon Musk. The two companies were close equivalents in many ways. Both had around fifty employees and 300,000 users. Both were growing fast, and for a while both had offices in the same building on University Avenue in Palo Alto. But X.com had one distinguishing advantage. Whereas Confinity had secured capital from Nokia, a marginal Silicon Valley player, X.com had been anointed by Sequoia.

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Moritz told his partners at Sequoia that merging was the better option. The two sides were like feuding families in a medieval Italian town, firing arrows across the street at each other. A merger would mean that Sequoia’s share in the resulting company would shrink. But it would be worth it.[15] Thiel and Levchin met Elon Musk and Bill Harris at Evvia, a Greek restaurant in Palo Alto, to discuss Moritz’s proposal. Musk was all for bringing the two companies together, but because he had Sequoia at his back, he presumed he was by far the senior partner. X.com had more money in the bank, and having a brand-name venture investor ensured that it could raise further cash if needed.

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
by James Bridle
Published 6 Apr 2022

, CNBC, 20 May 2020; https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/20/aws-salesman-pitch-to-oil-and-gas-we-actually-consume-your-products.html. 9. For an elaboration of the paperclip hypothesis, see Nick Bostrom, ‘Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence’, 2003; https://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai.html. 10. Samuel Gibbs, ‘Elon Musk: Regulate AI to Combat “Existential Threat” Before It’s Too Late’, The Guardian, 17 July 2017; https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/17/elon-musk-regulation-ai-combat-existential-threat-tesla-spacex-ceo. 11. Nick Statt, ‘Bill Gates is Worried about Artificial Intelligence Too’, CNET, 28 January 2015; https://www.cnet.com/news/bill-gates-is-worried-about-artificial-intelligence-too/. 12.

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Some of the strongest warnings about AI have in fact come from its greatest proponents: the billionaires of Silicon Valley who have most bullishly pushed a narrative of technological determinism. Technological determinism is the line of thinking which decrees that technological progress is unstoppable. Given that the rise of AI is as inevitable as that of computers, the internet, and the digitization of society as a whole, we should strap ourselves in and get with the programme. Yet Elon Musk, creator of PayPal and owner of Tesla and SpaceX, believes that AI is the ‘biggest existential threat’ to humanity.10 Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft – whose Azure AI platform keeps Shell’s oil platforms humming – has said he doesn’t understand why people are not more concerned about its development.11 Even Shane Legg, co-founder of the Google-owned AI company DeepMind – best known for beating the best human players at the game of Go – has gone on the record to state that ‘I think human extinction will probably occur, and technology will likely play a part in this.’

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The latter name evokes some kind of intelligent imp or sprite conjured up to undertake minor tasks on the wizard’s to-do list. This is pretty much what the algorithmic daemon does: checking network connections, keeping other tasks running and shutting down defunct processes. But it also suggests a certain malevolence. When Elon Musk described work on artificial intelligence as ‘summoning the demon’, he was evoking something powerful and unknowable – something potentially dangerous. It’s this equation between the unknowable and the dangerous which I want to challenge, because it seems to squat at the root of many of our fears about technology and the broader, physical world.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Wojcicki replied: MostlySane, “In Conversation with CEO, YouTube—Susan Wojcicki,” YouTube video, April 16, 2019, 26:30, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P-9uEvKD0o. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “jacksepticeye and Elon Musk”: jacksepticeye was a top creator; Elon Musk appeared on YouTube often but didn’t have his own channel. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT one email newsletter: Claire Stapleton, “Down the ’Tube: (no subject),” Tiny Letter, February 15, 2019, https://tinyletter.com/clairest/letters/down-the-tube-no-subject.

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That past autumn, when a YouTube channel featuring Bollywood songs looked set to surpass PewDiePie’s subscriber total, his army had formed a rallying cry to defend their king against critics and the threat to his crown. Subscribe to PewDiePie! That cry rang out from every corner of the internet. It appeared on signs at the Super Bowl in Atlanta and during a basketball game in Lithuania. A British political party tweeted it. A colorful cast of characters spread the cry: HackerGiraffe, Goose Wayne Batman, Elon Musk. It was an antiestablishment mantra, a screw-you to corporate internet overlords, a cultural phenomenon. A meme. And the cry, like YouTube.com, grew beyond anything YouTube, the company, ever imagined. Since the death to all jews incident, YouTube had kept its biggest star at arm’s length, making no public displays of support or promotions as it did for other broadcasters.

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A Google c-suiter few had ever worked with or even met was taking charge. Those close to Wojcicki knew she had been restless and itching for a loftier executive role, like many of her peers had. By 2014 her conflict with the ads engineer Ramaswamy felt untenable. Wojcicki held private talks to join Tesla as a chief operating officer, number two under Elon Musk, an old PayPal Mafia member. But Page wanted her to stay. He knew Kamangar wanted out. And by then, Page had begun plotting his own exit—a plan to hand Google off to a trusted deputy, Sundar Pichai. In a conversation, Laszlo Bock, Page’s HR chief, suggested Page could more easily clear the way for his chosen successor by moving Wojcicki to YouTube.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
by William Davies
Published 26 Feb 2019

But arguably, the ultimate destination of the Austrian ideology is a system which starts to eliminate the market altogether, at least in the ordinary sense of companies competing to sell to the same set of customers. New private empires are built to compete against rival private empires, with attributes that appear more like those of states than typical businesses. The billionaire Elon Musk, for example, seized the initiative from NASA and the European Space Agency and made traveling to Mars one of his entrepreneurial ambitions. Amazon’s relationship to retail markets is becoming closer to that of a regulator than a competitor. Companies such as Palantir and SCL, which founded the now defunct Cambridge Analytica with Mercer’s financial support, straddle commercial, political, and military domains of intelligence operations.

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Sure enough, Facebook soon appointed Mark Chevillet, an applied neuroscientist from Johns Hopkins University, and Regina Dugan, a former head of the US defense research agency DARPA, who was hired to lead on “technologies that fluidly blend physical and digital worlds.” Technologies are emerging for limited forms of mind-reading. DARPA has invested $60 million in brain–computer interface technology, while a Boston-based start-up, Neurable, is seeking to develop technologies that can track “intentions” of users in virtual reality environments.1 Elon Musk has founded a company, Neuralink, to develop “neural lace” technologies which will see chips implanted directly into the brain, so as to integrate thinking with computers. Among Dugan’s projects at Facebook was the development of technologies through which users could send brief “text messages” using only their thoughts, and could “hear” similar messages through their skin, wearing a vibrating sleeve.2 Discussing these new technological frontiers in April 2017, Dugan put a neat multicultural spin on the vision that Zuckerberg had laid out a couple of years earlier: “it may be possible for me to think in Mandarin and you to feel it instantly in Spanish.”

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If Napoleon turned war into a conflict between national populations, the Cold War turned it into a conflict between national intelligence infrastructures, both in the sense of espionage and of “artificial” intelligence. That paradigm still obtains today. Vladimir Putin has expressed the view, regularly advanced by others such as Elon Musk, that the country that leads the world in artificial intelligence will dominate the twenty-first century.8 The initial question put forward by Turing was whether a machine could “think,” which he argued it could. But this quickly flips into speculation as to what kind of “machine” is the mind. During the 1940s and 1950s, as computers were becoming imbued with almost metaphysical and humane characteristics, cognitive scientists reimagined humans as circuits of information.

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story
by Billy Gallagher
Published 13 Feb 2018

Evan had a team build a Snapchat music product that combined Snapchat’s penchant for communicating through media with Evan’s vision for how music should work digitally. However, it was never released, likely because the rights to the music were too complex and expensive. Employees were happy to work tirelessly on Evan’s experiments, music or otherwise. Evan’s benevolent dictatorship is not uncommon in tech. Many visionaries like Jobs, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos have been described in similar, and even more draconian, ways. But Jobs, Musk, and Bezos have accomplished such spectacular achievements that employees will follow them no matter what. Evan seemed to be following right in their footsteps, but we have only seen him at the helm when Snapchat is thriving and growing spectacularly well.

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White had cut her teeth at the much larger and more established Google and Facebook; it was difficult for her to translate those experiences to the rapidly changing Snapchat, which had only fifty employees when she arrived. Once she left Snapchat, White joined the board of directors of Hyperloop Technologies, a startup trying to realize Elon Musk’s vision for a high-speed, tube-based transportation system. White also founded Mave, a high-end personal concierge startup in Santa Monica. White’s departure was made worse by the sheer number of high-level executives who left around the same time. Many didn’t survive a year at Snapchat. Mike Randall, who had been hired by White and reported to her while at Snapchat, left after seven months.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT THE ROAD TO IPO JUNE 2015 RANCHO PALOS VERDES, CA The Code Conference is an annual tech conference held at an exclusive resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. The high point of the conference is an interview with tech press legends Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. The two have sat in iconic red chairs across from the biggest names in the business, from Steve Jobs to Elon Musk to Bill Gates. Now, in June 2015, Evan sat in one of those same red chairs as Swisher and Mossberg probed about Snapchat’s future. Initial public offerings are in many ways the finish line for startups. They are liquidity events, giving founders, employees, and investors an actual hard cash return on the years of investment and work they’ve poured into the company.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
by Melanie Mitchell
Published 14 Oct 2019

In 2014, the physicist Stephen Hawking proclaimed, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”7 In the same year, the entrepreneur Elon Musk, founder of the Tesla and SpaceX companies, said that artificial intelligence is probably “our biggest existential threat” and that “with artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.”8 Microsoft’s cofounder Bill Gates concurred: “I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”9 The philosopher Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence, on the potential dangers of machines becoming smarter than humans, became a surprise bestseller, despite its dry and ponderous style.

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Hofstadter, “Staring Emmy Straight in the Eye—and Doing My Best Not to Flinch,” in Creativity, Cognition, and Knowledge, ed. T. Dartnell (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002), 67–100.   7.  Quoted in R. Cellan-Jones, “Stephen Hawking Warns Artificial Intelligence Could End Mankind,” BBC News, Dec. 2, 2014, www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540.   8.  M. McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With Artificial Intelligence, We Are Summoning the Demon,’” Washington Post, Oct. 24, 2014.   9.  Bill Gates, on Reddit, Jan. 28, 2015, www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2tzjp7/hi_reddit_im_bill_gates_and_im_back_for_my_third/?. 10.  Quoted in K. Anderson, “Enthusiasts and Skeptics Debate Artificial Intelligence,” Vanity Fair, Nov. 26, 2014. 11.  

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Kreye, “A John Henry Moment,” in Brockman, What to Think About Machines That Think, 394–96. 28.  Kurzweil, Singularity Is Near, 494. 29.  R. Kurzweil, “A Wager on the Turing Test: Why I Think I Will Win,” Kurzweil AI, April 9, 2002, www.kurzweilai.net/a-wager-on-the-turing-test-why-i-think-i-will-win. 30.  Ibid. 31.  Ibid. 32.  Ibid. 33.  M. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse,” Vanity Fair, March 26, 2017. 34.  L. Grossman, “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal,” Time, Feb. 10, 2011. 35.  From Singularity University website, accessed Dec. 4, 2018, su.org/about/. 36.  Kurzweil, Singularity Is Near, 316. 37.  

Artificial Whiteness
by Yarden Katz

These narratives are tied to the forgery of universality: an article in the Atlantic magazine, for example, suggests that science is “in decline,” partly because the random nature of individual scientists’ “previous experiences” plays too large a role in scientific discovery—but that “outsourcing to A.I. could change that.”21 The viability of AI systems exceeding human thought is also conveyed through dystopian scenarios. The Guardian reported that Silicon Valley billionaires are “prepping for the apocalypse” by buying secure hideouts in New Zealand, the “apocalypse” being a situation of “systematic collapse” that may include nuclear war or “rampaging AI.”22 Similarly, Silicon Valley mogul Elon Musk has stated to considerable fanfare that current work on AI is “summoning the demon” and that AI is “our biggest existential threat.”23 These narratives are testament to the unstated consensus among experts that AI possesses transformative powers; this is why fantastical commentaries can pass without even referencing specific instantiations of AI or its history.

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For example, in 2017 the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and the MIT Media Lab jointly received a $7.6 million grant from a fund created by Reid Hoffman (cofounder of LinkedIn), Pierre Omidyar (cofounder of eBay), William and Flora Hewlett (of Hewlett-Packard Company), and the Knight Foundation to study the “ethics and governance” of AI. Other universities have launched similar initiatives. UC Berkeley, for instance, began a $5.5 million initiative in 2016 to study AI, sponsored through a foundation created by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, as well as by the Elon Musk–funded Future of Life foundation. See “Berkeley Launches Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence,” Philanthropy News Digest, September 5, 2016. Carnegie Mellon University started its own new AI center, in partnership with Boeing, Uber, IBM, Microsoft, and the Pentagon, among others.   40.   

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Brace for the Robot Apocalypse,” Guardian, February 15, 2019.   21.   Ahmed Alkhateeb, “Can Scientific Discovery Be Automated?,” Atlantic, April 25, 2017.   22.   Mark O’Connell, “Why Silicon Valley Billionaires Are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand,” Guardian, February 15, 2018.   23.   Matt McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With Artificial Intelligence We Are Summoning the Demon,’ ” Washington Post, October 24, 2014.   24.   Glenn Greenwald, “Glenn Greenwald: As Bezos Protests Invasion of His Privacy, Amazon Builds Global Surveillance State,” Democracy Now!, February 11, 2019.   25.   Max Tegmark, “Let’s Aspire to More than Making Ourselves Obsolete,” in Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI, ed.

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Jul 2023

I dug in: Various articles from Reuters, Bloomberg, the New York Times, Forbes, and others. 152 Sequoia was blown away . . . during a Zoom call: Sequoia Capital, profile on Sam Bankman-Fried from Sequoiacap.com (since removed), September 22, 2022. 156 We began: Ben McKenzie interview with Sam Bankman-Fried, 1 Hotel Central Park (New York, NY), July 2022. CHAPTER 10: WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE? 180 Elon Musk . . . promoted Dogecoin: Eric Deggans, “Elon Musk Takes An Awkward Turn As ‘Saturday Night Live’ Host,” NPR, May 9, 2021. 181 President Biden . . . executive order: White House, “Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets,” March 9, 2022, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/03/09/executive-order-on-ensuring-responsible-development-of-digital-assets/. 181 The statistics cited by the FTC: Emma Fletcher, “Reports show scammers cashing in on crypto craze,” FTC, June 3, 2022, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/data-visualizations/data-spotlight/2022/06/reports-show-scammers-cashing-crypto-craze. 182 The revolving door kept spinning: Tech Transparency Project, “Crypto Industry Amasses Washington Insiders as Lobbying Blitz Intensifies,” https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/crypto-industry-amasses-washington-insiders-lobbying-blitz-intensifies. 186 Mark Hays: Ben McKenzie interview with Mark Hays, Summer 2022. 188 The United States of America is unique: Conversations with Lee Reiners (policy director at the Duke Financial Economics Center and a lecturing fellow at Duke Law), Summer 2022. 193 John Reed Stark: Ben McKenzie interview with John Reed Stark, Maryland, August 2022. 198 Two weeks later, Kim Kardashian: press release, “SEC Charges Kim Kardashian for Unlawfully Touting Crypto Security,” U.S.

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Flash crashes in crypto markets tend to be accompanied by technical snafus or unexplained outages, including an inability to withdraw funds. On September 7, 2021, for example, when El Salvador introduced Bitcoin as a form of legal tender, a market-wide slide led to a number of exchanges reporting transaction delays and other problems. Similarly, Binance users have reported regular technical issues, with Tesla chief executive Elon Musk publicly criticizing the exchange for an issue that prevented traders from withdrawing Dogecoin for at least two weeks in November of 2021. (A Binance representative said that “the Dogecoin withdrawal issue was an unlikely and unfortunate coincidence for Binance and the DOGE network,” and pointed out that “the technical issue was resolved.”)

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It was no longer so cool to be a bored ape if your JPEG was now worth a few hundred thousand real dollars less than when you had FOMO’d into it. Analysts argued over whether the NFT market had collapsed by 97 percent or 99 percent. In its public filings, Tesla revealed that it had lost hundreds of millions of dollars on its crypto investments. Elon Musk, the supposed genius billionaire who had gone on Saturday Night Live the year before and promoted Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency he admitted was “a hustle,” had apparently been hustled himself. (Musk was simultaneously in the midst of receiving the most expensive lesson in contract law in history with his ill-conceived bid for Twitter.)

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War
by Jeff Sharlet
Published 21 Mar 2023

He had plowed it into a small empire of good barbecue and guided hunts and, illuminated at night, a curiosity cabinet of magnificently antlered bucks, dozens of heads expertly stuffed. The rich man said it was all for God. He was also interested in artificial intelligence. His brother was investing heavily in Tesla, he said, to get closer to Elon Musk, so he could bring him to Christ. “Imagine,” said the Popper King, “what Elon Musk will be able to do when he knows Jesus!” The Popper King wondered if we might yet discover the ghost in the works, whether a God-fearing Elon might build for us robots with souls. I thought of a recurring theme in Wisconsin Death Trip’s local news clippings of the 1890s: men driven mad—taken off to the asylum—by their attempts to invent a perpetual-motion machine.

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I’m just saying, the situation”—he meant his marriage—“was unrecoverable.” 2 The term “red pill” is derived from the 1999 movie The Matrix, in which the hero, Neo, is offered a choice of a red pill that will awaken him to the brutal truth of a world controlled by intelligent machines, or the blue pill, which will allow him to remain contentedly ignorant. “Red-pilling” has been adopted as a meme not only by MRAs but also by White nationalists, despite the film’s radical commitment to genderfluid multiculturalism. “Fuck both of you,” Matrix co-director Lilly Wachowski told Ivanka Trump and billionaire troll Elon Musk when they Tweeted their “red-pilled” status to each other in an apparent expression of contempt for Covid-19 protocols. 3 Within the manosphere, Farrell passed as a gentle character. In his daylong pre-conference workshop, he asked attendees to make massage circles, to close their eyes and think of their fathers, to role-play explaining manly needs to the one woman in the session.

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“They”—the elites, the communists, the city-dwellers—try to tell us we live in an age of innovation. This, he said is a ruse. “What has been invented in the last fuckin’ hundred and some years?” I suggested a few notable items. James dismissed each as derivative, wan commentary on an age of American genius a hundred years gone. Except, he said, for Elon Musk. I didn’t argue. I never do, with the well-armed. “He wants to colonize Mars,” said James, pulling from within himself a skein of hope for his nine children’s seven children. A mission to colonize Mars, James let himself hope, would make us great again. It’d be like the Old West, like our forefathers.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

The Harvard Business School guru Clayton Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail) argues, “Financial markets—and companies themselves—use assessment metrics that make innovations that eliminate jobs more attractive than those that create jobs.” Whereas the return on “efficiency innovations” is relatively quick, the more important “market-creating innovations,” which create entirely new industries that produce jobs, have a long time in which to return the investment. Even Silicon Valley heroes such as Elon Musk and his Tesla car are merely producing what Christensen calls “performance-improving innovations [that] replace old products with new and better models. They generally create few jobs because they’re substitutive: When customers buy the new product, they usually don’t buy the old product.” While economists of such different political affiliations as Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, and Tyler Cowen all have written extensively about the cause of the joblessness and “secular stagnation” in the US economy that has endured since 2000, they never examine the role that monopoly capitalism might play in this crisis.

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And it is one of a series of quiet investments by Schmidt that recognize how modern political campaigns are run, with data analytics and digital outreach as vital ingredients that allow candidates to find, court, and turn out critical voter blocs. Google makes sure to place bets on both sides of the aisle. So while Eric Schmidt is advising Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Larry Page flew with Sean Parker and Elon Musk in March of 2016 to a secret Republican meeting at a resort in Sea Island, Georgia, organized by the right-wing think tank the American Enterprise Institute. There they met with Republican leadership, including Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan as well as Karl Rove, to plan Republican 2016 election strategy.

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The conference, called the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit, left me wondering whether there isn’t a kind of bubble in the Valley that has nothing to do with the inflated valuations of the “unicorns” (private companies worth more than $1 billion), which were so much a focus of conversation onstage and envy offstage—especially from established Hollywood moguls, who are drawn to Graydon Carter like moths to a flame. The real bubble is a thought bubble, in which the magical thinking of the guys who clearly believe they are the smartest cats in the room goes completely unchallenged. Case in point: Elon Musk, who said that he will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on his quest to inhabit Mars, going so far as to suggest that we cause a nuclear explosion on the planet in order to melt all that frozen water, warm the atmosphere, and enable us to grow vegetables for future space colonies. Musk proposed this with a straight face, and neither the interviewer nor the other panelists even blinked.

Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture
by Designing The Mind and Ryan A Bush
Published 10 Jan 2021

Virtual or augmented reality technology may become so advanced as to be indistinguishable from reality, connect directly into our nervous systems, and allow us to live in worlds currently unimaginable. Furthermore, an advanced understanding of the mind may allow us to perfectly simulate the human brain through digital computers and upload our consciousness to the cloud. Organizations such as DARPA10 and Elon Musk’s Neuralink11 are already working to create brain-machine interfaces. These devices would allow our brains to connect directly to computers, convert our thoughts into bits and back again, and augment our intelligence, communication, and more. Theoretically, this could allow us to effectively merge with artificial intelligence, or with other people to form one radically intelligent and capable mind.

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When people take action according to their distorted worldviews, they can cause great damage and harm in the name of doing good. (Belief systems may be simplified for demonstration purposes) Methods for Cognitive Debiasing You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong. - Elon Musk Perhaps as you read over these biases you accepted the consistently irrational tendencies we all share. Or maybe, you thought to yourself, “Well, I can see that most people would have that bias, but I don’t think I have that one.” Well, I’ve got another one for you. Bias blind spot refers to the tendency to believe one is immune to the same biases which plague others.

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If we are unable to conquer the human tendencies to believe and act according to dogma and desire, the same forces which cause destruction and war today will cause total extinction tomorrow.35 But even the most selfish sociopath has plenty of reason to view the world as clearly as possible. Rationality is a core building block of wisdom. Good decisions in your life, your relationships, and your career or business depend on the ability to think clearly and learn properly. On his excellent blog, Wait But Why, Tim Urban provides an analysis of Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX.36 He suggests a key factor of the entrepreneur’s success is his ongoing endeavor to optimize his own mind. Musk sees people as computers, and he sees his brain software as the most important product he owns—and since there aren’t companies out there designing brain software, he designed his own, beta tests it every day, and makes constant updates.

Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence
by James Lovelock
Published 27 Aug 2019

The atmosphere is about a hundred times thinner than the summit of Everest and it provides no shield against cosmic radiation or the ultraviolet radiation of the Sun. The thin air of Mars is 99 per cent CO2 and utterly unbreathable. There are traces of water on the planet, but it is as salty as the waters of the Dead Sea and undrinkable. The pioneer and would-be spacefarer Elon Musk has said he would like to die on Mars, though not on impact. Martian conditions suggest death on impact might be preferable. Perhaps Mars could provide hermit cells for the ultra-rich who might spend half their fortunes on voluntarily travelling there. Whatever cash was left could be spent on building and maintaining a tiny capsule of life from which escape would be impossible.

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Even so, it might seem that conflict is inevitable and that a global-scale battle will soon begin for possession of the planet. Though my argument is that this is unlikely to happen because of our mutual need to keep the planet cool enough for us all to function, there are certainly dangers that need to be avoided. In July 2017 Elon Musk and 115 other Silicon Valley AI specialists wrote an open letter to the UN, asking for a ban on autonomous weapons. Known in the trade as LAWS – lethal autonomous weapons systems – these are devices that can seek, identify and kill enemy targets. Usually, a human is involved in the final decision to fire, but this is a precaution rather than a necessity.

Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution
by Beth Gardiner
Published 18 Apr 2019

Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, accessed November 27, 2017, https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_11.html. 28 “Cars on England’s Roads Increase by Almost 600,000 in a Year,” BBC News, January 20, 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-35312562. 29 “PC World Vehicles in Use,” International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers, accessed November 27, 2017, http://www.oica.net/wp-content/uploads//PC_Vehicles-in-use.pdf. 30 Transport Outlook: Seamless Transport for Greener Growth, International Transport Forum at the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development 2012: 31, accessed August 20, 2018, https://www.oecd.org/greengrowth/greening-transport/Transport%20Outlook%202012.pdf. 31 David Roberts, “China Made Solar Panels Cheap. Now It’s Doing the Same for Electric Buses,” Vox, April 17, 2018, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/4/17/17239368/china-investment-solar-electric-buses-cost. 32 Kara Swisher, “Elon Musk Is the Id of Tech,” New York Times, August 16, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/opinion/elon-musk-crazy-tesla.html. 33 Swisher, “Elon Musk Is the Id of Tech.” Chapter Nine 1 Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly, Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles (New York: Overlook Press, 2008), 13–17, 35, 51–52. 2 Arthur Winer, emeritus professor, Department of Environmental Health Sciences, UCLA, Skype interview with author, January 27, 2015. 3 Mary Nichols, “UCLA Faculty Voice: How Angelenos Beat Back Smog,” UCLA Newsroom, October 20, 2015, accessed November 14, 2017, http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/ucla-faculty-voice-how-angelenos-beat-back-smog. 4 Connie Koenenn, “Bent on Clearing the Air: Attorney Mary Nichols Hopes ‘Amazing L.A.’

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As Kim bids us farewell—“Hopefully I showed a lot of the magic and the mystery around your car,” she says—I finally realize what’s missing, the part I haven’t seen here, one so familiar it’s taken me until now to clock its absence. There are no exhaust pipes on these cars. Tesla—with its sleek style and big ambitions, its well-publicized troubles, and a CEO, Elon Musk, whom one columnist dubbed “the id of tech”32—has taken on outsized symbolism as the representative of an industry hoping to jump from its infancy straight into adolescence and beyond. Its cars drive smoothly, require little maintenance, and are replete with clever touches like door handles that pop out when a driver approaches and large touch screens in place of old-fashioned dashboard controls.

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History
by Kassia St Clair
Published 3 Oct 2018

No.’, @stephenniem, 2017 <https://twitter.com/stephenniem/status/919897406031978496> Muldrew, Craig, ‘ “Th’ancient Distaff” and “Whirling Spindle”: Measuring the Contribution of Spinning to Household Earnings and the National Economy in England,1550–1770’, The Economic History Review, 65 (2012), 498–526 Murray, Margaret Alice, The Tomb of Two Brothers (Manchester: Sherratt & Hughes, 1910) Musk, Elon, ‘I Am Elon Musk, CEO/CTO of a Rocket Company, AMA!-R/IAmA’, Reddit, 2015 <https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2rgsan/i_am_elon_musk_ceocto_of_a_rocket_company_ama/> [accessed 12 December 2017] ———, ‘Instagram Post’, Instagram, 2017 <https://www.instagram.com/p/BYIPmEFAIIn/> [accessed 12 December 2017] N NASA, Apollo 16 – Technical Air-to-Ground Voice Transcript, April 1972 <https://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/AS16_TEC.PDF> ———, Lunar Module: Quick Reference Data Nelson, Craig, Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon (London: John Murray, 2009) ‘New Fibres Spur Textile Selling’, New York Times, 19 April 1964, section Finance, p. 14 Newman, Dava, ‘Building the Future Spacesuit’, Ask Magazine, January 2012, 37–40 Nightingale, Pamela, ‘The Rise and Decline of Medieval York: A Reassessment’, Past & Present, 2010, 3–42 ‘Nike Engineers Knit for Performance’, Nike News, 2012 <https://news.nike.com/news/nike-flyknit> [accessed 9 January 2018] ‘Nike Launches Hijab for Female Muslim Athletes’, the Guardian, 8 March 2017, section Business <http://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/mar/08/nike-launches-hijab-for-female-muslim-athletes> [accessed 17 December 2017] Niles’ Weekly Register, 1827, xxxiii Noble, Holcomb B., ‘Secret Weapon or Barn Door?’

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One astronaut, upon returning from their mission, reported that a ‘urine dump at sunset’ was the most beautiful thing they’d seen on the entire voyage.42 Man Made for Mars To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. Mary Roach, Packing for Mars, 2010 In the summer of 2017, Elon Musk released a concept image for our space-age future. The picture was of the spacesuit astronauts might wear on the manned version of the SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule. It was sleek and fitted and strikingly monochrome – a world away from the Omega, which Armstrong once memorably described as ‘tough, reliable and almost cuddly’.

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Slonim, Effects of Minimal Personal Hygiene and Related Procedures During Prolongued Confinement (Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio: Aerospace Medical Research Laboratories, October 1966), p. 4. 39Ibid., pp. 6, 10; Borman, Lovell, and NASA, pp. 156–8; ‘Astronauts’ Dirty Laundry’. 40NASA, Apollo 16, pp. 372, 435. 41Hadfield, quoted in Roach, p. 46. 42PBS; quoted in Nelson, p. 55. 43Musk, ‘I Am Elon Musk; Musk, ‘Instagram Post’; Brinson. 44Monchaux, pp. 263, 95. 45Grush; Mark Harris; Ross et al., pp. 1–11; Dieter. 46Dieter; Newman; Mark Harris; Feinberg; Masse. 47Howell; Burgess, pp. 209, 220–4. 12 Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger 1‘Swimming World Records in Rome’. 2Ibid.; Crouse, ‘Biedermann Stuns Phelps’; Burn-Murdoch; ‘Swimming World Records in Rome’. 3Quoted in Brennan; Crouse. 4Wilson 5‘Space Age Swimsuit Reduces Drag’.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle
Published 4 Sep 2019

It is quite possible that car ownership would fall sharply as people predominantly chose to take rides in driverless vehicles from a floating pool. A joint study by the World Economic Forum and the Boston Consulting Group sees substantial scope for the sharing of rides in driverless cars, thereby undermining the market for public transport.6 Elon Musk has said that “owning a human-driven vehicle will be similar to owning a horse – rare and optional.7 The results would include fewer cars needing to be built (as well as sold, repaired, insured, etc.). Additionally, there would be less demand for space to park cars that remain idle most of the time.

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Advocates of the vision of driverless vehicles sometimes try to counter the point about “safety drivers” still being needed by pointing out that these “safety drivers” can still provide some of the ancillary services provided by drivers now, such as helping passengers with their bags, helping them in and out of the vehicle, and chatting to them during the journey. This is true, but they cannot do this anymore when they are not actually driving the vehicle than when they are. And while they are there in the car, they cost just the same. So, what’s the point? Overall assessment Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, has warned against setting the safety requirements of driverless vehicles too high. After all, he reasons, since human error when driving is responsible for a large number of fatalities, there is room for driverless vehicles to cause some fatal accidents that a human driver could have avoided and yet for the introduction of driverless cars still to reduce the overall accident rate and the number of fatalities.

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Accordingly, it makes sense for us now to leave it to one side and to concentrate on the more mainstream idea of a UBI. It seems much more likely to fly. Indeed, in some senses it has already taken off. Illustrious support The essential principle of a UBI has recently received widespread support, including from Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Tesla’s Elon Musk. At the World Government Summit in Dubai in 2017, referring to the coming transformation of transportation, the latter said: “Twenty years is a short period of time to have something like 12 [to] 15 percent of the workforce be unemployed.” And on UBI he said: “I don’t think we’re going to have a choice.

The Crux
by Richard Rumelt
Published 27 Apr 2022

As with climbers, every person, every company, every agency faces both opportunities and obstacles to their progress. Yes, we all need motivation, ambition, and strength. But, by themselves, they are not enough. To deal with a set of challenges, there is power in locating your crux—where you can gain the most by designing, discovering, or finding a way to move through and past it. ONE OF ENTREPRENEUR Elon Musk’s passions is populating Mars. He imagined promoting this idea by sending a small payload there. In a 2001 visit to Russia, Musk tried to buy an old Russian rocket but was unhappy with the style of bargaining and how the price tripled during the negotiations. He began to look at the problem of why it cost so much to put payloads into orbit.

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Going into space is risky, and rockets are risky. The current media climate would turn any fatal accident into a circus. Under current norms, there would have never been the development of aircraft during the twentieth century—someone might get hurt. I can tell you that the key to SpaceX’s advantage in rocketry arose from Elon Musk’s grasp of the crux of the problem and his insight into how to surmount it. Plus, advantage is created by the company’s coherent policies, all directed reliably at putting mass into orbit at the lowest cost possible. EFFECTIVE PEOPLE GAIN insight through finding and concentrating attention on the crux of a challenge—the part of the tangle of issues that is both very important and addressable (which can be overcome with reasonable surety).

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For example, a proposal to build more low-income housing should be confronted by the fact that people in such developments have, in the past, been the frequent victims of crime.8 Without a law-enforcement or crime-control substrategy, simply building the project may do more harm than good. Given this history, a new solution to low-income housing requires an audacious leap to a novel mixture of policy, architecture, planning, and action. Elon Musk, as we noted earlier, saw the crux of the challenge of cheaper cost to orbit as reusability. His audacious leap occurred when he realized that fuel is cheaper than hardware. His new rocket would include extra fuel so it could return to Earth without burning up. Here are some more examples of audacious leaps to action based on a recognition of a crux: • Like Russia, China had traditionally collected tax and operating revenues centrally and then allocated funds based on various plans.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

Hence why the threat of planetary deterioration is rarely a consideration when it comes to major decisions. Why have children if we suspect that they will have to fight over basic resources like water? Why buy property in a coastal city that is likely to be flooded by rising water levels? Why not just sit back and have faith that Elon Musk will save us? For the governments who are genuinely committed to starving off an environmental Armageddon, a saner assumption is that Elon will flee to Mars (along with every fellow plutocrat wealthy enough to afford the ride) and watch the world burn from afar. One can always take the middle ground and refuse to succumb to excessive optimism or pessimism.

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In some cases, like that of PayPal founder Peter Thiel (perhaps the most vocal libertarian of his cohort) the obsession with market fundamentalism made him become a staunch supporter of Trump, and he even served as part of his transition team. He remained a Trump advisor even after many of his tech colleagues, such as Elon Musk, abandoned the administration due to its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change. Figure 6.7: The bigger firms keep getting bigger Notes: This chart shows the share of revenues by the top 4 firms in each industry (based on NAICS two-digit levels which are given in parenthesis) where data on industry concentration is available.

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Each dollar goes further towards improving standard of living for the average person in an aristocratic system than in a Democratic one.34 This monarchy, of course, would be a corporatist one. In other words, government would operate not unlike an actual enterprise with the CEO as the monarch and the populace as the shareholders. Yarvin calls this system of government “neocameralist” and he certainly has one man in line for the job: “It’s easy to say ‘put Elon [Musk] in charge, he’ll figure it out,’ and he might well”.35 Some tech tycoons certainly appear to be eying the possibility of running for office. Before Facebook was riddled with public scandals over its role in the 2016 election, Mark Zuckerberg went on a country-wide road trip that led to suspicions that he may have been harboring presidential ambitions.36 The trip was immaculately staged and photographed, and the people he interviewed carefully chosen so as to not be too controversial nor disruptive, which goes to show how loosely he correlates transparency with democracy.

The Deepest Map
by Laura Trethewey
Published 15 May 2023

Vrimani, “Ocean vs Space: Exploration and the Quest to Inspire the Public,” Marine Technology News, June 7, 2017, https://www.marinetechnologynews.com/news/ocean-space-exploration-quest-549183. 13.Alex Macon, “When SpaceX Rockets Take Flight (or Blow Up), LabPadre Is Watching,” TexasMonthly, December 15, 2020, https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/spacex-rockets-launch-labpadre-livestream/. 14.FY 2020 Agency Financial Report, NASA, https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/nasa_fy2020_afr_508_compliance_v4.pdf. 15.Mike Read, “Virtual Conference: Industry Role in Seabed 2030,” Marine Technology Society Virtual Symposia, June 11, 2020, https://register.gotowebinar.com/recording/3054056681389715723. 16.Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisinger, “How the IRS Was Gutted,” ProPublica, December 18, 2018, https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted. 17.Chris Isidore, “Elon Musk’s US Tax Bill: $11 Billion. Tesla’s: $0 | CNN Business,” CNN, February 10, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/10/investing/elon-musk-tesla-zero-tax-bill/index.html. 18.Kim McQuaid, “Selling the Space Age: NASA and Earth’s Environment, 1958–1990,” Environment and History 12, no. 2 (May 2006): 127–63, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20723571. 19.Carl Sagan, “The Gift of Apollo,” Parade, January 11, 2014, https://parade.com/249407/carlsagan/the-gift-of-apollo/. 20.Maria Johansson et al., “Is Human Fear Affecting Public Willingness to Pay for the Management and Conservation of Large Carnivores?

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Throughout the twentieth century, national governments typically funded scientific or military operations to reach extreme unexplored terrain, but more recently, the world’s wealthiest individuals—most of them white men—have been outpacing government investment by forming their own private exploration companies. Critics argue that companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin are not a step forward but rather a slide backward, throwing up barriers that only the rich and connected can hope to overcome. By privatizing exploration, such companies make exploration in the twenty-first century look a lot like exploration in the nineteenth century, when the brutal inequalities of England’s Industrial Revolution provided enough “gentlemen explorers” with the time and money to pursue a new hobby: striking out for unknown terrain.7 Over the coming four years, Victor would sink millions into chasing the five deepest dives that Branson had abandoned.

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But after decades of neoliberal capitalism, hobbled government agencies,16 and the wealthiest people and corporations paying little to no tax, the richest people in the world can now launch private exploration companies that rival the US government’s. For now, the clients for deep-sea and space travel are other ultrarich patrons or government agencies, such as NASA contracting SpaceX to carry astronauts to the International Space Station. But the spacefaring entrepreneur Elon Musk—at one point the richest man in the world, whose car company, Tesla, paid zero federal income tax in 202117—dreams of a day when the masses can afford a trip to Mars. Of course, everyone would be better served by less flashy ambitions, such as a sustainable future here on planet Earth. The two fields also share the hunt for extreme life that thrives in severe conditions found in the deep sea and on faraway planets.

Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game
by Walker Deibel
Published 19 Oct 2018

By combining an investment in the existing revenue, infrastructure, and earnings with the drive and innovation fueling the entrepreneur, acquisition provides a powerful recipe, allowing existing companies to go to new heights, having tremendous impact, and providing a platform for the entrepreneur’s art. 10 ACQUISITION ENTREPRENEURSHIP VERSES VENTURE CAPITAL Acquisition entrepreneurship is not right for every circumstance or everyone. After all, certain entrepreneurs have enjoyed such remarkable success that they have obtained celebrity, even legendary status. We’re all familiar with the titans of technology who dominate the business media: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk, to name a few. These 9 guys didn’t start by buying a company, so why should you? Lately, it’s been the startups able to get to the billion-dollar valuation, the “unicorn” companies, in the limelight. These companies are changing how we live and work, and they are not only creating tremendous value but are introducing new business models.

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The knowledge that things are malleable creates an interest for solving market problems, generating innovative solutions, and implementing ongoing improvement—both for yourself and your work— which is the mark of successful entrepreneur. A fixed mindset, by contrast, confirms a deterministic view of the world and results in never achieving your full potential. Without a growth mindset, Elon Musk’s SpaceX would never have achieved successful trips to the International Space Station after the first three rockets literally crashed and burned. Or, take Thomas Edison. His teachers notoriously said he was “too stupid to learn anything,” and he ultimately failed over 1,000 times before eventually creating the lightbulb.

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It could be an eternally profitable, high growth, or turnaround. More likely, it’s somewhere in the middle. A nice, “good” company with some aspects of stability and some of risk, but the goal is to define an acquisition target by the growth opportunity it provides. It’s a little understood fact that Elon Musk bought PayPal when his own similar startup X.com, well, failed. Peter Thiel came with the acquisition and later ran PayPal as CEO. Tesla, as well. Although he is now considered a founder, the company was started by two others and grown very effectively by Musk. Gary Vaynerchuk took over his parents’ liquor store.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

Bremmer, who is president of the research and consulting firm Eurasia Group, says that such leaders are surrounded by yes-men and “don’t get great information, especially about the second and third order effects of the decisions they take”—which can result in arbitrary policy-making and, potentially, momentous mistakes. Among the “rogue actors” Bremmer names are Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un, as well as business leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who control “immensely powerful global platforms that operate with some level of sovereignty outside of the power purview even of governments.” Technology and globalization have amplified the volatility of today’s interregnum, but many of the primary drivers of instability have long been hallmarks of times of transition.

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In addition to the frequently cited examples of Google co-founder Sergey Brin (who was born in Russia) and Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs (the son of a Syrian immigrant), there’s eBay’s founder, Pierre Omidyar (born in France to Iranian parents), Yahoo’s co-founder Jerry Yang (born in Taiwan), PayPal’s co-founder Peter Thiel (born in Germany), the Tesla and SpaceX co-founder, Elon Musk (born in South Africa), and the co-founders of Stripe, John and Patrick Collison (born in Ireland). A 2019 Stanford University paper found that “immigrants comprised 23% of the total workforce in STEM occupations” and account “for 26% of US-based Nobel Prize winners from 1990 through 2000.” Drawing on a 2003 survey, the study also showed that immigrants in the United States with a four-year college degree were “twice as likely to have a patent than US-born college grads.”

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Who First Originated the Term VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity)?,” U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, usawc.libanswers.com/​faq/​84869. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT n:ew developments in artificial intelligence: futureoflife.org/​open-letter/​pause-giant-ai-experiments/; theverge.com/​2023/​3/29/​23661374/​elon-musk-ai-researchers-pause-research-open-letter. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “technology is neither good nor bad”: Eric Schatzberg and Lee Vinsel, “Kranzberg’s First and Second Laws,” Technology’s Stories 6, no. 4 (Dec. 2018), technologystories.org/​first-and-second-laws/; Rinkesh D, “Kranzberg’s Laws of Technology—Understanding Interaction of Society and Technology,” AIC-IIITH, aic.iiit.ac.in/​kranzbergs-laws-of-technology-understanding-interaction-of-society-and-technology/.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
by Michael Wolff
Published 5 Jan 2018

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, which had become one of the many Trump media bêtes noires in the media world, nevertheless took pains to reach out not only to the presidentelect but to his daughter Ivanka. During the campaign, Trump said Amazon was getting “away with murder taxwise” and that if he won, “Oh, do they have problems.” Now Trump was suddenly praising Bezos as “a top-level genius.” Elon Musk, in Trump Tower, pitched Trump on the new administration’s joining him in his race to Mars, which Trump jumped at. Stephen Schwarzman, the head of the Blackstone Group—and a Kushner friend—offered to organize a business council for Trump, which Trump embraced. Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor and fashion industry queen, had hoped to be named America’s ambassador to the UK under Obama and, when that didn’t happen, closely aligned herself with Hillary Clinton.

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In the restaurant that morning: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman; Washington fixture, lobbyist, and Clinton confidant Vernon Jordan; labor secretary nominee Wilbur Ross; Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith; Washington Post national reporter Mark Berman; and a table full of women lobbyists and fixers, including the music industry’s longtime representative in Washington, Hillary Rosen; Elon Musk’s D.C. adviser, Juleanna Glover; Uber’s political and policy executive, Niki Christoff; and Time Warner’s political affairs executive, Carol Melton. In some sense—putting aside both her father’s presence in the White House and his tirades against draining the swamp, which might otherwise include most everyone here, this was the type of room Ivanka had worked hard to be in.

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The Trump White House stood less for government and the push-pull of competing interests and developing policies, and more, in a brand-savvy world, as a fixed and unpopular cultural symbol. Uber’s Kalanick resigned from the council. Disney CEO Bob Iger simply found that he was otherwise occupied on the occasion of the forum’s first meeting. But most of the people on the council—other than Elon Musk, the investor, inventor, and founder of Tesla (who would later resign)—were not from media or tech companies, with their liberal bent, but from old-line, when-America-was-great enterprises. They included Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors; Ginni Rometty of IBM; Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE; Jim McNerney, the former CEO of Boeing; and Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future
by Orly Lobel
Published 17 Oct 2022

The fears surrounding AI oscillate between its nascent reality and its omnipotent future. Thought leaders and industry moguls from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk have warned that at a critical moment when AI becomes independent, the human race should be quite concerned about its own survival. Hawking wrote, “The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence. A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.” He worried that once humans develop full AI, it will take off on its own and redesign itself without human control. Elon Musk has warned that AI may become a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”18 The thought experiment goes like this: What if we told a robot to maximize the number of paper clips it produces or the number of strawberry fields it plants?

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Subcomm. on Energy, H. Comm. on Sci., Space & Tech., 115th Cong. 50 (2018). 17. A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (October 1950): 433, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433. 18. David Z. Morris, “Elon Musk Says Artificial Intelligence Is the ‘Greatest Risk We Face as a Civilization,” Fortune, July 15, 2017, https://fortune.com/2017/07/15/elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-2/. 19. Joshua Gans, “AI and the Paperclip Problem,” VoxEU, June 10, 2018, https://voxeu.org/article/ai-and-paperclip-problem. 20. Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 286. 21.

Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now
by Guy Standing
Published 19 Mar 2020

  Slaying Giants with Basic Income 31 (6) The robot advance One relatively new justification for a basic income is the threat to jobs posed by robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Bank of England, the OECD and the McKinsey Global Institute are among those predicting the disappearance of huge numbers of jobs over the next two decades.61 Elon Musk, one of several very wealthy and successful entrepreneurs who have made similar statements, has concluded that a basic income is a necessary policy for a fast-approaching future in which ‘there will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better’. There are reasons for scepticism about the more apocalyptic forecasts.

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Sensible, modern business folk, including leading entrepreneurs and CEOs of mainstream corporations, also understand that basically secure people make more cooperative and productive workers, and even more rational consumers. Those on the political left should not be cynical about the fact that leading entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Richard Branson have come out in favour of basic income. There is growing evidence that a basic income has popular support and the potential for much more, contrary to jaundiced views by prominent figures who have not studied the subject.2 Two types of evidence are worth mentioning. Some years ago, a team of social psychologists conducted experiments in deliberative democracy covering large samples in three countries, in which people were asked to decide which of four options of fair distribution policy should have precedence.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World
by Scott Galloway
Published 2 Oct 2017

It doesn’t matter what the reality is—Amazon will win, as it’s playing poker with ten times the chips. Amazon can muscle everyone else out of the game. The real hand-wringing is going to begin when people start asking if what’s good for Amazon is bad for society. It’s interesting to note that even while some scientists and tech tycoons (Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk) publicly worry about the dangers of artificial intelligence, and others (Pierre Omidyar, Reid Hoffman) have funded research on the subject, Jeff Bezos is implementing robotics as fast as he can at Amazon. The company increased the number of robots in its warehouses 50 percent in 2016.37 Peterson, Hayley.

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In sum, the parent brand “China” provides an unwelcome halo of “We may not be cool, but we are corrupt.” In high school, the “Bad Boy” who was also lame did not get laid. Tesla History is littered with the skeletons of entrepreneurs who challenged big auto—they make movies about them (think Tucker). But right now, it looks as if the movie about Elon Musk involves a dope outfit and a brooding Gwyneth Paltrow. Tesla faces challenges, but it has accomplished more than any other start-up automobile company in our lifetime, and looks well positioned to solidify its position as the market leader in electric- powered cars. Although it remains mostly a luxury product for Silicon Valley bros, its combination of design (no more Hobbit electric cars), innovation in digital control, and massive investment in infrastructure (notably the giant battery factory outside Reno)—not to mention its Edison-like, visionary leader—suggest Tesla has the potential to bust out of its specialty niche and become a mass market player.

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It’s a fundamental American myth, from Ayn Rand’s still influential personification of entrepreneurial independence in Hank Rearden to the mythmaking that erupted upon the death of Steve Jobs. Entrepreneurs are seen as individual, self-made visionaries with vast wealth. They are perhaps the purest expression of the American hero. Superhero, even. Superman can reverse the rotation of the Earth, but Iron Man Tony Stark would be better on an earnings call and is a very human superhero—Elon Musk. As we’ve discussed, it’s not for most people—and the odds against you seem heavier by the year. In fact, very few people have the personality characteristics and skills that make up a successful entrepreneur. And it isn’t about being “good enough” or “smart enough”—indeed, some of the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs are real detriments in other aspects of life.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
by Meredith Broussard
Published 19 Apr 2018

We passed another Tesla in Greenwich Village, and we waved. This is a thing that Tesla owners do: they wave to each other. Drive a Tesla on the highway in San Francisco, and your arm gets tired from waving. Ryan kept referring to Elon Musk. A cult of personality surrounds Musk, unlike any other car designer. Who designed the Ford Explorer? I have no idea. But Elon Musk, even my son knew. “He’s famous,” my son said. “He was even a guest star on the Simpsons.” We parked and took a picture of my son and me standing next to the bright white car, its wings up. We got into our family car parked outside.

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“You know, regulations,” meant that Joshua Brown died in an Autopilot crash and the NTHSA hadn’t yet finished its investigation—so Tesla had turned off the Autopilot on all cars until the developers could build, test, and roll out new features. Ryan chatted about the future, which in his view meant Teslas everywhere. “When we have full autonomy, Elon Musk says you should be able to press a button and summon your car no matter where you are. It might take a few days for your car to find you, but it should arrive.” I wondered if it occurred to him that waiting for days for your car to arrive kind of defeats the point of having a car at all. “Someday” is the most common way to talk about autonomous vehicles.

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work
by Richard Baldwin
Published 10 Jan 2019

Bob violino, “Why Robotic Process Automation Adoption Is on the Rise,” ZDNet.com, November 18, 2016. 4. Harriet Taylor, “Bank of America Launches AI Chatbot Erica —Here’s What It Does,” MONEY 20/20, CNBC.com, October 24, 2016. 5. Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “The Great A.I. Awakening,” New York Times Magazine, December 4, 2016. 6. Ron Miller, “Artificial Intelligence Is Not as Smart as You (or Elon Musk),” TechCrunch.com, July 25, 2017. 7. Disney Research, “Neural Nets Model Audience Reactions to Movies,” Phys.org, July 21, 2017. 8. Specifically, 60 percent of jobs are in occupations where at least 30 percent of the job is automatable using proven technology according to McKinsey Global Institute in “A Future That Works: Automation, Employment, and Productivity,” January 2017. 9.

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In Gate’s view, job displacement is coming too fast for the economy to absorb. “You cross the threshold of job replacement of certain activities all sort of at once. You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed.”1 And Gates is not the only rich tech guy who’s worried. The technology entrepreneur, Elon Musk, who owns rocket ships as a sideline to being CEO of Tesla, also knows a thing or two about disruptive technologies. Tesla was valued more highly by the stock market in 2017 than any of the traditional carmakers. And Musk is as concerned as Gates. Here is how he phrases it: “What to do about mass unemployment?

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If history is a guide, the next step will be some form of backlash, and possibly another wave of populism. It has happened before. 1. Quote from Kevin Delaney, “The Robot That Takes Your Job Should Pay Taxes, Says Bill Gates,” Quartz, February 17, 2017. 2. Quote from Quincy Larson, “A Warning from Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking,” freeCodeCamp.org, February 18, 2017. 3. Quoted in Walt Mossberg, “Five Things I Learned from Jeff Bezos at Code,” Recode (blog), June 8, 2016. 4. Stephen Hawking, “This Is the Most Dangerous Time for Our Planet,” The Guardian, December 1, 2016. 5. Quotes from Adam Lashinksy, “Yes, AI Will Kill Jobs.

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

One of these is that, far from being repelled by it, financial institutions and mega-corporations seem increasingly eager to incorporate it into their operations. The same technology that can co-ordinate networks of ordinary people can be repurposed to coordinate oligopolies. By 2021, blockchain hype had hit a new fever pitch, as the global capitalist system began to swallow whole sections of it. Tech titans like Elon Musk began promoting crypto-tokens, venture capitalists set up funds to invest in crypto start-ups, and massive global payments companies like Visa started offering new business lines to integrate crypto into normal payments systems. It might have begun as an imagined antithesis to Big Finance and Big Tech, but in reality a synthesis is emerging, and one that is just as likely to further dystopian trends as it is to combat them.

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The original coding stipulated that the techno-clerks could only ever bring to life 21 million tokens (the number is arbitrary, given that it could also have been 50,000 or 100 million tokens). If those were equally spread among the 7.5 billion people in the world, each would get 0.0027, but the early system gave them out in 50-token chunks (18,333 times the egalitarian distribution) to whichever techno-clerk had the right equipment at the right time. In 2018 Elon Musk earned 18,333 times the amount of someone earning $28,000, but he did have to launch a global corporation to get into that position. Early Bitcoin miners, by contrast, claimed disproportionate percentages of the tokens for little more than letting their big computers run. The comparison above is perhaps misleading.

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Countertrade – the act of swapping money-priced goods with each other, rather than using money itself – has historically been limited, but Bitcoin (and other similar crypto-tokens) can supercharge this practice. This may indeed prove to be useful for people living under difficult regimes, or for those operating in the cracks of mainstream monetary systems. The weakness, however, of relying upon such countertradeable collectibles is that a single tweet by billionaire industrialists like Elon Musk can randomly and violently alter their price. This is extremely disruptive to the lives of any vulnerable people attempting to use them. There also continues to be a conflict between the reality of Bitcoin and the marketing rhetoric put out by the growing industry that surrounds it. The latter markets the crypto-tokens as a competing monetary system, while simultaneously fixating upon its dollar price.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

Meanwhile the rest of us who lie on the couch and watch films get almost 98 per cent, in lower prices for goods and services, and therefore increased purchasing power. This is a beneficial form of inequality, and the greater the profits made by entrepreneurs, the more our 98 per cent share will be worth. On the other hand, 2.2 per cent of multi-billion profits are enough to become a new Ingvar Kamprad, Bill Gates or Elon Musk, and the hope of joining them can inspire many. Sven Norfeldt, one of Sweden’s most successful entrepreneurs, once described the market to me as a minefield. Over there, on the other side, there is new knowledge, capacities, products and services that could enrich the whole of society. But our path there is blocked by a minefield of uncertainty, technological dead-ends, unpredictable consumers, shifting business cycles, interest rate changes, capricious policies and plain bad luck.

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Can we even find a single collective project that would make Patrick Deneen, Noreena Hertz, Joel Halldorf and Nina Björk cuddle together in communitarian hygge? Even then we are still only talking about a small homogeneous group of Western intellectuals who demand a collective political project. What does the collective utopia look like that would fill the empty hearts of such diverse people as Stephen Fry, MrBeast, Elon Musk, Billie Eilish, Roger Federer, Mario Vargas Llosa, Danielle Steel, Richard Dawkins, PewDiePie, Robert Downey Jr, Nick Cave, LeBron James, Larry David, Donald Trump, Kylie Jenner, The Rock, Boris Johnson, Quentin Tarantino, Posh Spice, Robert Smith, Chris Rock, Blixa Bargeld, Neal Stephenson, Kim Kardashian, Lionel Messi, Johan Norberg and some 7.9 billion more?

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Nordhaus, ‘Schumpeterian profits in the American economy: Theory and measurement’, NBER Working Paper no.10433, 2004. 6. Compare with Frédéric Bastiat’s reasoning on the invention of the printing press, Bastiat 1964, pp.37f. 7. Donald Boudreaux, Globalization, Greenwood Press, 2008, p.32f. 8. Not Gates any more. Jeff Bezos beat him a few years back, then it was Elon Musk and now it is Bernard Arnault. It changes very fast depending on the temporary stock prices of the companies the super-rich founded, so I’ll continue to use Gates as an example for a while. 9. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Belknap Press, 2014, p.444ff. 10. Ibid., p.31. 11.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

In December 2022, several thousand German law enforcement agents were involved in arresting a group suspected of plotting a violent coup – based on QAnon ideology – that sought to reimpose the country’s Second Reich.17 Simultaneously, in the US the world’s second-richest man – and the owner of one of the world’s key social networks, Twitter – was openly flirting with QAnon conspiracy theories, falsely suggesting that Twitter’s former head of trust and safety supports the sexualisation of children, and that Anthony Fauci (the chief medical advisor of the US) should be prosecuted in connection with the Covid-19 pandemic. So overt was Musk’s flirtation with the Q movement that some within it started to wonder whether Elon Musk, not Donald Trump, was the movement’s promised saviour.18 QAnon constantly changes shape, but it just keeps coming. We can’t just study each of these manifestations as some kind of independent occurrence, as if each emerged from nothing and eventually dwindled – there is a reason the internet keeps generating these movements, and until we change the internet, it will continue to do so.

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In the UK, for example, only 7 per cent of people are privately educated, but 59 per cent of Liz Truss’s first cabinet were. Top journalists and top politicians are often married to one another. The ultra-rich know and socialise with each other – PayPal founder and billionaire Peter Thiel knows billionaire and former PayPal CEO Elon Musk, who socialises with Google founder Larry Page, and so on. But the reality of it being a small world at the top is transformed into a conspiracy theory that they are actively conniving and running the show as a cabal of some sort. It’s a theory that is perhaps oddly more reassuring than the idea that everything is just random, and everyone is fumbling their way through life.

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Mass Shooter Said He Was American, Trump-Supporting Virgin’, www.thedailybeast.com, 13 August 2021. 16. Complaint online at https://heavy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/USA-v-Coleman-COMPLAINT.pdf. 17. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/12/12/germany-conspiracy-us-arrests-january-6-capitol-attack-bundestag-nazism-reich-coup/ 18. https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-replacing-trump-qanon-celebrity-du-jour-twitter-rcna61802 1 ASK THE Q 1. moot is no longer anonymous but is still a rather private individual, as his personal site shows: https://moot.tumblr.com. 2. The (priceless) headline was ‘Modest Web Site Is Behind a Bevy of Memes’, by Jamin Brophy-Warren, www.wsj.com, 9 July 2008. 3.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

Likewise, there are many successful investors and entrepreneurs whose thinking about innovation and business creation have inspired us. Innovation happens through entrepreneurship and it is impossible to grasp innovation without understanding the business motivations behind it. In reality, books like ours cannot substitute for studies of successful entrepreneurs like Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Sam Walton, and the business environment they and others created in their respective firms. More people than we can mention have generously taken the time to talk through particular issues with us or showed us the power of new technology and innovative business ideas. We are particularly grateful to a group of friends who have read, commented, and in other ways helped us with various versions of the manuscript.

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Most sizable modern companies have automated information flows in their production and logistics, and these flows will prompt action even if there is no human being to command it. But Beer’s Cybersyn was not a product of Silicon Valley, the MIT Media Lab, or other places where big-data business models grow and artificial intelligence develops. He was not hired by Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, nor was he in the employment of NASA or the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. He never had a Facebook account, and never tweeted his cybernetic vision. The long-bearded, Rolls-Royce-driving Beer is fascinating because he is a product of history. He died in 2002 and his grand cybernetic model was created over 40 years ago.

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It also boosted the number of M&As, because companies needed to become bigger than before to capture the specialization gains from a growing world economy. There was little demand for innovators and entrepreneurs fanning that “perennial gale of creative destruction,” and that demand naturally declined as companies turned into logistics hubs. Executive recruiters were not scouting for entrepreneurial people like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg to take up key positions in multinationals. They wanted executives with specialisms in optimization, management, logistics, capital markets, and other key operative functions of a firm. They wanted trusted partners from the “technostructure” of managerial capitalism, to quote John Kenneth Galbraith.6 And these partners were planners, not entrepreneurs.

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 3 Sep 2018

id=sjMsDwAAQBAJ. 86The US Department of Defense defines: Heather Roff (9 Feb 2016), “Distinguishing autonomous from automatic weapons,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, http://thebulletin.org/autonomous-weapons-civilian-safety-and-regulation-versus-prohibition/distinguishing-autonomous-automatic-weapons. 86If they are autonomous: Paul Scharre (29 Feb 2016), “Autonomous weapons and operational risk,” Center for a New American Security, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/autonomous-weapons-and-operational-risk. 86Technologists Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking: Michael Sainato (19 Aug 2015), “Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates warn about artificial intelligence,” Observer, http://observer.com/2015/08/stephen-hawking-elon-musk-and-bill-gates-warn-about-artificial-intelligence. 86The risks might be remote: Stuart Russell et al. (11 Jan 2015), “An open letter: Research priorities for robust and beneficial artificial intelligence,” Future of Life Institute, https://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter. 86I am less worried about AI: These two essays talk about that: Ted Chiang (18 Dec 2017), “Silicon Valley is turning into its own worst fear,” BuzzFeed, https://www.buzzfeed.com/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway.

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Weapons that can’t be recalled or turned off—and also operate at computer speeds—could cause all sorts of lethal problems for friend and foe alike. All of this comes together in artificial intelligence. Over the past few years, we’ve read some dire predictions about the dangers of AI. Technologists Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking, and philosopher Nick Bostrom, have all warned of a future where artificial intelligence—either as intelligent robots or as something less personified—becomes so powerful that it takes over the world and enslaves, exterminates, or ignores humanity. The risks might be remote, they argue, but they’re so serious that it would be foolish to ignore them.

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values
by Brian Christian
Published 5 Oct 2020

Ring and Orseau, “Delusion, Survival, and Intelligent Agents.” 73. Plato, Protagoras and Meno. In Plato’s text, Socrates poses this to Protagoras in the interrogative, though he makes clear that this is indeed his view. CHAPTER 7. IMITATION 1. Egan, Axiomatic. 2. Elon Musk, interviewed by Sarah Lacy, “A Fireside Chat with Elon Musk,” Santa Monica, CA, July 12, 2012, https://pando.com/2012/07/12/pandomonthly-presents-a-fireside-chat-with-elon-musk/. Not only was the car uninsured, but Peter Thiel was not wearing a seat belt. “It was a miracle neither of us were hurt,” says Thiel. See Dowd, “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself.” 3. This is discussed in greater detail in Visalberghi and Fragaszy, “Do Monkeys Ape?”

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“If he can distinguish good from evil, nothing will force him to act otherwise than as knowledge dictates, since wisdom is all the reinforcement he needs.”73 PART III Normativity 7 IMITATION I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me. —GREG EGAN1 Watch this. —ELON MUSK TO PETER THIEL, IMMEDIATELY BEFORE LOSING CONTROL OF AND CRASHING HIS UNINSURED $1 MILLION MCLAREN F12 In English, we say that to imitate something is to “ape” it, and we’re not the only ones; this seemingly arbitrary linguistic quirk appears again and again across languages and cultures. The Italian scimmiottare, French singer, Portuguese macaquear, German nachäffen, Bulgarian majmuna, Russian обезьянничать, Hungarian majmol, Polish małpować, Estonian ahvima: verbs for imitation and mimicry, again and again, have their etymologies rooted in terms for primates.3 Indeed, the simian reputation for being a great imitator, not just in etymology but in science, goes back a century and a half at the minimum.

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But I am certain that, at a minimum, conversations and exchanges with the following people have made the book what it is: Pieter Abbeel, Rebecca Ackerman, Dave Ackley, Ross Exo Adams, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Jacky Alciné, Dario Amodei, McKane Andrus, Julia Angwin, Stuart Armstrong, Gustaf Arrhenius, Amanda Askell, Mayank Bansal, Daniel Barcay, Solon Barocas, Renata Barreto, Andrew Barto, Basia Bartz, Marc Bellemare, Tolga Bolukbasi, Nick Bostrom, Malo Bourgon, Tim Brennan, Miles Brundage, Joanna Bryson, Krister Bykvist, Maya Çakmak, Ryan Carey, Joseph Carlsmith, Rich Caruana, Ruth Chang, Alexandra Chouldechova, Randy Christian, Paul Christiano, Jonathan Cohen, Catherine Collins, Sam Corbett-Davies, Meehan Crist, Andrew Critch, Fiery Cushman, Allan Dafoe, Raph D’Amico, Peter Dayan, Michael Dennis, Shiri Dori-Hacohen, Anca Drăgan, Eric Drexler, Rachit Dubey, Cynthia Dwork, Peter Eckersley, Joe Edelman, Owain Evans, Tom Everitt, Ed Felten, Daniel Filan, Jaime Fisac, Luciano Floridi, Carrick Flynn, Jeremy Freeman, Yarin Gal, Surya Ganguli, Scott Garrabrant, Vael Gates, Tom Gilbert, Adam Gleave, Paul Glimcher, Sharad Goel, Adam Goldstein, Ian Goodfellow, Bryce Goodman, Alison Gopnik, Samir Goswami, Hilary Greaves, Joshua Greene, Tom Griffiths, David Gunning, Gillian Hadfield, Dylan Hadfield-Menell, Moritz Hardt, Tristan Harris, David Heeger, Dan Hendrycks, Geoff Hinton, Matt Huebert, Tim Hwang, Geoffrey Irving, Adam Kalai, Henry Kaplan, Been Kim, Perri Klass, Jon Kleinberg, Caroline Knapp, Victoria Krakovna, Frances Kreimer, David Kreuger, Kaitlyn Krieger, Mike Krieger, Alexander Krizhevsky, Jacob Lagerros, Lily Lamboy, Lydia Laurenson, James Lee, Jan Leike, Ayden LeRoux, Karen Levy, Falk Lieder, Michael Littman, Tania Lombrozo, Will MacAskill, Scott Mauvais, Margaret McCarthy, Andrew Meltzoff, Smitha Milli, Martha Minow, Karthika Mohan, Adrien Morisot, Julia Mosquera, Sendhil Mullainathan, Elon Musk, Yael Niv, Brandie Nonnecke, Peter Norvig, Alexandr Notchenko, Chris Olah, Catherine Olsson, Toby Ord, Tim O’Reilly, Laurent Orseau, Pedro Ortega, Michael Page, Deepak Pathak, Alex Peysakhovich, Gualtiero Piccinini, Dean Pomerleau, James Portnow, Aza Raskin, Stéphane Ross, Cynthia Rudin, Jack Rusher, Stuart Russell, Anna Salamon, Anders Sandberg, Wolfram Schultz, Laura Schulz, Julie Shah, Rohin Shah, Max Shron, Carl Shulman, Satinder Singh, Holly Smith, Nate Soares, Daisy Stanton, Jacob Steinhardt, Jonathan Stray, Rachel Sussman, Jaan Tallinn, Milind Tambe, Sofi Thanhauser, Tena Thau, Jasjeet Thind, Travis Timmerman, Brian Tse, Alexander Matt Turner, Phebe Vayanos, Kerstin Vignard, Chris Wiggins, Cutter Wood, and Elana Zeide.

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
by Will Storr
Published 14 Jun 2017

‘We’re not trying to bring material back to Earth. We’re after hydrocarbons, water, nickel, iron. All the materials you’d need to build cities in space.’ ‘And you actually think we’ll live to see people living in space?’ ‘I think I’ll live another thirty years, yeah,’ he said. ‘Elon Musk wants to put people on Mars by 2026. Anyone else at any other time in history would’ve been mad to say that. But this is Elon Musk.’ I wondered about the influence of Ayn Rand among his fellow founders. Steve Jobs, for one, is said to have treated Atlas Shrugged as his ‘guide in life,’ whilst Travis Kalanick of Uber used the cover of The Fountainhead as his Twitter avatar.

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Once the specific microbial species that made up their particular bacterial community was analysed, a personalized treatment would be delivered. Austen was immediately interested. He agreed to help not only with the technology but with business advice. He took a 10 per cent stake in her company. Word of his work spread further. He met Sergey Brin from Google, Elon Musk from Tesla and SpaceX and Jared Leto from the movies. He was invited to Richard Branson’s private island, where apparently he silenced the billionaire’s dinner table with his visions of an intentionally designed, synthetic future. He was interviewed by Fortune and NPR and Wired. CNN named his technology as one of its ‘Top Ten Ideas That Could Save Lives’.

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Ultimately, we can all take comfort in the understanding that they’re not actually perfect, and that none of us ever will be. We’re not, as we’ve been promised, ‘as gods’. On the contrary, we’re animals but we think we’re not animals. We’re products of the mud. * Before I left Silicon Valley, I accompanied some residents of the Rainbow Mansion to a rocket launch. Elon Musk’s company SpaceX had been contracted to take a NASA satellite into orbit. As we drove south out of Cupertino, I watched as the blue dot on my smartphone’s map passed Big Sur and Esalen, not far to the west. With the highway running into the great Californian sky in front of us, I thought about the other journey I’d been on, which was now, finally, drawing to a close.

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today
by Jane McGonigal
Published 22 Mar 2022

Swan with Stacey Colino, Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021). 8 Lixiao Zhou et al., “PM2.5 Exposure Impairs Sperm Quality through Testicular Damage Dependent on NALP3 Inflammasome and miR-183/96/182 cluster Targeting FOXO1 in Mouse,” Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety 169 (March 2019): 551–63, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoenv.2018.10.108. 9 NASA, “NASA Announces US Industry Partnerships to Advance Moon, Mars Technology,” press release no. 19-063, July 30, 2019, https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-announces-us-industry-partnerships-to-advance-moon-mars-technology. 10 Elon Musk, March 25, 2019, on Twitter as @elonmusk. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1110329210332053504. 11 Justin Bachman, “New Space Race Shoots for Moon and Mars on a Budget: QuickTake,” Washington Post, February 21, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/new-space-race-shoots-for-moon-and-mars-on-a-budget-quicktake/2021/02/18/661c1c0a-7243-11eb-8651-6d3091eac63f_story.html; Dave Mosher, “Elon Musk Says SpaceX Is on Track to Launch People to Mars within 6 Years—Here’s the Full Timeline of His Plans to Populate the Red Planet,” Business Insider, November 2, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-mars-plan-timeline-2018-10; “UAE Aims to Establish Human Settlement on Mars by 2117,” SpaceWatch.Global, February 2017, https://spacewatch.global/2017/02/uae-aims-establish-human-settlement-mars-2117/. 12 “Governance Futures Lab—Reinventing Civic Society,” Institute for the Future, accessed August 27, 2021, https://www.iftf.org/govfutures/. 13 Alan Taylor, “Mars in the Gobi Desert,” Atlantic, April 17, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/04/photos-mars-gobi-desert/587353/. 14 Jason Pontin, “The Genetics (and Ethics) of Making Humans Fit for Mars,” Wired, August 7, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/ideas-jason-pontin-genetic-engineering-for-mars/. 15 Swan, Count Down, 2–3. 16 Nathaniel Scharping, “Sperm Counts Are on the Decline.

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Who, exactly, is going to be watching the sun rise differently on Mars in the next decade? Is this a ridiculous, at first, idea—or just a ridiculous one? We dug deeper. It turns out there are plenty of space entrepreneurs trying to develop the technology to help humans settle on Mars as soon as possible. Elon Musk and his SpaceX company is the best known, but there are at least thirteen other companies working with NASA to make Mars settlement more feasible—including Lockheed Martin, which is developing autonomous robots to grow and harvest plants so people could feed themselves in space.9 Meanwhile, the United States, China, Japan, Russia, India, and the United Arab Emirates all have unmanned research programs underway aimed at the red planet, with an eye toward sending humans in the 2030s.

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Swan with Stacey Colino, Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021). 8 Lixiao Zhou et al., “PM2.5 Exposure Impairs Sperm Quality through Testicular Damage Dependent on NALP3 Inflammasome and miR-183/96/182 cluster Targeting FOXO1 in Mouse,” Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety 169 (March 2019): 551–63, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoenv.2018.10.108. 9 NASA, “NASA Announces US Industry Partnerships to Advance Moon, Mars Technology,” press release no. 19-063, July 30, 2019, https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-announces-us-industry-partnerships-to-advance-moon-mars-technology. 10 Elon Musk, March 25, 2019, on Twitter as @elonmusk. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1110329210332053504. 11 Justin Bachman, “New Space Race Shoots for Moon and Mars on a Budget: QuickTake,” Washington Post, February 21, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/new-space-race-shoots-for-moon-and-mars-on-a-budget-quicktake/2021/02/18/661c1c0a-7243-11eb-8651-6d3091eac63f_story.html; Dave Mosher, “Elon Musk Says SpaceX Is on Track to Launch People to Mars within 6 Years—Here’s the Full Timeline of His Plans to Populate the Red Planet,” Business Insider, November 2, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-mars-plan-timeline-2018-10; “UAE Aims to Establish Human Settlement on Mars by 2117,” SpaceWatch.Global, February 2017, https://spacewatch.global/2017/02/uae-aims-establish-human-settlement-mars-2117/. 12 “Governance Futures Lab—Reinventing Civic Society,” Institute for the Future, accessed August 27, 2021, https://www.iftf.org/govfutures/. 13 Alan Taylor, “Mars in the Gobi Desert,” Atlantic, April 17, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/04/photos-mars-gobi-desert/587353/. 14 Jason Pontin, “The Genetics (and Ethics) of Making Humans Fit for Mars,” Wired, August 7, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/ideas-jason-pontin-genetic-engineering-for-mars/. 15 Swan, Count Down, 2–3. 16 Nathaniel Scharping, “Sperm Counts Are on the Decline.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 28 Jun 2020

“Whatever agreements not to use H-bombs had been reached in time of peace, they would no longer be considered binding in time of war,” acknowledged Albert Einstein and British philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1955, “for, if one side manufactured the bombs and the other did not, the side that manufactured them would inevitably be victorious.”131 Today, just 25 percent of Americans say they believe nuclear weapons can be eliminated.132 When a New York Times reporter asked Oppenheimer how he felt after the bomb was tested on July 16, 1945, the father of the atomic bomb said, “Lots of boys not grown up yet will owe their life to it.”133 After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer put out word that “the atomic bomb is so terrible a weapon that war is now impossible.”134 9 Destroying the Environment to Save It 1. “The Only Path” In spring 2015, Elon Musk walked on stage to loud applause from an audience of hundreds of supporters and invited guests. “What I’m going to talk about tonight,” he said, “is a fundamental transformation of how the world works, about how energy is delivered across Earth. “This is how it is today—it’s pretty bad.” He showed a graph of rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

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Human civilization would have to occupy one hundred to one thousand times more space if it were to rely solely on renewables. “This power density gap between fossil and renewable energies,” writes energy analyst Vaclav Smil, “leaves nuclear electricity generation as the only commercially proven non-fossil high-power-density alternative.”81 What about Elon Musk’s claim that an apparently tiny square of solar panels could power the United States? It was deeply misleading. If the only requirement was producing the same total electricity the United States currently does, regardless of time of day or season, Musk underestimated the required land area by 40 percent.

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“CNN Poll: Public Divided on Eliminating All Nuclear Weapons,” CNN, April 12, 2010, http://www.cnn.com. 133. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 309. 134. Ibid., 317. 9: Destroying the Environment to Save It 1. Bryan Bishop and Josh Dzieza, “Tesla Energy Is Elon Musk’s Battery System That Can Power Homes, Businesses, and the World,” The Verge, May 1, 2015, https://www.theverge.com. 2. Tesla, “Tesla introduces Tesla Energy,” YouTube, May 2, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=82&v=NvCIhn7_FXI&feature=emb_logo. 3. H. J. Mai, “Tesla Powerwall, Powerpack deployment grows 81% to 415 MWh in Q2,” Utility Dive, July 30, 2019, https://www.utilitydive.com. 4.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

By far the most significant measure governments of wealthy nations could have taken to stop the spread of new variants would have been to make vaccines free and available to the entire global population at the same time as they were rolled out domestically; the suspension of pharmaceutical company patents would have been more than justified, since public money so heavily subsidized the development and rollout of the vaccines. And the cost would have been relatively low: the chief economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimated that the entire world could have been vaccinated for $50 billion, just a little more than Elon Musk paid to turn Twitter into his personal plaything. But doing so would have required a waiver of intellectual property protections at the World Trade Organization, which would have facilitated lifting the patents that have allowed a handful of pharmaceutical companies to treat the vaccines as permission to print money.

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It is, moreover, extremely dangerous and troubling that corporate platforms can arbitrarily delete users and cut them off from the web of connections they built with their own words, images, and labor over years. When Wolf says that “they start purging your enemies, then they purge you,” she’s not wrong. Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, progressives in North America had been pretty complacent about this threat because it had mostly been their political adversaries getting booted off platforms. But well before Musk started suspending the accounts of Twitter users who displeased him, the same kinds of power abuses had deplatformed Palestinian human rights activists at the behest of the Israeli government, and advocates for the rights of farmers and religious minorities at the behest of India’s Hindu-supremacist government.

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But a minority of them, steeped in diagonalist rhetoric, claimed that the vaccine requirement constituted a new form of tyranny, and so they teamed up with a mix-and-match of aggrieved small- business owners, ex-cops and ex-soldiers, the author of Oh She Glows vegan cookbooks, and a great many evangelical Christians—all banding together to “shut the country down,” with a stretch goal of convincing the governor general, the Queen’s representative in Canada, to dissolve Trudeau’s newly reelected government. The convoy had plenty of fans. Donald Trump and Elon Musk celebrated the “Canadian truckers” as working-class heroes; Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson gave them blanket coverage; my doppelganger cheered them on as modern-day freedom fighters. Soon enough, copycat convoys were on the move from Washington, D.C., to Wellington, New Zealand. After taking a remarkably passive approach to the occupation for weeks, the Trudeau government made an abrupt about-face and invoked, for the first time in our history, the Emergencies Act, which cleared the way for a range of repressive tactics like freezing supporters’ bank accounts.

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO
by Felix Gillette and John Koblin
Published 1 Nov 2022

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “If you look at the history”: “Comedy Master Class with Casey Bloys and Jenni Konner,” Banff World Media Festival, June 27, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jVOLp_DRtY. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Afterward, Tesla’s Elon Musk: Nellie Bowles, “At HBO’s Silicon Valley Premiere, Elon Musk Has Some Notes,” Recode, Vox, April, 3, 2014. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Some critics would: Esther Breger, “The Boring Sexism of HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley,’ ” New Republic, May 30, 2014. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In June 2014: Hadas Gold, “Rupert Murdoch’s Failed $80B Bid for Time Warner,” Politico, July 16, 2014.

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While critics were generally delighted, not every American tech billionaire was amused by the needling. As part of the show’s rollout, HBO held a premiere at the Fox Theatre in Redwood City, California, in the cradle of Silicon Valley. Under dimmed lights, a passel of prominent venture capitalists, cast members, and masters of the tech universe watched the first two episodes. Afterward, Tesla’s Elon Musk, well on his way to becoming one of the richest humans on the planet, bristled at HBO’s uppity, unflattering depiction of the tech world. It was totally off base, he told Recode. “I really feel like Mike Judge has never been to Burning Man, which is Silicon Valley,” Musk said. “If you haven’t been, you just don’t get it.”

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Over time, as the series grew into a hit, the tech industry grew more guarded and self-conscious around Judge and his staff. Judge recalls that during a second visit to one of California’s big tech giants, his crew received a much different reception. Casually observing brogrammers in the wild was no longer going to be such a breeze. “They put us in a room with nothing but female engineers,” Judge recalls. While Elon Musk was simmering down, HBO had another headstrong tycoon to worry about. In June 2014, just a couple of months after HBO’s Sunday night premiere of Silicon Valley, Rupert Murdoch, the insatiable media mogul, made an unsolicited $80-billion bid for Time Warner, taking everyone by surprise. Jeffrey Bewkes met with the company’s board members, who rejected the offer.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 7 Nov 2017

As we have seen, Les Mills International had to adopt a very different business model from traditional gym businesses in order to grow to the size it did. The emphasis on network effects is an insight of Thiel’s that suggests that governments might become more important to company success in the future. One of Peter Thiel’s PayPal cofounders, Elon Musk, is currently involved in what might become one of the ultimate network businesses: self-driving, battery-powered cars. The network effect would be familiar to any nineteenth-century entrepreneur. Horses and carts needed a gigantic network of stables to feed and water the horses and repair the carts.

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This is why leadership is going to be so valued in an intangible economy. It can at best replace, and likely mitigate, the costly and possibly distortive aspects of managing by authority. A good example of the importance of leadership in an intangible age can be seen in the phenomenon sometimes called systems or systemic innovation. Elon Musk is sometimes described as a systems innovator, aspiring to develop new products in a number of related fields (electricity storage, solar power, electric cars) or in complex systems (space procurement, carbon credits). Systems innovation is also widely discussed in the not-for-profit sector, particularly as large-scale funders such as the Gates Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies seek to change whole systems at once, such as public health in developing countries or city government.

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As we have seen, the largest institutional investors may be able to invest broadly across an ecosystem, knowing that they can benefit from spillovers of intangible investments even if an individual company they have backed does not. These larger national funds could be deployed to invest in particular ecosystems (in the way that Fidelity is reported to have invested across Elon Musk’s intangible-intensive business empire). Alongside these regulatory changes, we might cautiously hope for a cultural shift among the managers of large companies and institutional investors. The UK’s Purposeful Company project (Big Innovation Centre 2017) and the international initiative Focusing Capital on the Long Term have both argued for managers and large shareholders to be more willing to make long-term investments, particularly in intangible investments like R&D and organizational and human capital.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook
Published 28 Mar 2016

Immigration, meanwhile, not only allows foreigners to share in the American Dream, which is something we should value for its own sake, but may also fuel economic growth.16 Low-skilled workers tend to bid down wages for low-skilled work, which sounds bad until you remember that this lowers the cost of the products we all buy. And high-skilled workers bring us all the benefits of their ability, which includes starting new businesses (see the careers of Andrew Carnegie, PayPal’s Elon Musk, Intel’s Andy Grove, and Google’s Sergey Brin, among many others). But we should not paint a one-sided picture. Although the inequality critics highlight the restrictions on economic liberty of the post-war era (more on that shortly), in many ways it was an era of growing economic freedom. This is difficult to quantify, but the best attempt to date comes from economist Leandro Prados de la Escosura, who has constructed a Historical Index of Economic Liberty (HIEL) similar to indexes produced by the Heritage Foundation and the Fraser Institute that try to measure economic freedom today.

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The greatest contributors to production are not those who supply physical labor but those who contribute ideas—new theories, inventions, tools, businesses, and methods—to the productive process. We can see this most clearly when we look at the role of the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur seeks out new profit opportunities, often introducing new products, new services, or new ways of doing business. Entrepreneurs like Bill Gates (Microsoft), Elon Musk (PayPal), and Richard Branson (Virgin) are the risk takers and trailblazers who start new businesses and even new industries. The word “entrepreneur” comes from the French word entreprendre, which means to “undertake” and is thought to have been coined by the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say. According to Say, the entrepreneur is the “master-agent.”

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Talent is the currency of Silicon Valley, and individuals there use their talent to move us forward, pioneering revolutionary achievements in social media, big data, personalized health care, biotechnology, smartphones, mobile commerce, cloud technology, and 3D printing, to name just a few. Silicon Valley is the place creators like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Peter Thiel go to make a fortune by inventing the future. What made it all possible? No doubt there are many forces at work, but one enormous factor is the extent to which the government has kept its hands off the Valley. Perry Piscione points out the benefits of “the lack of heavy government regulation that would typically favor the interests of established banks, companies, and labor unions” over young upstarts.36 People are free to act on their ideas and compete on ability, without having to wade through a minefield of government permissions before launching their ventures.

Nothing but Net: 10 Timeless Stock-Picking Lessons From One of Wall Street’s Top Tech Analysts
by Mark Mahaney
Published 9 Nov 2021

Imitation may well be the sincerest form of successful product innovation. Twitter’s checkered track record on product innovation may be due to its unusual management structure—the fact that Jack Dorsey, its CEO, is simultaneously the CEO of Twitter and Square. Now there are several examples of successful two-firm CEOs, such as Elon Musk, who has been extraordinarily innovative with Tesla. And Dorsey’s other company, Square, has been enormously successful in the public markets. I also believe Dorsey deserves the highest of praise for cofounding two different successful businesses. He has to go down as one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our generation.

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Ma at Alibaba, Bezos at Amazon, Jobs at Apple, Zuckerberg at Facebook, Brin and Page at Google, Gates at Microsoft, Hastings at Netflix, Lütke at Shopify, Ma at Tencent, and Musk at Tesla (Table 8.1). TABLE 8.1 Founders and Their Companies Steve Jobs’s tenure excludes the period when Jobs left Apple in 1985 and rejoined in 1997; Elon Musk as cofounder per 2009 settlement. Market cap as of Febuary 9, 2021. Check out the average tenure of these founders: 24 years! That’s more than two times the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours/10 years rule for excellence he offered in Outliers. And that’s weighed down by the fact that Zuckerberg didn’t think to start Facebook until 2004 (when he was 19, two years below the minimum legal drinking age), Lütke didn’t help conceive of Shopify until 2004 (when he was 25), and Musk was busy with PayPal before he thought to help launch Tesla in 2003 (at the advanced age of 32).

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It helped that Barton and Frink controlled a large chunk of the company’s shareholder vote, but as founders, the three individuals had the ability and the credibility to take on this type of risky decision. I am skeptical that a non-founder executive could have pulled off this type of pivot, which has turned out to be enormously beneficial to ZG shareholders. So those are the main examples of the long-term stock benefits of founder-led companies. One other quick example comes to mind—Tesla and Elon Musk. As an analyst, I never covered TSLA. But as a regular market participant, it was impossible to not notice the audacity, vision, and drive of that company’s founder. It’s hard to see how Musk hasn’t been a key part of that company’s and that stock’s success. Now just because almost every single one of the most successful tech stocks has belonged to founder-led companies doesn’t mean that all founder-led companies make great stocks.

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption
by Ben Mezrich
Published 20 May 2019

If he was a Japanese man, he wrote in idiomatic, flawless English that alternated between American spellings and British spellings. The time stamps of his writings revealed no particular time zone. Investigative journalists had named at least fifteen people as possible alter egos to the mysterious inventor, including Elon Musk, the Tesla billionaire, and Hal Finney, a game designer and cryptographer who had received the first Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi in 2009; but none of these leads had led anywhere. “To me,” Voorhees said, “the mystery surrounding Satoshi is a feature of Bitcoin, not a bug. The beauty of Bitcoin is that it is not built around Satoshi, it’s not built around anyone.

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Both Lonsdale and Thiel were chess geniuses known to battle it out with each other for hours on end. Thiel himself was, of course, a Valley legend, having founded PayPal, and was considered the “don” of the “PayPal Mafia”—a group of PayPal alums who’d gone on to start a slew of world-changing companies. The group included Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), David Sacks (Yammer), Ken Howery (Founders Fund), Max Levchin (Yelp), and others. Thiel also happened to have been the first investor in Facebook; he turned a $500,000 check into a billion-dollar investment, a mind-blowing 13,000x return. At the dinner, Naval had told the twins about the company he had cofounded in 2010, called AngelList, a meeting place for investors and entrepreneurs—something Business Insider had once called “Match.com for investors.”

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A handsome Taiwanese-American entrepreneur and investor, Lee had sold his first company for $265 million during the dot-com frenzy in the late 1990s. After that, he had exited to the Dominican Republic, where he’d bought a hotel and surfed for two years. Upon his return, Lee had promptly backed his best friend Elon Musk’s new startups: Tesla and SpaceX. A few years later, he would marry Al Gore’s youngest daughter. Lee was probably one of the most influential yet under-the-radar people in the Valley—virtually unknown to the outside world. Inside the Valley, he cut his own image—imbued with a style that strayed far from the khaki pants of the VCs on Sand Hill Road, or the hacker hoodies of the Facebook set.

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now
by Sergey Young
Published 23 Aug 2021

Eric Verdin and his incredible colleagues at the Buck Institute are working hard on defining a “universal theory of aging,” but it may not even be necessary: nowadays, most longevity pioneers prefer to just get on with the work of developing our ability to manage aging, whether we fully understand it or not. But how can this be done effectively? You can’t very well solve a problem that you do not first boil down to its essential elements. This is something that Aristotle referred to in Greek as arche, which modern-day problem solvers like Elon Musk call “first principles.” Even if figuring out the “cause” of aging is more trouble than it’s worth, gerontologists still need a way to identify the first principles of the problem of aging. THE HALLMARKS OF AGING In 2013, a group of European scientists led by biochemist and molecular biologist Carlos López-Otín published a seminal paper entitled “The 9 Hallmarks of Aging,” which tackled this problem and gave the longevity community a way to study aging without agreeing on its root cause.

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CTRL Labs invented a wristband equipped with what they call “myocontrol” that can already allow you to execute fine-motor-control behavior like typing on a keyboard, without ever touching a real keyboard. Actions can be caused by manipulating your hands remotely, or just by thinking about doing so. CTRL Labs was acquired by Facebook in 2019. All of these technologies are noninvasive—they involve wearing something. But if Elon Musk has his way, brain-machine interfaces may take another turn. In August 2020, Musk’s company Neuralink made history when it introduced the world to Gertrude—a pig fitted with a microchip and over a thousand electrodes in her brain. Instead of wearing an external device, which may have limited ability to pick up high-fidelity electrical signals, Neuralink seeks to build on its work with Gertrude to achieve full man-machine integration.

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Today, renewable energy accounts for nearly one-fifth of global energy consumption.12 Air pollution in the United States decreased by 54 percent13 between 1990 and 2010, while the number of bodies of water that meet clean-water standards has nearly doubled14 in just the first twenty-five years since such regulations were introduced. Where electric cars were a not-very-sexy choice reserved for penny-pinchers and do-gooders a few years ago, Elon Musk and the success of Tesla have forced the automotive industry to make carbon-emission reduction a core pillar of its strategy. And even China and India—historically among the greatest polluters on Earth—have engaged in aggressive measures to improve their air and water quality. I’ve been visiting China at least once a year for almost two decades.

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do
by Erik J. Larson
Published 5 Apr 2021

The myth of artificial intelligence is that its arrival is inevitable, and only a matter of time—that we have already embarked on the path that will lead to human-level AI, and then superintelligence. We have not. The path exists only in our imaginations. Yet the inevitability of AI is so ingrained in popular discussion—promoted by media pundits, thought leaders like Elon Musk, and even many AI scientists (though certainly not all)—that arguing against it is often taken as a form of Luddism, or at the very least a shortsighted view of the future of technology and a dangerous failure to prepare for a world of intelligent machines. As I will show, the science of AI has uncovered a very large mystery at the heart of intelligence, which no one currently has a clue how to solve.

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Hedgehogs returned, and predictably, the media fanned the flames of fresh futurism. But something strange is happening in AI lately. I noticed it in more skeptical talk in 2018, and in 2019 it’s unmistakable. The foxes are returning. Many mythologists (with a few notable exceptions) are also non-experts, like Elon Musk, or the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, or even Bill Gates. Still, they helped create much of the media ballyhoo about AI—mostly, deep learning ballyhoo—which peaked a few years ago (circa 2015, give or take a year). Now, though, it’s increasingly common to hear talk of limitations again—for instance, from Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and founder of robotics company Robust.AI, who coauthored with computer scientist Ernest Davis the 2019 Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust.9 Marcus and Davis make a compelling argument that the field is yet again overhyped, and that deep learning has its limits; some fundamental advance will be required to achieve generally intelligent AI.

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If he has had any equals in that respect in the entire history of philosophy, they do not number more than two.2 Yet Peirce died an outcast, largely forgotten. Forgotten geniuses are common enough in history that we occasionally rediscover them, as with Tesla. But arguably more than Tesla—who, after all, achieved a kind of posthumous fame as Elon Musk’s choice of inspiration to name an electric car company after—Peirce stands as an important thinker who has been mostly written out of the history books. His work is most appreciated in philosophy, where he is known as the founder of the philosophical school known as pragmatism. His early work on computing has been all but forgotten.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 14 Jun 2017

Tim has gained a number of prominent readers as well, like authors Sam Harris and Susan Cain, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, TED curator Chris Anderson, and Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova. Tim’s series of posts after interviewing Elon Musk have been called by Vox’s David Roberts “the meatiest, most fascinating, most satisfying posts I’ve read in ages.” You can start with the first one, “Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man.” Tim’s TED Talk, “Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator,” has received more than 21 million views. * * * What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?

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I think the key to life is to figure out when it makes sense to save mental energy and be like Keating (I’m super conforming in my clothing choices because it’s not something that’s important to me) and when in life it really matters to be like Roark and reason independently (choosing your career path, picking your life partner, deciding how to raise your kids, etc.). The Fountainhead was a major influence when I wrote a long blog post about why I think Elon Musk is so successful. To me, he’s like Roark—he’s tremendous at reasoning from first principles. In the post, I call this being a “chef” (someone who experiments with ingredients and comes up with a new recipe). Musk is unusually cheflike. Most of us spend most of our lives being like Keating, or what I call a “cook” (someone who follows someone else’s recipe).

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I think swimming in the middle lane happens most often in people’s 30s or 40s, a stage where you begin crafting your own language for what you do as an increasingly “strong poet”—you make your craft your own and view your life as more self-expression than simply playing out other people’s roles for you. And then some small percentage of people will paddle over to the lane next to chaos, the place where you find novelists Robert Pirsig and David Foster Wallace, investors like Mike Burry or Eddie Lampert, or entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. I experience them as consistently “asserting reality” through their powerful storytelling, while always bearing the risk that their egos grow too big and their creative narcissism becomes too well defended. They can lose their feedback loop with reality and flop onto the bank of chaos. Through this lens, Pirsig’s wrestling with his sanity toward the end of his life, Steve Jobs’ magical thinking about his illness, and Eddie Lampert’s Ayn Randian framing of his investment in Sears may all have been examples of strong poets losing their feel for where they can mythologize to the point of bending our collective reality and where they suddenly appear crazy.

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance
by Eswar S. Prasad
Published 27 Sep 2021

See https://dogecoin.com/ for more information on the provenance of Dogecoin and to sign up. Price and market capitalization figures for Dogecoin are from https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dogecoin/. See Ryan Browne, “Tweets from Elon Musk and Other Celebrities Send Dogecoin to a Record High,” CNBC, February 8, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/08/tweets-from-elon-musk-and-celebrities-send-dogecoin-to-a-record-high.html. The story about how Meme coin came to be and Lyall’s quote on the matter can be found in Mathew Di Salvo, “How an Anti-Meme Coin Joke Backfired into a $1.2 Million Meme Coin,” Decrypt, August 15, 2020, https://decrypt.co/38887/an-anti-meme-coin-joke-just-led-to-a-1-2-million-meme-coin.

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There is also another dimension of technological vulnerability that strikes at the heart of what was intended as a key distinguishing feature of cryptocurrencies. We consider that next. Mirage of Digital Anonymity In July 2020, the Twitter accounts of a number of prominent persons displayed the same message: “Send Bitcoin and get double your money back.” The hacked accounts belonged to such luminaries as Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, and a few even more culturally significant personages such as Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Former US president Obama’s account displayed this message: “I am giving back to my community due to Covid-19! All Bitcoin sent to my address below will be sent back doubled. If you send $1,000, I will send back $2,000!”

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Then the price took off, and the market capitalization peaked at $1.9 billion on January 7, 2018. It fell back sharply after that, but not quite back to earth, with a still astonishing market capitalization of $580 million as of December 2020. That was not it, however. A series of supportive tweets from Elon Musk, who referred to it approvingly as “the people’s crypto,” then helped push Dogecoin’s market capitalization briefly above $90 billion in early May 2021! Struck by the absurdity of such meme coins, in August 2020 a programmer named Jordan Lyall introduced the Degenerator, a phony project that supposedly allowed anyone to create their own DeFi project in less than five minutes.

The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire
by Tim Schwab
Published 13 Nov 2023

reduce the population of Nigeria: A newer generation of billionaires, including Elon Musk (Tesla) and Jack Ma (Alibaba), has been vocal about their concerns about population growth. “The biggest issue in 20 years will be population collapse. Not explosion. Collapse,” Musk noted in a public presentation in 2019. “I absolutely agree with that,” Ma said. “The population problem is going to be facing huge challenge. 1.4 billion people in China sounds a lot, but I think next 20 years, we will see this thing will bring big trouble to China.” Catherine Clifford, “Elon Musk and Jack Ma Agree: The Biggest Problem the World Will Face Is Population Collapse,” CNBC, August 30, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/30/elon-musk-jack-ma-biggest-problem-world-will-face-is-population-drop.html.

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One account of these retreats, which became known as “pajama parties,” describes a van of reporters who “chattered excitedly, like Scouts going to summer camp” on their way to Gates’s compound, a sojourn that included a ride on a “Turbo Beaver” seaplane. After a sumptuous dinner, Gates led a bull session with the reporters, “holding court for nearly two hours.” It’s difficult to read this account and avoid seeing the reporters of that era as being too close to their subject. If Elon Musk today were to hold annual “pajama parties” with top business reporters staying at his family home and feasting on caviar, leg of lamb, and copious amounts of wine, such a junket might be considered a scandal, with attending journalists ridiculed as sellouts or, at the very least, compromised. But such was the magic of Bill Gates at that time, the Boy Wonder billionaire, the most powerful corporate executive in the most exciting industry in the world.

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If we take the Gates model of philanthropy to its logical conclusion, we can imagine not only Bill Gates’s private foundation growing in size, wealth, and power in the decades ahead but also the expanding role of other billionaires in world affairs. It presents us with a future in which a small group of super-rich global elites—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Charles Koch, Carlos Slim, MacKenzie Scott, Mukesh Ambani, Jack Ma—play an ever-larger role in global governance, organizing trillions of dollars to remake the world according to their own narrow interests, calling it philanthropy. * * * IN THE YEARS after the Great Recession, the political debate around the world’s economic woes included endless references to “belt tightening” and “hair cutting.”

Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration
by Buzz Aldrin and Leonard David
Published 1 Apr 2013

The long-term results of this ‘first’ are beyond our ability to see at the beginning of this era, but there is no doubt that it will serve as a huge incentive for young people who now have firm evidence of the value, and opportunity for individual initiative,” he added. “Near-Earth space is now firmly a regular part of the human environment along with the air, water, and land. The future is now, once again, opened to imagination, creativity, and dreams!” I applaud all these comments and see the achievement by commercial rocketeer Elon Musk and his SpaceX team as a first step. Others will follow, cultivating new capabilities that drive down costs and further secure a private-sector toehold in low Earth orbit. Buzz Aldrin salutes the flag at Tranquillity Base: his proudest moment. (Illustration Credit 3.13) CHAPTER FOUR DREAMS OF MY MOON People often ask me to recount my Apollo 11 moonwalking experiences, my reminiscences of being on the moon.

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(Illustration Credit 7.8) Here an artist’s rendering depicts Dragon spacecraft on the planet. (Illustration Credit 7.9) Red Dragon: A Private Affair With Mars The reach for Mars need not be a governmental event. One private-sector plan is being led by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), a U.S. commercial space firm birthed in June 2002 by entrepreneur Elon Musk. He gained his fortunes, in part, from co-founding and then selling PayPal, the online money transfer and payment system. In May 2012 SpaceX made history when its Dragon spacecraft flew atop the company’s Falcon 9 booster to become the first commercial vehicle to rendezvous with and then attach to the International Space Station.

Moon Rush: The New Space Race
by Leonard David
Published 6 May 2019

A commercial lunar base providing propellant in lunar orbit would reduce the cost to NASA of sending humans to Mars by as much as $10 billion a year. Of course, the space agency needs to devote the up-front resources to build such a base. Over the past few years since the study was published, the situation has improved, says Miller, pointing to space tech luminaries like Elon Musk with SpaceX and Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin. Both space entrepreneurs are pushing forward with plans to develop boosters capable of reaching the Moon. “We went to the Moon in the 1960s as a race between nations,” Miller says. “The best way to go back to the Moon is to set up a race between billionaires

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He suggests that one delivery spot could be Shackleton crater, at the lunar south pole—a location that contains ice for fuel and logistics support, mineral compounds for developing structures, and near-continuous sunlight for power generation. Shackleton crater and other locations like it offer pragmatic proving grounds for judging deep-space exploration technologies in close proximity to Earth. Not to be outdone, Elon Musk, founder and leader of the California-based firm SpaceX, also has company crosshairs on the Moon. “Having some permanent presence on another heavenly body, which would be the kind of Moon base, and then getting people to Mars and beyond—that’s the continuance of the dream of Apollo that I think people are really looking for,” Musk says.

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership
by Richard Branson
Published 8 Sep 2014

Putting it differently, I suppose, with tongue firmly in cheek I could say it was a classic case of, ‘Screw It, Let’s Blue It.’ Sorry! ENVISAGING VISIONARIES Brett is just one of many true visionaries I have been lucky to know with the passion, drive, focus and skills to turn their often seemingly impossible dreams into game-changing realities. Like a lot of people before him, Elon Musk had a vision to build a commercially viable electric car. This is a space in which all the early movers have focused their attention on the mass market by developing affordable, compact fuel-saving vehicles almost completely devoid of anything in the way of sex appeal. Musk decided instead to come at it from the premium sports car end of the market and over time move into more mainstream vehicles.

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The $70,000 Tesla Model S not only looks like a very cool sports car but behaves like one: it reportedly accelerates from 0 to 60 mph in an incredible 3.7 seconds and for those like me who have a conscience about such things, it is almost twice as energy efficient as the homely sector-leading Toyota Prius. And as if all that were not enough, the influential ‘Consumer Reports’ magazine ranked the Tesla as ‘the best we have ever tested’ with a ninety-nine per cent overall rating. Rate this one an A on all counts. Of course Tesla is not Elon Musk’s first big success at breaking new ground in emerging industries. His vision of creating a new form of payment to accommodate the unique requirements of online retail sales started life as X.com and soon morphed into PayPal. His other current major dream coming true is SpaceX, which, along similar lines to Virgin Galactic, is developing a private sector satellite launch vehicle to take over where NASA left off.

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His other current major dream coming true is SpaceX, which, along similar lines to Virgin Galactic, is developing a private sector satellite launch vehicle to take over where NASA left off. There is even talk of Musk merging his PayPal and space ventures with PayPal Galactic to tackle the challenges of ‘off-Earth’ payments – I will have to give some more thought to that one! In any case Elon Musk’s successes at Tesla, PayPal and Space-X only serve to demonstrate the incredible results that can flow from vision and leadership coming together in one inspired individual with the assistance of an army of equally inspired followers. PASSION KNOWS PASSION Another great advantage to having truly passionate leaders is their inherent ability to recognise raw passion in others when they see it.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
by Adam Grant
Published 2 Feb 2016

King was inspired by Gandhi: Rufus Burrow Jr., Extremist for Love: Martin Luther King Jr., Man of Ideas and Nonviolent Social Action (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014). as was Nelson Mandela: “Nelson Mandela, the ‘Gandhi of South Africa,’ Had Strong Indian Ties,” Economic Times, December 6, 2013, articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-12-06/news/44864354_1_nelson-mandela-gandhi-memorial-gandhian-philosophy. Elon Musk . . . Lord of the Rings: Tad Friend, “Plugged In: Can Elon Musk Lead the Way to an Electric-Car Future?” New Yorker, August 24, 2009, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/24/plugged-in. Peter Thiel . . . Lord of the Rings: Julian Guthrie, “Entrepreneur Peter Thiel Talks ‘Zero to One,’” SFGate, September 21, 2014, www.sfgate.com/living/article/Entrepreneur-Peter-Thiel-talks-Zero-to-One-5771228.php.

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King was inspired by Gandhi, as was Nelson Mandela. In some cases, fictional characters may be even better role models. Growing up, many originals find their first heroes in their most beloved novels, where protagonists exercise their creativity in pursuit of unique accomplishments. When asked to name their favorite books, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel each chose Lord of the Rings,, the epic tale of a hobbit’s adventures to destroy a dangerous ring of power. Sheryl Sandberg and Jeff Bezos both pointed to A Wrinkle in Time,, in which a young girl learns to bend the laws of physics and travel through time. Mark Zuckerberg was partial to Ender’s Game, where it’s up to a group of kids to save the planet from an alien attack.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby
Published 23 May 2016

Let’s start by observing that many smart people are thinking about the robot-filled society of the future, and that they are widely distributed on the basic question of whether we are all going to hell in a handbasket. Our news culture being what it is, we tend to hear the opinions of celebrity thinkers and innovators the most, and particularly when they are willing to thrill us with a good scare. Thus the statement by Elon Musk that AI represents “our biggest existential threat” was probably the most repeated quote of 2014. Right on its heels was Stephen Hawking’s warning that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” and Bill Gates’s musing that “I don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”

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Should her employer forbid that (or encourage it)? Is it something the Department of Labor or its Occupational Safety and Health Administration needs to rule on? Sitting a layer above our need to answer such questions is our need to figure out how they should be answered, and by whom. Speaking at a 2014 MIT event, Elon Musk said, “I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish.” But issues of governance will arise in every setting where smart machines take over tasks from humans, and we doubt they can all be answered by governments.

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(Even the International Atomic Energy Agency holds sway only over those countries that have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.) Is it possible that, seventy years from now—deep into that time frame when AI experts expect machine superintelligence to exist—no global mechanisms will exist to contain a technology that Elon Musk calls “potentially more dangerous than nukes”? We’re encouraging the many convenings that are happening already to surface the decisions that must be made about artificial intelligence and its impacts—and the more international they are, the better. When a major business-oriented conference like the Global Drucker Forum focuses on a theme like “Claiming our Humanity in the Digital Age,” that can only be for the good.

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World
by Sandra Navidi
Published 24 Jan 2017

Kirsten Grind, “’Bond King’ Bill Gross Loses Showdown at Firm,” Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/bond-king-bill-gross-loses-showdown-at-firm-1411773652. 28. Barbara Kiviat, “Even Bond Guru Bill Gross Can’t Escape,” Time, September 18, 2008, http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1842501,00.xhtml. 29. Robert Frank, “Elon Musk’s Ex-Wife on Secret to Getting Rich: ‘Be Obsessed,’” CNBC, April 20, 2015, http://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/20/elon-musks-ex-wife-on-secret-to-getting-rich-be-obsessed.xhtml. 30. Ray Dalio, Principles. 31. Michelle Celarier & Lawrence Delevingne, “Ray Dalio’s Culture of Radical Truth,” Institutional Investor, March 2, 2011, http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/Article/2775995/Ray-Dalios-radical-truth.xhtml. 32.

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Even the most talented fund manager must employ a minimum of interpersonal skills and build a network of loyal supporters to call in favors, accumulated in the form of social capital, when the time comes. ON A MONOMANIACAL MISSION: RAY DALIO Another common superhub trait is an ability to focus excessively on one idea. Perhaps Elon Musk’s ex-wife, Justine, put it best when she said that “extreme success results from an extreme personality.” But their chief characteristic, according to Justine, can be summed up in two words: Be obsessed. “People who are obsessed with a problem or issue can work through all the distractions and barriers that life puts in their way.

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy
by David Sawyer
Published 17 Aug 2018

[242] website in April 2017 alone: “The History of FIRE / Financial Independence, Retire Early.” 8 May. 2017, toreset.me/242. A brilliant blog post explaining in detail the history of the FIRE movement. [243] Which?: “Which? – Wikipedia.” toreset.me/243. [244] Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis: “Martin Lewis (financial journalist) – Wikipedia.” toreset.me/244. [245] SpaceX: “SpaceX.” toreset.me/245. [246] Elon Musk: “Elon Musk – Wikipedia.” toreset.me/246. [247] “deep pits”: “An International Portfolio from The Escape Artist – jlcollinsnh.” 12 Jan. 2018, toreset.me/247. JL Collins is one of my FI heroes, author of The Simple Path to Wealth and the person who introduced me to the liberating idea of F.U. Money. [248] Build your assets: “Rich Dad Poor Dad: What The Rich Teach Their Kids... – Amazon UK.” toreset.me/248, p. 85.

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Over the past two years living in Glasgow, I’ve asked hundreds of people if they’ve ever heard of the financial independence movement or Mr. Money Mustache. Not a single one has answered yes. I hope RESET will change that. Yes, much you will have heard before, no it’s not about being tight, and yes, some of it’s just common sense. But so’s rocket science, when you think about it, and I imagine – unless you’re SpaceX[245] founder Elon Musk[246] – you need instructions before you begin. Benefits F.U. Money brings freedom. You can live the lifestyle you want. It gives you options. As a friend of mine says: “Money gives you time tokens.” You can work for people and towards goals you like and respect. Financial independence gives you the power to lead life on your own terms.

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce
by Natalie Berg and Miya Knights
Published 28 Jan 2019

Available from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardkestenbaum/2017/10/24/richard-baker-of-hudsons-bay-talks-about-we-work-lord-taylor-deal/#2ca653d23487 [Last accessed 30/6/2018]. 18 Taylor, Kate (2018) Tesla may have just picked a spot for Elon Musk’s dream ‘roller skates & rock restaurant’ – here’s everything we know about the old-school drive in, Business Insider, 13 March. Available from: http://uk.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-restaurant-los-angeles-2018-3 [Last accessed 1/7/2018]. 19 Anonymous (2018) Mothercare confirms 50 store closures, BBC, 17 May. Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44148937 [Last accessed 1/7/2018]. 20 La Monica, Paul (2018) The death of the big toy store, CNN, 13 March.

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Never failing to impress, Selfridges launched the world’s first boxing gym within a department store. Meanwhile, now-defunct department stores (BHS sites, for example) are being reincarnated not only as fitness centres but also bowling alleys, crazy golf centres, cinemas and even an art gallery. And if Elon Musk has his way, his Tesla supercharger stations across the US will feature upmarket convenience stores alongside climbing walls, outdoor cinemas and 1950s-style drive-in restaurants with waiting staff on roller skates – giving customers something to do during the 30 minutes it takes to recharge their vehicles.18 It’s not quite colonizing Mars, but it’s certainly blurring the lines between retail and entertainment.

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
by Reeves Wiedeman
Published 19 Oct 2020

Adam was pitching investors on this expanded vision for his company—an entire WeWorld. He wanted others to see WeWork as capable of much more than managing offices. The company referred to its Chelsea home as its “Galactic Headquarters,” and Adam told a reporter in 2015 that “WeWork Mars is in our pipeline.” He fantasized about working with Elon Musk. “When he gets everybody to Mars,” Adam said, “we’re going to build a community like there’s never been.” * * * WHILE HE WAITED to hear from Musk, Adam set his sights on occupying other territory. “Adam, more than anything, was a deal guy,” one of his early investors said. “Whether he was raising money or closing a building, he loved the deal.”

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But IWG operated five times as many spaces as WeWork did globally, and was still valued at just $3 billion. What exactly WeWork was doing to merit a tech company valuation of $20 billion remained a mystery. * * * TWO YEARS AFTER declaring that “WeWork Mars is in our pipeline,” Adam finally got his meeting with Elon Musk. Adam was nervous, as he often was before big meetings, when he seemed to course with anxiety until his audience was in front of him and whatever pitch he was making hit a groove. Tesla was one of the hottest tech stocks on the market, and Musk was the Valley’s leading eccentric visionary—a rare entrepreneur whose ambition and self-regard outpaced Neumann’s.

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For JPMorgan, it would mean not only a $50 million fee but also the lead left slot. For Adam, it meant that successfully going public would give him access to $9 billion to fund his vision for the We Company. * * * DURING HIS WEST COAST SWING, earlier in the year, Adam had made another attempt at enmeshing WeWork into the ecosystem of tech giants he aspired to join. Elon Musk wasn’t taking any more meetings with WeWork, but Adam and Michael Gross went fishing for potential partnerships. They talked about building an office-management app with Salesforce, and with Apple about ways to use iPhones as access devices to WeWork spaces. Adam and Bruce Dunlevie had dinner with Ruth Porat, the CFO of Alphabet, in the hope of enticing her to join WeWork’s board.

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds
by Sally Adee
Published 27 Feb 2023

Another group of researchers, who said they had transmitted a memory of a sensation, had used thirty-two electrodes. But Johnson told reporters that the plan was prosthetic memory implants containing nearly 2,000 electrodes, and that 5,000 or even 10,000 were achievable. Never to be outdone, SpaceX and Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk proposed a brain implant that would read to and write from thousands of neurons simultaneously. (Not known for modest goals, Musk advocated using this implant to “co-evolve” with artificial intelligence.) It seemed like a fairly straightforward, linear progression: the more neurons you could manipulate, the more precisely you could write the neural code; the more precisely you could write the neural code, the more powerful the brain interface.

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However, now there are several other new designs in the works—another electrode called Neuropixels is already being used to record data in patients undergoing DBS implantation.79 It’s not yet approved but has a similar design to Kennedy’s neurotrophic electrode, able to record deeper in the brain. And then there’s neural dust—micron-size piezoelectric sensors that would be scattered throughout the brain and use reflected sound waves to capture electrical discharges from nearby neurons.80 The one you have probably heard of is neural lace, the stuff Elon Musk sewed into a pig using a robot sewing machine. The most recent entrant is neurograins; salt grain–sized sprinkles unveiled in 2021 to make a better ECoG.81 They are proliferating, largely because money has been pouring in. BlackRock, the investment fund that has financed the neurograins, is on record as stating that they want brain chips to become more common than pacemakers.82 There are three essential problems facing the further development of brain interfaces.

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Frontiers in Neuroengineering, 27 May 2014 <https://doi.org/10.3389/fneng.2014.0001> 14 “The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2000,” NobelPrize.org <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2000/summary/> 15 Cuthbertson, Anthony. “Material Found by Scientists ‘Could Merge AI with Human Brain,’” The Independent, 17 August 2020 <https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/artificial-intelligence-brain-computer-cyborg-elon-musk-neuralink-a9673261.html> 16 Chen, Angela. “Why It’s so Hard to Develop the Right Material for Brain Implants,” The Verge, 30 May 2018 <https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/30/17408852/brain-implant-materials-neuroscience-health-chris-bettinger> 17 Technically, there are also ways to inhibit action potentials, but that just means stimulating inhibitory neurons—which are the kinds of neurons that make other neurons not fire.

Robot, Take the Wheel: The Road to Autonomous Cars and the Lost Art of Driving
by Jason Torchinsky
Published 6 May 2019

* * * 35 “Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars,” Tesla.com, https://www.tesla.com/autopilot. 36 Thatcham Research Press Release, “Automated Driving Hype is Dangerously Confusing Drivers,” October 18, 2018, https://news.thatcham.org/pressreleases/autonomous-driving-hype-is-dangerously -confusing-drivers-study-reveals-2767283. 37 Felton, Ryan, “Tesla Says Autopilot Was On Before Fatal Model X Crash, But That Driver Didn't Abide Warnings,” Jalopnik, March 30, 2018, https://jalopnik.com/tesla-admits-autopilot-was-on-before-fatal -model-x-cras-1824224176. 38 Noyes, Dan, “Victim Who Dies in Tesla Crash Had Complained About Autopilot,” ABC7 News, March 28, 2018, http://abc7news.com/automotive/i-team-exclusive-victim-who-died-in-tesla-crash-had -complained-about-auto-pilot/3275600/. 39 Westbrook, Justin, “Tesla Blames Driver in Fatal Model X Autopilot Crash As Family Considers Legal Action,” Jalopnik, April 11, 2018, https://jalopnik.com/tesla-blames-driver-in-fatal-model-x-autopilot -crash-as-1825193432. 40 “Discover Cadillac,” Super Cruise, https://www.cadillac.com/world -of-cadillac/innovation/super-cruise. 41 King, Alanis, “Stop Doing This Shit with Autonomous Cars,” Jalopnik, January 15, 2018, https://jalopnik.com/stop-doing-this-shit -with-semi-autonomous-cars­­-1822090627. 42 Davies, Alex, “Ford’s Working on a Remote Control for Your Car,” Wired, January 26, 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/01/fords-working-remote-control-car/. 43 Coxworth, Ben, “Full Size Remote-Control Cars - Coming Soon to a Road Near You?” New Atlas, July 30, 2013, http://www.gizmag.com/remote-control-cars/28521/. 44 Hawkins, Andrew J., “Elon Musk Still Doesn’t Think Lidar is Necessary for Fully Driverless Cars,” The Verge, February 7, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/­­2018/2/7/16988628/elon-musk-lidar-self -driving-car-tesla. 45 Orlove, Raphael, “Angry Owners Sue Tesla for Using Them as Beta Testers of ‘Dangerously Defective’ Autopilot,” Jalopnik, April 20, 2017, https://jalopnik.com/angry-owners-sue-tesla-for-using-them -as-beta-testers-o-1794503348.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson
Published 26 Mar 2019

a machine that can truly reason: Kevin Hartnett, “To Build Truly Intelligent Machines, Teach Them Cause and Effect,” Quanta Magazine, May 15, 2018, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-machines-teach-them-cause-and-effect-20180515; Gary Marcus, “Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal,” arXiv, January 2, 2018, accessed August 21, 2018, https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00631. with surprising speed: Bostrom, Superintelligence, 1723. rise up to kill us: “Elon Musk Talks Cars—and Humanity’s Fate—with Governors,” CNBC, July 16, 2017, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/16/musk-says-a-i-is-a-fundamental-risk-to-the-existence-of-human-civilization.html; Maureen Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion-dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse,” Vanity Fair, April 2017, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dollar-crusade-to-stop-ai-space-x. 10 to 25 years from now: Oren Etzioni, “No, the Experts Don’t Think Superintelligent AI Is a Threat to Humanity,” MIT Technology Review, September 20, 2016, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602410/no-the-experts-dont-think-superintelligent-ai-is-a-threat-to-humanity.

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So we could wake up one day, fifteen years from now, to discover that, whoops, someone in Shenzhen has almost accidentally produced a superintelligence. Given that, a phalanx of AI experts has begun to prepare now. “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization,” Tesla founder Elon Musk said, and he followed up on his warning by investing in OpenAI, a think tank devoted to planning for “responsible” AI—smart machines that won’t, or can’t, rise up to kill us. If you wanted some comfort, though, consider that of the AI experts I’ve spoken to—the people who, unlike Bostrom and even Musk, build AI all day long—most were considerably less worried about ultraintelligent machines emerging suddenly.

Facebook: The Inside Story
by Steven Levy
Published 25 Feb 2020

He loves this format, much preferring it to lecturing or being interviewed fireside-style by pesky journalists. He takes special pride in telling the crowd that Facebook has built a satellite that will expand Internet coverage to many unserved areas of Africa, including Nigeria. The results will soon be delivered, as the bird is on the launchpad now, on a SpaceX rocket ship. Elon Musk’s company. One of the pre-submitted questions the moderator has on hand asks how easy—or hard—it had been for Zuckerberg to move from the total control of a software developer to the fuzzier domain of running a company. Did he miss just coding? “I’m an engineer, like a lot of you guys,” he says.

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A survey early in the year ranked him “Tech’s most popular CEO.” He was happily married, and after a series of disheartening miscarriages (news of which he would share on Facebook), his wife gave birth to their adorable daughter. Even his pet, a shaggy Hungarian sheepdog whose white fur looked twisted into dreadlocks, had a fan club. As problems go, Elon Musk’s exploding satellite and concerns about Internet.org weren’t so insurmountable. In short, Facebook had taken its place as one of the great American success stories. Mark Zuckerberg’s world seemed perfect. What could go wrong? * * * • • • BARELY TWO MONTHS after Mark Zuckerberg returned from Nigeria, Donald Trump was elected the president of the United States.

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If not, Hoffman figured, he’d step up himself. Criticism or not, he wasn’t going to pass on this opportunity. Thiel was head of the Founders Fund, an investment firm he started after leaving the company that made his own fortune, PayPal. (Besides Hoffman, other veterans of that payment company included Tesla founder Elon Musk and entrepreneur Max Levchin. They would become known as the PayPal mafia because of their undue influence—in both investing and philosophy—on Silicon Valley thereafter.) Thiel didn’t name his fund by accident: he believes that the prime indicator of a successful company is a driven, iconoclastic founder, the kind of person who perseveres even when others think they are utterly insane.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning
by Justin E. H. Smith
Published 22 Mar 2022

The inhabitants would not necessarily be able to tell whether their world is simulated or not; but if they are intelligent enough they could consider the possibility and assign it some probability.”2 This hypothesis has been extremely popular among the representatives of whatever simulation of an intelligentsia the tech industry has produced. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has concluded that the probability that our world is a simulation is at least several billion to one. The celebrity physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who otherwise has done much to broaden the values of scientific literacy and rationality, has said of the simulation argument: “I wish I could summon a strong argument against it, but I can find none.”3 On social media, popular memes proclaim that the belief that our world is the “real” world amounts to a new sort of “geocentrism”: a stubborn attachment to an increasingly insupportable prescientific theory.

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Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment §64, 5:370/242. Chapter 3. The Reckoning Engine and the Thinking Machine 1. Alim et al., “Mechanism of Signal Propagation in Physarum polycephalum.” See also Tero et al., “Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design.” 2. Bostrom, Superintelligence, 164. 3. See Corey S. Powell, “Elon Musk Says We May Live in a Simulation. Here’s How We Might Tell If He’s Right,” NBC News, October 2, 2018. 4. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:464/328. 5. Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”, 243. 6. Dennett, “Will AI Achieve Consciousness? Wrong Question.” 7. Schneider, “It May Not Feel Like Anything to Be an Alien.” 8.

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond
by Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar
Published 19 Oct 2017

While DigiCash failed to become a household name, some players will resurface in our story, such as Nick Szabo, the father of “smart contracts,” and Zooko Wilcox, the founder of Zcash, both of whom worked at DigiCash for a time.5 Other attempts were made at digital currencies, payment systems, or stores of value after ecash, like e-gold and Karma. The former ran into trouble with the FBI for serving a criminal element,6 while the latter never gained mainstream adoption.7 The pursuit of a new form of Internet money drew the attention of present day tech-titans such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, both of whom had a hand in founding PayPal. Except for Karma, the problem with all these attempts at digital money was that they weren’t purely decentralized—one way or another they relied on a centralized entity, and that presented the opportunity for corruption and weak points for attack. THE MIRACLE OF BITCOIN One of the most miraculous aspects of bitcoin is how it bootstrapped support in a decentralized manner.

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In June 2014, Buterin received the Thiel Fellowship14as a 20-year-old dropping out of the University of Waterloo to pursue his interest in Ethereum on a full-time basis. While Buterin may go down as one of Thiel’s greatest investments, Thiel wasn’t alone in recognizing the potential of Ethereum. In 2014, Buterin was given the World Technology Award in Information Technology Software,15 alongside influential names such as Elon Musk in the Energy category and Walter Isaacson in Media & Journalism. While the Thiel Fellowship was an indication of what was to come for Buterin, $100,000 wasn’t enough to sustain his team. To that end, from July 23, 2014, to September 2, 2014, they staged a 42-day presale of ether, the cryptocommodity underlying the Ethereum network.16 Ether was sold at a range of 1,337 to 2,000 ether per bitcoin, with 2,000 ether per bitcoin on offer for the first two weeks of the presale and then declining linearly toward 1,337 ether per bitcoin in the latter half of the sale, creating momentum by incentivizing people to buy in at the beginning.

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In the past, this world was open only to the wealthy, but with new trends such as crowdfunding, token launches, and innovative regulation via the JOBS Act, opportunities exist for innovative investors of all shapes and sizes to get involved. Chapter 16 The Wild World of ICOs During the early tech days, innovators such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell became iconic figures who had turned ideas into multibillion-dollar businesses. Over the last decade, we’ve seen visionaries such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg do the same. These innovators changed the world because people believed in their visions, and these early believers invested money to turn their ideas into reality. While these investments brought great benefit, they were not based on altruism; initial investors were looking to get a sizable return on their risky investments.

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

Facebook announced a breakthrough in its research into machine learning algorithms: BBC News. (2019, July 31). Facebook funds AI mind-reading experiment. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49165713 Neuralink … is reportedly developing “a high bandwidth brain-machine interface”: Wong, J. C. (2019, July 17). Elon Musk unveils plan to build mind-reading implants: ‘The monkey is out of the bag’. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/17/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-implants-mind-reading-artificial-intelligence Ryan Calo has ominously warned where these experiments might lead: Calo, R. (2014). Digital market manipulation. George Washington Law Review 995(82). http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2309703; See also Calo, R., & Rosenblat, A. (2017).

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With such capabilities in hand back in 2010, imagine what can be done now, or a few short years from now. In 2019, Facebook announced a breakthrough in its research into machine learning algorithms136 capable of turning brain activity into speech, while Neuralink, a company owned by Tesla founder and inventor Elon Musk, is reportedly developing “a high bandwidth brain-machine interface” to connect people’s minds directly to a computer and to “read” the activity of neurons.137 University of Washington cyberlaw expert Ryan Calo has ominously warned where these experiments might lead, noting we are entering into a new era of digital market manipulation, whereby “firms can not only take advantage of a general understanding of cognitive limitations, but can uncover, and even trigger, consumer frailty at an individual level.”138 Such awesome power to manipulate the emotions of billions of users, in the hands of a few small platforms, should give everyone serious cause for concern.

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success
by Tom Eisenmann
Published 29 Mar 2021

But in the moment, it can be difficult to determine whether a founder’s “change-the-world” vision is delusional. In the early 1970s, for example, many people thought Fred Smith was crazy for trying to raise what at the time was the biggest VC round in history to fund the nascent Federal Express. As I write this, skeptics are asking similar questions about Elon Musk’s sanity, and Tesla’s long-term viability. There is no foolproof method for avoiding the Cascading Miracles failure pattern, but I’ll present some early-warning signs that a late-stage startup might be heading toward this treacherous path. How to Fail (Better) My postmortem interviews with founders put the human cost of entrepreneurial failure into sharp focus.

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According to Hamm, these impulses include 1) loyalty to colleagues who may lack the skills to fulfill evolving leadership roles, 2) a relentless focus on executing today’s “to-do list” at the expense of thinking strategically, and 3) working in isolation instead of with management team members or ecosystem partners, which is especially prevalent among founders who excel at product development. Founders who successfully led their firms through the scaling phase and beyond come readily to mind—Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk. However, these entrepreneurs are the exception rather than the rule. Despite coaching, most founder/CEOs cannot master the skills required to lead a larger, more complex startup. According to research by Yeshiva University’s Noam Wasserman, 61 percent of founders who held the CEO role when their ventures launched were no longer in that role after their firms raised Series D financing.

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Examples of failed moonshots come easily to mind, because we are so often dazzled by these visionary ventures on their way up and riveted by the huge, steaming craters they leave in the landscape after they crash. But other moonshots do succeed in reaching their destination. Federal Express did; when Fred Smith founded the company in the early 1970s, it was the biggest venture capital bet in history. More recently, we have Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX, both of which have soaring valuations as I write this. So, expect more moonshots; indeed, we need them to address grand societal challenges like climate change. Visionary entrepreneurs around the world are working on hyperloops, autonomous vehicles, gene editing, and quantum computing.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination
by Adam Lashinsky
Published 31 Mar 2017

Instead, Google was experimenting with a business model that enhanced the value of its smartphone software, Android, and also paved the way for its own eventual self-driving taxi service. Looming largest for Uber, at least in the ultracompetitive mind of Travis Kalanick, were Tesla and its founder, Elon Musk. Tesla had added a controversial feature to its electric cars called Autopilot, a kind of glorified cruise control that allowed drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel during highway driving. Rumors had begun to circulate that Musk coveted more than the self-driving car market. As part of a long-established goal of creating products that didn’t rely on fossil fuels—Musk had started the solar panel company Solar City, which he merged with Tesla in late 2016—the Tesla founder was assumed to be exploring a ridesharing service of his own.

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Kalanick isn’t able to hide his defensiveness or his annoyance. He ascribes his moments of pique to “fierce truth seeking.” Someone willing to say exactly what he thinks, empathy be damned, will be judged harshly. He’s not alone. It’s a trait that’s been repeatedly ascribed to Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and to Kalanick’s contemporary Elon Musk. Kalanick is aware of this, referring to the “meme that founder-CEOs have to be assholes to be successful.” He rejects that notion, but he’s obviously just short of obsessed by it. “I think there’s this question out there,” he says, shifting away from general memes to himself. “Is he an asshole?

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World
by Yancey Strickler
Published 29 Oct 2019

Tesla was willing to give away its best ideas to help make that happen. “Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote. “By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.” Rather than maximizing for a Now Me financial return, Tesla’s patent strategy maximizes for Future Us sustainability.

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“positive impact on the environment”: Patagonia’s public benefit statements can be found at https://www.patagonia.com/b-lab.html. “we’re giving it away”: The biorubber story comes from a report by Sustainable Brands (“Patagonia Sharing Proprietary Biorubber to Advance Sustainable Surf Industry”). “factories every day”: Elon Musk’s blog post announcing Tesla’s new patent policy was titled “All Our Patent Are Belong to You,” June 12, 2014 (https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you). CHAPTER NINE: HOW TO DO A PERFECT HANDSTAND thirty years as a cadence for change: My thinking on the thirty-year theory of change was first sparked by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism
by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
Published 5 Mar 2019

Such research thus is almost entirely a phenomenon characteristic of public institutions or private charities rather than market actors. Similarly, it was not the market that got us to the moon, but a grand public-sector enterprise called NASA. Today, if we are to be honest, we must recognize that due to the vast costs associated with a viable Mars colony such as the one proposed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX (even if the cost of escaping Earth’s gravity is significantly reduced, for instance, through the use of reusable rockets), there still has to be a profitable commodity resulting from that colony that can be sold back on Earth. If there is one, bully for him. If not, his investors will quickly abandon him.

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Leaving aside the grotesque inequalities that would result from steadily ratcheting up flat taxes, even as working-class and poor people spend a larger proportion of their income on fuel, carbon-tax advocates have forgotten that their solution to climate change—the market—is the very cause of the problem. Think Bigger How will a carbon price build a network of electric vehicle fast-charging stations? Tesla only builds them in those areas where it can rely on profits. Like a private bus company or an internet service provider, Elon Musk won’t provide a service where it doesn’t make money (or at least, one that doesn’t convince investors that it will someday make money; Tesla is currently a loss-making black hole for venture capital). The market leaves the public sector to fill the gap. This is no abstract argument. Norway provides free parking and charging for electric vehicles, allows these cars to use bus lanes, and recently decided to build a nationwide charging network.

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality
by Blake J. Harris
Published 19 Feb 2019

And part of the answer had to do with a phrase Dixon coined called “the Bat Signal Effect.” “The way I think about it is like this,” Dixon began. “Let’s just take Elon Musk. There were all these people around the world who wanted to build electric cars. Like [for example] there was some smart MIT grad who was working in the Innovation Group before whose dream was to work on electric cars. And the only place to do it prior to Tesla was to work at a regular car company. In some back room. They don’t really take the project seriously. And then you maybe see this person—Elon Musk—is starting this company and you’re intrigued, but you’re not sure where it’s going. But then maybe you see that they sold some cars, or raise some money, or recruited some talented person [laughs], and you realize that this sort of Bat Signal goes out.

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It wasn’t all that long ago, Chen recalled, that technology was portrayed as an instrument of evil. Supercomputers, geolocation devices, and robotic assistants—these were all hallmarks of an evildoer. Now, these tropes were the staples of our heroes. From fictional protagonists—like Tony Stark and Rick Sanchez—to Silicon Valley icons—like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs—the “mad scientist” moniker had been replaced with words like visionary, luminary, and disruptor; and technology, in our cultural consciousness, had become perceived an instrument of empowerment. Sure, some people were afraid of technology (or maybe, on some level, we were all a little spooked), but the next generation of unknowns—and the one after that, and the one after that—just didn’t send a chill down our collective spines anymore; at least nowhere close to the way that it used to.

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Xoxo As with Nimble America’s original announcement earlier that day, Yiannopoulos’s post was largely met with anger and annoyance, ranging from comments like “Fuck off with the money grab” to “Love you Milo but you’re hardly ever here except when it helps you and nobody else.” The NimbleRichMan post, however, was better received, inspiring many members of the community to speculate on his identity (and whether or not he really existed). Several theories were thrown out—Peter Thiel, being the most popular, but Elon Musk and Carl Icahn were also in the mix. Ultimately, however, community members seemed less interested in who this individual was than why, if he really were a member of the 0.001 percent, he felt compelled to hide his identity. That seemed cowardly. Why wouldn’t he proudly step forward as a Trump supporter?

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech
by Jamie Susskind
Published 3 Sep 2018

Muse.com <http://www.choosemuse.com/> (accessed 30 November 2017). Zoltan Istvan, ‘Will Brain Wave Technology Eliminate the Need for a Second Language?’ in Visions of the Future, ed. J. Daniel Batt (Reno: Lifeboat Foundation, 2015), 641. Cade Metz, ‘Elon Musk isn’t the Only One Trying to Computerize Your Brain’, Wired, 31 March 2017 <https://www.wired.com/­ 2017/03/elon-musks-neural-lace-really-look-like/?mbid=social_ twitter> (accessed 30 November 17). Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 1. Daniel Kellmereit and Daniel Obodovski, The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things (DND Ventures LLC, 2013), 3.

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Wired, 6 May 2016 <https://www.wired.com/2016/05/ facebook-trying-create-ai-can-create-ai/> (accessed 28 Nov. 2017). Metz, Cade. ‘Microsoft Bets its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip’. Wired, 25 Aug. 2016 <https://www.wired.com/2016/09/ microsoft-bets-future-chip-reprogram-fly/?mbid=social_twitter> (accessed 28 Nov. 2017). Metz, Cade. ‘Elon Musk Isn’t the Only One Trying to Computerize Your Brain’. Wired, 31 Mar. 2017 <https://www.wired.com/2017/03/ elon-musks-neural-lace-really-look-like/?mbid=social_twitter> (accessed 30 Nov. 17). Metz, Cade. ‘Google’s Dueling Neural Networks Spar to Get Smarter, No Humans Required’. Wired, 11 Apr. 2017 <https://www.wired. com/2017/04/googles-dueling-neural-networks-spar-get-smarterno-humans-required/> (accessed 28 Nov. 2017).

Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future
by Jean M. Twenge
Published 25 Apr 2023

Some of these luminaries are still famous, while others were well-known in decades past and have since faded, so might provide a pleasant surge of nostalgia if you remember them when. Listing people by generation provides a new perspective outside of the usual prototypical representatives of a generation. Most people know that Kurt Cobain of Nirvana was a Gen X’er—but so are Jimmy Fallon, Kanye West, Blake Shelton, Julia Roberts, Elon Musk, and Jennifer Lopez. Mark Zuckerberg is a quintessential Millennial, but the generation also includes Beyoncé, Michael Phelps, and Lady Gaga. You may find a few surprises: Until I made these lists, I didn’t realize that Melania Trump was a Gen X’er. There are also some intriguing parallels: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born in the same year, 1955.

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POPULATION IN 2020) 62.7% White 12.8% Black 16.6% Hispanic 6.7% Asian, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander 1.2% Native American Parents: Silent and Boomers Children: Millennials, Gen Z, Polars Grandchildren: Polars and post-Polars MOST POPULAR FIRST NAMES * First appearance on the list Boys Michael Jason* David Christopher* John James Robert Girls Lisa Jennifer* Karen Mary Kimberly* Susan Michelle* Amy* Heather* Angela* Jessica* Amanda* FAMOUS MEMBERS (BIRTH YEAR) Actors, Comedians, Filmmakers Ben Stiller (1965) Chris Rock (1965) Brooke Shields (1965) Viola Davis (1965) Adam Sandler (1966) John Cusack (1966) Jim Gaffigan (1966) Julia Roberts (1967) Jimmy Kimmel (1967) Will Ferrell (1967) Will Smith (1968) Molly Ringwald (1968) Anthony Michael Hall (1968) John Singleton (1968) Margaret Cho (1968) Jennifer Lopez (1969) Jennifer Aniston (1969) Matthew McConaughey (1969) Wes Anderson (1969) Ken Jeong (1969) Julie Bowen (1970) Matt Damon (1970) Tina Fey (1970) Melissa McCarthy (1970) Ethan Hawke (1970) Kevin Smith (1970) Sarah Silverman (1970) Winona Ryder (1971) Amy Poehler (1971) Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) Ava DuVernay (1972) Sofia Vergara (1972) Seth Meyers (1973) Kristen Wiig (1973) Dave Chappelle (1973) Wilson Cruz (1973) Jimmy Fallon (1974) Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) Drew Barrymore (1975) Angelina Jolie (1975) Zach Braff (1975) John Cena (1977) James Franco (1978) Katie Holmes (1978) Ashton Kutcher (1978) Andy Samberg (1978) Jason Momoa (1979) Jordan Peele (1979) Mindy Kaling (1979) Claire Danes (1979) Musicians and Artists Janet Jackson (1966) Kurt Cobain (1967) Liz Phair (1967) Jay-Z (1969) Gwen Stefani (1969) Queen Latifah (1970) Tupac Shakur (1971) Snoop Dogg (1971) Eminem (1972) Jewel (1974) Lauryn Hill (1975) Blake Shelton (1976) Kanye West (1977) John Legend (1978) Entrepreneurs and Businesspeople Michael Dell (1965) Peter Thiel (1967) Sheryl Sandberg (1969) Elon Musk (1971) Larry Page (1973) Sergey Brin (1973) Sean Parker (1979) Politicians, Judges, and Activists Brett Kavanaugh (1965) Kevin McCarthy (1965) Neil Gorsuch (1967) Gavin Newsom (1967) John Fetterman (1969) Paul Ryan (1970) Ted Cruz (1970) Ketanji Brown Jackson (1970) Hakeem Jeffries (1970) Marco Rubio (1971) Gretchen Whitmer (1971) Amy Coney Barrett (1972) Stacey Abrams (1973) Raphael Warnock (1973) Marjorie Taylor Greene (1974) Andrew Yang (1975) Ron DeSantis (1978) Josh Hawley (1979) Athletes and Sports Figures Mary Lou Retton (1968) Nancy Kerrigan (1969) Tonya Harding (1970) Andre Agassi (1970) Mia Hamm (1972) Shaquille O’Neal (1972) Dale Earnhardt Jr. (1974) Derek Jeter (1974) Tiger Woods (1975) Tom Brady (1977) Kobe Bryant (1978) Journalists, Authors, and People in the News Rodney King (1965) Matt Drudge (1966) Mika Brzezinski (1967) Kellyanne Conway (1967) Anderson Cooper (1967) Joe Rogan (1967) Ron Goldman (1968) Tucker Carlson (1969) Melania Trump (1970) Chuck Klosterman (1972) Monica Lewinsky (1973) Rachel Maddow (1973) David Muir (1973) Norah O’Donnell (1974) John Green (1977) Donald Trump Jr. (1977) Kourtney Kardashian (1979) On the Internet, No One Knows You’re a Dog Trait: Analog and Digital Communicators YouTube was created because a Gen X’er wanted to see a nipple.

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Before long, Gen X’ers and others were finding new things people wanted to do online, often around two of their favorite things: pop culture and commerce. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar (b. 1967); the first item that sold on the site was a broken laser pointer. Tom Anderson (b. 1970) cofounded Myspace, the social networking site that was the most popular until Facebook took over—he’s still remembered by Gen X’ers and early Millennials as “Tom from Myspace.” PayPal was founded by Peter Thiel (b. 1967) and Elon Musk (b. 1971). Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey (b. 1976), and Uber by Travis Kalanick (b. 1976) and Garrett Camp (b. 1978). Sean Parker (b. 1979) cofounded Napster, the file-sharing music site later shut down over copyright issues, and served as the first president of Facebook. Gen X’er Sheryl Sandberg (b. 1969) didn’t found Facebook—that would be Millennial Mark Zuckerberg—but she helped run it for a decade.

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money
by Nathaniel Popper
Published 18 May 2015

CHAPTER 18 186“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more”: Eric Jackson, PayPal Wars (Washington, DC: WND Books, 2004). 187Thiel advocating for floating structures: “Peter Thiel Offers $100,000 in Matching Donations to TSI, Makes Grant of $250,000,” Sea-steading Institute, February 10, 2010, http://www.seasteading. org/2010/02/peter-thiel-offers-100000-matching-donations-tsi-makes-grant-250000/. 187aiming for the colonization of Mars: Adam Mann, “Elon Musk Wants to Build 80,000-Person Mars Colony,” Wired, November 26, 2012, http://www.wired.com/2012/11/elon-musk-mars-colony/. CHAPTER 19 190In June 2012 the founders announced: BFL (Butterfly Labs) to BTCF, June 16, 2012. 190a young Chinese immigrant in New York, Yifu Guo, announced: ngzhang to BTCF, September 17, 2012. 191that power doubled again in just one month after Yifu’s machines: Historical data on the hashing power available at https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate. 195“This is a dark day for Bitcoin”: “Breaking: The Blockchain Has Forked,” Bitcoin Trader, March 11, 2013, http://www.thebitcointrader .com/2013/03/breaking-blockchain-has-forked.html. 196“clarify the applicability of the regulations implementing”: The FinCen guidance is available at http://fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001.html.

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Investors and entrepreneurs were cooking up ever more ambitious schemes involving virtual reality, drones, and artificial intelligence, alongside more quotidian projects, like remaking public transportation and the hotel industry. The PayPal founders were among the most ambitious, with Thiel advocating for floating structures where people could live outside the jurisdiction of any national government. Elon Musk, an early PayPal employee and founder of SpaceX, was aiming for the colonization of Mars. If there was ever a time that Silicon Valley believed it could revive the long-deferred dream of reinventing money, this was it. A virtual currency that rose above national borders fitted right in with an industry that saw itself destined to change the face of everyday life.

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road
by Matthew B. Crawford
Published 8 Jun 2020

In the following six months, it would climb to $383. The technology and business website Ars Technica reports that when another Tesla customer died in an Autosteer-related crash in March 2018, Tesla cited NHTSA’s positive report in a blog post defending the technology. A few weeks later, Tesla CEO Elon Musk “berated reporters for focusing on stories about crashes instead of touting the safety benefits of Autopilot.” “They should be writing a story about how autonomous cars are really safe,” Musk said in a May 2018 earnings call. “But that’s not a story that people want to click on. They write inflammatory headlines that are fundamentally misleading to readers.”

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Boudette, “Tesla’s Self-Driving System Cleared in Deadly Crash,” New York Times, January 19, 2017; Tom Randall, “Tesla’s Autopilot Vindicated with 40% Drop in Crashes,” Bloomberg, January 19, 2017; Andrew J. Hawkins, “Tesla’s Crash Rate Dropped 40 Percent After Autopilot Was Installed, Feds Say,” Verge, January 19, 2017; Elon Musk (@elonmusk-Twitter), “Report highlight: ‘The data show that the Tesla vehicles crash rate dropped by almost 40 percent after Autosteer installation,’” Twitter, January 29, 2017, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/822129092036206592; Chris Mills, “Report Finds Tesla’s Autopilot Makes Driving Much Safer,” BGR, January 19, 2017. 4.In its report on this matter, the firm states that it has no financial stake in Tesla, its competitors, or any other interests connected to the technology of autonomous cars and driver assistance systems. 5.

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As a consequence, the overall 40 percent reduction in the crash rates reported by NHTSA following the installation of Autosteer is an artifact of the Agency’s treatment of mileage information that is actually missing in the underlying dataset” (“NHTSA’s Implausible Safety Claim”). 7.Timothy B. Lee, “In 2017, the Feds Said Tesla Autopilot Cut Crashes 40%—That Was Bogus,” Ars Technica, February 13, 2019. See also Timothy B. Lee, “Sorry Elon Musk, There’s No Clear Evidence Autopilot Saves Lives,” Ars Technica, May 4, 2018. 8.Sam Peltzman, Regulation of Automobile Safety (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1975), p. 4. 9.According to the Fatal Analysis Reporting System of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in the year 2000 seat belts alone were estimated to have a 48 percent effectiveness in preventing fatalities (to people over twelve years old) in crashes that otherwise would have been fatal.

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

At Stanford University, we rarely meet students who know Swartz’s name or can describe what he did. They do know the names of Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and former Stanford students such as Larry Page and Sergey Brin (the cofounders of Google), Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy (the cofounders of Snapchat), Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger (the cofounders of Instagram), and Elon Musk (the founder of Tesla and SpaceX). And many students on campus today know the name Joshua Browder. If they haven’t heard of his successfully funded start-up, they know of his work because he spammed the entire student body in early 2019 to offer them a chance, by using his service DoNotPay, to get out of fees that support a wide array of student groups on campus.

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Since Russell published his open letter, more than three thousand individuals and organizations have indicated their support for an autonomous weapons ban and signed a pledge not to “support the development, manufacture, trade, or use of lethal autonomous weapons.” The signatories include major names in technology, including Elon Musk (SpaceX and Tesla), Jeff Dean (the head of Google AI), and Martha Pollack (the president of Cornell University), and leading organizations, such as Google DeepMind. A campaign to ban killer robots has gone global, and thirty member countries of the United Nations have explicitly endorsed the call for a ban.

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“Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology,” the OpenAI team wrote, “we are not releasing the trained model. As an experiment in responsible disclosure, we are instead releasing a much smaller model for researchers to experiment with, as well as a technical paper.” OpenAI was created in 2015 as a nonprofit organization funded by wealthy technologists, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Reid Hoffman, who were concerned with charting a path toward safe artificial general intelligence. With a social rather than profit-making mission, the team worried that the powerful tool it created could easily be put to illicit or even nefarious use producing fake text analogous to deep-fake images and videos.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

Sagaria, ‘Misperception of Exponential Growth’, Perception & Psychophysics, 18(6), November 1975, pp. 416–422 <https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03204114>. 14 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 20. 15 Pascal Boyer and Michael Bang Petersen, ‘Folk-Economic Beliefs: An Evolutionary Cognitive Model’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41, 2018, E158 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X17001960>. 16 Duff McDonald, The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), pp. 178–179. 17 ‘Planet of the Phones’, The Economist, 26 February 2015 <https://www.economist.com/leaders/2015/02/26/planet-of-the-phones> [accessed 15 March 2021]. 18 Simon Evans, ‘Solar Is Now “Cheapest Electricity in History”, Confirms IEA’, Carbon Brief, 13 October 2020 <https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-is-now-cheapest-electricity-in-history-confirms-iea> [accessed 18 December 2020]. 19 Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York, NY: Penguin, 2000). 20 Suzana Herculano-Houzel, ‘The Human Brain in Numbers: A Linearly Scaled-up Primate Brain’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 3 November 2009 <https://doi.org/10.3389/neuro.09.031.2009>. 21 Carl Zimmer, ‘100 Trillion Connections: New Efforts Probe and Map the Brain’s Detailed Architecture’, Scientific American, January 2011 <https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0111-58>. 22 Even if we could build a machine with the complexity of the human brain – comprising artificial rather than real neurons, and connections between them – it isn’t clear this would give rise to anything that can do what the human brain does. 23 Graham Rapier, ‘Elon Musk Says Tesla Will Have 1 Million Robo-Taxis on the Road Next Year, and Some People Think the Claim Is So Unrealistic That He’s Being Compared to PT Barnum’, Business Insider, 23 April 2019 <https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-robo-taxis-elon-musk-pt-barnum-circus-2019-4> [accessed 11 January 2021]. 24 Andrew Barclay, ‘Why Is It So Hard to Make a Truly Self-Driving Car?’, South China Morning Post, 5 July 2018 <https://www.scmp.com/abacus/tech/article/3028605/why-it-so-hard-make-truly-self-driving-car> [accessed 11 January 2021]. 25 Rani Molla, ‘How Apple’s iPhone Changed the World: 10 Years in 10 Charts’, Vox, 26 June 2017 <https://www.vox.com/2017/6/26/15821652/iphone-apple-10-year-anniversary-launch-mobile-stats-smart-phone-steve-jobs> [accessed 22 July 2020]. 26 Ritwik Banerjee, Joydeep Bhattacharya and Priyama Majumdar, ‘Exponential-Growth Prediction Bias and Compliance with Safety Measures Related to COVID-19’, Social Science & Medicine, 268, January 2021, 113473 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113473>. 27 Robert C.

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Our best current guess is that the human brain has about 100 billion neurons.20 Each neuron is connected, on average, to a thousand others, leading scientists to estimate that there are 100 trillion connections in the human brain.21 If these estimates prove correct, and if we have properly understood the function of neurons, a machine that mimics the complexity of the brain could conceivably be built within a couple of decades. But those are big ifs. When our scientific understanding of a subject is still developing, predictions are sometimes little better than guesswork.22 Self-driving cars create similar, if rather smaller, headaches. In 2019, Elon Musk envisioned that Tesla, the car firm, would have a fleet of 1 million self-driving taxis, what he called ‘robo-taxis’, on the roads by the end of 2020.23 The actual number was zero. And Tesla is not alone. Every self-driving car company has missed its targets. It turns out that the problem is much harder, from a purely technical perspective, than the teams building the technologies were willing to acknowledge.

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians
by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman
Published 21 Mar 2017

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as Space X, is an aerospace manufacturer that builds and launches space rockets, founded in 2002 by Peter Thiel’s cofounder at PayPal, Elon Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla Motors. Elon’s goal is to reduce space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars. “SpaceX is already 3-D printing essential elements of its rockets rather than purchasing machined parts from a contractor,” says Chris. “SpaceX launches cargo into space at a much lower launch cost than the incumbent players. How? Elon Musk reasons from first principles. Begin with what is known to be true and eliminate assumptions—especially those coming from long-established industries.

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“We need docking modules that will allow any number of FLIPs to lock together above and below the waterline and allow safe passage between them while at sea. No one FLIP design will work for every job, so the new FLIPs should be infinitely configurable so they can do an insanely great job at whatever our markets require of them. All of these modules should be easily interchangeable without the use of a shipyard. Elon Musk will finally have a stable, multi-FLIP rocket recovery base. That’s our Step One market. Our Step Two market will involve people finding value in other ways that we can’t imagine yet.” Bob Ballard didn’t tell Chris he was crazy. Bob thinks going to Mars is crazy, and mass-producing FLIPs is a necessity.

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America
by Garrett Neiman
Published 19 Jun 2023

Several of the students told me how fortunate they felt that the SAT preparation program I was leading had happened to arrive during the year when they needed to prepare for the SATs. Had the program arrived even a year later, they would have lacked crucial resources to secure admission to universities that served as gateways to further opportunities. Many rich white men credit luck with enabling at least some of their success, too. There are exceptions—like Elon Musk, who tweeted “Working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks in year and people still calling me lucky”12—but most rich men I know factor in luck. When I reviewed the two hundred letters written by billionaires who signed the Giving Pledge—an initiative started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett that asks the world’s wealthiest individuals and families to dedicate at least half of their wealth to charitable causes—participants reference how luck contributed to their success more than sixty times.

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When the American Investment Council aligns otherwise-competing private equity firms to protect the carried interest loophole, that’s anticompetitive—and antidemocratic, since the public’s desire to close the loophole is suppressed. Extractive actions like these enabled Amazon and Tesla—the companies led by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the world’s two richest men—to pay zero income taxes in 2018.9 When rich white guys deplete public infrastructure—such as the public universities that educate our workforces and the roads that get employees to our offices—without renewing it, we are engaging unsustainably, enriching ourselves at the expense of the public good.

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Samantha Artiga, Olivia Pham, Kendal Orgera, and Usha Ranji, “Racial Disparities in Maternal and Infant Health: An Overview,” Kaiser Family Foundation, November 10, 2020, https://www.kff.org/report-section/racial-disparities-in-maternal-and-infant-health-an-overview-issue-brief/. 11. Colleen Murphy, “What Is White Savior Complex—and Why Is It Harmful?,” Health, September 20, 2021, https://www.health.com/mind-body/health-diversity-inclusion/white-savior-complex. 12. Elon Musk (@elonmusk), “Working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks in a year and people still calling me lucky,” Twitter, June 11, 2020. 13. Warren Buffett, pledge letter, Giving Pledge, accessed September 15, 2022, https://givingpledge.org/pledger?pledgerId=177. 14. Jon and Karen Huntsman, pledge letter, Giving Pledge, June 18, 2010, https://givingpledge.org/pledger?

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition
by David Levinson and Kevin Krizek
Published 17 Aug 2015

The US government provides $2500 tax credits for plug-in EVs, and has in the past provided other subsidies for fuel efficient vehicles. Many states and other countries provide additional subsidies. New companies formed to market high-end EVs. Leading the charge, Tesla Motors, was founded by serial entrepreneur Elon Musk (also of SpaceX, Solar City, and PayPal) Their continued growth in profits and increasing sales is paving the way (no pun intended). Such fame is derived in large part from automobile production, but their real advances are as a robust battery manufacturer. Sales of EVs, shown in Figure 5.1,119 remain in the thousands, while the US market is about 13 to 14 million cars and light trucks per year.120 That has not stopped Musk from claiming most new cars will be EVs within 20 years.

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Fast forward just a few years and we see that Google hired many of the leaders of the Stanford and Carnegie Mellon teams.155 156 Google Self-Driving Cars have since traveled 1.5 million miles (2.4 million km) autonomously, mostly around the San Francisco Bay Area, but also more recently in Austin, Texas and Kirkland, Washington (Figure 7.1).157 Google's cars are map-dependent, operating where the roads have been mapped out in detail, so that they can compare what they see with what they expect to see158—a strategy with obvious strengths and weaknesses.159 In Fall of 2015, the electric vehicle automaker Tesla remotely upgraded its most recent model year cars (about 50,000 vehicles) with “auto-pilot”, making them semi-autonomous (late Level 2, early Level 3).160 Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, says he expects fully autonomous vehicles within 3 years (i.e. by 2018). David took a test ride with a Tesla owner running the vehicle in Autopilot. As countless internet videos attest, Teslas are able to function in hands-off mode some of the time. They use adaptive cruise control to follow the vehicle in front at a desired speed constrained by a fixed following distance and use lane markings to stay in lane.

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value
by John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen
Published 30 Dec 2014

Billionaires don’t seem to view the world that way, however. To them, all oceans are purple, a blending of available opportunity extant within established practice. John Paul DeJoria launched John Paul Mitchell Systems into the populated market of high-end hair care; there were other ways to pay sellers online before Elon Musk bought PayPal; Bharti Enterprises founder Sunil Mittal got his start importing known, legacy technologies into India; Sara Blakely’s Spanx were inserted into a hosiery market dominated by L’eggs and Hanes; Carnival Cruise billionaire Micky Arison made his billions by reinventing the cruising business away from its status as a vacation option only for the wealthy and elderly; James Dyson invented the dual cyclone to compete in a product space that was so entrenched that Mr.

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In 1985, he branched into film and television by purchasing 20th Century Fox and creating the Fox Broadcasting Company. Other acquisitions include HarperCollins and the Wall Street Journal. Today, Murdoch remains executive chairman of News Corporation, while continuing to make headlines for his efforts to acquire more media properties. Elon Musk b. 1971, South Africa Tesla, PayPal The South African native and serial entrepreneur founded multiple businesses before the ones that made him famous. In 1999, he cofounded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail company. A year later X-com merged with Cofinity, along with its online bank subsidiary, PayPal.

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
by Mark O'Connell
Published 13 Apr 2020

(Thiel was an early investor in, and advocate of, the seasteading movement, though his interest has waned in recent years.) Then you mined the moon for its ore and other resources, before moving on to colonize Mars. This last level of the game reflected the current preferred futurist fantasy, most famously advanced by Thiel’s former PayPal colleague Elon Musk, with his dream of fleeing a dying planet Earth for privately owned colonies on Mars. The influence of The Sovereign Individual was all over the show. It was a detailed mapping of a possible future, in all its highly sophisticated barbarism. It was a utopian dream that appeared, in all its garish detail and specificity, as the nightmare vision of a world to come.

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Nippert, in a recent New Zealand Herald article, had published the architect’s plans for the place. Thiel was making some alterations to the master bedroom. He was putting in a panic room. 5 OFF-WORLD COLONY Toward the end of the final episode of the National Geographic documentary series Mars, there is a scene where Elon Musk, the founder of the private space transportation company SpaceX, visits Cape Canaveral with his young son. Together they ascend the elevator up the launch tower to where the space shuttles once began their trajectory into space, and he explains to the boy that in years past this was exactly how the astronauts themselves would have ascended before launching.

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley
by Cary McClelland
Published 8 Oct 2018

Even earlier, the first real movement for suffrage was in California, sometime in the 1890s. Electronic technology is just another goldmine. In a sense, unleashing and controlling the power of the electron is no different than digging in the ground, smelting, yada, yada, yada. The nineteenth century looks primitive today, and we’ll look primitive in a hundred years. The Elon Musk effect, the Travis Kalanick obsession—they’re just the lucky sons of guns who staked their claim on the right river. And it’s produced a volcanic eruption of money. There’s reinvestment: a lot of money gets plowed back into tech. Hell, since the housing meltdown in 2008, the global economy is so shitty, a lot of the world’s surplus money gets buried in tech because it doesn’t know what else to do.

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What separates me and you from him?” The guy got frustrated and asked, “Can you please just drop me here?” We get that more and more now. I was here when Uber was at the beginning, when Travis Kalanick was at his beginning, or Brian Chesky from Airbnb, or Jack Dorsey was trying to make Square, and the beginning of Elon Musk doing Tesla.§ I have driven many of them. From my own experience, when you meet them, you don’t see anything inspiring on them. You don’t see that genius in them. These are normal people with regular IQs, maybe they’re sneakier than others. Maybe they took the back roads, the shortcuts. In the end, I go to myself, Well, it’s a good thing, because it means it’s easier to succeed in this city than it seems.

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street
by Jeff John Roberts
Published 15 Dec 2020

Giant and far-flung business visions are usually associated with Valley and tech CEOs who have outsize personalities. Steve Jobs is the archetype. Even as the late Apple CEO introduced some of the most profoundly disruptive technology the world has ever seen, he nourished a cult of personality with his distinct appearance and a stage presence worthy of P. T. Barnum. Elon Musk, who runs both the electric car company Tesla and the rocket maker SpaceX, likes to share extravagant plans for living on Mars and building high-speed tunnels between US cities. In person and online, Musk is combative and outrageous—picking fights with the SEC on Twitter and smoking weed during live radio interviews.

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On social media, the scams became so bad that crypto firm Ripple filed a lawsuit against YouTube over a series of send-us-your-money videos that hijacked the image of its CEO Brad Garlinghouse. Meanwhile, teenagers would hack into Twitter in July of 2020, hijacking the accounts of everyone from Brian to Elon Musk to Michelle Obama in order to invite their millions of followers to send bitcoin. And, in the fifth season of Billions, the Showtime series beloved by finance junkies, a key plot point turns on an illegal bitcoin mining operation run by the main character’s teenage son. Overall, though, bitcoin’s reputation is better than it’s ever been.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

This made use of each car’s existing suite of onboard cameras and sensors—a forward-looking, long-distance radar system to see through bad weather, cameras equipped with image-recognition software, and a battery of ultrasonic proximity sensors—to achieve a limited degree of autonomous operation. As far as Tesla was concerned, this capacity was meant to augment, rather than supplant, human guidance. That it was limited, however, wasn’t always clear from the company’s official pronouncements. “The car can do almost anything,” enthused CEO Elon Musk, talking up Autopilot at an unveiling event. “We’re able to do lane keeping on freeways, automatic cruise control, active emergency braking … It’ll self-park. Going a step further, you’ll be able to summon the car, if you’re on private property.” Anyone enticed by this reeling-off of capabilities—or his earlier brag that a driver could take a Model S from San Francisco to Seattle “without touching the controls at all”—could perhaps be forgiven for missing the hesitant “almost” with which he hedged the claim.10 Musk further touted his product’s almost uncanny ability to learn from experience, referring to each Model S owner as an “expert trainer” who could tutor Autopilot simply by driving with the mode engaged.

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Else, “The ‘1033 Program,’ Department of Defense Support to Law Enforcement,” Congressional Research Service, August 28, 2014, fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R43701.pdf. 15.Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics,” Critical Legal Thinking, May 14, 2013; Novara Media, “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” podcast, June 2015, novaramedia.com/2015/06/fully-automated-luxury-communism/. 16.Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, New York: Bantam Books, 1971. 17.Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, New York: Olympia Press, 1968. 18.Quoctrung Bui, “Map: The Most Common* Job In Every State,” National Public Radio, February 5, 2015, npr.org. 19.Elon Musk, “Master Plan, Part Deux,” July 20, 2016, tesla.com. 20.See the site of Amazon’s fully owned robotics subsidiary at amazonrobotics.com, and the video of one of its warehouses in operation at youtube.com/watch?v=quWFjS3Ci7A. 21.Pew Research Center, “Digital Life in 2025: AI, Robotics and the Future of Jobs,” August 6, 2014, pewinternet.org. 22.In fairness, while nobody invokes the Bui map directly, several of Pew’s respondents did point out that truck driver is the number-one occupation for men in the United States, and that alongside taxi drivers, current holders of the job would be among the first to be entirely displaced by automation.

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October 14, 2015, teslamotors.com/en_GB/blog/your-autopilot-has-arrived. 10.Alex Davies, “The Model D is Tesla’s Most Powerful Car Ever, Plus Autopilot,” Wired, October 10, 2014; Damon Lavrinc, “Tesla Auto-Steer Will Let Drivers Go From SF To Seattle Hands-Free,” Jalopnik, March 19, 2015. 11.Roger Fingas, “ ‘Apple Car’ Rollout Reportedly Delayed Until 2021, Owing to Obstacles in ‘Project Titan,’” AppleInsider, July 21, 2016. 12.Danny Yadron and Dan Tynan. “Tesla Driver Dies in First Fatal Crash While Using Autopilot Mode,” Guardian, July 1, 2016. 13.Elon Musk, Tweet, April 17, 2016. twitter.com/elonmusk/status/721829237741621248. 14.Tesla Motors, Inc. “A Tragic Loss,” June 30, 2016, teslamotors.com/blog/tragic-loss. 15.Tesla Motors, Inc. “Misfortune,” July 6, 2016, teslamotors.com/blog/misfortune. 16.Fred Lambert, “Google Deep Learning Founder Says Tesla’s Autopilot System Is ‘Irresponsible,’ ” Electrek, May 30, 2016. 17.United Nations General Assembly.

When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity
by Anthony Berglas , William Black , Samantha Thalind , Max Scratchmann and Michelle Estes
Published 28 Feb 2015

The book then analyzes the medium term effects of those semi-intelligent tools upon society. This includes some surprising results from an historical review of existing technologies. There is a growing awareness of these issues, with concerns recently raised by physicist Stephen Hawking, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and billionaire Elon Musk. Copyright Copyright 2015 Anthony Berglas. Createspaces ISBN-13: 978-1502384188 ISBN-10: 1502384183 Images in this book are marked as follows:Owned. The images are owned by Anthony. William Black and Samantha Lindsay drew many of them as noted. Permitted. The owner of the image has given specific permission to use it in this book.

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It takes a cold look at where that technology is likely to lead, with an unusually strong focus on natural selection. It also reviews other writer’s books and papers on the subject to provide alternative perspectives. There has been a slowly growing awareness of these issues. Technology billionaire Elon Musk recently warned that research into artificial intelligence was “summoning the devil” and that artificial intelligence is our biggest existential threat. World famous physicist Stephen Hawking expressed his concerns that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”.

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The survey considered several possible advances over the next fifty years ranging from organ transport to space colonization, even teleportation. But the much more likely possibility of developing a truly intelligent machine was not even mentioned. However, this is beginning to change. In October 2014 technology billionaire Elon Musk warned that research into artificial intelligence was “summoning the devil”, that artificial intelligence is our biggest existential threat, and that we were already at the stage where there should be some regulatory oversight. Musk is CEO of Tesla, Solar City and SpaceX and co-founder PayPal. He has recently invested in the DeepMind AI company to “keep an eye on what’s going on”.

Choose Yourself!
by James Altucher
Published 14 Sep 2013

Although the service was available to every retailer and consumer, he found a niche market where many online transactions were occurring and he decided to build his monopoly there: eBay customers. Why shouldn’t every eBay customer use PayPal to settle their transactions? Only two things stood in his way: eBay could compete and Peter had one competitor, X.com, run by Elon Musk. So rather than try to directly destroy his competitors, Peter reinforced that PayPal was a monopoly. First off, he paid customers who signed up ten dollars. This basically killed off eBay’s efforts almost immediately. Second, he merged with X.com. Why merge with a company he could potentially defeat?

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So instead of letting me sell the other 50 percent, they had to go in and buy the other 50 percent less than five months after we launched our deal. The other company they invested in around the same time ended up going out of business. TheStreet.com only owned 10 percent of them. So Peter Thiel naturally figured, why fight Elon Musk’s X.com and destroy each other in the process plus waste a ton of time and money when they could just merge and become a monopoly and go public and create real value, even if meant they all had lesser stakes? Once they merged they had twice as many ideas — which meant that their stakes would be worth more than twice as much, since we now know that ideas are more valuable than money.

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News
by Eliot Higgins
Published 2 Mar 2021

The website Which Face Is Real demonstrates this, placing a computer-generated portrait beside a real photo.29 They are frighteningly hard to distinguish. Audio deepfakes have already been put to malicious use, with scammers using speech samples of a CEO to replicate his voice digitally, with which they ordered a junior employee to urgently transfer €220,000 into the con artists’ account.30 A research company backed by Elon Musk, OpenAI, created an algorithm that writes coherent text independently, creating the prospect of automated trolls able to do more than just spam; they could engage people in argument, push conspiracy theories and dilute meaningful public discussion. Fearful of misuse, OpenAI decided not release the research.31, 32 While deepfakes are a threat, we can inform ourselves, prepare and respond.

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pfmredir=sm 16 www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/narrative-war-coming 17 news.un.org/en/story/2019/02/1032811 18 www.transparency.org/news/feature/regional-analysis-MENA www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/richest-countries- in-the-world 19 www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/gun-control-yemen-style/273058/ 20 www.acleddata.com/2019/06/18/press-release-yemen-war-death-toll-exceeds-90000-according-to-new-acled-data-for-2015/ 21 www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6278080/ 22 news.un.org/en/story/2019/03/1035501 23 mwatana.org/en/day-of-judgment/ 24 yemen.bellingcat.com/work 25 www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2019/04/22/the-yemen-project-announcement/ 26 yemeniarchive.org/en 27 www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0 28 www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDOo5nDJwgA 29 www.whichfaceisreal.com/ 30 www.wsj.com/articles/fraudsters-use-ai-to-mimic-ceos-voice-in-unusual-cybercrime-case-11567157402 31 amp.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/14/elon-musk-backed-ai-writes-convincing-news-fiction?__twitter_impression=true https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/ 32 www.vice.com/en_us/article/594qx5/there-is-no-tech-solution-to-deepfakes 33 lab.witness.org/projects/synthetic-media-and-deep-fakes/ 34 www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=Qh_6cHw50l0 35 amp.axios.com/deepfake-authentication-privacy-5fa05902-41eb-40a7-8850-5450bcad0475.html?

The Switch: How Solar, Storage and New Tech Means Cheap Power for All
by Chris Goodall
Published 6 Jul 2016

The single most important figure in the battery industry today is Elon Musk, the head of Tesla. Working with battery manufacturer Panasonic, Tesla is building a vast ‘Gigafactory’ in Nevada that will produce battery packs for Tesla cars and also for the company’s new residential and grid storage systems. By building a factory of this size Tesla is expected to reduce the cost per watt of storage to about half the level of just a couple of years ago. This will accelerate electric car sales and the use of lithium ion batteries in static storage as well. Elon Musk unveils Tesla’s ‘Powerwall’ battery storage at an event in California, April 2015.

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business
by Paul Jarvis
Published 1 Jan 2019

Envy: The Ulcer of the Soul (and of Business Growth) Socrates said that envy is the ulcer of the soul, meaning that we can easily become negatively affected by the success of others. Who we are and what we actually want become overshadowed when we internally compare ourselves to others. We idolize people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Oprah and think that their path to success—creating massive empires—is our own key to happiness and career fulfillment. For some reason, when our business is just us, or when it isn’t growing, we feel a societal pressure to keep up with other, larger businesses in order to be seen as “making it.”

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Word of mouth happens, Google links to you favorably, you’re invited to speaking gigs, and so on—all because your expertise is valued. But how do you build authority? And how does it work? If you think of the leaders in your industry, you can see that those people have an image of authority—like Debbie Millman in the field of graphic design, or Elon Musk in the field of electric cars. We look to these people for answers, we learn from them, and if we’re part of the audience they’re teaching, we probably buy from them as well. In business these days, it’s not enough to just tell people you’re an authority—you’ve got to demonstrate your actual expertise by sharing what you know and teaching others.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data
by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge
Published 27 Feb 2018

Newer machine learning systems are looking for more than patterns in the data: they utilize feedback data in a more nuanced, differentiated way, devaluing older data for instance, a bit like human memory does. Feedback is central to any such system, especially when the system is used to assist in critical decision-making. Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, boasted on Twitter in late 2016 that his company’s cars logged many hundreds of millions of miles using Autopilot, Tesla’s semiautonomous driving system. Likely, it wasn’t simple numbers-bragging that drove Musk to tweet. Autopilot generates and accumulates valuable feedback data that gets sent to Tesla and is used to “train” the next software release of the Autopilot system.

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UBI, as it is affectionately called by its proponents, has garnered surprising support, particularly among leading figures in the high-tech sector. “Superangel” investor Marc Andreessen, the coauthor of Mosaic, one of the first widely used Web browsers, is in favor of it. And so are New York–based Albert Wenger, another highly successful venture capitalist; start-up incubator impresario Sam Altman; and Elon Musk, the brash but congenial cofounder of PayPal and CEO of Tesla. Silicon Valley isn’t alone in its enthusiasm for UBI, but it is Silicon Valley’s digital and data-driven innovations that have given rise to the idea. There are innumerable variations, but the core idea is similar. Everyone receives a monthly check for a fixed amount that would be sufficient to pay for food, clothing, basic education, a warm, dry home, perhaps even some form of health insurance.

The 37th Parallel: The Secret Truth Behind America's UFO Highway
by Ben Mezrich
Published 5 Sep 2016

CHAPTER 22 * * * NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA, AUGUST 2008 Jeff Foust The fastest way to make a small fortune in the aerospace industry is to start with a large one. The thought wasn’t original; in fact, Robert Bigelow had borrowed it from his sometime colleague, sometime competitor in the private, commercial space race, Elon Musk, but at the moment it seemed particularly apropos. Standing in the center of the command center of Bigelow Aerospace Mission Control—surrounded by millions of dollars in equipment, caught in the glow of multiple giant screens hanging from the ceiling, above row after row of oblong workstations, staffed by dozens of the top aerospace engineers money could drag to his secure, somewhat fortresslike fifty-acre compound in a residential/commercial suburb ten miles north of the Las Vegas Strip—Bigelow couldn’t help but think about hard numbers.

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The steps that had led Bigelow from Budget Suites to Bigelow Aerospace, and Genesis—by way of the NIDS, it could be said—had been a mixture of accident and applied imagination. Although space had always been his goal—for what he assumed to be very different reasons from the ones that possessed men like Elon Musk and those who ran his competitors in the industry—he had at first approached his dream like the real estate mogul he was. The ideas he’d first advanced, dutifully documented by awed and amused local and national journalists, had been met by much skepticism: hotels in space, a resort on the Moon, even an orbital cruise liner.

Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms
by Hannah Fry
Published 17 Sep 2018

There’s little doubt that their system has had a net positive impact, making driving safer for those who use it – you don’t need to look far to find online videos of the ‘Forward Collision Warning’ feature, recognizing the risk of accident before the driver, setting off an alarm and saving the car from crashing.64 But there’s a slight mismatch between what the cars can do – with what’s essentially a fancy forward-facing parking sensor and clever cruise control – and the language used to describe them. For instance, in October 2016 an announcement on the Tesla site65 stated that ‘all Tesla cars being produced now have full self-driving hardware’.# According to an article in The Verge, Elon Musk, product architect of Tesla, added: ‘The full autonomy update will be standard on all Tesla vehicles from here on out.’66 But that phrase ‘full autonomy’ is arguably at odds with the warning users must accept before using the current autopilot: ‘You need to maintain control and responsibility of your vehicle.’67 Expectations are important.

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v=SnRp56XjV_M. 65. https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now-have-full-self-driving-hardware. 66. Jordan Golson and Dieter Bohn, ‘All new Tesla cars now have hardware for “full self-driving capabilities”: but some safety features will be disabled initially’, The Verge, 19 Oct. 2016, https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13340938/tesla-autopilot-update-model-3-elon-musk-update. 67. Fred Lambert, ‘Tesla introduces first phase of “Enhanced Autopilot”: “measured and cautious for next several hundred million miles” – release notes’, Electrek, 1 Jan 2017, https://electrek.co/2017/01/01/tesla-enhanced-autopilot-release-notes/. 68. DPC Cars, ‘Toyota Guardian and Chauffeur autonomous vehicle platform’, YouTube, 27 Sept. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global
by Rebecca Fannin
Published 2 Sep 2019

In another case involving a China autonomous vehicle company, Apple charged an engineer also leaving for China of stealing its driver-less car secrets.4 NIO in Road Race with Tesla From another corner of China’s fledgling electric market, premium maker NIO is coming on strong as a Tesla challenger with Star Trek-y looking cars and a starting price tag of around $70,000, much less than Tesla in China. The founder, William Li, has been called the Elon Musk of China. His company’s slogan is “Blue sky coming.” Tech-savvy Chinese customers can link their mobile phone to NIO and tap on a screen for repairs, maintenance, and quick power boosts by battery swapping and mobile charging vans. Like at Xpeng, Li has poured some of his own money into the startup, which is backed by China tech titans Baidu and Tencent plus veteran investors Sequoia Capital, Hillhouse Capital, and Temasek.

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But Tesla got a slow start and has sold only an estimated 30,000 Tesla models since launching in China in 2013, compared to about 180,000 in the United States, where it is the dominant seller with about half of EV sales. The issues for Tesla in China have mainly been high prices due to tariffs and too few supercharging stations. Tesla’s China sales slid in 2018 in the wake of the country’s slowing economy, tariff swings, and multiple price shifts in the US-China trade war. To the rescue, visionary founder Elon Musk. He recently flew to Shanghai and shook hands with the mayor in a ceremony to debut Tesla plans to construct its own megafactory in the city, which could crank out 500,000 cars annually, as much as its Fremont, California, plant. With local production in China starting in a few years, Tesla could get around 25 percent tariffs on its models, which are priced at $78,000 to $150,000 for high-end sedans.

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving
by Celeste Headlee
Published 10 Mar 2020

There are some very smart thinkers who believe work is what gives our life meaning because without it we accomplish nothing and make no mark upon history. Without work, we might die and it would be as though we had never lived. Since evolution is fueled by a desire to leave a lasting legacy, this argument can be quite compelling. Elon Musk once wondered how people could find meaning without a job. “A lot of people derive meaning from their employment,” he warned. “If you’re not needed, what is the meaning? Do you feel useless?” It seems the answer to his question might be yes. In the United States, the number of people still working past retirement age has risen by almost 35 percent in recent years.

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Here’s the bottom line: The average of answers from a large, independent, and diverse group of people will often be more accurate than the answer arrived at by a smart individual or a small group of smart people. In our culture, which focuses on personal achievement and sometimes worships charismatic individuals like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, this advice can seem counterintuitive, but it’s backed by decades and decades of evidence from a wide variety of industries. I know it feels more efficient to work alone, but the point of this book is to encourage you to ask more questions about efficiency. Does your current process really save time, or are you taking that on faith?

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?
by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland
Published 15 Jan 2021

AEEII (https://ddd.uab.cat/record/182669). 2 It is a disturbing reality that the science fiction of the past defines present-day visions of the future. As Jill Lepore, professor of American History at Harvard University, has demonstrated, Elon Musk’s plans and investments appear to have been shaped by the works of Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams. Excellent writers, but not representatives for humanity in all its diversity. (You can listen to Lepore discuss this in her 2021 BBC radio series ‘Elon Musk: the evening rocket’, available at https://bbc.in/3uo8xQZ). Figure 3. Homo transporticus: a convenient fiction of modern transport design. More precisely, transport designers have fabricated a new species: Homo transporticus, a cousin of economic man.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone
by Brian Merchant
Published 19 Jun 2017

I’m looking forward to it. It’s like being afraid of nuclear power—you know, if we designed nuclear technology knowing what we know now, we could make it safe, probably.” Yet critics like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have raised concerns that AI could evolve more quickly than we could control it—that it could pose an existential threat to humanity. “Oh, it’s great,” Gruber says of the discussion. “We’re kind of at the stage now where the Elon Musks of the world are saying, ‘Look, this is going to be powerful enough to destroy the earth. Now how do we want to deal with the technology?’ And I don’t like the way that we have dealt with nuclear, but it hasn’t killed us.

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A sustainable modern society must return to harvesting its energy from sunlight and wind. Plants harvest sunlight but are needed for food. Photovoltaic cells and windmills can provide electricity without polluting the air, but this electric power must be stored, and batteries are the most convenient storage depot for electric power.” Which is exactly why entrepreneurs like Elon Musk are investing heavily in them. His Gigafactory, which will soon churn out lithium-ion batteries at a scale never before seen, is the clearest signal yet that the automotive and electronics industry have chosen their horse for the twenty-first century. The lithium-ion battery—conceived in an Exxon lab, built into a game-changer by an industry lifer, turned into a mainstream commercial product by a Japanese camera maker, and manufactured with ingredients dredged up in the driest, hottest place on Earth—is the unheralded engine driving our future machines.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
by Mike Isaac
Published 2 Sep 2019

An introvert by nature, Camp enjoyed tinkering with ideas for startups or solving problems in his head as he walked the sloped streets of San Francisco. Even at thirty years old, Camp still looked like a college student with his close-cropped cut of dirty blond hair and button-down oxford shirts. He was cerebral, a little geeky, able to explain the intricate architecture of the internet, but lacking the polish and showmanship of, say, an Elon Musk. His wide, toothy grin made him look more goofy than dashing—something like “the entrepreneur next door.” Camp was fun to hang out with, though. He enjoyed traveling, loved experimenting with fine dining in the Bay Area. He was always game for a hot tub hang, enjoyed theme parties that obliged one to rent a tux.

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Graves caught the entrepreneurial bug early. He worshiped entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, idolizing the way they built something enormously successful out of nothing but an idea and a computer. Graves’s Tumblr was filled with photos of Jeff Bezos, quotes from Albert Einstein, articles about Elon Musk. One personal favorite was an iconic quote from Shawn Carter, better known by hip-hop fans as Jay-Z: “I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man.” In 2009, he was bored of his job as a database admin at GE’s health care unit in Chicago. He wanted a cool job, perhaps at one of the startups whose apps populated his iPhone home screen.

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Headlines in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other major publications admired the progress achieved by tech’s boy geniuses. Mark Zuckerberg was a visionary whose social network connected friends and family worldwide. Twitter had enabled democracy to flourish in the Middle East. Google wunderkinds had built beautiful maps that made life easier, and given everyone a free email account. Elon Musk’s ambitions were transcendent: he would save the world with electric Teslas and conquer the stars with SpaceX. Though many had written about the negative aspects of tech, the American press and public often overlooked Facebook’s towering monopoly on social media, Amazon’s takeover of internet infrastructure, the disappearance of privacy enabled by Google’s advertising technology, the noxious, racist trolls enabled by Twitter, and the outlandish and harmful theories fed to users by YouTube’s automated algorithms—the earth is flat, vaccinations cause autism, 9/11 was an inside job.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

Despite the obvious challenges, the exponential productivity boosts, dramatic cost savings, and rising profits attainable through artificial intelligence systems are so great there will be no turning back. AI is here to stay, and never one to miss an opportunity, Crime, Inc. is all over it. Al-gorithm Capone and His AI Crime Bots We need to be super careful with AI. It is potentially more dangerous than nukes. ELON MUSK As we learned in previous chapters, the malicious use of AI and computer algorithms has given rise to the crime bot—an intelligent agent scripted to perpetrate criminal activities at scale. Crime bots are foundational to Crime, Inc. and are responsible for its vast rise in profitability. These software programs automate computer hacking, virus dissemination, theft of intellectual property, industrial espionage, spam distribution, identity theft, and DDoS attacks, among other threats.

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The Final Frontier: Space, Nano, and Quantum The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. JOHN F. KENNEDY Though the space shuttle program has ended, much research and activity in the field of space science continues, particularly with private companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic commercializing space transportation. Another space company, Planetary Resources, founded in 2012 by Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson, intends to bring the natural resources of space to within humanity’s reach by landing robots on asteroids and mining them for raw materials, using ultralow-cost 3-D printed spacecraft.

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But they are not alone, and there is indeed a new breed of “techno-philanthropists” out there, committed to using their wealth to better the world. eBay’s first president, Jeff Skoll, has worked tirelessly crusading against pandemics and nuclear proliferation, endowing his foundation with nearly $1 billion of his own funds. Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Paul Allen, Steve Case, Larry Ellison, Mo Ibrahim, Sir Richard Branson, and Michael Bloomberg have all incredibly generously signed “The Giving Pledge,” committing to dedicate the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. These individuals have personal passions that they are actively supporting with their wealth, ranging from good governance to child development.

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
by Tyler Cowen
Published 27 Feb 2017

Those options seemed like logical next steps for a world that had recently been transformed by railroads, automobiles, urbanization, and many other highly visible shifts in what was built, how we got around, and how things looked. But over the last few decades, the interest in those kinds of transportation-based, landscape-transforming projects largely has faded away. Elon Musk’s hyperloop plans will remain on the drawing board for the foreseeable future, and the settlement of Mars is yet farther away. Urban progress is less transformational and more a matter of making more neighborhoods look and act like the nicer neighborhoods—namely gentrification. When it comes to transportation, mostly we are hoping to avoid greater suffering, such as worse traffic, cuts in bus service, or the rather dramatic declines in service quality experienced in the Washington, DC, Metro system.

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But since the 1970s, most travel around the United States has become slower—due to traffic—rather than faster. We’ve stopped increasing travel speeds and even have given up on supersonic jet transport. The Concorde, rather than proving to be the wave of the future, has been retired. Entrepreneur Elon Musk stands as the most visible and obvious representative of the idea of major progress in the physical world. For all of his admirable confidence and unapologetic ambition, most of his projects have yet to succeed. The hyperloop talk seems like more of a publicity stunt than anything else, as we will not be transporting people by whipping them in capsules through reduced-pressure tubes, not anytime soon at least.

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail
by Robert Bruce Shaw , James Foster and Brilliance Audio
Published 14 Oct 2017

Obsession may not be healthy, but it describes a core attribute of great companies and teams. The downside of obsessive behavior is the price to pay for doing something extraordinary. Let’s start with the obsessive nature of those who lead cutting-edge firms. Justine Musk is the former wife of Elon Musk, the highly respected founder of the car company Tesla and other ventures such as PayPal. She describes Elon’s obsessive personality as a key to his extraordinary success: Extreme success is different from what I suppose you could just consider “success,” . . . you don’t have to be . . . Elon to be affluent and accomplished and maintain a great lifestyle.

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Also see Max Chafkin, “Airbnb Opens up the World,” Fast Company, February 2016. 20Merriam-Webster’s definition of obsession: “A state in which someone thinks about someone or something constantly or frequently especially in a way that is not normal; someone or something that a person thinks about constantly or frequently; an activity that someone is very interested in or spends a lot of time doing.” 21“What It Takes to Be As Great As Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, or Richard Branson,” Inc. Aug 31, 2015 22See Geoff Colvin, (New York: Portfolio, 2008). 23Andre Agassi, (New York: Vintage, 2010). 24See the group’s website, www.workaholics-anonymous.org/. 25Xiao-Ping Chen, “Company Culture and Values Are the Lifelines of Alibaba: An Interview with Jack Ma, Founder and Executive,” Executive Perspectives, August 2013, www.iacmr.org/V2/Publications/CMI/LP021101_EN.pdf. 26Graham describes the best founders as being cockroach like—in that they will survive anything, including a nuclear winter, while others perish.

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism
by Olivia Fox Cabane
Published 1 Mar 2012

We’ll see how each of these is perceived, how to develop it, and when to use it. There are, of course, other kinds of charisma we could consider, but these four are the most practical for daily life, the easiest to access, and thus the most useful to study. Focus Charisma: Presence and Confidence Elon Musk, cofounder of PayPal and current CEO of Tesla Motors, embodies focus charisma. As he’ll tell you himself, Musk is very much an introvert. In Tesla’s open office space, his nearly empty desk is in the far right corner, two huge monitors arranged to create a cocoon, shielding him from the rest of the office.

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Many of these great business minds were so kind as to contribute insights: Chris Ashenden, Gilles August, Hayes Barnard, Sunny Bates, Steve Bell, Charles Best, Michael Feuer, Tim Flynn, Scott Freidheim, Matt Furman, Carl Guardino, Catherine Dumait Harper, Ira Jackson, Ken Jacobs, Randy Komisar, Jim Larranaga, Jack Leslie, Maurice Levy, Dan’l Lewin, Angel Martinez, Jeff Mirich, Farhad Mohit, Peter Moore, Elon Musk, Tom Schiro, Nina Simosko, Kevin Surace, Peter Thiel, Duncan Wardle, Bill Whitmore, and Bill Wohl. With great skill, dedication, patience, kindness, and generosity, Courtney Young led Penguin’s impressive team effort. Adrienne Schultz worked wonders, making the writing clearer and more concise, and greatly improving the flow.

Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required
by Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung
Published 8 Jul 2019

Hustlers tend to gravitate toward entrepreneurial activities, correctly recognizing that trading time for money has a natural ceiling on how much you can earn. You only have so many hours a day, so tying your earnings to time limits your potential. If you become an entrepreneur, on the other hand, there is no upper limit on your earnings, so these people tend to work for themselves. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg are examples of successful Hustlers. Hustlers see the world as endlessly full of opportunities to make money, and if given the chance they will talk your ear off about their next venture (or ventures). They tend not to put much emphasis on controlling their spending, as they view money as an infinitely renewable resource.

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They tend not to put much emphasis on controlling their spending, as they view money as an infinitely renewable resource. After all, if they run out of money, they can make more! Hustlers also tend to be very comfortable with risk and are willing to bet everything if they believe in a business they’re creating. This tendency to risk it all is the source of much of their success—but also their failures. Elon Musk, after selling PayPal to eBay, at one point had over $200 million in cash. He invested all of it in Tesla, and in a divorce filing in 2010 was forced to publicly admit he was broke. From $200 million to broke. It boggles my mind how anyone can spend that amount in a lifetime. Tesla, of course, became a global phenomenon and a household name, but that’s how risk-seeking Hustlers can be.

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together
by Nick Polson and James Scott
Published 14 May 2018

AI Anxieties We’ve told you how excited our students are about AI, and how the world’s largest firms are rushing to embrace it. But we’d be lying if we said that everyone was so bullish about these new technologies. In fact, many people are anxious, whether about jobs, data privacy, wealth concentration, or Russians with fake-news Twitter-bots. Some people—most famously Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX—paint an even scarier picture: one where robots become self-aware, decide they don’t like being ruled by people, and start ruling us with a silicon fist. Let’s talk about Musk’s worry first; his views have gotten a lot of attention, presumably because people take notice when a member of the billionaire disrupter class talks about artificial intelligence.

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After all, just because we can dream it and make a film about it doesn’t mean we can build it. Nobody today has any idea how to create a robot with general intelligence, in the manner of a human or a Terminator. Maybe your remote descendants will figure it out; maybe they’ll even program their creation to terrorize the remote descendants of Elon Musk. But that will be their choice and their problem, because no option on the table today even remotely foreordains such a possibility. Now, and for the foreseeable future, “smart” machines are smart only in their specific domains: • Alexa can read you a recipe for spaghetti Bolognese, but she can’t chop the onions, and she certainly can’t turn on you with a kitchen knife

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream
by Alissa Quart
Published 14 Mar 2023

In 2021, the collective gain of the richest was a staggering $1.6 trillion, a swelling of 55 percent, while millions of Americans were at risk of losing their homes. After the debut of the annual Forbes billionaires list in April 2021, the Washington Post wrote, “Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, with an estimated fortune of $177 billion, topped the list for the fourth year running,” while Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive, “came in at No. 2” at $151 billion and Zuckerberg, CEO and cofounder of Facebook, came in fifth with $97 billion. There was little guilt in evidence among those who were making out like bandits during the pandemic. All that seemingly mattered was that their own metaphorical boots continued to be the newest and most expensive and that they stayed healthy and safe: some of the ultrarich scampered off to their New Zealand farms, to Scotland, or to competitive frenzies in formerly neglected towns to nab the rare estate, getting their toro salmon and Pelotons sent to them, their personal needs met by “quarantine assistants.”

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Possessed by anti-government mania, Cato and others argue that we are supposed to take care of ourselves, and we should be neither assisted nor empathized with in our downward descents. According to Subsidy Tracker, Tesla received nearly $2.5 billion: Or, as Jerry Hirsch’s Los Angeles Times headline reads, for all of Musk’s companies at that time, according to their data: “Elon Musk’s Growing Empire Is Fueled by $4.9 Billion in Government Subsidies” (May 30, 2015). individual effort in success: In a similar vein, Ivanka Trump’s “motivational quotes” during her father’s presidential tenure included “If you are content, that’s probably not good enough,” faulting women for not being able to surmount obstacles, as if they were ne’er-do-wells creating roadblocks for themselves, the glass ceiling all in their heads.

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell
Published 23 May 2023

They may have thought if most people are broadly like themselves, they probably earn roughly the same, and therefore their finances are also similar – that is, more likely to be negatively affected by a marginal income tax hike for earnings above £80,000 than benefited by the potential strengthening of welfare provision those funds may allow for. These misunderstandings about incomes at the top, nevertheless, hide a kernel of truth. For many, the figure of the top 5% evokes images of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, yachts and private jets. These are the ‘masters of the universe’, the truly wealthy, whose economic reality is completely foreign to most. Although Barber may have underestimated the threshold for that kind of wealth, his insistence that he isn’t part of it was not unjustified. Torsten Bell, Head of the Resolution Foundation, wrote one of the best op-eds about the Question Time episode.

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In a fascinating book on the lives of the very wealthy in New York, sociologist Rachel Sherman44 argued that many among her interviewees were what she called ‘upward-oriented’, meaning that they thought they were situated somewhere in the middle of the income distribution: first, because most of the people they socialised with had similar or even higher incomes; and second, because there will always be the Bill Gates and Elon Musks of the world, whose fortunes dwarf everyone else’s. Considering this, a more feasible second explanation for William’s unease is that those at the cusp of the top 1% have been prospering, but not necessarily so compared with some of their colleagues in Canary Wharf. They are well-paid, highachieving professionals, often with advanced degrees and with all the respect associated with this.

Principles: Life and Work
by Ray Dalio
Published 18 Sep 2017

A shaper is someone who comes up with unique and valuable visions and builds them out beautifully, typically over the doubts and opposition of others. Jobs built the world’s largest and most successful company by revolutionizing computing, music, communications, animation, and photography with beautifully designed products. Elon Musk (of Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity), Jeff Bezos (of Amazon), and Reed Hastings (of Netflix) are other great shapers from the business world. In philanthropy, Muhammad Yunus (of Grameen), Geoffrey Canada (of Harlem Children’s Zone), and Wendy Kopp (of Teach for America) come to mind; and in government, Winston Churchill, Dr.

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I started by exploring the qualities of Jobs and other shapers with Isaacson, at first in a private conversation in his office, and later at a public forum at Bridgewater. Since Isaacson had also written biographies of Albert Einstein and Ben Franklin—two other great shapers—I read them and probed him about them to try to glean what characteristics they had in common. Then I spoke with proven shapers I knew—Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Reed Hastings, Muhammad Yunus, Geoffrey Canada, Jack Dorsey (of Twitter), David Kelley (of IDEO), and more. They had all visualized remarkable concepts and built organizations to actualize them, and done that repeatedly and over long periods of time. I asked them to take an hour’s worth of personality assessments to discover their values, abilities, and approaches.

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They are simultaneously creative, systematic, and practical. They are assertive and open-minded at the same time. Above all, they are passionate about what they are doing, intolerant of people who work for them who aren’t excellent at what they do, and want to have a big, beneficial impact on the world. Take Elon Musk. When he had just come out with the Tesla and showed me his own car for the first time, he had as much to say about the key fob that opened the doors as he did about his overarching vision for how Tesla fits into the broader future of transportation and how impor-tant that is to our planet. Later on, when I asked him how he came to start his company SpaceX, the audacity of his answer startled me.

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
by Toby Ord
Published 24 Mar 2020

What we need are ways to judge just how speculative it really is, and a very useful starting point is to hear what those working in the field think about this risk. Some outspoken AI researchers, like Professor Oren Etzioni, have painted it as “very much a fringe argument,” saying that while luminaries like Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates may be deeply concerned, the people actually working in AI are not.103 If true, this would provide good reason to be skeptical of the risk. But even a cursory look at what the leading figures in AI are saying shows it is not. For example, Stuart Russell, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the most popular and widely respected textbook in AI, has strongly warned of the existential risk from AGI.

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“Astrophysical Ionizing Radiation and Earth: A Brief Review and Census of Intermittent Intense Sources.” Astrobiology, 11(4), 343–61. Menzel, P. T. (2011). “Should the Value of Future Health Benefits Be Time-Discounted?” in Prevention vs. Treatment: What’s the Right Balance? (pp. 246–73). Oxford University Press. Metz, C. (June 9, 2018). “Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the Feud Over Killer Robots.” The New York Times. Milanovic, B. (2016). Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization. Harvard University Press. Minsky, M. (1984). Afterword, in True Names. Bluejay Books. Mnih, V., et al. (2015). “Human-Level Control through Deep Reinforcement Learning.”

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Derek Parfit (2017b, p. 436): “What now matters most is how we respond to various risks to the survival of humanity. We are creating some of these risks, and we are discovering how we could respond to these and other risks. If we reduce these risks, and humanity survives the next few centuries, our descendants or successors could end these risks by spreading through this galaxy.” Elon Musk (2018): “… it’s important to get a self-sustaining base. Ideally on Mars because Mars is far enough away from Earth that a war on Earth, the Mars base might survive, is more likely to survive than a moon base.” Carl Sagan (1994, p. 371) implicitly suggested it when saying: “In the littered field of discredited self-congratulatory chauvinisms, there is only one that seems to hold up, one sense in which we are special: Due to our own actions or inactions, and the misuse of our technology, we live at an extraordinary moment, for the Earth at least—the first time that a species has become able to wipe itself out.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future
by Mervyn King and John Kay
Published 5 Mar 2020

Those greedy bankers, by contrast, may be insatiable in their demands for personal wealth but cautious in assuming personal risk. The senior executives who led financial institutions towards collapse in 2008 largely walked away from the wreckage as rich men. But their bonus plans pale into insignificance beside that of Elon Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX, who demanded and received from the car company a scheme which could net him $55 billion – his current wealth is estimated at $20 billion, enough for most people. But Musk is the greatest business risk-taker of our age – and with his own money as well as other people’s. Anticipating risk In a world of radical uncertainty, there are limits to the range of possibilities we can hold in our minds.

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The exchange between Samuelson and his colleague was not capable of being settled by any demonstration that one answer was ‘better’ or more rational than another. If some of the examples we have cited seem extreme, and they are, they reinforce that central Knightian insight into the links between radical uncertainty and creativity. If St Francis and George Orwell and Elon Musk defy the precepts of rationality as described by expected utility theory, we might reasonably wish there was more such ‘irrationality’. At a more mundane level, people we like and admire buy lottery tickets, drive fast cars and climb mountains; they insure their bags against loss, the College silver against theft, and their oil wells against blowout.

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And it is that interpretation – risk as failure to fulfil the central elements of the reference narrative – which we will continue to use, in this book and in our everyday lives. In earlier chapters we described some risk lovers who have changed society – Richard Branson, Winston Churchill, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, George Orwell. Ignaz Semmelweis, whose dogmatic conviction of his own rightness drove him to insanity but helped save the lives of millions of women. Barry Marshall, who changed medical practice and won a Nobel Prize by infecting himself with bacteria. None of this behaviour has anything to do with the utility of wealth functions of these individuals.

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future
by Ed Conway
Published 15 Jun 2023

For a vivid illustration of the magic, try dropping a strong, heavy magnet on to a slab of pure copper – or, easier still, go online where a few people have filmed precisely that. What happens next is quite extraordinary: the magnet falls like any metallic object would, but just before it hits the copper it hovers for a moment, suspended in mid-air, before slowly rotating and gently resting on the surface. Watching it feels a little watching one of Elon Musk’s rockets firing its boosters as it comes in to land – as if the laws of physics are being turned on their head. But what powers this phenomenon is far more exciting than rocket fuel: it is the almighty, invisible force of electromagnetism, as the electrons within the copper go into a frenzy when the magnet approaches.

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There are a fair few other buildings that go by that name these days; at the time of writing Tesla had four others besides – one in Shanghai, one in Berlin, one in Texas and another in upstate New York, though while Tesla still calls that last one a gigafactory most others do not. The definition of a gigafactory is anyway rather vague, in large part because the term was essentially plucked out of the air a few years ago by the mercurial Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, and because his own precise definition seems to have shifted as time has gone by. These days, however, most people in the battery business seem to have converged on a broad definition: a gigafactory is any big manufacturing plant turning out a lot of batteries – and since that last Tesla ‘gigafactory’ makes solar panels, it doesn’t qualify.

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Che Guevara Studies Center (Penguin, 2021) Gustafson, T., Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012) Hager, T., The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler (Crown, 2008) Hall, C.A.S. and Klitgaard, K., Energy and the Wealth of Nations (Springer, 2018) Hartcup, G., War of Invention (Brassey’s, 1988) Haskel, J. and Westlake, S., Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017) Hecht, J., City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics (Oxford University Press, 1999) Higgins, T., Power Play: Elon Musk, Tesla, and the Best of the Century (WH Allen, 2021) Higginson, J., A Working Class in the Making: Belgian Colonial Labor Policy, Private Enterprise, and the African Mineworker, 1907–1951 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) Hochschild, A., King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Picador, 2019) Hochschild, A., To End All Wars: A Story of Protest and Patriotism in the First World War (Picador, 2011) Hughes, T.P.P., Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) Hyde, C.K., Copper for America: The United States Copper Industry from Colonial Times to the 1990s (University of Arizona Press, 2016) Israel, P., Edison: A Life of Invention (Wiley, 1998) Johnson, S., How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World (Penguin, 2015) Jones, R.A.L., Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life (Oxford University Press, 2007) Jonnes, J., Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World (Random House, 2004) Joralemon, I.B., Romantic Copper: Its Lure and Lore (D.

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism
by David Golumbia
Published 25 Sep 2016

But the analysis of cyberlibertarianism is getting at something subtler: the way that a set of slogans and beliefs associated with the spread of digital technology incorporate critical parts of a right-wing worldview even as they manifest a surface rhetorical commitment to values that do not immediately appear to come from the right. Certainly, many leaders in the digital technology industries, and quite a few leaders who do not work for corporations, openly declare their adherence to libertarian or other right-wing ideologies. Just a brief list of these includes figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Eric Raymond, Jimmy Wales, Eric Schmidt, and Travis Kalanick. Furthermore, the number of leaders who demur from such political points of view is small, and their demurrals are often shallow. But the group of people whose beliefs deserve to be labeled “cyberlibertarian” is much larger than this.

The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World
by Steve Levine
Published 5 Feb 2015

If the Department of Energy sought to hold on to Envia, a federal grant recipient with a significant apparent breakthrough, it was acting no differently from Chamberlain himself. Wasn’t he forever speaking of saving America? Wasn’t that what the Hub was all about? The Hub was industrial policy. Sitting in his office, Chamberlain conceded that this was true. • • • Argonne and Envia were not the sole U.S. actors in the race. While they fought for prominence, Elon Musk, the South African chairman of Tesla Motors, became the popular face of electric cars in the country. A lithe, distant, and tall man with furry patches around the perimeter of his face, Musk had earned a fortune by cofounding and selling PayPal. Now, with his exquisitely designed Tesla, he had made electrics cool.

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He said he was “highly confident” that he would do so and thus create a new paradigm for American manufacturing. It would be Bell Labs 2.0. He said, “I’m hoping in five or ten years to be touring the country saying, ‘This is how it can be done.’” He watched electrics quietly moving ahead. The Volt for sure was a pioneering vehicle, but Elon Musk had pushed further—he had made electrics indisputably cool. With Tesla, Musk himself was now the most celebrated technologist in Silicon Valley. Toward the end of 2014, a mini-rivalry erupted: Musk hurtled into a contest with GM to produce the two-hundred-mile electric. He did not say he was in competition with GM—in his eyes, that would be demeaning.

Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology
by Adrienne Mayor
Published 27 Nov 2018

As the vengeful god’s AI agent, Pandora executed her mission to unseal a jar of disasters to plague humankind forever. She was presented as a wife to Epimetheus, a man known for his impulsive optimism. As we saw, Prometheus warned humankind that Pandora’s jar should never be opened. Are Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and other prescient thinkers the Promethean Titans of our era? They have warned scientists to halt or at least slow the reckless pursuit of AI, because they foresee that once it is set in motion, humans will be unable to control it. “Deep learning” algorithms allow AI computers to extract patterns from vast data, extrapolate to novel situations, and decide on actions with no human guidance.

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Pharmaka “animates” the statues with a kind of “soul” or life but does not necessarily make them move. Hollow statues as vessels that are vivified by being filled with substances, Steiner 2001, 114–20. 19. Asimov’s laws, Kang 2011, 302. Future of Life Institute’s Beneficial AI Conference 2017; FLI’s board included Stephen Hawking, Frank Wilczek, Elon Musk, and Nick Bostrom. https://futurism.com/worlds-top-experts-have-created-a-law-of-robotics/. See also Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence: http://lcfi.ac.uk/. 20. Martinho-Truswell 2018. 21. Four-wheeled carts, Morris 1992, 10. A small, shallow bronze basin-cart on three wheels, an ancient example of pen, bonsai basin, was excavated in a sixth/fifth century BC archaeological site in China, indicating that the idea of a wheeled tripod was put into practice elsewhere in antiquity, Bagley et al. 1980, 265, 272, color plate 65.

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World
by Jeff Goodell
Published 23 Oct 2017

We live in a rapidly accelerating technological age, with new iPhones every year that make the old ones seem as primitive as a brick, where robots perform surgery and computers fly 757s. Scientists are unraveling the mysteries of DNA and plotting the circuitry of the human brain. Techno-optimists like Ray Kurzweil talk openly about immortality. Elon Musk aspires to create a “multiplanet civilization” in the very near future. It seems only natural that a slow-moving force like sea-level rise would have a technological solution too. Why not build a thermostat for the planet? We are already engineering the Earth’s operating system by dumping billions of tons of greenhouse gases into it every year.

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Snowmass: “Workshop on Critical Issues in Climate Change.” Energy Modeling Forum. July 25–August 3, 2006. Details of event reconstructed from interviews with many participants, including Lowell Wood. 2. “multiplanet civilization”: Quoted in Ross Andersen. “Exodus.” Aeon, September 30, 2014. Accessed March 12, 2017. https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-planet-civilisation 3. research project: Henry Fountain. “White House Urges Research on Geoengineering to Combat Climate Change.” New York Times, January 10, 2017. 4. Davos: The Global Risks Report 2017. World Economic Forum, Geneva, 43. Accessed March 12, 2017. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/GRR17_Report_web.pdf 5.

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business
by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro
Published 30 Aug 2021

Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: Harper, 2017); Derek Thompson, “Can Science Cure Aging?” The Atlantic, September 13, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/can-science-cure-aging/570121/. 86 For just two examples, John Koetsier, “Elon Musk’s 42,000 Star-Link Satellites Could Just Save the World,” Forbes, January 9, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/01/09/elon-musks-42000-starlink-satellites-could-just-save-the-world/; and Navneet Alang, “As the Robots Arrive, We Have to Remember: Another Future is Possible,” Toronto Star, February 27, 2021, https://www.thestar.com/business/opinion/2021/02/27/as-the-robots-arrive-we-have-to-remember-another-future-is-possible.html. 8.

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI
by Madhumita Murgia
Published 20 Mar 2024

When he left high school, he’d had to support his mother and sisters and hadn’t had the money to go to college. ‘Now I wanna be a developer. When I joined Sama, I was imagining that these things that we are doing here, it is a stepping stone to Tesla, the company, or the Tesla technology itself.’ The mention of Tesla tickles Benja. ‘I saw that guy, Elon Musk, on TV. I said hey, that guy, I’m building his car!’ Ian wants to eventually start his own business, a dream of many Nairobi locals I meet both within and outside Kibera. ‘You know, causing chaos on the streets, that was the order of the day,’ he says. ‘You pick it up from your brothers and sisters.

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She had joined OpenAI a few years previously when it was a non-profit research lab with a single goal: to create an artificial form of ‘general intelligence’, AI software able to perform any task at the same level of competence as human beings. It had been set up by radical tech entrepreneurs including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel out of a concern that AI would end up destroying the human race. Their solution? To fund the creation of a benevolent AI system that they could control to do good, not evil. But then, the organization transformed. OpenAI took a hefty investment of more than $10bn from Microsoft and converted itself into what was, for all intents and purposes, a for-profit enterprise that sold AI technologies to large corporations and governments around the world.4 OpenAI’s crown jewel was an algorithm called GPT – the Generative Pre-trained Transformer – software that could produce text-based answers in response to human queries.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
by George Packer
Published 4 Mar 2014

But it became clear that setting up an account on the PayPal website, which enabled transactions with anyone who had an e-mail address, was a far more popular way to send money than trying to get Palm Pilots to mate on a restaurant table (the mobile Internet was in its earliest, glitch-ridden stage). The e-mail idea seemed so simple that it would be only a matter of time before competitors figured it out. The pace grew even more frantic, with hundred-hour workweeks. The most dangerous competitor, X.com, founded by a South African immigrant named Elon Musk, was located just four blocks up University Avenue. Confinity held daily meetings on the war with X.com. One day, an engineer displayed a schematic of an actual bomb that he’d designed. The idea was quickly shelved. With his funding Thiel went on a hiring spree. He wasn’t looking for industry experience but for people he knew, people who were incredibly smart, people who were like him, Stanford friends like Reid Hoffman, Stanford Review alums like David Sacks and Keith Rabois, and Confinity’s cramped, spartan offices above a bike shop soon filled with carelessly dressed, badly groomed men in their twenties (Thiel was one of the oldest at thirty-two), chess players, math whizzes, libertarians, without distracting obligations like wives and children or time-wasting hobbies like sports and TV (one applicant was turned down because he admitted to enjoying shooting hoops).

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He assumed that the more optimistic candidate would always win. He assumed that things were still fundamentally working. For example, what about the information age? Wasn’t it working unbelievably well? Thiel, whom it had made rich, no longer thought so. At Café Venetia in downtown Palo Alto—the spot where Thiel and Elon Musk had decided over coffee in 2001 to take PayPal public, five blocks up University Avenue from the original offices of PayPal, which were across the street from the original offices of Facebook and the current offices of Palantir, six miles from the Google campus in Mountain View, less than a mile in one direction and half a block in the other direction from that secular temple of the new economy known as an Apple Store, in the heart of the heart of Silicon Valley, surrounded by tables full of trim, healthy, downwardly dressed people using Apple devices while discussing idea creation and angel investments—Thiel pulled an iPhone out of his jeans pocket and said, “I don’t consider this to be a technological breakthrough.”

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Biology joined with computation to extend life: that was the kind of radical future where Thiel was placing his effort and money. In the deadly race between politics and technology, he was investing in robotics (robot-driven cars would put an end to congestion, and not one more road would have to be built in America). After the sale of PayPal, Thiel’s old colleague Elon Musk had gone on to found a company called SpaceX, to make commercial space exploration affordable, and Founders Fund became the first outside investor, with $20 million. Through his foundation, Thiel funded research in nanotechnology. He gave $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation, whose goal was to reverse human aging, and he supported a nonprofit called Humanity Plus, dedicated to transhumanism—the transformation of the human condition through technology.

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction
by Alec Nevala-Lee
Published 22 Oct 2018

Paul Krugman “I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon.” Seldon was the inventor of the science of psychohistory in the Foundation series. Paul Krugman, “Asimov’s Foundation novels grounded my economics,” The Guardian, December 4, 2012. Elon Musk “[Musk] was influenced, he says, by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, a science fiction saga in which a galactic empire falls and ushers in a dark age.” Rory Carroll, “Elon Musk’s mission to Mars,” The Guardian, July 17, 2013. Newt Gingrich “While Toynbee was impressing me with the history of civilizations, Isaac Asimov was shaping my view of the future in equally profound ways. . . .

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Campbell’s magazine counted Albert Einstein and the scientists of Bell Labs among its subscribers, and it made an indelible impression on such fans as the young Carl Sagan, who stumbled across it in a candy store: “A glance at the cover and a quick riffle through the interior showed me it was what I had been looking for. . . . I was hooked. Each month I eagerly awaited the arrival of Astounding.” Public figures of all political persuasions—from Paul Krugman to Elon Musk to Newt Gingrich—have confessed to being influenced by its stories. Campbell and his writers were creating nothing less than a shared vision of the future, which inevitably informs how we approach the present. Science fiction’s track record for prediction is decidedly mixed, but at its finest, it was a proving ground for entire fields—such as artificial intelligence, which frequently invokes the Three Laws of Robotics—that wouldn’t exist for decades.

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success
by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown
Published 24 Apr 2017

Drew and I brainstormed with an intern Drew had roped into the effort, Albert Ni, and together we decided to create a referral program like the one PayPal had implemented to great success. The only catch was that the PayPal program had offered to deposit $10 into the user’s PayPal account, in exchange for referrals, and though the total cost had not been disclosed (cofounder Elon Musk has since revealed that it amounted to some $60 to $70 million), there was no way Dropbox could afford to “buy” users to achieve the level of growth they were looking for.6 Then it hit us: What if we could offer people something else they clearly valued highly—more storage space—in exchange for referrals?

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Jackson, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth (WND Books: 2012), 35–40. 5. Josh Elman, “3 Growth Hacks: The Secrets to Driving Massive User Growth,” filmed August 2013; posted on YouTube August 2013, youtube.com/watch?v=AaMqCWOfA1o. 6. “Conversation with Elon Musk,” online video clip, Khan Academy, April 17, 2013. Accessed September 13, 2016. 7. LeanStartup.co, “Dropbox @ Startup Lessons Learned Conference 2010,” July 2, 2014, youtube.com/watch?v=y9hg-mUx8sE. 8. Douglas MacMillan, “Chasing Facebook’s Next Billion Users,” Bloomberg.com, July 26, 2012, bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-07-25/chasing-facebooks-next-billion-users. 9.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by Naomi Klein
Published 12 Jun 2017

It’s about being willing to engage in a battle of ideas—during and, more importantly, between elections—that will take on the corrosive, and deeply bipartisan, wealth-worshiping worldview that created the backlash in the first place. Unless progressives learn to speak to the legitimate rage at the grotesque levels of inequality that exist right now, the Right is going to keep winning. There is no superhero enlightened billionaire coming to save us from the villains in power. Not Oprah, not Zuckerberg, and not Elon Musk. We’re going to have to save ourselves, by coming together as never before. And in 2016 we caught a glimpse of that potential. CHAPTER SEVEN LEARN TO LOVE ECONOMIC POPULISM Bernie Sanders is the only candidate for US president I have ever openly backed. I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with candidate endorsements.

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Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, came out strongly against Clinton during the primaries, arguing that her track record on criminal justice and welfare meant she did not deserve the Black vote. But she also chose not to publicly endorse Sanders. The most urgent message of the 2016 election, she told me, is: “If progressives think they can win in the long run without engaging meaningfully with Black folks and taking racial history more seriously, they better get Elon Musk on speed dial and start planning their future home on Mars, because this planet will be going up in smoke.” It’s a message we need to learn fast. Because if Left populist candidates keep missing the mark, and Democrats keep putting up establishment candidates in their place, there is every reason to expect an increasingly belligerent Right to keep on winning.

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence
by Richard Yonck
Published 7 Mar 2017

These are huge questions, as enormous and perhaps as difficult to answer as whether or not computers will ever be capable of genuinely experiencing emotions. As it happens, the two questions may be intimately interlinked. Recently a number of notable luminaries, scientists, and entrepreneurs have expressed their concerns about the potential for runaway AI and superintelligent machines. Physicist Stephen Hawking, engineer and inventor Elon Musk, and philosopher Nick Bostrom have all issued stern warnings of what may happen as we move ever closer to computers that are able to think and reason as well as or perhaps even better than human beings. At the same time, several computer scientists, psychologists, and other researchers have stated that the many challenges we face in developing thinking machines shows we have little to be concerned about.

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This brings us full circle in the possible plots for this long-playing buddy movie. Rather than fighting this extensive, highly successful coevolution, perhaps our best course of action is to embrace and continue it, which would essentially mean our eventual merging with technology. Such hybridization would result in what Elon Musk has referred to as “an AI-human symbiote.” While many people will balk at such a development, recall that we have been merging with technology for a very long time already. Spectacles, ear trumpets, and crutches made out of tree limbs have given way to corneal transplants, cochlear implants, and bionic limbs.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
Published 19 Feb 2019

In “An Account of My Hut,” a memoir of Bay Area house-hunting and climate-apocalypse-watching in the 2017 California wildfire season—which was also the season of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma and Maria—Christina Nichol describes a conversation with a young family member who works in tech, to whom she tried to describe the unprecedentedness of the threat from climate change, unsuccessfully. “Why worry?” he replies. “Technology will take care of everything. If the Earth goes, we’ll just live in spaceships. We’ll have 3D printers to print our food. We’ll be eating lab meat. One cow will feed us all. We’ll just rearrange atoms to create water or oxygen. Elon Musk.” Elon Musk—it’s not the name of a man but a species-scale survival strategy. Nichol answers, “But I don’t want to live in a spaceship.” He looked genuinely surprised. In his line of work, he’d never met anyone who didn’t want to live in a spaceship. * * * — That technology might liberate us, collectively, from the strain of labor and material privation is a dream at least as old as John Maynard Keynes, who predicted his grandchildren would work only fifteen-hour weeks, and yet never ultimately fulfilled.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World
by Jevin D. West and Carl T. Bergstrom
Published 3 Aug 2020

Delving into the details of algorithmic auditing may be dull compared to drafting a Bill of Rights for robots, or devising ways to protect humanity against Terminator-like superintelligent machines. But to address the problems that AI is creating now, we need to understand the data and algorithms we are already using for more mundane purposes. There is a vast gulf between AI alarmism in the popular press, and the reality of where AI research actually stands. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and PayPal, warned US state governors at their national meeting in 2017 that AI posed a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” Around the same time, Fast Company fueled those fears with an article headlined “AI Is Inventing Languages Humans Can’t Understand.

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London: Longman and Co., 1864. Bloudoff-Indelicato, Mollie. “Have Bad Handwriting? The U.S. Postal Service Has Your Back.” Smithsonian. December 23, 2015. Bradley, Tony. “Facebook AI Creates Its Own Language in Creepy Preview of Our Potential Future.” Forbes. July 31, 2017. Domonoske, Camila. “Elon Musk Warns Governors: Artificial Intelligence Poses ‘Existential Risk.’ ” National Public Radio. July 17, 2017. Emery, David. “Did Facebook Shut Down an AI Experiment Because Chatbots Developed Their Own Language?” Snopes.com. August 1, 2017. Ginsberg, J., et al. “Detecting Influenza Epidemics Using Search Engine Query Data.”

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives
by Michael A. Heller and James Salzman
Published 2 Mar 2021

Nor do they rely on shaming and first mover advantages as in fast fashion conflicts. Instead, they can use secrecy and scale to control genetic resources without ownership. Secrecy is straightforward: the industry doesn’t publish its gene databases; it licenses access instead. Here secrecy substitutes for copyright; it can replace patents, too. For example, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, says, “We have essentially no patents. Our primary long-term competition is China. If we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book.” Savvy entrepreneurs often rely on discretion, not law. Scale also matters, wholly apart from ownership.

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Kristen Brown, a Bloomberg: Kristen Brown, “Deleting Your Online DNA Data Is Brutally Difficult,” Bloomberg, June 15, 2018. Today roughly two of every three: Murphy Heather, “Most White Americans’ DNA Can Be Identified Through Genealogy Databases,” New York Times, October 11, 2018. “We have essentially no patents”: Chris Anderson, “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Wired, October 21, 2012. “a sublicensable, worldwide”: AncestryDNA Terms and Conditions, accessed June 5, 2020. These terms change without notice—and that’s part of our point. “The average customer who”: Erin Brodwin, “DNA-testing Companies Like 23andMe Sell Your Genetic Data to Drugmakers and Other Silicon Valley Startups,” Business Insider, August 3, 2018.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
by Nouriel Roubini
Published 17 Oct 2022

Investors in the crypto space use leverage, up to one hundred times capital on some exchanges, meaning small fluctuations can wipe out positions. As these practices proliferate, a new species of debt may elevate systemic risk. If nothing restrains the mining of cryptocurrencies, collateral social costs may pile up. Creating cryptocurrency already consumes so much energy that Tesla founder Elon Musk, who briefly embraced bitcoin as payment for his electric cars, reversed policy. The high environmental cost of the data mining that bitcoin demands clashes with the mission of a car company that is weaning automobiles off fossil fuels. Crypto assets are energy hogs, using as much energy as the Netherlands or Argentina.

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Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom, the author of Superintelligence, ranks artificial intelligence next to giant asteroid strikes and nuclear war as an existential threat to humanity. The late mathematician Stephen Hawking worried that AI “could spell the end of the human race.” That is why he suggested that humans should move to other planets—as the machine will take over not only all jobs but also the human race. Tesla founder Elon Musk welcomes AI that controls electric cars his company makes, but putting AI in ultimate charge worries him. “It’s fine if you’ve got Marcus Aurelius as the emperor,” Musk told The Economist, “but not so good if you have Caligula.”44 No one knows how long it will take for severe structural technological unemployment to make most workers irrelevant.

How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, From Home Renovations to Space Exploration
by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
Published 16 Feb 2023

One of the world’s leaders in hydroelectricity, Norway, a country of just 5 million inhabitants, has an active policy to enhance small hydro development and has commissioned more than 350 small-scale hydroelectric projects since 2003, with more to come.18 A giant factory, too, may seem to be one huge thing or nothing. But when Elon Musk announced that Tesla would build Gigafactory 1 (today known as Giga Nevada), the world’s largest factory by footprint, he envisioned it in modular terms. His Lego was a small factory. Build one, get it working. Build another beside it and integrate the two. Build a third, a fourth, and so on. By building Gigafactory 1 this way, Tesla started turning out batteries and earning revenue within a year of the announcement, even as work continued on the whole giant facility, which will consist of twenty-one “Lego blocks” when completed.19 The key elements of modularity appear to be central to Elon Musk’s general approach to engineering, and he uses them in remarkably different ventures.

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By building Gigafactory 1 this way, Tesla started turning out batteries and earning revenue within a year of the announcement, even as work continued on the whole giant facility, which will consist of twenty-one “Lego blocks” when completed.19 The key elements of modularity appear to be central to Elon Musk’s general approach to engineering, and he uses them in remarkably different ventures. Tesla would seem to have nothing to do with SpaceX, a Musk creation that is revolutionizing space transport and services. But the use of replicability to shoot up the learning curve, accelerate delivery, and improve performance is woven into the company’s planning and delivery model.20 Space has long been dominated by big, complex one-off projects, and priced accordingly, with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope—$8.8 billion, 450 percent over budget—just the latest example.

Living in a Material World: The Commodity Connection
by Kevin Morrison
Published 15 Jul 2008

The Indian-born entrepreneur has his own investment firm, Khosla Partners, which has a portfolio of renewable energy investments from cellulosic ethanol to solar technology, plastics, building materials and electrical efficiency. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are investors in Nanosolar, a solar-film technology group, and are promoters of plug-in cars as well as trying to make the company carbon-neutral. PayPal founder Elon Musk, who sold his electronic payments company to Ebay for $1.5 billion, has become the major financier of Tesla, the electric sports car. Craig Venter, pioneer of the human genome that cracked the DNA code first, is applying the same technique to plants in an effort to make biofuels from plants more effectively.

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This is the spearhead of General Motors’ campaign to catch up with Toyota Motor Company, the maker of the hybrid pioneering car, the Prius. Launched in Japan in 1997, the Prius is a hit in Europe and the US. With ‘green technology’ the new economy of the 21st century, entrepreneurs see an opportunity for electric vehicles including Telsa Motors, founded by internet mogul Elon Musk, as do university research departments at points around the US, the UK, Europe and Japan; all of which will require more copper. Motor vehicles are big polluters; combined with air travel, transport as a whole accounts for 14% of global emissions each year. It has been 192 | LIVING IN A MATERIAL WORLD the fastest growing source of emissions because of continued increases in car transport and the rapid expansion of air travel (Stern, 2006).

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work
by Iain Gately
Published 6 Nov 2014

The California High Speed Rail (CHSR) is budgeted at US$68 billion and projected to be in operation by 2029. The journey time between its headline destinations will be about three hours. Its locomotives and carriages will be painted in the California state colours of blue and gold. The project, however, has had a spoke thrown in its wheels in the form of a counterproposal by Elon Musk, a forty-two-year-old South African-born entrepreneur, who co-founded PayPal and is now CEO of both Tesla Motors and SpaceX. Tesla is the first-ever electrical car manufacturer to turn a profit, and SpaceX the first private company to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. Musk’s success is down to flair and lateral thinking.

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There would be arrivals and departures at each station every second, and ramps on and off at every road intersection. Auto-commuting and rapid transit would be yin and yang – two parts of the same unity. Perhaps a golden age of commuting is on its way. Unfortunately, it’s doubtful that it will be with us before Elon Musk retires to Mars. If basic comforts are unlikely to appear on public transport before Generation Now turn into pensioners, might it not be better to wish for, and work towards, an end to commuting altogether? If it can’t be perfect, then why have it at all? Two distinct schools of thought have prophesied the death of rush hour in centuries to come.

An Optimist's Tour of the Future
by Mark Stevenson
Published 4 Dec 2010

Another reason was that SpaceShipOne provided a real-world demonstration of cheap commercial spaceflight. A number of commercial spaceflight companies have popped up in the last decade, most funded by billionaires looking for a new challenge and/or some ego food. Some are beginning to do serious business. Los Angeles-based SpaceX (founded in 2002 by PayPal founder Elon Musk) has already secured launch contracts from NASA and commercial satellite developers. The company claims it has developed all the flight hardware for its Falcon 9 orbital rocket, the Dragon spacecraft that is designed to sit on top of it, as well as three launch sites for less than the cost of one of NASA’s launch towers – all while making a profit.

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As we talk, it starts to rain, the downpour drumming loudly on the corrugated metal roof. ‘Not everyone has picked up on the David and Goliath aspect of XCOR,’ says Jeff. ‘Richard Branson is pouring more money into Virgin Galactic in a month than we’ve spent in our history. You’ve got NASA doing billions and billions of dollars of its thing. Elon Musk pouring all of his money into SpaceX. Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos is funding Blue Origin …’ And yet, despite their underdog status, XCOR keeps being mentioned in the same breath as its far better-funded rivals. Talking to Jeff you don’t get any sense of ego. He’s trying to run a business – it just happens to be one that wants to make spaceplanes.

The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press)
by Terrence J. Sejnowski
Published 27 Sep 2018

When AlphaGo convincingly beat Lee Sedol at Go in 2016, it fueled a reaction that had been building over the last several years concerning the 24 Chapter 1 dangers that artificial intelligence might present to humans. Computer scientists signed pledges not to use AI for military purposes. Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates made public statements warning of the existential threat posed by AI. Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs set up a new company, OpenAI, with a one-billion-dollar nest egg and hired Ilya Sutskever, one of Geoffrey Hinton’s former students, to be its first director. Although OpenAI’s stated goal was to ensure that future AI discoveries would be publicly available for all to use, it had another, implicit and more important goal—to prevent private companies from doing evil.

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Although the optimal solution would be a judicious balance between profit and fairness, the trade-off must be made explicit in the cost function, which requires that someone decide how to weight each goal. The ethical perspective of those in the humanities and social sciences should inform these trade-offs. But we must always keep in mind that choosing a cost function that seems fair may have unintended consequences.29 Calls to regulate the use of AI have come from Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking as well as legislators and researchers. An open letter signed by 3,722 AI and robotics researchers in 2015 called for a ban on autonomous weapons: In summary, we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so.

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All
by Robert Elliott Smith
Published 26 Jun 2019

Read it if you want to stay human.’ DR ANASTASIA DEDYUKHINA, Founder of Consciously Digital and author of Homo Distractus ‘When the crowd at Comic Con talk of Robot Overlords, it can be disregarded as a fantasy far detached from real life. When you hear that a crowd of world-class technologists and scientists, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, have publicly voiced their concerns that advanced AI technologies could pose an existential threat to humanity – trouble on the scale of climate change, bioplague and large asteroids – you really have to wonder what’s going on. Rage Inside the Machine is a guide to how we got here, conceptually and historically.

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One theory is that personal computers were essentially gaming systems and marketed specifically to men, but a more likely explanation may be that once the role shifted from relative obscurity to a high-profile, highly paid career, then entrenched social bias deemed the role better suited to (mainly white) men, fostering a ‘brogrammer’ culture, with alienating fringe elements like the ‘manosphere’, which has probably played a substantial role in moving women out of the field, and implicitly shifting perceptions towards computer science being something women shouldn’t (and perhaps can’t) do. Computer scientists like Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are now not only enormously rich, but world famous. They have a position in society that far exceeds that of Edwards, Wollstonecraft, Lovelace or Taylor-Mill, and there are no contemporary female equivalents to them. In opening a 2005 debate on the issue of the relative abilities of men and women in science, then Harvard University President (and former Treasury Secretary under US President Clinton) Larry Summers made comments that were interpreted as endorsing the idea that women may be innately inferior to men in that regard, prompting widespread outrage and condemnation.12 However, far more interesting was the content of the actual debate, which pitted two Harvard psychologists against one another.

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power
by Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck
Published 14 Sep 2020

Many commentators delighted in echoes of today’s Saudi Arabia in the film’s story: It’s about a young king who must decide whether to hide his jungle kingdom from, or engage with, the outside world. That was one side of a frenzied 2018 for Mohammed, a year in which he would push through social and economic transformation plans at a dizzying pace and in full public view. In the coming months he would meet with presidents, CEOs, and tech billionaires including Elon Musk and Bill Gates, publicly proclaiming an open and innovative future for Saudi Arabia. He would make massive commitments to virtual reality and solar power and cutting-edge urban planning. “The most influential Arab leader. Transforming the world at 32,” blared the cover of an unfamiliar magazine titled The New Kingdom (priced at $13.99) that showed up on newsstands across the United States just ahead of the prince’s visit.

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They told Ambassador Dennis Horak, who was on vacation in Toronto, that he wasn’t welcome back. Then they canceled trade deals with Canada, withdrew Saudi students studying there, and publicly accused Canada of meddling in local affairs. Controversy continued to surround Mohammed and his initiatives through the summer of 2018. In August, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he was considering taking the company private and later said that he was discussing the deal with the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF). Federal officials suspected Musk was trying to juice his company’s stock price, and the US Department of Justice called in PIF chief Yasir al-Rumayyan for an interview.

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World
by Tim Marshall
Published 14 Oct 2021

The ISS is a floating lily pad, one of many which will be built as we hop further from home. The lessons learnt there are part of the journey. Space travel is no longer only the domain of powerful states. Getting out there is becoming cheaper and within reach of private companies, so we can expect competition for the Moon’s resources. Elon Musk, a co-founder of PayPal and the entrepreneur behind Tesla cars, is fanatical about getting humans to Mars within his lifetime (possibly in this decade). His company SpaceX has been carrying cargo to the ISS for years and in 2020 took two NASA astronauts there. Musk figured out how to reduce costs by introducing reusable rockets.

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Rushdie) 52 satellite technology/networks xv–xvi, 30–1, 132, 303, 304, 306, 313, 314, 315, 316–18 Saud, Crown Prince 84 Saud, King Abd Allah al 80 Saud, Muhammad ibn 74, 78, 79 Saudi Arabia xiii, xiv, 44, 47, 57, 58, 61, 69, 186 Al-Qaeda 88–90 anti-television protests 85 Covid-19 99 Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman 90–1, 92–7, 102–4 Crown Prince Saud 84 early Saud dynasty 74–5, 78–82 Eastern Province 77, 82, 97, 99, 104 employment 98–9, 101, 104 Empty Quarter 76 Fahd of Saudi Arabia 87 Faisal I of Saudi Arabia 84–5 First Saudi State 79–80 foreign population/workforce 98–9 geography 75–7 Ibn Saud 80–3 investment in the Sahel 219, 233–4 Islamist terrorism 88–90, 104 Jeddah 77, 99 Khalid of Saudi Arabia 85–7 land borders 76 Libyan Civil War 92 Mecca 77, 78, 79, 81, 84, 86, 99 Medina 77, 79, 81, 84 murder of Jamal Khashoggi 94–5 Najd 78–9, 80, 81 National Guard 87, 88, 96 Neom city project 99 oil supplies 75, 76, 77, 82–3, 84, 85, 93, 96, 97–8, 99–100, 101–2, 104 Osama Bin Laden 75, 87, 88–9, 104 population size 75, 83, 98–9 Rashidi dynasty 80–1 relationship with China 102 relationship with France 86 relationship with Iran 91–2, 93, 94, 103 relationship with Israel 102–3 relationship with Lebanon 93–4 relationship with post-war Iraq 91 relationship with Qatar 92, 258 relationship with Syria 91–2 relationship with United Kingdom 81–3 relationship with USA xiv, 75, 83–4, 85, 87–9, 93, 102, 104 religious extremism 75, 85, 88–90, 104 renewable energy 101 resignation of Saad al-Hariri 93–4 Riyadh 77, 80–1, 99, 177 Saud family arrests at the Ritz Carlton 96–7 Shia Islam 77, 79, 97, 99, 104 siege of the Grand Mosque 86–7 slavery 84 Sunni Islam 77, 79, 91 (see also Wahhabism) Vision 2030 98–9 Wahhabism 79, 86, 87, 89–90, 97, 104 water supplies 100–1 Yemen Civil War 93 Saudi Aramco 83, 85, 98, 100 SAVAK 50 Schinas, Alexandros 151 Scotland Act of Union (1707) 116 alliance with France 117, 118 colony in Panama 117–18 independence xv, 109, 118, 133, 134–7 Scotti tribe settlement 114 wars with England 115, 117 Second Balkan War 151–2 Second World War ix–x, 23–4, 49, 83, 84, 122–3, 126, 136, 153–4, 181, 249, 303 Serbia x, 151, 152, 185, 293–4 Shammar, emirate of 74, 79, 80 sharia law 88, 186, 213, 214 Shatt al-Arab waterway 39, 42 Shia Islam xi, xiv, 42, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 57–8, 59, 61, 68, 91, 104 Iran 42, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 57–8, 59, 61, 68, 91, 94 Saudi Arabia 74–5, 77, 79, 93, 97, 99, 104 Sidi Yahya mosque 213–14 Sisi, General Abdel Fattah el- 92, 187, 261–2 SKY Perfect Corporation 318 slavery 84, 121, 208, 209, 249, 261 Society of Pathseekers of the Islamic Revolution 54 Soleimani, Qasem 62 Solomon Islands 28 Solomon, King 246 Somalia 242, 243, 244, 250, 251, 252, 258–9 South China Sea 26, 31–2 South Korea 31, 32 South Pacific 27–9 South Sudan 210, 242, 262 Southeastern Anatolia Project 192–3 Soviet Union 17, 25, 49, 50, 87, 123, 154, 161, 304 see also Russia space xv–xvi Artemis Accords 302–3, 309 asteroid 3554 Amun 324 astropolitical theory/space geography 311–14 Chinese exploration 314 colonizing the Moon 302 commercial companies 308 development of rocket technology 303–4 Earth boundaries 310 Earth Space/low Earth orbit 312–14 Elon Musk/SpaceX 308, 319–20 extraterrestrial life forms 322–3 first moon landing 303, 304, 305 governmental frameworks 302–3, 309–11, 324–5 imagining the future 319–25 International Space Station (ISS) 303, 306, 307–8 Jeff Bezos/Blue Origin 308 junk/debris 318 Laika the dog 304 meteor strikes 325 militarization of 314–19 mining the moon 302, 309 Moon ‘safety zones’ 309 Moon Treaty (1979) 310–11 Neil Armstrong 304, 305 Outer Space Treaty (1967) 309–11, 315 the Pioneer Plaque 323 Skylab space station 306 Soyuz/Apollo docking (1975) 306, 325 Space Shuttle missions 305–6, 307 speed of travel 321–2 Sputnik satellites 304 travel to Mars 308, 313 water-recovery system 307 Yuri Gagarin 304–5 Spain xv, 118, 119, 210, 219, 234 attempted coup (1981) 288 attempted invasion of England 278–9 Basque Country 269, 279, 284, 289–90 Catalan referendums for independence 292–3, 294 Catalonia 269, 279–80, 282, 284, 287, 289, 291–6 Civil War 282–4 colonialism 277, 280–1 Columbus, Christopher 276–7 ETA (Euzkadi ta Askatasuna) 290–1 EU and NATO 289, 293–4, 297 Francisco Franco 282–7 geography 268, 270–2 historical invasions 273–4 hydroelectric power 272 Inquisition 275–6 internal tensions 268–9, 272 see also Basque Country; Catalonia Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain 275–6, 277 King Juan Carlos 287–9 King Philip II 278 Latin American gold 277 Latin American rebellions 280–1 La Guerra dels Segadors 279 maritime vulnerability 277–8 medieval fortresses 268 migrants and refugees 297 military force and conflicts 271, 274–5, 277–81 military support in the Sahel 297 Moors 271–2 Muslim invaders/settlement 273–4, 275, 276 naval defence 271, 296–7 population size 270, 280 Reconquista Iberia 274–5 relationship with France 279–80 relationship with the USA 286–7 Roman occupation 273 Visigoths 273 water supplies 271–2 Spartacus film 46 Sputnik satellites 304 Stafford, Thomas P. 306 Standard Oil Company of California (SOCAL) 83 Starshot/space sails project 322 Stolen Generation, Australian 12 Strait of Hormuz 43–4, 61 Suarez, Adolfo 288 Sudan 210, 242, 262 Suez Canal 120, 151, 180 Sunni Islam xi, 42, 47, 51, 57–8, 59, 64, 174, 187 Fulani 222 Iran 42, 47, 51, 57–8, 59, 64 Muslim Brotherhood 186 Salafists 223 Saudi Arabia/Wahhabism 75, 77, 79, 86, 87, 89–90, 91, 97 Sweden 126, 131, 218 Syria xii, 57, 61, 68, 69, 81, 85, 103, 143, 166, 192, 193, 195–6, 198 Civil War xi, 47, 58, 63, 91–2, 131, 173, 177, 187–8, 233 T Taiwan 28, 30, 231 takfiri ideology 223 Taliban 89, 232 Tamerlane 40 Tasmania 20 Taylor, Griffith 7–8 Tehran, Iran 42 Tejero, Lieutenant-Colonel 288 Temple of Jerusalem 45 Ten Pound Poms 17 Tesla 101 Tewodros II, Emperor 248 The Times 227 Thessalonika (Salonika) 151, 153, 154 Thiele, Heike 219 Thomas, Bertram 76 Those Who Sign in Blood 215 Thucydides 142 Timbuktu 213 Tomyris 45 Tonga 29 Torres Straight Islanders 13–14 Treaty of Lausanne (1923) 153, 189–90 Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) 277 Troy, siege of 158 Truman, Harry S. 286 Trump, Donald xii, 25, 61–2, 93, 315–16 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin 303–4 Tuareg people 205, 211, 212, 213, 214, 219, 234–5 Tudors 115 Tunguska meteor 325 Turkey xiii, xv, 42, 48, 92, 94–5, 96 Aegean Sea 142, 143, 191 Anatolia 172, 173, 174, 175, 191–3, 197 Arab Uprisings (2011) 185–6 Armenian genocide 164, 180, 188 arms manufacture 198 attempted coup (2016) 188–9 Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul 148–9, 152, 174–5, 178, 179 dams and water supplies 192–3 defence 172, 175–7 General Kemal Atatürk 152–3, 179–81, 196, 199 geography 172, 173, 176 Hagia Sophia 196–7 industrialisation 180–1 languages 179–80 Lausanne Treaty (1923) 189–90 Mavi Vatan/Blue Homeland strategy 189–90, 198 Mediterranean gas fields 142, 162–3, 190 migrant/refugee crisis 157, 188 military coups 182 and NATO 163, 164–6, 181, 188–9, 191, 197–8, 199 Osman Ghazi 174 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan 183–9, 191, 194, 195–7, 198–9, 258 relationship with Cyprus 143, 161–2, 198 relationship with Egypt 186–7, 198, 258, 259 relationship with Ethiopia 259 relationship with France 164, 198 relationship with Greece 142, 143, 147, 152–3, 158–60, 161–3, 179, 190, 198 relationship with Israel 185–6 relationship with Russia 190–1 relationship with Somalia 259 relationship with Syria 187–8, 192, 193, 195–6 relationship with the Kurds 175, 181, 182, 187, 192, 193–5 relationship with UAE 258 sanctions 191 Second Balkan War 152 Second World War 181 Seljuk Empire 173–4 War of Independence 152–3, 179 Westernization 179–80 see also Ottoman Empire Turkmen, Iranian 42 U Ukraine xi, 175 unipolar decade (1990s) x United Arab Emirates (UAE) 44, 57, 76, 80, 92, 102–3, 186, 198, 219, 258–9, 262 United Kingdom xiii Acts of Union (1707) 109, 116, 117–18, 133 Anglo-Persian Oil Company 48, 49 Anglo-Saxons 110, 114 armed forces 131, 134–5, 136, 165, 218, 219, 249 (see also Royal Air Force; Royal Navy) Brexit xv, 108, 127, 136 British Empire 118–22, 123–4, 148, 150–1, 161, 210, 308 Catalonian independence 295–6 Celtic Britain 112–13 colonialism 108, 117, 121, 210 Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act (1900) 15 defeat the Spanish Armada 278 dialects 110–11 east–west divide 111, 113–14 education system 132–3 EEC and EU 125–7, 129, 131–2, 136, 164 EFTA membership 295 English language 132 geography 108, 109–10, 111 German invasion plans 122–3 historical invasions 113–15 industrial revolution 111 intelligence network 30, 129, 135 Iranian military coup (1953) 49–50 Ireland 109–10 LEJOG cycle route 110 London 112, 113, 115, 249 Magna Carta 115 MI6 49 military support in the Sahel 218, 219, 235 Napoleonic wars 119–20 Norman invasion 114–15 nuclear submarines 134–5, 136 place names 110–11 population distribution 112 Reformation 116 relationship with Australia 22, 23 relationship with China 128, 130 relationship with France 130–1, 133 relationship with Germany 121–2, 133 relationship with Iran 40 relationship with Poland 130 relationship with Saudi Arabia 81–3, 84 relationship with Scotland 109 relationship with USA 121–2, 123–4, 126, 128–9, 130 Roman occupation 112–13 Scottish independence xv, 109, 118, 133, 134–7, 296 Second World War 122–3 terrain and infrastructure 111–12 trade deals 128–30 Tudors 115 Vikings 110–11, 114 Wales 112, 113, 115–16 United Nations 28, 53, 60, 68, 84, 132, 161–2, 204, 218, 219, 225, 231, 249, 285, 310, 311 United States of America x Apollo space missions 303, 305–6 armed forces 23, 24, 30, 31, 61–2 assassination of Qasem Soleimani 63 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 30–1, 49 commercial space travel 308 Constitution 115 embassies burnt 86 embassy siege, Iran 60–1 Greek Civil War 154 intelligence network 30–1, 61, 129 International Space Station 307 invasion of Iraq (2003) 57 Iranian military coup (1953) 49–50 Louisiana Purchase 119 militarization of space 314–19 military coup, Cyprus (1974) 161 National Space Policy 319 Pact of Madrid 286–7 Quadrilateral Security Dialogue 32 rare-earth supplies 229–30, 231 relationship with Australia 23, 24–5, 30 relationship with Ethiopia 249, 251, 261 relationship with Greece 154, 165–6 relationship with Iran 39, 44, 49, 60–2, 63, 68–9 relationship with Saudi Arabia xiv, 83–4, 85, 87–9, 93, 102, 104 relationship with the UK 121–2, 123–4, 126, 128–9, 130 relationship with Turkey 189, 191 resignation of Lebanese prime minister 94 Russian ‘stalking’ satellites 316–17 Sahel Alliance commitments 219, 220–1, 232 satellite-killer systems 317–18 Second World War 23 Skylab space station 306 Soyuz/Apollo docking 306 Space Force 303, 314–16 stock-market crash (1929) 181 Strategic Petroleum Reserves 22 in the West Pacific 24–5 uranium production 227–8, 230 V V-2 rockets 303 Van Allen radiation belts 314 Vanuatu 28 Velayat-e faqih 52 Versailles Treaty (1919) 303 Victoria, Queen 15, 150 Victory, HMS 119 Vienna 176–7 Vietnam 24, 30, 32 Vietnamese ‘boat people’ 17 Vikings 110–11, 114 Visigoths 273 Vision 2030 98–9 von Braun, Wernher 303 voting rights 12–13, 50 Voulet-Chanoine expedition (1898/99) 209–10 Voulet, Paul 209–10 W Wahhab clan 79, 86 Wahhab, Muhammad ibn Abd al- 79 Wahhabism 79, 81, 87, 89–90, 97, 104 Wales 112, 113, 115–16 ‘walkabout,’ Australia 6–7 Wall Street Journal 231 ‘White Australia’ Policy 16–17 Whitson, Peggy 307 William the Conqueror 114–15 Wilson, Edward 12 Witiza, King 273 women’s rights 52, 65, 97, 98, 283 World Bank 219, 225 Y Yemen 44, 57, 61, 68, 69, 76, 77 Civil War 47, 93, 258 Yugoslavia x, 154, 160 Yugoslav Wars 17, 182–3 Z Zagros Mountains 39, 42, 44–5, 53 Zayed, Prince Mohammed bin 102 Zenawi, Meles 252 Ziyad, Tariq ibn 273–4 Zoroastrianism 45, 46 First published 2021 by Elliott and Thompson Limited 2 John Street London WC1N 2ES www.eandtbooks.com ISBN: 978-1-78396-538-0 Copyright © Tim Marshall 2021 The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

It was a great invention for a Silicon Valley libertarian boys’ club but of limited use to the rest of the country. Confinity was also not the only digital-payments company around. It wasn’t even the only digital-payments company in its office building. Across the hall was X.com, an online bank founded by Elon Musk, whose city-directory platform, Zip2, was bought by Compaq for a touch over $300 million and no good reason. Musk, like Balwani and Kalanick and Graham and Cuban and such, was one of those lucky late-1990s founders who cashed out on an ultimately worthless web start-up, in his case for a personal share of around $20 million.44 Confinity and X.com raised tens of millions of dollars each, but they were pissing it all away on referrals, bribing users in cash to sign up and again to rope other people in.

…

The peak of Thiel’s power came when he assumed the role of White House liaison to Silicon Valley, sitting at the president’s left hand while executives kissed the Trump ring. In the room were the industry’s elite: Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos, Sheryl Sandberg for Facebook, Eric Schmidt for Google, and the CEOs of Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle. Thiel also invited reps from a couple of smaller firms: Karp from Palantir and Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX. It was a classic Hoover-style meeting, bringing a sector’s corporate leadership together with federal leadership, not to command but to pat backs and work out their common interests, which centered on competition from China. After this meeting, these firms grew willing and even eager to deal with the government directly: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft pursued and won tens of billions in security contracts, edging into the territory of traditional prime contractors.71 Trump gripped his adviser Thiel’s right hand awkwardly, with both of his.

…

To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”i Today, capital’s ambition extends farther than Rhodes dared to hope: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are leading the capitalist charge into space with their respective Blue Origin and SpaceX firms. Musk hopes to colonize Mars, and Bezos told a morning news show that “we can move all heavy industry and all polluting industry off of Earth and operate it in space.”7 There is always another frontier, if you know where to look.

Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed
by Laurie Kilmartin
Published 13 Feb 2018

The next Marie Curie is a college senior right now, waiting to be talked out of applying to law school. But first things first. Every feared rapper is in a beef, nerds need to be called out too. START A BEEF: Stop writing “Dad lost his battle with cancer.” Instead, cast some blame in the obit: “Elon Musk failed to cure Dad’s leukemia.” “Peter Thiel did nothing as Mom’s heart gave out.” Neither statement is incorrect. Let’s see if those two fight back, with a cure. MONEY MAKE PATIENTS PAY A “YOU SAVED MY LIFE” COMMISSION: A doctor or a scientist gives a sick person 5, 10, maybe 40 more years of life.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
by Brad Stone
Published 14 Oct 2013

In an interview I conducted with Bezos in 2000, I asked him what he was reading. He talked about Robert Zubrin’s books Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization and The Case for Mars. At the end of the conversation, I wondered when some brave Silicon Valley entrepreneur would start a private space company (this was two years before PayPal cofounder Elon Musk started his rocket company SpaceX). Bezos’s answer seemed particularly convoluted. “It’s a very hard technical problem and I think it’s very hard to see how you would generate a return in a reasonable amount of time on that investment,” he said. “So the answer to your question is probably yes, there probably is somebody doing it, but it’s not… when you go to venture capital conferences, it never comes up.

…

“Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we’re signed up for this to be hard,” Bezos wrote in a blog post on the Blue Origin website.13 A year after that, the company successfully tested the spaceship’s crew-capsule escape system. It has received two grants from NASA worth more than $25 million to develop technologies related to human spaceflight. Internet magnate Elon Musk, with SpaceX, and billionaire Richard Branson, the founder of an enterprise called Virgin Galactic, are pursuing some of the same goals. Bezos does not allow the public or media to tour his space facilities. In 2006, the company moved to larger headquarters in Kent, Washington, twenty miles south of Seattle.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy
by Christopher Mims
Published 13 Sep 2021

However they will ultimately leave the port, most containers are carried into the container yard, the place where they idle between being taken off a ship and being put on some sort of intermodal transport, like a train or truck. (The Port of Hamburg is exploring using a Hyperloop, the ultrafast transport system proposed by Elon Musk, as a form of intermodal transport, but such a system would be hugely expensive and take decades to complete.) Not far from where the autostrads picked up their containers, they place them on the concrete a second time. Here, they’re picked up by a different sort of gantry crane, known as an automated stacking crane.

…

Whichever of these companies succeeds, the implications for trucking are even more profound—although not, perhaps, in the ways that are immediately obvious. TuSimple’s goal is not to build a vehicle that can go anywhere under any circumstances. That’s an end so unachievable with present technology that only Elon Musk regularly claims to be anywhere near reaching it. (And, to be blunt, almost no one who is deeply involved in this industry, outside of Tesla, believes him.) TuSimple’s goal is to build a vehicle that spends 90 percent of its time on the highway, an environment well marked and relatively predictable.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

Delivery drones like Amazon's Prime Air programme are at advanced stages of testing; startups in Germany, the US, China and New Zealand are trialling flying quadcopter cars; solar-powered planes circumnavigate the Earth, and prototype jetpacks are available to buy if you have enough money. Space is reopening thanks to a generation of buccaneering entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. In addition to the old heavyweights of NASA, Russia and the European Space Agency, China and India have booming space programmes. The Chinese Tiangong programme will soon have fully fledged space stations in orbit. Ambitious lunar and Martian missions are planned for the near future.

…

Academic advances dovetail with technology: neuroprosthetics will let people control wheelchairs or artificial limbs. Neurotechnology from the likes of the BrainGate research project can restore movements or communicative functions to the paralysed or those suffering from neurodegenerative diseases. Elon Musk's Neuralink and ARPA's Brain Initiative are just two leading efforts pursuing brain-to-machine interfaces: scalable, high bandwidth systems plugging brains into computers via microelectrode threads robotically sewn into the brain. This work is still at an early stage and involves opening the skull, always a delicate procedure.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

If you can argue from first principles, then you can more easily approach unfamiliar situations, or approach familiar situations in innovative ways. Understanding how to derive formulas helps you to understand how to derive new formulas. Understanding how molecules fit together enables you to build new molecules. Tesla founder Elon Musk illustrates how this process works in practice in an interview on the Foundation podcast: First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world. . . . You kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, “What are we sure is true?” . . . and then reason up from there. . . .

…

Specialized skills or business processes that take a long time to develop (for example, Apple’s vertically integrated products and supply chain, which meld design, hardware, and software) Exclusive access to relationships, data, or cheap materials A strong, trusted brand built over many years, which customers turn to reflexively Substantial control of a distribution channel A team of people uniquely qualified to solve a particular problem Network effects or other types of flywheels (as described in Chapter 4) A higher pace of innovation (e.g., a faster OODA loop) Elon Musk notably sparred with Warren Buffett on the concept of moats. In Musk’s words from a May 2, 2018, Tesla earnings call: “Moats are lame,” and “If your only defense against invading armies is a moat, you will not last long.” He was pointing out that, in his opinion, the most important sustainable competitive advantage is creating a culture that supports a higher pace of innovation, because that higher pace of innovation can overcome traditional moats.

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Published 9 Sep 2019

Now he was switching from lust to greed, also correcting an initial mistaken hypothesis he had absorbed from the gaming world, that people would not want to join online communities under their real names. PayPal became enduringly important in the lore of Silicon Valley because it launched several important careers—not just Hoffman’s and Thiel’s, but also that of Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX—and helped establish a set of guiding principles for the Internet generation of technology companies. One of these principles was extreme adaptability. PayPal began as a security system for PalmPilot, a short-lived handheld device, and evolved into a system for processing transactions on eBay, the world’s first successful online marketplace.

…

Obama was friendly to a number of the Valley’s political causes, such as permitting generous allotments of H-1B visas, under which technology firms can hire engineers from abroad; net neutrality, which forbade Internet service providers from charging higher prices to heavy users of video, music, and gaming services; and a new law, opposed by Obama’s own financial regulators, that permitted online sales of stock in technology start-ups. The Obama administration gave a $465 million loan to Tesla, the electric car company founded by Hoffman’s friend Elon Musk. When the White House gave a state dinner for Xi Jinping, the president of China and therefore the person who controlled access to the most important growth market for LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman (in a tuxedo!) and Michelle Yee were among the guests. On Hoffman’s office wall were framed photographs, impossible for any visitor to miss, of himself with Obama, Bloomberg, and Bill Clinton.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture
by Scott Belsky
Published 1 Oct 2018

Scott Heiferman, the CEO and founder of Meetup, sees another advantage of DRIs at all levels: making sure that everyone is aligned on how their role within the company matters. As Scott explained to me over lunch one day in downtown New York City, “I love the idea of every person understanding how their small role aligns with the broader mission. . . . Elon Musk says that you can stop anyone on the SpaceX factory floor and ask them what they’re doing and why it’s important. Someone could be making bolts and you could say, ‘Why do you do it? What’s your job?’ And they’ll say, ‘Oh, I’m making these bolts so that we can have a landable vehicle, because if we do a landable vehicle, then we can get to Mars.

…

When you launch a new product or service, presenting unanswered questions may be a more effective means of engaging prospective customers than explicitly explaining your product, which leaves customers with no questions at all. Movies achieve this level of intrigue with trailers, showing us a glimpse of great characters and scenes without context and leaving us wondering what happened in between. For companies like Elon Musk’s electric-car empire Tesla, a sense of mystery has been achieved with features like “ludicrous speed,” which has drawn customers in without much explanation as to how it is turned on, never mind what it means. Perhaps the most famous corporate purveyor of mystery is Apple, whose penchant for secrecy around new products and carefully curated publicity causes millions of people to tune in live to huge product-reveal events to learn about the next iPhone’s features.

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth
by Dan McCrum
Published 15 Jun 2022

He joined them in good spirits and they celebrated détente with a series of large gin and tonics. The question of the fee for their public relations efforts was settled: a six-figure sum each for the father and son. As the evening wore on, Marsalek talked about his interests, his fascinations with technology and security, name-dropping as he went. He’d met Elon Musk, he said, and was a firm believer in Tesla: ‘Buy that stock and tuck it away,’ he advised them. Marsalek’s idea of relaxation was a little different to the Kilbeys’. ‘My leisure time is more work in Libya.’ He talked about his stake in three cement plants which once belonged to an Austrian conglomerate, but were sold after the country descended into chaos.

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To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader. 1A Mauritius fund 79–89, 115, 134, 250 advisors’ fees 88 Ernst & Young investigation 135 7995 transaction codes 16, 19, 42, 101 Absolute Poker 30 acai berry sellers 61 Acai Berry King see Willms, Jesse Achleitner, Paul 224, 231–2 Adyen 175 AIM market 91 Akhavan, Hamid ‘Ray’ ix, 118 and Animo Associates 278–9 and Marsalek 227, 278, 285 arrested USA 285 sentenced 304 Al Alam Solutions 245, 246, 249, 258, 272, 276–7, 301 and Allied Wallet 210 and Third-Party Acquiring 200–202, 221 rebrands as Symtric 277 unsecured loans/no income 286–7 Wirtschaftswoche on 261 Al Alawi, Kumail 69–70 Ali, Marsalek’s bribery contact 184 Alken Asset Management 119, 140 Allied Wallet 210–11, 304 Allscore Beijing, Wirecard and 250 Alphaville blog (FT) 52–3, 54, 91, 258 Camp Alphaville 52–3, 55–6, 96, 112–13 House of Wirecard series 91 and Ingenico/Wirecard 108 ‘Rabble’ 54, 96 Schillings on 119 Anderson, Pamela 223 Angermayer, Christian 198–9, 239 Animo Associates, Wickford 278–9, 283–4 APG Protection 255, 257n Arafat, Yasser 266 Ardiss, Katherine, and 1A/Hermes deal 83–4 Ashazi Services, Bahrain 67–71, 72–7 Asian Internet Gaming conference 57–8 Assion, Rüdiger, KPMG report meeting 290 Austrian coalition government collapse 2019 263 Austrian Interior Ministry, and refugees/stabilization 265–9 Austrian People’s Party 196 Aykroyd, Dan 21 Badel, Antoine 119, 140 BaFin and Earl 208–10, 294 and Palos 116 ban Wirecard shorting 180, 182, 186, 226, 240–41 blamed by MPs 302 criminal complaint against McCrum and Palma 195 on market manipulation 139, 172 reforms 305 Baker Tilly 85 Banc de Binary 211 Banco de Oro (BDO) 274 declares Wirecard documents spurious 294 Bandits xii ‘Bank of Oman’ 181 Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) 274 declares Wirecard documents spurious 293–4 Barber, Lionel xii, 54, 107, 141, 143–4, 169, 175, 176, 177, 205, 206, 224, 225, 247, 257, 259, 270, 299 and FTI 261–2 on FT bribery accusation 207 on Nick Gold tapes 220–23 on Novichok story 244–5 on Wirecard story 1–6 reviews McCrum and Zatarra 132 Barclay Brothers, Sunday Business 53–4 Barth, Hubert 167, 305 Batson, Chris 173 Bauer, Christopher ix, 45, 62, 249 and Third-Party Acquiring 200 denies running PayEasy 193–4 in Manila 58 meets KPMG 275–6 on Ashazi Services 70–71 Palma seeking 191–4, 207 reported dead 303 Bauer-Schlichtegroll, Paul ix, 14 and Electronic Billing Systems (EBS) 12–14, 17 and Flynt Publications 11–12 and InfoGenie reverse takeover 17 and Wagner 10 buys Wirecard for porn billing 12–13 moves to supervisory board 27 divests from Wirecard 31, 46 Bäumler-Hösl, Hildegard 183–6, 209–10 Bavarian police, 2015 Wirecard raid 101–3 Bayerische Wirtschaft 31 Bellenhaus, Oliver x, 10, 44, 261 and EBS 18–19 and prepaid credit cards 18 CardSystems Middle East 200–202 Al Alam meeting 276–7 and Allied Wallet 210 and Wirecard special audit 252 driving 39–40 personal habits 199–200 surrendered/co-operated 303 BellTrox 298–9 Bergermann, Melanie, on Al Alam 261 Roland Berger 233 Bergman, James, PayEasy 62 Berntsen, Gary 178 Bharara, Preet, hedge funds prosecution 35–6 Bijlipay card reader 80–81 Bill (purported Wirecard source) 244, 282 Bitcoin, Braun on 250 Blank Rome, and Wirecard self-review 102–3 Block, Carson xi, 93, 99 Doing Business in China for Dummies 37 Marsalek tries to bribe 118 on Casino supermarkets 112–13 on NMC Health 261 on Sino Forest 36–7 Bloomberg, Ali on bribing 184–5 Blue Ridge hedge fund 121 Bluetool 97 Bosler, Tobias 107 and the Turkish boxers 33–4 on Wirecard accounts 32–4 Bournewood (BVI entity) 97 Boyd, Roddy, ‘Great Indian Shareholder Robbery’ 146–7 Branston & Gothard 53–4 Braun, Dr Markus, Wirecard CEO ix, 25–34, 46–7, 60, 103, 110, 111, 145, 154, 172, 176, 229, 231, 234 on Ashazi 76–7 and Deutsche Bank 232 loan 147 and FT imaginary clients story 248–52 offers interview 259–60 orders Marsalek to get FT onside 230 intimidates short sellers 31–4 in French Riviera 197 and visit by heavies 197 Ingenico, revives purported bid 117–18 and IT systems 41–4 and KPMG report blames KPMG for delay 289 cash loan January 2020 288 Gill on 301–2 KPMG meeting 290 on publication 291 rejects supervisory board advice 289 suspicions of 287 not fired 294–5 resigns 296 arrested 303 management style 64 and McKinsey report 234–5 on Project Tiger 174, 175 SoftBank, and Wirecard 197–200, 203, 205, 237, 238 Vienna weekends 196–7 on Wirecard and Bitcoin 249–50 on Wirecard Asian non-offices 93 on Wirecard Brazil/Turkey MCAs 236 and Wirecard DAX Index membership 156, 159–60 on Wirecard total integrity 74–7 Zatarra Report 107 Kroll to investigate 117–19 Earl on 124 Wirecard London presentation 111 Braun, Sylvia 64 Bribery Act 207 Brinken Merchant Incorporations 44 British Virgin Islands and shell companies 44 Wirecard and 31 Bub Gauweiler 183 Buckminster Fuller question 75 Budde, Andreas 203 Buffett, Warren 65, 95 Bundestag, Wirecard inquiry 302 critical report on EY 305 MPs apologize to FT 302 Burtnick, Nelson, Marsalek on 62–3 Cambridge Analytica story 150, 241 Camp Alphaville 52–3, 55–6, 96, 112–13 CardSystems Middle East 200–202 Casino supermarkets 112–13 CellarDoor 53 CenturionBet 102n Cerberus 231 chargebacks nutraceuticals scam 47–9 Visa 2009 crackdown 49 China, Wirecard buying Allscore Beijing 250 Chinese frauds exposure 36–7 Chuprygin, Andrey xi and GRU 268 Citadelle Corporate Services, uncooperative 271, 272 Citigroup AsiaPacific deal with Wirecard 145–6, 152–3 Project Tiger summary papers sent to 167–8 Click2Pay (Wirecard online wallet) 13–19 Clifford Chance, and Manila trustee meeting 272–5 Cloudflare 109 CMS lawyers 17, 243 CNBC, Braun interview on FT and accounts 203–4 Coathanger King 244, 257, 282 Cobb, Oliver, on Wirecard 144–5, 236–7, 298 Cohodes, Marc 226 ‘Colin’ (Marsalek’s friend) x, 86–7, 88–9, 277, 278, 301 at P61 116 in Singapore 133–4 on Dr Rami 278 barbecue 279–80 Commerzbank 157, 292 accuses FT of market manipulation 172 retracts 174 losses 304 Committee to Protect Journalists 187 ConePay, purported creditor, non-existent 187–90 Connaught outsourcing company 94 Control Risks, and R&T information flow 202–3 Covid, travel issues 276 credit cards high-risk processing 43–4, 47 payments, post–2008 scrutiny 47 prepaid/unbranded, for Click2Pay e-wallets 17–19 Credit Suisse 23 and Wirecard/SoftBank bond 238 Crypto currency, Braun on 250 Dahmen, Martin (EY) 292 and Singapore audit 202–3 Al Alam meeting 277 and Manila trustee meeting 272–5 on Third-Party arrangements 251–2 ‘Dale’, whistleblower, on Wirecard UK & Ireland 245 Dallas investigation 227, 282 Daniel Stewart stockbroker 134n Dave the IT guy 109, 113, 123 Davies, Paul 238 DAX 30 28, 236, 287, 288 Dennis, Jonathan 213, 215, 216, 217, 241 Der Spiegel 195, 263 Deutsche Bank 3, 183, 196, 224, 305 and Braun loan 288 Samt and Marsalek decide to buy 231 Wirecard and 27 Dialectic Capital hedge fund 105 Dolan, Shane 261 Döpfner, Mathias 177 Dowson, Simon x, 44, 97, 278–9 Reuters investigation 122 Dun & Bradstreet 233 Duterte, Rodrigo 187, 221, 251, 273 Dyer, Geoff 194 Earl, Matthew xi, 94–5, 109–12, 185–6 and BaFin on Zatarra 109 case dropped 141–3 explains Wirecard to 208–10 avoiding Perring 123–4 Kroll on 119, 130 on Markus Braun 124 on Wirecard/Hermes 95, 97–100 reports to FBI on Wirecard critics hacking 208 reports to Mastercard on Wirecard 208 talks on Sky News 298 Toronto University on hacking gang 208, 298–9 under siege 127–31 faked photo of 257 outed on Twitter 127 phished/attacked online 131–2 shadowed 127–9 VisMas Files 124 EasyJet 233 Eaze 285 Edelman, KPMG report meeting 290 Eichelmann, Thomas 233, 235, 249, 294, 296 backs Braun and special audit 271–2, 283, 288–9 El Obeidi, Rami xi, 218–19, 301 Elder, Bryce 108, 117–18 Electronic Billing Systems (EBS) 12–14, 17, 18–19 Elvins, Hayley xi, 255, 256–7, 257n Emery, Bruce 144–5, 236 Enderle, Franz 183, 242 Ennismore hedge fund 91 Epsilon Investments 134 Ernst & Young 76, 77, 237, 248, 249 and CardSystems 201 litigation against 305 and NMC Health 261 and Wirecard Singapore 154, 167–8, 201–3 Wirecard/1A/Hermes investigation 135–8, 144 Wirecard special audit 249–50, 251–2 alerts BaFin 294 and Al Alam Solutions 201, 277 and Manila trustee meeting 272–5 completing audit 292–4 on Third-Party arrangements 251–2 Ernst & Young Canada 37 European Securities and Markets Authority 180 Exxon, on BellTrox 299 Federal Trade Commission, and Allied Wallet 210 Fieldfisher, and Singapore audit 203 financial crisis 2008 23–4 financial markets betting schemes 61 Financial Conduct Authority 99, 109, 255 Financial Times Alphaville see Alphaville Festival of Finance 112–13 Lex column 21–2 North American edition, Lex column 22–4 office, London 1–2 people xii moves back to Bracken House 205, 206–7 newsroom 169 surveillance discovered 173–4 office New York 20–24, 35–8 scepticism culture 37–8 Wirecard investigations/stories 1–7 and short-sellers set-up 212–19, 220–25, 228 blamed for Wirecard short attack 107 Braun orders Marsalek to get FT onside 230 declines Braun interview offer 259–60 FT’s QC blocks Project Tiger story 4–6, 168 puts questions to Wirecard 218 Singapore investigation story published 170–71, 174 accused of market manipulation 172 blames Zatarra 107 Wirecard suing for misuse of business secrets 194–5 Singapore/Philippines stories 236 Wirecard imaginary clients story 248–52 Wirecard action vs. 242–3 internal investigation 240–42 see also specific FT people Fleep messaging service 82 Flutter group 213, 241–2 Flynt, Larry, and Bauer-Schlichtegroll 11–12 Foster Mitchell, Victoria 261 Foulis, Patrick 21 Frankfurt stock exchange (Deutsche Börse) 25 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 180, 305 Freedom Party Austria 178, 263 Freis, James 294–6 Friend Finder 43 Fritsche, Klaus-Dieter 250 Froehlich Tours 191 FTI Consulting 111, 261–2 Full Tilt 30, 62–3 G2Pay payment processor 29–31, 102 G2Pay Dublin 39, 42–4 G2Pay Toronto 30, 42 begins to shrink 45–6, 59–60 ICC-Cal issues 49–51 Mastercard fines 42 miscoded 7995 transactions 42 upfront payment to Wirecard 30–31 Gattringer, Wolfgang, and Libya refugee project 266–9 General Electric 153 German civil legal system 242–3 German institutions, investor confidence in 93 German press supports Wirecard 110 Geschonneck, Alexander 251, 290 Getnow 278 GI Retail 105 GI Technology 86 Gibraltar, Wirecard and 31 Gill, Evelyn (Pav’s mother) 160, 162, 166–7, 168, 171, 306 Gill, Pav, Wirecard AsiaPacific legal counsel x, 152–60 and Ng investigate finance team 155–8 and whistleblower 154–5, 156, 158 Ng & Steinhoff, Telegram chats 157–8, 163 on Braun/Marsalek 301–2 on Wirecard Singapore 161–5, 171 ousted 158–60 Project Tiger copies 158–60 thriving 305–6, 307 Gold, Nick xii, 212–13, 229, 254–5 El Obeidi on 219 IVA agreed 306 Kroll to investigate 117–19 on FT about to expose Wirecard 213–17 recorded/quoted 221–2, 241–2 Goldman Sachs 249 Goomo travel firm 87, 88, 133, 135, 137 P61 HQ 116 Görres, Andrea, and Wirecard x self-review 102–3 special audit 252 Graham and Dodd, Security Analysis 95 Grant Thornton 30 Greenvale Capital 144–5, 236–7 GRU (Russia Military Intelligence) 263–70 Guardian 53 Gupta, Varun 89 Gustenau, Brigadier, on refugee project 267 Guttenberg, Karl-Theodore zu 250 Hallbergmoos, Wirecard office 9–11 Hamilton, Ben (re Kroll), fishing visit to Earl 129–30 Handelsblatt 177, 186, 219, 222, 229 Hanson, Nigel xii, 3–6, 106, 125, 170, 171, 175, 194, 205, 243 on McCrum’s correspondence hacked 121–2 on FT/short-sellers set-up 220–22 reviews McCrum and Zatarra 132 Harper Gray 174 Harris, Daniel, and Wirecard shorting rumour 182–3 Harris, James 115 Helms, Matthias (Wirecard due diligence) 135–7 Hempton, John xi, 55–6, 74, 188–9 Henseler, Alfons 234 Herbert Smith Freehills (law firm) 175, 220, 221, 223, 224 Hermes i-Tickets 78–89 Earl on 95–7 Ernst & Young investigation 135–8 Ramasamy on 111 Hodgson, Camila 149 ‘Hollins, Ian’ 96, 112, 123–4, 127, 226, 305 Honourable Artillery Company 52 House of Wirecard Alphaville series 91 HSBC 185 Hufeld, Felix 294, 305 Hume, Neil 54 Hustler, Flynt Publications, Bauer-Schlichtegroll and 11–12 ICC-Cal 27, 48 miscoded 7995 transactions 42 Merchant IDs crackdown 50–51 Wirecard cash stolen 50–51 IIFL Wealth 82 Inatec 46, 61, 63, 97, 116 InBev and Budweiser story 54 Indo-German Chamber of Commerce 250 InfoGenie reverse takeover 17 Ingenico purported bid for Wirecard 108, 117–18 Investors Chronicle 21 Israeli security Wirecard executives and 50–51 Iwersen, Sönke 219, 222 J-Capital Research 92–4, 98, 113, 121 ‘Jack’, whistleblower 166, 188 Jakab, Spencer 23 Jenkins, Patrick 141 Jilson (photographer) 187 Jon, on short sellers surveillance 254–7 Jones Day 130 Jones, Sam xii, 126 on FT office surveillance 173 on Marsalek, Libya, GRU and Wagner 263–70 Kalixa, Senjo buys 138 Kaminska, Izabella 223–4 Kepler Cheuvreux 292 Khalaf, Roula 173, 259–60, 270, 302 Khan, Imran 1 Khawaja, Ahmad ‘Andy’ 210, 304 Kilbey, Gary xii, 115, 306 and Marsalek 147–51 on Wirecard shorting rumour 181 on Wirecard story news leak 170–71 Kilbey, Tom xii, 147, 148–51 and Marsalek 182 Kirch, Leo 183 Kirch Media 109–10, 142 Kirk, Stuart (US Lex team) 35 Kleinschmidt, Kilian on Marsalek 264–5 reaction to Marsalek and Libya 269–70 testifies 302 Klestil, Stefan 232–3, 234 Knöchelmann, Dietmar x, 29–31, 45 KPMG 26 on 1A/Hermes 85, 88 Wirecard special audit 249, 250–51 Al Alam meeting 277 complains of obstructions/delays 287 Manila trustee meeting 272–5 on PayEasy client non-existence 276 PayEasy meeting 275–6 seeking Wirecard Singapore cash 271–6 draft report to supervisory board 286–90 enforces deadline 290 final report, no evidence for Third-Party Acquiring 291 Braun’s spins on 285, 287, 291–2 Kramp-Karrenbauer, Annegret 231 Krisper, Stephanie, on Marsalek contact 264–5 Kroeber, Susannah, on Wirecard Asian offices 92–4 Kroll investigations 58 accusatory letter to Earl 129–30 seeking Zatarra, 117, 119 Kukies, Jörg 231, 249–50 Kurniawan, Edo x and Ernst & Young 135–8, 154 on cash definition issues 259 FT and 6–7, 174 head of Wirecard Asia Pacific finance team 138, 153–8, 161, 170, 172, 210, 246, 301 and Hong Kong unit accounts 154 on ‘round tripping’ funds 155–8 paperwork 258 Wirecard supports 170 and Project Tiger 158, 165–6 vanished 176, 303 Kurz, Sebastian 196, 266 Lauterbach, Anastassia 233–4, 235, 249, 287 Lehman Brothers 22–3, 47 Leitz, Sven-Olaf 251 Ley, Wirecard CFO ix, 28, 31, 46, 50–51, 60, 64, 78, 79, 136, 142, 153, 236, 291 on Deutsche Bank 239 and Hermes 84, 85 and Kirch Media 109–10 on Wirecard Asian non-offices 93 Wirecard cash flow statement 90–91 and Wirecard self-review 102–3, 104 confronts Greenvale 144–5 KPMG report meeting 290 arrested 303, 304 Liao, Bob 139 Libya Marsalek and 116 cement plants 116, 135, 151, 247, 267, 268 creating strong border force 269 refugees as guest workers 266–9 Kleinschmidt’s reaction to 269–70 GRU and 268–9 Rami El Obeidi 255–6 Lincolnshire police 125–6 Linklaters 88 Lipscomb, Dashiell 200 Lordship Trading blog 95 Louis XIII project 231, 239 M’Cwabeni, Vuyiswa 233, 234 Macquarie, on Wirecard 139 Madoff, Bernie, Ponzi scam 23–4 Mail on Sunday 261 Majali, Yousef 105, 121 Manager Magazin allegations 261 Eichelmann interview 271–2 on forensic audit 249 on FT bribery 207 on Wirecard board 234–5 Maria, Tolentino’s paralegal 273 Marques, Eduardo xi, 299 on Senjo and 1A 146 on Wirecard and SoftBank 210 shorts Wirecard stock 59 Marsalek, Jan (Wirecard chief operating officer) ix, 39, 40, 46–51, 64, 153, 154, 172, 226 and 1A fund 115 Al Alam meeting 276–7 on Ali, FT and Bloomberg bribery scam 183–6 and Akhavan 278 whistleblower on 285 and Animo Associates 278–9 on Burtnick hiring 62–3 on Cambridge Analytica 150 and CardSystems Third-Party Acquiring 200–203 and Chuprygin; Gustenau; Gattringer 268–9 and Click2Pay 11, 13–16 ATM cards for e-wallets 17–19 on Deutsche Bank 239 and Dr Rami 278 on Elon Musk/Tesla 151 and Nick Gold tapes 217–19 Kilbeys, pays off 151 suspected of story news leak 170 G2Pay pressured 46 and Gold 213–14 and Goomo travel firm 87, 88–9 and Hermes i-Tickets/1A 78–89 and fake clients special audit 251–2 at Colin’s barbecue 279–80 crying drunk 279–80 and FT fake clients story 248–52 Third-Party Acquiring cover story 258–9 defends Third-Party business 234, 235–6 on Inatec 61 on Ingenico purported bid 108 and IT systems 41–4 on Israeli politics 178–9 on KPMG report publication 291 KPMG report meeting 290 post-audit, offers raw data 287–8 stalls 294–5 suspended not fired 294–5 fired, police charge 296 disappears to Minsk 300 and Kurniawan 136–8 on Libya 151 and refugees as guest workers 266–9 cement plants 116, 135, 151, 247, 267, 268 on creating strong Libya border force 269 Manila trustee meeting 273–5 management/lifestyle 64 extreme Covid precautions 277–8 extravagance, employee on 177–8 new information on 263–70 office 115–16 office, Samt on 252–3 P61 villa 115–16, 269, 277, 278, 280 questions about 247 Sabines (two assistants) 115, 116, 269, 279, 300 on McCrum 149 McKinsey report on 234, 235 and Novichok documents 303 recipe 179–80 story 244 and nutraceuticals chargebacks scam 47–9 PayEasy meeting 275–6 police take inbox archives 101–3, 104 Rami El Obeidi link 256 ‘Ray’, correspondence from 178 and Samt 229–30 decide to buy Deutsche Bank 231 on Senjo 138 in Singapore 134–5 and Singapore audit 201–3 in Project Tiger papers 166 on Singapore cash new Manila trustee 272 Turkey money replaces Singapore 278 and Smaul 65–6 nutraceutical processing deal 59–63 on Syria visit with Russian military 266 on Telegram 150 on Wirecard misunderstood 149 and Zatarra Report 114–19 suspects UK leak 116–17 targets McCrum and Palos 116–19 tries to bribe Carson Block 118 Marsalek, Viola 252, 253 Martiradonna, Francesco 102n Mastercard 43 fines G2Pay 42 Project Tiger summary papers sent to 167–8 compliance person 118–19 on Wirecard 208 Mateschitz, Dietrich 15 Mattias, Wulf 232–3, 249, 271 MCA Mathematik (Greenvale alias) 236–7 on forensic audit 249 McCrum, Charlotte (author’s wife) 22, 55, 126–7, 165, 174, 205, 256, 285, 297 targeted by Wirecard 175 McCrum, Dan early career 20–24, 35 New York FT office 20–24, 35–8 joins Alphaville 55–6 moved to FT Lex 141, 143–4 FT internal investigation 240–41 personal life 22–3, 105, 120, 140–41, 165, 205, 225, 227–8, 285, 297–8, 299 improves home security 126–7, 131–2 surveillance fears 257–8 and Nick Gold tapes 220–25, 228 Wirecard investigations/stories Animo Associates 283–4 and Ashazi Services, Bahrain 67–71, 72–7 blog post on Wirecard short attack 106 Exocet on fake clients 247–8, 272, 300 and Macquarie Wirecard meeting 139–40 following-up Wirecard Third-Party Acquiring 221 Marsalek said to intend bribe 147–50 and Palma, accused of bribery and threats 207 criminal case dropped 302 and Pav Gill 161–5 Singapore story publication 1–7 telephone interview with Braun 74–7 testifies to Bundestag inquiry 302 and Zatarra accusations against 127, 132 correspondence hacked 121–2, 125–6 decides to move on 132 Kroll to investigate 117–19 Marsalek’s security to investigate 116–19 meets with Earl and Perring 100 Schillings on 119 on whistleblowers protection 302–3 see also specific people or stories McKinsey 35, 233 Wirecard compliance review 252 on Wirecard Third-Party business 234, 235 and Wirecard/Deutsche Bank 239 Merchant Category Codes 16 Merchant ID (MID) 16 Visa/Mastercard and 43 Merkel, Angela 250 Metropolitan Police 208 Mishcon de Reya 127, 142, 143 Moody’s 237 Mubadala, takes over SoftBank loan to Wirecard 238 multilevel marketing pyramid schemes 61 Munich public prosecutor 183 Munich Security Conference 231 Murphy, Gary 226–7 Murphy, Paul xii, 52–5, 106, 115, 143–4, 170, 171, 172, 177, 194, 211, 225, 228, 237, 245, 246–7, 263, 278, 297, 298, 299, 302, 306 and Ashazi Services story 67, 68, 69, 73 has Alphaville IT secured 125 at Alphaville’s vaudeville 223–4 and Coathanger King/Bill 282–3 on FT/short-sellers set-up 220–22 denies shorting rumour 181 frightens Animo Associates director 279 FT internal investigation 241–2 Marsalek said to intend bribe 147–51 on SoftBank and Wirecard 205–6 spy story published 260 and surveillance informers 254–8 and Wirecard source 243–4 on Wirecard story 1–6, 100 Naheta, Akshay 198, 210, 237, 238 Narayanan, Veerappan 88 Nasdaq exchange 24 Neteller 16, 29 Neuer Markt Frankfurt 17 Neukeferloh, Grasbrunn, Wirecard move to 14 Newcastle Building Society prepaid card unit 66 Newton, Helmut 14 Ng, Royston 153, 154, 209 and Gill investigate finance team 155–8 Marsalek implicates in Bloomberg scam 185–6 Nikkei 144, 194, 205, 206, 222 Nix, Alexander 241 NMC Health 261 Novichok documents leaked 303 GRU and 268 Marsalek story 244 recipe, Marsalek and 179–80 Novum stockbroker 134n nutraceuticals charges scam 47–9 Marsalek deal with Smaul 59–63 O’Connor, Sarah 149 O’Murchu, Cynthia xii, 149, 261, 282 O’Sullivan, Henry x, 117, 249, 250, 271, 278 arrested 304 and Hermes i-Tickets 78–89 and Senjo loan 138 in Singapore 133–4 and Third-Party Acquiring 200 WalPay 102 Odey, Crispin 257 Öner, Ahmet 33–4 online casinos/gambling and banks 16 and Click2Pay 14–16 and Wirecard 14–17 countries outlawing 45–6 USA bans 2006 29 online poker legal grey area 29 US indictment 2011 62–3 7995 transactions 42–3 online porn billing, Bauer-Schlichtegroll and Wirecard 12–13, 43 online wallets 13, 16–17, 29 Orbit travel agency 87, 88 Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons 179 Ortiz, Carlos, and Wirecard self-review 102–3 Osterloh, Martin 47–9, 57–8, 199, 301 P61 (Marsalek’s villa) 115–16, 269, 277, 278, 280 Pacha club 15 Pacquiao, Manny 304 Pago (Deutsche Bank) 27 Pal, Alasdair 298 accusations against 127 on Dowson paperwork factory 122 Palldium phase 2 surveillance dossier 257 Palma, Stefania (FT) xii, 176, 243, 276, 299, 300 accused of bribery and threats 207 criminal case dropped 302 finds whistleblower Jack 166 in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur 165 meetings with Gill and Evelyn 163–4 hostile-environment training 193 seeking Christopher Bauer 191–4 seeking ConePay 187–90 Palos, Brett 116–19, 257 Paolucci, Paul 208 Pauls, Heike, analyst xii, 292, 304 accuses FT of market manipulation 172 retracts 174 on ‘buying opportunity’ 175 Paulson, John, and Sino Forest 36–7 PayEasy Solutions 58, 62, 70–71, 258, 272, 301 and Third-Party Acquiring 200 KPMG and 249, 275–6 no information 191–4 unsecured loans/no income 286–7 PayPal 2 Perring, Fraser xii, 95, 96–7, 109–13, 179, 226, 257 faces prosecution for Zatarra 141 further activities 305 on ‘Ian Hollins’ 96, 112, 123–4, 127, 226, 305 Kroll on 119 on Wirecard/Hermes 95, 97–100 outed on Twitter 127 reports demand to name Zatarra people 124–5 wants expenses 123–4 Perry, Leo xii, 210, 299 on Wirecard 67, 73, 90–92, 139–40 Philippines Wirecard new trustee meeting 272–5 Wirecard purported partners 187–94 Palma’s story published 195 Poker Stars 30, 42n Pollard, Brett 261 Ponzi scam (Madoff) 24 Portsea Asset Management 226 Prima Vista Solusi 66 Project Panther 239 ‘Project Tiger’ 155–8 Gill saves copies 158–60 information flow 202–3 summary papers sent to banks/auditor 167–8 taken over by Marsalek 157–9 ProtonMail 178, 227 Puck, Wolfgang 134, 148 Putin, Vladimir, foreign policy speculative 269 matryoshka doll 252 Quadir, Fahmi 225–7 on Akhavan and Marsalek 285 attacked 281–2 and Marsalek whistleblower 226–7 Safkhet Capital, FBI source 281–2 on Wirecard Pennsylvania 226 Quintana-Plaza, Susana 233, 289 Quirk, Mark 278–9, 284 Rajah & Tann, Project Tiger 155 Gill seen with McCrum 162 interim report 167 information flow 202–3 Report 177, 243 Braun on 287 Ramasamy, Ramu and Palani ‘The Boys’ x, 79–80, 81–9 at London presentation 111 blamed for Hermes accounts 137 Wirecard falling-out 155 Rami El Obeidi, Dr and Marsalek 278 and short sellers surveillance 255–6 sends FT flowers 260–61 Randall, Jeff 53 Raynor, Greg xi, 255, 257n Mancunian facilitator 213–17 refugees/stabilization, Austrian Interior Ministry, and 265–9 Reichert, Jochen, on Zatarra weaknesses 109–10 Reserve Bank of India 83 Reuters, on Dowson paperwork factory 122 Reynolds Porter Chamberlain (RPC, law firm) 107, 222, 224–5, 228, 240–2 on Zatarra Report 107 FT internal investigation 240–2 Robert Smith 261 Roddy 95–7, 112–13, 123 at Wirecard London presentation 111–12 on Wirecard/Hermes 95, 97–100 seeks advice 99, 100 sees vehicles shadowing Earl 129 Roland Berger 233 RP Richter (auditor) 30 Rubie, Saif 213, 216, 217 Russian diplomat, at Colin’s barbecue 279–80 Russian military in Syria 266 Novichok 179–80, 244, 268, 303 Wagner Group soldiers 268–9 Russian Military Intelligence (GRU) 263–70 Sabines (Marsalek’s two assistants) 115, 116, 269, 279, 300 Safkhet Capital 281–2 Samt, Mr (Marsalek’s PR) x, 217–19, 229–30, 231, 252–3 Santego Capital 81 SAP 233 Schäfer, Daniel 177 Schillings law firm 91 blames FT for Wirecard short attack 107 letters to FT on Zatarra 132 on McCrum/Alphaville 119 on Wirecard story 4–6, 170–71 replaced 175 Schneider, Dagmar 279 and KPMG special audit 251, 252 KPMG report meeting 290 Manila trustee meeting 273–5 Schneider, Klaus (SdK), on Wirecard accounts 34 Schütt, Michael 59, 97 Schütz, Alexander 196–7, 198 on FT 196–7 apologizes 304–5 Schwager, Market Wizards 95 SdK (Schutzgemeinschaft Der Kleinaktionäre) on Wirecard 31–4 Sender, Henny 24 Senjo 134, 138, 258, 272, 301 and Third-Party Acquiring 200, 202 buys Kalixa 138 KPMG to consider 249 unsecured loans/no income 286–7 Sewing, Christian 231, 232 ShadowFall Research 185, 209 Shah, Amit 82–8 Shanmugaratnam, R.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

Most significantly of all, hydraulic fracking—which involved the high-velocity injection of millions of gallons of liquid into bedrock to release the natural gas within—vastly increased domestic energy production and drove down prices, taking away the market incentives to use alternative fuels. On top of this came the cable-news-stoked political scandal of Solyndra, a solar energy company that collapsed after receiving $500 million in federal subsidies. (As staggering as the sum appeared, it was small potatoes in the world of green energy. Elon Musk’s various ventures together received close to $5 billion in government subsidies by 2015.) Under fire, the Obama Administration scaled back their ambitions for a green-tech future, and Kleiner did as well.19 Doerr and Gore had made a gamble that fell far short of its promise, even though in another, less divided and less austerity-minded political moment it might have indeed been another successful moon shot.

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CHANGE THE WORLD Although tech’s shortcomings attracted increasing attention, it was hard not to be dazzled by the grand visions coming out of Northern California and Seattle. Government was enfeebled and polarized. Tech had flash, ambition, and billions to spend. The CEO of Google’s advanced research laboratory was the Rollerblade-wearing grandson of H-bomb developer Edward Teller; his corporate title was “Captain of Moonshots.” Elon Musk’s Tesla produced roaringly fast roadsters that featured a button allowing drivers to enter “ludicrous mode.” When he wasn’t building cars or jokingly repurposing welding tools to sell as $500 flamethrowers to adoring fans, Musk was literally shooting the moon with his SpaceX commercial space venture, beating out Lockheed and others for prime contracts.

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Ellen McGirt, “Al Gore’s $100 Million Makeover,” Fast Company, July 1, 2007. 17. John Doerr, “Salvation (and profit) in Greentech,” TED2007, March 2007; Marc Gunther and Adam Lashinsky, “Cleanup Crew,” Fortune 156, no. 11 (November 26, 2007). 18. Jon Gertner, “Capitalism to the Rescue,” The New York Times, October 3, 2008. 19. Jerry Hirsch, “Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by $4.9 billion in government subsidies,” The Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2015; Sarah McBride and Nichola Groom, “Insight: How cleantech tarnished Kleiner and VC star John Doerr,” Reuters Business News, January 15, 2013. 20. David Streitfeld, “Kleiner Perkins Denies Sex Bias in Response to a Lawsuit,” The New York Times, June 14, 2012; Ellen Huet, “Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr and Ellen Pao: A Mentorship Sours,” Forbes, March 4, 2015. 21.

Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre
Published 18 Jan 2023

Hawkins, “Tesla Didn’t Fix an Autopilot Problem for Three Years, and Now Another Person Is Dead,” The Verge, May 17, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18629214/tesla-autopilot-crash-death-josh-brown-jeremy-banner; Edward Niedermeyer, “Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ Pricing Controversy Misses the Point,” The Drive, March 5, 2019, https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26790/teslas-full-self-driving-pricing-controversy-misses-the-point; Nick Lum and Edward Niedermeyer, “How Tesla and Elon Musk Exaggerated Safety Claims About Autopilot and Cars,” Daily Beast, April 13, 2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-tesla-and-elon-musk-exaggeraged-safety-claims-about-autopilot-and-cars. 652019 survey of leading AI researchers: Baobao Zhang et al., Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence: Evidence from a Survey of Machine Learning Researchers (arXiv.org, May 5, 20210), 40, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.02117.pdf. 65survey respondents supported Google’s decision: Zhang et al., Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence, 42. 65researchers trusted the military with AI significantly less than the U.S. general public: Zhang et al., Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence, 6–7, 31. 65Defense Innovation Board convened roundtable discussions with experts: “Defense Innovation Board’s AI Principles Project,” Defense Innovation Board, n.d., https://innovation.defense.gov/ai/. 65“resilient, robust, reliable, and secure”: Summary of the 2018 Department of Defense Artificial Intelligence Strategy (U.S.

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How AI Is Impacting Journalism,” Forbes, February 8, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolemartin1/2019/02/08/did-a-robot-write-this-how-ai-is-impacting-journalism/#7cc457dd7795; Joe Keohane, “What News-Writing Bots Mean for the Future of Journalism,” Wired, February 16, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/02/robots-wrote-this-story/. 119fake news at industrial scales: Ben Buchanan et al., Truth, Lies, and Automation: How Language Models Could Change Disinformation (Center for Security and Emerging Technology, May 2021), https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/truth-lies-and-automation/. 120malicious AI applications: Miles Brundage et al., The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation (February 2018), https://maliciousaireport.com/. 120“fear-mongering”: Anima Kumar, “An Open and Shut Case on OpenAI,” anima-ai.org, January 1, 2021, https://anima-ai.org/2019/02/18/an-open-and-shut-case-on-openai/. 120“The words ‘too dangerous’ were casually thrown out here”: James Vincent, “AI Researchers Debate the Ethics of Sharing Potentially Harmful Programs,” The Verge, February 21, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/21/18234500/ai-ethics-debate-researchers-harmful-programs-openai. 120technical breakthrough for which they hadn’t yet seen the academic paper: James Vincent, “OpenAI’s New Multitalented AI Writes, Translates, and Slanders,” The Verge, February 14, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/14/18224704/ai-machine-learning-language-models-read-write-openai-gpt2; “Better Language Models and Their Implications,” openai.com, n.d., https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/; Alec Radford et al., Language Models Are Unsupervised Multitask Learners (openai.com, n.d.), https://cdn.openai.com/better-language-models/language_models_are_unsupervised_multitask_learners.pdf. 120“too dangerous” theme was echoed in other outlets: Delip Rao, “When OpenAI Tried to Build More Than a Language Model,” deliprao.com, February 19, 2019, http://deliprao.com/archives/314 (page discontinued); Alex Hern, “New AI Fake Text Generator May Be Too Dangerous to Release, Say Creators,” The Guardian, February 14, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/14/elon-musk-backed-ai-writes-convincing-news-fiction; Aaron Mak, “When Is Technology Too Dangerous to Release to the Public?” Slate, February 22, 2019, https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/openai-gpt2-text-generating-algorithm-ai-dangerous.html; James Vincent, “OpenAI has Published the Text-Generating AI It Said Was Too Dangerous to Share,” The Verge, November 7, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/7/20953040/openai-text-generation-ai-gpt-2-full-model-release-1-5b-parameters. 120pre-briefing the press “got us some concerns that we were hyping it”: Jack Clark, interview by author, March 3, 2020. 120more careful about the phrasing around potential dangers: “Better Language Models.” 121realistic-looking fake videos: Samantha Cole, “We Are Truly Fucked: Everyone Is Making AI-Generated Fake Porn Now,” Vice, January 24, 2018, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjye8a/reddit-fake-porn-app-daisy-ridley. 121swap the faces of celebrities: Samantha Cole, “AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We’re All Fucked,” Vice, December 11, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gydydm/gal-gadot-fake-ai-porn. 12114,000 deepfake porn videos online: Henry Adjer et al., The State of Deepfakes: Landscape, Threats, and Impact (DeepTrace Labs, September 2019), 1, https://regmedia.co.uk/2019/10/08/deepfake_report.pdf. 121The videos didn’t only harm the celebrities: Cole, “AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here.” 121revenge porn attacks: Kirsti Melville, “The Insidious Rise of Deepfake Porn Videos—and One Woman Who Won’t Be Silenced,” abc.net.au, August 29, 2019, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-30/deepfake-revenge-porn-noelle-martin-story-of-image-based-abuse/11437774. 121“Deepfake technology is being weaponized against women”: Adjer et al., The State of Deepfakes, 6. 121AI assistant called Duplex: Jeff Grubb’s Game Mess, “Google Duplex: A.I.

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance
by Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge
Published 29 Mar 2020

As a cofounder of the Intercept, it only made sense for her to be there. But in a surprising snub, Bralow — the same First Look attorney we’d encountered earlier — barred her from attending. Four months later, things got weirder. First Look Media announced more layoffs. Rumors spread that the company was buying Passionflix, a website owned by Tosca Musk — Elon Musk’s sister — that streams adaptations of romance novels. (Viewers are invited to rank the videos using a “barometer of naughtiness.”) Had management lost its collective mind? Dozens of employees wrote the board of directors, demanding to know what was going on. A New York magazine reporter asked First Look about Passionflix.

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
by Extinction Rebellion
Published 12 Jun 2019

Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed in time. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion.

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives
by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
Published 22 Apr 2013

Bloomberg “Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s thoughtful, well-researched work elucidates the staggering impact of technology on our daily lives, as well as what surprising and incredible developments the future may hold. Readers might be left with more questions than answers, but that’s the idea—we are at our best when we ask ‘What’s next?’ ” —Elon Musk, cofounder of Tesla Motors and PayPal THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Copyright © 2013 by Google Inc. and Jared Cohen All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

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Our gratitude to all our friends and colleagues whose ideas and thoughts we’ve benefited from: Elliott Abrams, Ruzwana Bashir, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Chris Brose, Jordan Brown, James Bryer, Mike Cline, Steve Coll, Peter Diamandis, Larry Diamond, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, James Fallows, Summer Felix, Richard Fontaine, Dov Fox, Tom Freston, Malcolm Gladwell, James Glassman, Jack Goldsmith, David Gordon, Sheena Greitens, Craig Hatkoff, Michael Hayden, Chris Hughes, Walter Isaacson, Dean Kamen, David Kennedy, Erik Kerr, Parag Khanna, Joseph Konzelmann, Stephen Krasner, Ray Kurzweil, Eric Lander, Jason Liebman, Claudia Mendoza, Evgeny Morozov, Dambisa Moyo, Elon Musk, Meghan O’Sullivan, Farah Pandith, Barry Pavel, Steven Pinker, Joe Polish, Alex Pollen, Jason Rakowski, Lisa Randall, Condoleezza Rice, Jane Rosenthal, Nouriel Roubini, Kori Schake, Vance Serchuk, Michael Spence, Stephen Stedman, Dan Twining, Decker Walker, Matthew Waxman, Tim Wu, Jillian York, Juan Zarate, Jonathan Zittrain and Ethan Zuckerman.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

Geraci is one of a number of authors who have painted Moravec as the intellectual cofounder, with Ray Kurzweil, of a techno-religious movement that argues that humanity will inevitably be subsumed as a species by the AIs and robots we are now creating. In 2014 this movement gained generous exposure as high-profile technological and scientific luminaries such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking issued tersely worded warnings about the potential threat that futuristic AI systems hold for the human species. Geraci’s argument is that there is a generation of computer technologists who, in looking forward to the consequences of their inventions, have not escaped Western society’s religious roots but rather recapitulated them.

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If someone believes that technology will likely evolve to destroy humankind, what could motivate them to continue developing that same technology? At the end of 2014, the 2009 AI meeting at Asilomar was reprised when a new group of AI researchers, funded by one of the Skype founders, met in Puerto Rico to again consider how to make their field safe. Despite a new round of alarming statements about AI dangers from luminaries such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, the attendees wrote an open letter that notably fell short of the call to action that had been the result of the original 1975 Asilomar biotechnology meeting. Given that DeepMind had been acquired by Google, Legg’s public philosophizing is particularly significant. Today, Google is the clearest example of the potential consequences of AI and IA.

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech
by Geoffrey Cain
Published 15 Mar 2020

Through his branding and advertising campaigns, Samsung overtook Sony in brand value and sales by the mid-2000s. Todd Pendleton. Chief marketing officer at Samsung’s American mobile unit from 2011 to 2015. Led advertising efforts against Apple during the Samsung-versus-Apple smartphone wars. Daren Tsui and Ed Ho. Two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who got their start working with Elon Musk and later sold their music software, mSpot, to Samsung in May 2012. After the sale, they joined Samsung as vice presidents for content and services; they ran the grand experiment Milk Music until its closure in September 2016. Paul Elliott Singer. Founder and CEO of Elliott Management, an ultrasecretive hedge fund in New York.

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Daren was the deal maker, running around and impressing partners and signing deals, while Ed was the programmer at the computer, the one who attended to the product’s coding. Daren kicked off his career in 1994, that allowed publications to bring their classified advertising and articles to the Internet. In late 1997, Pantheon was acquired by Elon Musk and bundled into his first company, an online city guide called Zip2. It offered “door-to-door directions and Yellow Pages and so forth,” Daren told me. It was at Zip2 that Daren and Ed met, developing the door-to-door technology that Nokia used on an early mobile phone. They went on to co-found a mobile advertising company called SkyGo that was also acquired.

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear
by Gregg Easterbrook
Published 20 Feb 2018

Or electronic intelligence might permanently be constrained to running whatever people allow such devices to be connected to. But danger is real. Three generations ago, the advent of thermonuclear explosions appeared to doom humanity; instead, the world has grown more peaceful since then. In the next generation, artificial intelligence may become an existential threat. In 2015, Elon Musk, Martin Rees, Francesca Rossi, Steve Wozniak, and other luminaries of the tech and physics realms warned that artificial intelligence could be a great benefit but also could cause society great harm. The time to impose regulation on artificial intelligence, they said, is now—before chips are capable of thinking for themselves.

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Japan, the nation with the longest life spans: See the “Life Expectancy” page maintained by the World Health Organization, detailing life expectancy around the globe, at http://www.who.int/gho/mortality_burden_disease/life_tables/situation_trends/en/. The Yale University computer scientist David Gelernter forecast: David Gelernter, The Tides of Mind (New York: Liveright, 2016). Elon Musk, Martin Rees, Francesca Rossi, Steve Wozniak, and other luminaries: See “Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence,” an open letter with over 8,000 signatories to date, available at Future of Life Institute, https://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter/. Alan Robock of Rutgers University and Owen Toon of the University of Colorado calculate: Alan Robock and Owen Toon, “The Climate Impacts of Nuclear War,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2012.

Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements
by Haym Benaroya
Published 12 Jan 2018

When you enter the realm of Magical Thinking, you leave the world of evidence and logic and enter the weird Twilight Zone of psychology . The mind of the ideologue sees space as a blank screen upon which they project their greatest hopes, deepest fears, strangest quirks, favorite philosophies and preferred political persuasions. Space Cadets have read way too much Ayn Rand, Robert Heinlein and Elon Musk (in his most exuberant states) and not enough Greg Easterbrook or Greg Klerkx. They tend live in an echo chamber of like-minded sentiments and ideas. Sound familiar? Neither reasoned nor seasoned, what little knowledge they possess is broad but hardly ever deep. They are the epitome of “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

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I simply don’t have any idea whether or when NASA will return humans to the Moon. Right now, it seems improbable. In your mind, what is a likely scenario and timeline for manned space? The mindset seems to be to go to Mars. Overly optimistic projections claim that will happen in the 2030s. Elon Musk has fantastic dreams that make no sense to me. The problem as I see it is that NASA will need to spend a good part of its budget doing technology development and demonstration at Mars for more than 20 years just to have the capability to mount a human mission to Mars. When you look at the NASA budget, about 2/3 is so fully committed that the money is simply not there for this development.

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making
by Tony Fadell
Published 2 May 2022

And if you’re going to devote that much time to gathering information, then learn about something you’d be interested in even if you weren’t trying to get a job doing it. Follow your curiosity. Once you’re armed with that knowledge, then you can start hunting down the people who are the best of the best and trying to work with them. And that doesn’t mean stalking Elon Musk if you’re into electric cars. Look at who reports to him. And who reports to them. And which competing company would kill to hire those people. Understand the subdisciplines and see who leads the one you’re most interested in. Find the experts on Twitter or YouTube, then send them a message, a comment, a LinkedIn connection.

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They generally oversee the growth of existing products that they inherited and don’t take risks that might scare executives or shareholders. This invariably leads to the stagnation and deterioration of companies. Most public company CEOs are babysitters. 2. Parent CEOs push the company to grow and evolve. They take big risks for larger rewards. Innovative founders—like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos—are always parent CEOs. But it’s also possible to be a parent CEO even if you didn’t start the business yourself—like Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase or Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Pat Gelsinger, who recently took over the Intel CEO position, seems to be Intel’s first parent CEO since Andy Grove. 3.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

I have my mind inside the pectoral muscles when I do my bench press. I’m really inside, and it’s like I gain a form of meditation, because you have no chance of thinking or concentrating on anything else at that time.” ✸ Who do you think of when you hear the word “successful”? He mentioned several people, including Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Nelson Mandela, and Muhammad Ali, but his final addition stuck out: “Cincinnatus. He was an emperor in the Roman Empire. Cincinnati, the city, by the way, is named after him because he was a big idol of George Washington’s. He is a great example of success because he was asked to reluctantly step into power and become the emperor and to help, because Rome was about to get annihilated by all the wars and battles.

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You do not want to be the twelfth thin-panel solar company in the last decade. And you don’t want to be the nth company of any particular trend. So I think trends are often things to avoid. What I prefer over trends is a sense of mission. That you are working on a unique problem that people are not solving elsewhere. “When Elon Musk started SpaceX, they set out the mission to go to Mars. You may agree or disagree with that as a mission statement, but it was a problem that was not going to be solved outside of SpaceX. All of the people working there knew that, and it motivated them tremendously.” TF: Peter has written elsewhere, “The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system.

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[For example,] I’ve spent my entire life thinking that I want to go to Mars . . . it was on The Brady Bunch. I thought this was the best thing ever. “At some point, if I structure my life correctly, maybe I’ll get to go. I think it’s just so important for humanity to be able to do that . . . and I talked to Elon [Musk] a couple of times and was vastly inspired by everything that he and SpaceX are doing. . . . “I ran into Jeff Bezos a bit later and was saying I just got to talk with Elon, and I’m superexcited about Mars. I really hope that one day I can go. And Bezos looks at me and goes, ‘Mars is stupid.’ And I say, ‘What?’

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller
by Alec Nevala-Lee
Published 1 Aug 2022

“The universe does not allow waste”: Reeves Wiedeman, Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork (New York: Little, Brown, 2020), 136. “maybe in the way”: Lanier, author interview, March 12, 2019. geodesic domes on Mars: John Brownlee, “Elon Musk Wants to Build a Martian Colony out of Geodesic Domes,” Fast Company online, last modified October 24, 2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3064918/elon-musk-wants-to-build-a-martian-colony-out-of-geodesic-domes. “where employees can think”: The Spheres, https://www.seattlespheres.com (accessed January 2021). “Ideally,” Brand said: Stewart Brand, “The Clock and Library Projects,” https://longnow.org/about (accessed January 2021).

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It held staff meditation sessions in a dome and announced a “future cities initiative” by the Israeli designer and artist Dror Benshetrit, who consulted on redeveloping the Montreal Biosphere, but a fumbled public offering resulted in the ouster of Neumann, who had warned his employees, “The universe does not allow waste.” As Jaron Lanier noted, during his lifetime, Fuller had been famous “maybe in the way of a figure like Elon Musk.” Fuller and Musk both promoted themselves as outsiders who disrupted established fields—including the automotive industry—and presented a dream of innovation to counter the inability of existing systems to effect change. Both were also contemptuous of critics, obsessed with their press coverage, willing to pull projections out of thin air, and eager to portray themselves as martyrs, although Fuller concealed his flaws more capably than Musk, who has occasionally spoken of using geodesic domes on Mars.

Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield
by Robert H. Latiff
Published 25 Sep 2017

So-called quantum computing, if fully realized, will make cryptography impossible, allowing a quantum computer to break any code. Imagine a world, especially a military one, in which nothing can be kept secret. The enormous size and complexity of software systems will make understanding them difficult and may lead to unsafe assumptions about their provenance. Such luminaries as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking have sounded alarm bells over the continuing push for artificial intelligence. While the media often raises fears of apocalyptic scenarios with intelligent robots taking over the world, their concerns also include the more prosaic. They, too, worry about artificial intelligence systems going beyond humans’ ability to control, but also include in their concerns such issues as how to determine system trustworthiness, and how to detect errors in algorithms.

The 1% Rule: How to Fall in Love With the Process and Achieve Your Wildest Dreams
by Tommy Baker
Published 18 Feb 2018

For us, I’d been in the union for ten years and been slugging it out, and Ben for eleven years.” Behind every overnight success are years of focused effort, struggle, challenge, and rejection. The myth of overnight success plays well in a highlight-reel culture, yet when one pulls back the curtain, it’s easy to see the 1% Rule in effect. Whether it’s Elon Musk, Peyton Manning, Gary Vaynerchuk, or your favorite band, once you look deeper, you realize they were all overnight successes of a certain kind: To achieve overnight success will require a decade of consistency. It’s incredibly easy to take a snapshot out of context. For example, take your favorite musician.

Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Workflow
by Dominica Degrandis and Tonianne Demaria
Published 14 May 2017

While many of our business role models are in fact driven by a seemingly superhuman work ethic supported by 100+ hour work weeks, they nevertheless have an advantage over us mere mortals. While the number of minutes available to us each day might be the same, control over what we do with those hours differs significantly. When Elon Musk is faced with too much work-in- progress (WIP), he has the authority to delegate, deprioritize, or simply say no. When variation rears its head and a well-thought- out strategic plan no longer aligns with the organization’s needs, Sheryl Sandberg has the ability to switch gears. And when Jeff Bezos is confronted with conflicting priorities, it is likewise doubtful he needs to seek direction via a convoluted bureaucracy to gain clarity over which course to follow.

Automation and the Future of Work
by Aaron Benanav
Published 3 Nov 2020

Again, “the most frightening long-term scenario of all might be if the global economic system eventually manages to adapt to the new reality,” leading to the creation of an “automated feudalism” in which the “peasants would be largely superfluous” and the elite impervious to economic demands.6 For these authors, education and retraining will not be enough to stabilize labor demand in an automated economy; some form of guaranteed nonwage income, such as a negative income tax, must be put in place.7 This automation discourse has been enthusiastically adopted by the jeans-wearing elite of Silicon Valley. Bill Gates advocated for a robots tax. Mark Zuckerberg told Harvard undergraduate inductees to “explore ideas like universal basic income,” a policy Elon Musk also thinks will become increasingly “necessary” over time, as robots outcompete humans across a growing range of jobs.8 Musk gave his SpaceX drone vessels names like “Of Course I Still Love You” and “Just Read the Instructions,” which he lifted from the names of spaceships in Iain M. Banks’s Culture series.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

Together, the Tapscotts have achieved this comprehensively and in doing so have captured the excitement, the potential, and the importance of this topic to everyone.” —Blythe Masters, CEO, Digital Asset Holdings “This is a book with the predictive quality of Orwell’s 1984 and the vision of Elon Musk. Read it or become extinct.” —Tim Draper, Founder, Draper Associates, DFJ, and Draper University “Blockchain is a radical technological wave and, as he has done so often, Tapscott is out there, now with son Alex, surfing at dawn. It’s quite a ride.” —Yochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School “If you work in business or government, you need to understand the blockchain revolution.

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Once machines have intelligence and the ability to learn, how quickly will they become autonomous? Will military drones and robots, for example, decide to turn on civilians? According to researchers in AI, we’re only years, not decades, away from the realization of such weapons. In July 2015, a large group of scientists and researchers, including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Steve Wozniak, issued an open letter calling for a ban on the development of autonomous offensive weapons beyond meaningful human control.53 “The nightmare headline for me is, ‘100,000 Refrigerators Attack Bank of America,’” said Vint Cerf, widely regarded as the father of the Internet.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World
by Oliver Morton
Published 26 Sep 2015

It is partly because of this technological feasibility that the billionaire-geoengineer is a well-worn trope of speculation: within the geoclique, it is called the ‘Greenfinger’ scenario, an allusion to James Bond introduced, I think, by David Victor, a political scientist now at the University of California, San Diego. After all, billionaires building spaceships – either very publicly, as Richard Branson does with Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk does with SpaceX, or more privately, as Jeff Bezos does with Blue Origin – is almost a commonplace. In its pure form – a billionaire who tries to take over the climate more or less by him or herself – I think the Greenfinger idea is highly implausible. Consider the case of Bill Gates (as many do, in this regard).

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But the fact that Bond villains don’t exist does not mean that rich people do not seek out technological interventions that will leverage their wealth in world-changing ways. By funding vaccination programmes, Bill and Melinda Gates have played a part in saving millions of people; programmes they have paid for are saving lives on a scale similar to that on which Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong brought death, an accomplishment which strikes me as utterly remarkable. Elon Musk really does intend to make human space travel much cheaper and thus more routine – which I think he may well achieve – and sincerely believes that by doing so he will change the course of history. The idea of a Greenfinger motivated by a particular conception of the greater good rather than megalomania, and operating from and on behalf of a small group of sovereign states that is aiming only for a modest effect, is not something to dismiss out of hand.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion
by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Published 19 Jul 2021

He often managed on only a few hours’ sleep a night. Yet he never seemed tired. He was endlessly energetic, characterized by an unflagging drive. His head was a fountain of ideas constantly overflowing. Many were not terribly well thought out, nor did they receive much follow-up. He told staff he was eager to collaborate with Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, on his plans for Mars, which Musk aspired to travel to and settle. Later, in 2017, Neumann ended up securing a meeting with the entrepreneur. After waiting for more than two hours for an audience at SpaceX’s headquarters in Los Angeles, Neumann spent his fifteen minutes pitching Musk on how he wanted to build a community on Mars—when Musk’s space transport firm eventually got there.

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Through the first half of 2020, the electric car manufacturer Tesla—led by an eccentric, unpredictable founder known for overpromising and exciting investors—surged in value as backers saw near-infinite potential in its future. Little had changed in its business, but it started a climb that made it worth more than two times the valuation of Toyota, despite producing a fraction of the cars. CEO Elon Musk would become the richest person on the planet by the beginning of 2021. That rise had a ripple effect. In the summer of 2020, Nikola Corporation, a six-year-old electric truck company founded by a charismatic entrepreneur named Trevor Milton, went public and its stock soared. Even though Nikola wasn’t yet manufacturing trucks, Milton inspired investors by painting a picture of how its design would remake the whole enormous trucking sector.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt
by Sinan Aral
Published 14 Sep 2020

Degrees of separation are calculated as the average path lengths or number of hops between any two people in six different social media networks and whether those social media networks used friend-suggestion algorithms to recommend new connections. The Hype Loop (the Process) A narrative playing out in the cultural zeitgeist today demonizes technology as if it’s designed, in some way, to disrupt and destroy us. Elon Musk has warned of the dangers of artificial intelligence, claiming that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” The idea that robots are coming to “steal our jobs” implies a seemingly conscious intent on the part of technology to invade and pillage our economy. The U.S. Congress has blamed Facebook for the erosion of American democracy.

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The Structure of the Twitter Follow Graph,” in Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web (New York: ACM, 2014), 493–98. The average path lengths between people: Data compiled from and compared across Ugander et al., “Anatomy of Facebook Social Graph,” and Myers et al., “Information Network or Social Network?” “AI is a fundamental risk”: “Elon Musk Talks Cars—and Humanity’s Fate—with Governors,” CNBC, July 17, 2017. Experts have testified that bots: Clint Watts, testimony before U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, March 30, 2017, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/​sites/​default/​files/​documents/​os-cwatts-033017.pdf. rooted in and supported by research: Wanda J.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5
by Taylor Pearson
Published 27 Jun 2015

If you look at the current head coaches in the NBA or NFL, the 80/20 rule applies. 80% of them usually have common roots in apprenticing with 20% of the head coaches of the past generation. Technology startups have started to develop “mafias,” or groups of successful entrepreneurs that can trace their roots back to a common source. Elon Musk (Currently of SpaceX and Tesla), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), and Peter Thiel (Palantir) all worked together at PayPal.42 Trajectory Theory—A Guide to Hiring an Apprentice (or Getting Hired) Three-time New York Times bestselling author Tucker Max has hired a lot of people to work in an apprentice-type position, and they’ve almost always gone on to be successful in future projects and companies.

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com
by Richard L. Brandt
Published 27 Oct 2011

At that time, the cost of developing this first stage was estimated at $30 million. Crazy? It’s not the first time that adjective has been applied to Bezos as an epithet. But in the age of scaled-back NASA budgets and missions, Bezos is one of a few super-rich entrepreneurs (including Sergey Brin from Google, Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, and Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic Airways) who are pursuing or funding private alternatives to NASA. Blue Origin is also filled with former NASA engineers and other space scientists. The company’s slogan is the Latin phrase “Gradatim Fero-citer,” which may be translated as “Step by Step, Courageously.”

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn
by Chris Hughes
Published 20 Feb 2018

And by tweaking and expanding it, we could make it possible for all American families to make ends meet. 4 The Precariat Over the past couple years, many technology and business leaders have come to believe we need a guaranteed income because of the threat of artificial intelligence. Elon Musk and Richard Branson, for instance, believe that “intelligent” machines may soon create a new era of mass unemployment. In that world, they argue, there will be no choice but to help people meet their basic needs. These leaders aren’t contemplating a future of wholesale job destruction in order to be contrarian or controversial.

Asteroid Mining 101: Wealth for the New Space Economy
by John Lewis
Published 22 Jul 2014

The rockets and space systems we thought reserved for the use of governments and soldiers have found new purposes, and new masters, people who want to use them to go beyond the purposes of science and state and turn them into tools that can be used for other goals, such as flying people and machines out to the frontier for fun and profit – oh, and to live. Weapons of mass destruction morph into both weapons of mass protection and heavenly chariots delivering untold wealth to Earth and Earth’s children. Well before the idea that an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos could build and own their own fleets of spaceships, in fact well before either of them had the idea they could own their own car, John Lewis was exploring the solar system from his office at MIT and then the University of Arizona, and coming to the realization that the solar system was not some neatly arranged set of planets with a well-placed band of asteroids in its middle, but was full of errant chunks of rock and ice flying in all directions and wreaking havoc on these celestial objects in often unpredictable and sometimes incredibly spectacular ways.

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business
by Mikkel Svane and Carlye Adler
Published 13 Nov 2014

. • I doubt that it was super sexy selling books to nerds online when Jeff Bezos and Amazon started 24 Page 24 Svane c01.tex V3 - 10/24/2014 8:14 P.M. The Honeymoon their adventure back in 1994. But that “bookstore” is currently changing the world of commerce. • You can’t really call space rockets boring, but with the determined goal of making space flight affordable— democratizing it—suddenly Elon Musk is making the industry sexy again. All of these show us: boring is sexy. Or rather, sexy is not only about colored feathers, appearance, and glamour. Remember, Marilyn Monroe did marry Arthur Miller. We spent six months sketching out this product while we kept our consulting gigs on the side. It wasn’t intense work.

She Has Her Mother's Laugh
by Carl Zimmer
Published 29 May 2018

Urashima, Tadasu, Sadaki Asakuma, Fiame Leo, Kenji Fukuda, Michael Messer, and Olav T. Oftedal. 2012. “The Predominance of Type I Oligosaccharides Is a Feature Specific to Human Breast Milk.” Advances in Nutrition 3:473S–482S. Urban, Tim. 2015. “My Visit with Elon Musk at SpaceX.” Business Insider, May 11. http://www.businessinsider.com/my-visit-with-elon-musk-at-spacex-2015-5 (accessed March 22, 2017). US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Minority Health. 2017. “Asthma and Hispanic Americans.” http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/omh/browse.aspx?lvl=4&lvlid=60 (accessed August 24, 2017). US Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives. 1944.

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“I want to understand the uses and implications of this amazing technology,” the pig-faced Hitler told her. Doudna woke up with her heart pattering. What, she asked herself, have we done? * * * — Doudna was hardly the only person getting visits from Hitler. In 2015, a reporter asked the inventor Elon Musk if he was considering getting into the business of reprogramming DNA. Musk is the sort of entrepreneur who blithely sets out to replace the world’s fleet of gas-powered cars with electric ones while simultaneously building the first recyclable rockets. But gene editing gave him pause. “How do you avoid the Hitler Problem?”

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology
by Anu Bradford
Published 25 Sep 2023

It is these apparent features that make it difficult for the West to counter the growing appeal of the Chinese regulatory model around the world, as will be discussed in Chapter 8. 3 The European Rights-Driven Regulatory Model within moments after completing his purchase of Twitter on October 27, 2022, Elon Musk tweeted “the bird is free,”1 in an apparent reference to closing the contested deal and thereby gaining the authority to reinstate his favored techno-libertarian free speech norms on the platform. The European Union did not hesitate to respond. Within hours, the European Commissioner Thierry Breton retorted to Musk on Twitter: “In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules.”2 This exchange between an American tech entrepreneur and a European regulator captures the core sentiment underlying the European regulatory model: tech companies need rules and those rules are established by governments.

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Looking at the founders of the most successful US tech companies reveals a powerful story of the role of immigration behind these tech companies. Steve Jobs of Apple was the son of a Syrian immigrant; Jeff Bezos of Amazon is a second-generation Cuban immigrant; Eduardo Saverin, the cofounder of Facebook, is Brazilian; Sergey Brin, the cofounder of Google, was born in Russia; and Elon Musk of Tesla was born in South Africa. And these famous individuals are not rare exceptions. According to a 2018 study by the National Foundation for American Policy, 55 percent of America’s billion-dollar companies have an immigrant founder.48 Looking at skilled migration more generally, Europe also fares worse than the US.

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Times (June 2, 2016), https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/03/technology/huawei-technologies-subpoena-iran-north-korea.html. 239.James Kynge, Huawei Suffers Biggest-Ever Decline in Revenue After US Blacklisting, Fin. Times (Aug. 6, 2021), https://www.ft.com/content/dc170be7-262e-4616-9ef9-2a49c611c26b. Chapter 3 1.Elon Musk (@elonmusk), Twitter (Oct. 27, 2022), https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585841080431321088. 2.Thierry Breton (@ThierryBreton), Twitter (Oct. 28, 2022), https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1585902196864045056. 3.See generally Anu Bradford, Europe’s Digital Constitution, 64 Va. J. Int’l L.

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy
by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
Published 4 Sep 2013

He had planned to complete his ride in Boston but, instead, it was ingloriously aborted in Connecticut where the Tesla ran out of power and was towed away on the back of a truck. He photographed the power-sapped Tesla and reported having had a very bad experience in his Times review. Like Lutz, Elon Musk, Tesla founder and CEO, chose to blog his side of the story. Although Lutz had to count on his own credibility and persuasive abilities when writing his blog, Musk had a credible eyewitness to everything that happened between Broder and the Tesla. Like most luxury cars today, the Tesla collects and stores data on where it has been and what happened to it in a little-known device called an Event Data Recorder (EDR].

Be Obsessed or Be Average
by Grant Cardone
Published 20 Sep 2016

There can be no choices and no options. Yes, victory comes at a price—so does settling. Sure, you might be totally and completely insane. But you’re not going to stop. Because history shows that only the obsessed make it—people like Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Elon Musk, Howard Schultz, Oprah, Vincent van Gogh, Steve Jobs, Christopher Columbus, Charlie Chaplin, Mozart, Michelangelo, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese, Jay Z, Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and on and on. There is no shortage of these people, and like them or hate them, admire them or detest them, we all know them!

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy
by Callum Cant
Published 11 Nov 2019

He wants to ‘play the game of business as if people matter’.4 To work out how to do that, O’Reilly variously cites Jonathan Hall (an economist at Uber), Professor Andrei Haigu (in the Harvard Business Review), Simon Rothmans (venture capitalist), Tom Perez (secretary of labor under Obama), Steven Hill (of the Google-backed New America think tank), and Jose Alvarez (ex-CEO). His positive examples of social change are those luminaries of human emancipation, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.5 His argument represents, in short, the ideas of the bleeding-heart ruling class. His analysis of working conditions at a global platform like Uber begins with a very specific element of US employment law: that when employees work for over 30 hours a week, employers have a responsibility to pay a full-time benefits package.

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down
by Tom Standage
Published 27 Nov 2018

Entrepreneurs think that devices could go beyond simply replacing lost functions: they dream of connecting the brain directly to computers and to the internet to give it entirely new functions that are beyond human beings’ abilities today. Imagine Google searches that deliver their result to the brain before the question is consciously asked; or direct, brain-to-brain communication, in which messages are sent using thought alone. Elon Musk, with his new company Neuralink, and Bryan Johnson, with a slightly older company called Kernel, are leading the charge. For the time being, the function of the brain is not understood in enough detail to read and write information at this level of linguistic communication. But for the optimists of Silicon Valley, avid readers of science-fiction novels in which such devices are commonplace, it is only a matter of time.

Demystifying Smart Cities
by Anders Lisdorf

He typically has detailed plans for how things should be and is capable of effecting that change. On the other hand, he has very little interest in how things get done to implement his plan as long as it does. Real-world examples include Fidel Castro, Gandhi, and Joseph Stalin. In technology, we see people like Julian Assange, Elon Musk, and in particular Steve Jobs who was famous for being able to bend reality to his view. The archetypal revolutionary is the turnaround CEO who comes in with a lot of ideas about how things should be and little interest or time to understand how they are. In general, this type is often in a senior management position.

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony
by David G. W. Birch
Published 14 Apr 2020

As an aside, I must note that there were plenty of email payment services springing up around that time too. Does anyone remember Citibank’s c2it service, which was shuttered in 2003, or Yahoo!’s PayDirect, which launched at the same time?4 Or, indeed, eBay’s Billpoint service? In 2000, Confinity merged with Elon Musk’s online banking start-up X.com, which soon terminated other operations to focus on its money-transfer business. The company, at that point renamed PayPal, went public in 2002 and was soon acquired by eBay (at a time when around a quarter of eBay auctions were paid for via PayPal). In 2005, by which time 1 in 10 British people had a PayPal account, the company acquired VeriSign.

Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness
by Tim S. Grover and Shari Wenk
Published 17 May 2021

I’m not just talking about athletes here, I’m talking about innovators and groundbreakers in business, entertainment, science, technology, education, medicine, parenting… every walk of life. Bill Gates personally checking every line of code for the first five years of Microsoft’s existence. Jeff Bezos shipping books out of his garage. Sara Blakely cutting the feet off her pantyhose. Elon Musk gazing up at Mars. They weren’t afraid to think originally, they weren’t worried about what others would think about their “crazy” ideas. That whole BS about thinking outside the box is just that: BS. Winners don’t see the box. They see possibilities. They use their own decisions, successes, and failures as a springboard to elevate their thinking and results.

Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change
by Ronald Cohen
Published 1 Jul 2020

I can see great similarities between the disruption that high-tech brought to business and the disruption that impact is bringing today. I know we will see impact entrepreneurs that match the scale of the tech entrepreneurs’ ambition and success, but surpass them in terms of the positive impact they have on the planet. To date, the best-known impact entrepreneur is Elon Musk. For all his idiosyncrasies and the challenges Tesla, his high-end electric car company, has faced, Musk has single-handedly changed the automobile industry for the better. According to Tesla’s most recent impact report, the company has sold more than 550,000 electric vehicles, which have driven more than 10 billion miles between them.

Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds
by Dominique Mielle
Published 6 Sep 2021

Unfortunately, it remained an idea and I never saw him again. Panavision continued to sink and abandoned its 3D camera project. I am not bitter. I wish James the absolute best and I hope he is well—after all, I note with a certain concern that he has not released a movie since he last met me. Speaking of tall and rich men, I introduced Elon Musk at one of our research retreats at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he spoke twice. It was probably 2011, because he was about to launch the Tesla Model S and the second version of the Falcon 9 rocket, and he was a lot thinner. Whether it is the job or the weed, I would not know since I am neither working nor smoking pot.

Alpha Trader
by Brent Donnelly
Published 11 May 2021

Simple changes to market microstructure can often lead to significant changes in your P&L and can turn profitable strategies into duds. Now, let’s move to the next step. In Chapter 9, I will tell you how I stay in touch with the narrative, and how that helps me forecast future moves and come up with trade ideas. 101. If you are a huge Elon Musk fan or if you really can’t stand him for some reason, don’t trade TSLA. You need to be equally prepared to trade a stock from the long or short side or you should not be participating. If you Stan for Elon, trading TSLA is like a Real Madrid fan betting on a Real Madrid / Barcelona game. Do you think he’s going to make an unbiased bet on the team he thinks has the best chance of winning?

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Then, suddenly, the new supply runs into falling demand and prices whoosh lower. Furthermore, depending on the market, the higher price can also have other macroeconomic impacts that will lead to lower prices in the future. For example, a rise in the euro might lead to more accommodative ECB policy or a huge ramp up in Tesla stock might spur Elon Musk to sell stock in a secondary offering. Be sure to understand what price levels in your market might lead to major or non-linear changes in supply or demand. If you are expert in your market and keenly attuned to its driving narrative, you will recognize moments when the story has changed but price is not yet paying attention.

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone
by Satya Nadella , Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols
Published 25 Sep 2017

However, they don’t fully capture the values or design principles that researchers and tech companies should articulate when building computers, robots, or software tools in the first place. Nor do they speak about the capabilities humans must bring into this next era when AI and machine learning will drive ever-larger parts of our economy. Asimov was not alone in contemplating the risks. Elon Musk, the inventor and entrepreneur, went so far as to say that if humans don’t add a digital layer of intelligence to their brains—high bandwidth between your cortex and your computer AI—we may all become little more than house cats. And computer pioneer Alan Kay quips, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
by Franklin Foer
Published 31 Aug 2017

The alphabet was one of humanity’s greatest innovations, the sort of everlasting achievement that the company intends to foment again and again. Bluster pours forth from the tech elite, and much of the world tends to look at their lengthy inventory of grandiose projects as vanity. If Jeff Bezos wants to launch rockets into space, then Elon Musk will do him one better and colonize Mars. But Silicon Valley is hardly distinguished by the hegemonic egos of its leaders, especially relative to finance or media. What makes Big Tech different is that it pursues these projects with a theological sense of conviction—which makes its efforts both wondrous and dangerous.

Think Like an Engineer: Use Systematic Thinking to Solve Everyday Challenges & Unlock the Inherent Values in Them
by Mushtak Al-Atabi
Published 26 Aug 2014

It's coming up with ideas, testing principles and perfecting the engineering, as well as final assembly.” Sir James Dyson, Founder of Dyson Company “The path to the CEO's office should not be through the CFO's office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.” Elon Musk, CEO & CTO of Tesla CEO & Chief Product Architect of Tesla Motors Engineering is old; as old as human civilisation itself. It was born out of the need of humans to modify their environment to provide their basic needs such as food, shelter and security. It has always been largely motivated by the human desire to have a better, easier and more comfortable life.

The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design
by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth
Published 3 Oct 2019

If you extrapolate a little from the kinds of technology we have today to the kinds we might have in a hundred years, you might even arrive at the thought that AI poses an existential threat to humanity. And many high-profile people have. Stephen Hawking said that superintelligent AI “could spell the end of the human race.” Elon Musk views artificial intelligence as “our greatest existential threat.” And Google DeepMind cofounder Shane Legg has said that he thinks that artificial intelligence poses “the number one risk for this century.” In fact, when Google negotiated the purchase of DeepMind in 2014 for $400 million, one of the conditions of the sale was that Google would set up an AI ethics board.

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever
by Alex Kantrowitz
Published 6 Apr 2020

Dow Jones & Company, October 25, 2018. https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-netflix-radical-transparency-and-blunt-firings-unsettle-the-ranks-1540497174?mod=hp_lead_pos4. Ideas at Tesla come from the top: Duhigg, Charles. “Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Life Inside Tesla’s Production Hell.” Wired. Condé Nast, December 13, 2008. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-gigafactory. Uber’s culture is famously troubled: Isaac, Mike. Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. CHAPTER 1: INSIDE JEFF BEZOS’S CULTURE OF INVENTION Bezos drives Amazon’s inventive culture through fourteen leadership principles: “Leadership Principles.”

Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal That Undid Him, and All the Justice That Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein
by James Patterson , John Connolly and Tim Malloy
Published 10 Oct 2016

It was one of the most romantic, generous gestures that Jeffrey Epstein had ever made. CHAPTER 61 Al Seckel: January 2012 Epstein’s partner in the Mindshift conference, a man named Al Seckel, was known for throwing fabulous parties that were said to have included the actor Dudley Moore, magician James “the Amazing” Randi, and future Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, as well as many of the scientists Jeffrey Epstein would court in the course of his own climb up the social ladder. In certain Los Angeles circles, Al Seckel was a very good man to know. But, like Jeffrey Epstein, Seckel was a sort of illusionist. According to Mark Oppenheimer, a journalist who knew Seckel and followed his career for fifteen years, Seckel made his money by selling rare books and papers, often through his social and academic connections.

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger
by Matthew Yglesias
Published 14 Sep 2020

Los Angeles alone has invested billions of dollars in recent years in constructing the Los Angeles Metro Rail system, which has less than a third of the ridership of smaller mass transit systems in much smaller cities like Budapest, Milan, Busan, Montreal, or Stockholm. Concurrently, major political stakeholders in American mass transit are relentlessly focused on the concept of innovation, with New York governor Andrew Cuomo announcing a flashy “genius” contest to improve transit. Elon Musk, when not colonizing Mars or trying to revolutionize the car industry, muses publicly about totally reworking American urban transportation. There’s something natural about this. The United States is bad at mass transit but good at innovation, so the idea that we need to apply some innovation to our transit problem has some appeal.

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work
by Sarah Kessler
Published 11 Jun 2018

He was able to maintain his previous wage and live the flexible “vacation on a moment’s notice” lifestyle that had lured him in the first place. And yet, the last time I talked with him, in July of 2016, he was about to sign an employment contract with Silicon Valley’s golden child, SpaceX, a Los Angeles–based startup created by Elon Musk that builds rockets and spacecraft. It was a surprise to both of us. “It’s the only company I would want to work for instead of freelancing,” Curtis said. “It’s pretty much a dream company.” On a live video feed in 2013, he’d watched SpaceX test its first reusable rocket, Grasshopper, and he’d kept tabs on its progress ever since.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It
by Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert
Published 4 Jun 2018

And with all the dramatic improvements we’re seeing in manufacturing and 3D printing, maybe a whole new crop of automobile start-ups will be able to batch-print their own vehicles in Chinese factories (just like cell phones!), right? Wrong. As it turns out, it is really hard to build a safe, great car at scale. Just ask Elon Musk. Or Apple. Or Google. SILICON VALLEY VERSUS DETROIT? BET ON DETROIT As it turns out, the Big Three have some distinct institutional advantages over Silicon Valley when it comes to building the future of the automobile industry. First, they have the distribution. The vast dealer networks these companies operate are commanding assets.

Bulletproof Problem Solving
by Charles Conn and Robert McLean
Published 6 Mar 2019

You can see how it turned out not to be an achievable goal in the short term as few were in a position to believe they could win and the risks and costs were deemed to be large. EXHIBIT 6.10 Source: Jonathan Bays, Tony Goland, and Joe Newsum, “Using Prizes to Spur Innovation,” McKinsey Quarterly, July 2009. Elon Musk's Hyperloop project is an attempt to rapidly advance transportation technology. The Hyperloop is a pod transportation system currently under development, designed to transport people over long distances at astonishing, near supersonic speeds. Given its clear, well‐defined goal, and a large, diverse population of problem solvers, many of whom are students willing to accept the risk and hungry for the experience, the SpaceX Hyperloop competition is a great example to test the power of crowdsourcing.

Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era?
by David de Cremer
Published 25 May 2020

But, at the same time, they do provide us with valuable advice, since they outline how quickly our human desire to progress at any cost can escalate quickly into submission to a technology system that strips away our true human identity. Moreover, living a virtual life may not be a fantasy for that much longer. For example, Neuralink, a start-up founded by Elon Musk, is currently working on developing a brain-machine interface where human and AI can meet. On the surface, this does not need to be a problem, as long as AI is only used to augment human capabilities and the reality established is human. The point I want to emphasize here, however, is that humans need to have a strong moral compass in their search to continuously improve themselves with new technology.

Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber
by Susan Fowler
Published 18 Feb 2020

There was an uproar, and the #DeleteUber hashtag began to trend on Twitter. In the early days of #DeleteUber, an estimated 200,000 users deleted their accounts—a number that continued to grow as Twitter and the media covered Uber’s connections to the Trump administration. Alongside other CEOs like Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick had joined Trump’s economic advisory council shortly after the election; now, in light of the Muslim ban, Uber’s employees and customers were pressuring him to resign. Faced with growing employee unrest and unhappy users, Kalanick resigned from the council. #DeleteUber stopped trending.

For the Love of Autism: Stories of Love, Awareness and Acceptance on the Spectrum
by Tamika Lechee Morales
Published 23 Apr 2022

You have helped me to laser focus on my key interests of sports and theater, which has helped me turn some of those interests into a career. And autism, you may not know this, but you’ve even become more well-known now than when I was a kid. Dan Aykroyd once mentioned you and said that you, in part, made him successful as an actor. Other celebrities, like Elon Musk, Wentworth Miller, Anthony Hopkins, Daryl Hannah, and Susan Boyle, also have mentioned they are autistic, too. There are even people like Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Mozart rumored to be autistic as well. As we learn more about you, I’m excited for our society to try and find more ways to help autistics find more of the strengths it can bring while working with those who have additional needs and may need lifetime care.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

As one tech analyst commented: ‘The rise in unprofitable IPOs reflects the general preference in both public and private markets for growth over profitability.’18 Silicon Valley’s unicorns attracted higher valuations at each funding round, even as losses outpaced sales. A fortunate few, such as Uber and Lyft, made it to the public markets, where they jostled for attention with another company that had long promised, or rather over-promised, the imminent arrival of self-driving cars. In 2017, the market capitalization of Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. accelerated past General Motors.19 Three years later, Tesla was valued at more than Toyota, even though the Japanese car maker produced over twenty times as many vehicles. For this valuation to hold, Musk would have to produce millions more cars every year, and to achieve that Tesla required a great deal of investment.

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Hayek concluded his speech with a warning: The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.fn6 Postscript The World Turned Upside Down As long as other countries are receiving the benefits of Negative Rates, the US should accept the “GIFT”. Big numbers! Donald Trump tweet, May 2020 Actually, doesn’t feel quite right. Elon Musk, March 2021 (on turning down an offer of $1.1 million for a nonfungible token of a tweet) Towards the end of 2019, Mervyn King gave a speech in which he pointed out that global debt relative to GDP was much higher than in 2008. High levels of debt and elevated uncertainty were depressing consumption, said the former Governor of the Bank of England.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
Published 6 Dec 2016

A singularity, technically speaking, is the point at which a function takes an infinite value, such as what happens to space and time at the center of a black hole. What happens after a technological singularity? According to Kurzweil we enter a period of blissful transhumanism, in which the line between human and machine becomes indistinguishable, and the superintelligences that roam the planet solve all of mankind’s problems. Others—Elon Musk, Paypal alum and the inventor behind Tesla Motors, for one—believe the machines will rightly see humans as a kind of metastasizing cancer infecting the planet, and zap Homo sapiens out of existence. We encourage a broader view: Maybe AI’s good, maybe it’s bad. Or just maybe that’s beside the point when measured against the other threats and positive outcomes that might develop in the coming century.

Makers
by Chris Anderson
Published 1 Oct 2012

But what’s smallish for cars is still massive for everyone else. The Tesla factory occupies part of a building nearly a mile long. It will employ more than one thousand people. It is already the biggest factory in Silicon Valley. If you’ve seen the movie Iron Man, you’ll have a feel for it. The film’s protagonist, Tony Stark, was modeled after Tesla founder Elon Musk, and the factory looks like nothing more than the movie brought to life. Part of what makes this factory so innovative is that these are not your regular cars. For a start, the Model S, which the factory will start with, is pure electric, which means that it shares as much with a laptop computer as it does with a traditional gas-powered car.

Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account From Curiosity's Chief Engineer
by Rob Manning and William L. Simon
Published 20 Oct 2014

This would not only put MSL above the launch vehicle’s lift capability, but we would also need to develop a whole new technology of flying our rocket engines backward supersonically against the flow, a technique that few had studied much less developed as a reliable way to land on Mars. (This technology, called “supersonic retropulsive decelerators,” is now being developed by NASA and by Elon Musk’s Space-X team.) Mike understood and quickly gave up his objections to the parachute. There are few things more satisfying than talking to a person who listens carefully to reasoning, weighs what you said, and is willing to change his mind on the spot if you’ve succeeded in convincing him. We were off to a good start.

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past
by Chuck Klosterman
Published 6 Jun 2016

But this doesn’t translate, since (a) clearheaded McLaughlin was a speechwriter for Nixon, (b) one of the alleged liberals is often billionaire media mogul Mort Zuckerman, and (c) Pat Buchanan is on almost every single episode (and it would be impossible to find a public figure who’s as liberal as Buchanan is conservative, unless they suddenly hired Lena Dunham or Jello Biafra). To say The McLaughlin Group sometimes traffics in “outdated modes of thinking” is a little like saying Elon Musk sometimes “expresses interest in the future.” But this roundtable forces me to think about things I normally ignore—and not so much about politics, but about the human relationship to time. The McLaughlin Group pre-tapes its episodes on Friday afternoon. But they tape the show that runs during Thanksgiving weekend much further in advance, which means they have to ignore pressing current events (since something critical or catastrophic could transpire in the days between the taping and the broadcast).

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

Despite all the mystique surrounding deep learning and the dark web, our pop culture dystopias reveal a society well on its way to articulating a clear critique of what we don’t like about the Silicon Valley vision of the future.29 Our clarity is in part linked to the peculiar fact that many Silicon Valley visions about what technology should look like, and what our aspirations regarding technology should be, were originally located in science fiction. Star Trek fans say the smartphone is the real-life incarnation of the tricorder. Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur who founded Tesla, named his two spaceport drone ships Just Read The Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You in tribute to the “Culture” novels by the science fiction great Iain M. Banks. Many classic speculative fiction stories—for instance, The Winter Market, by William Gibson, and Ubik, by Phillip K.

Alone on the Wall: Alex Honnold and the Ultimate Limits of Adventure
by Alex Honnold and David Roberts
Published 2 Nov 2015

Long before I started the Honnold Foundation, when people asked me which nonclimbers I most admired, I cited guys like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Billionaires who used their riches to address problems of environmental degradation and income inequality, and to provide educational opportunities to the disadvantaged. Today I’d add Elon Musk to the list—a business magnate and engineer who’s reinventing the world. With my Honnold Foundation, what I really hope to do in the coming years is to improve the lives of the most vulnerable people in the world in a way that helps the environment. To support projects that both help the earth and help lift people out of poverty.

Automating Inequality
by Virginia Eubanks

“We need a program that can provide a temporary cash cushion,” they write, “because no matter what strategies we implement, work … will sometimes fail.”4 In the face of fears that automation promises a jobless future, a cash assistance plan, the universal basic income (UBI) is enjoying a resurgence. Experiments in UBI are currently being conducted in Finland and in Ontario, Canada. In May 2017, Hawaii adopted a bill declaring that “all families … deserve basic financial security” and began to explore instituting a UBI. High-tech entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, and Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors, believe that a UBI will provide a cushion allowing everyone to innovate and try new ideas. UBI plans usually offer between $8,000 and $12,000 a year. In principle, a UBI would be truly universal—offered to every citizen—but in political practice, guaranteed adequate income programs tend to be offered to those who are unemployed or who fall below a minimum income line.

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos
by Sarah Lacy
Published 6 Jan 2011

There was inevitably going to be a few decades where the costs of remaking our electrical lives would be prohibitive for most consumers, and hence would have to be subsidized by something like tax incentives. A lot of VCs talked a good game about cleantech, but most of the investments were lower-capital plays that only nibbled at the core problems, like a software system for better routing electricity around large retail chains. A glaring exception was Elon Musk, one of the founders of PayPal and an immigrant from South Africa. While his fel ow PayPal alums plowed their money back into the Web 2.0 world—funding or starting companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Slide, and Yelp—Musk built a rocket company cal ed SpaceX, a solar panel company cal ed SolarCity, and an electric car company cal ed Tesla.

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining
by James Meek
Published 5 Mar 2019

Last year it emerged that Amazon paid £7.4 million in corporation tax despite having a UK turnover of £1.46 billion. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, says he sells a billion dollars’ worth of Amazon stock each year in order to fund his Blue Origin rocket firm. Bezos is engaged in a private race with another US tycoon, Elon Musk, to be the first to commercialise space travel. If Leicestershire wonders where the money for its NHS went, the answer is that some of it is on its way to Mars. Charlesworth, who works for the Health Foundation, doesn’t believe there’s a political appetite for radical changes to the way the NHS is funded, even among Conservatives.

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking
by Matthew Syed
Published 9 Sep 2019

We unconsciously reject changes that might make our own jobs and lives more productive and fulfilled. But there is one group of people who do not seem to be hampered by this barrier. People who are often behind the success stories we have mentioned, and who hold out lessons for all of us. III Take a look at the following list of names: Estée Lauder, Henry Ford, Elon Musk, Walt Disney and Sergey Brin. Can you see what they have in common? On the surface, they look like a list of famous entrepreneurs, people who have made an impact on American society. But dig a little deeper and you will note that they share a pattern with dozens of others, including Jerry Yang, Arianna Huffington and Peter Thiel, each of whom have helped to shape the modern economy of the United States.

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond
by Tamara Kneese
Published 14 Aug 2023

Mormon transhumanism is the perfect space, both theoretically and practically, for considering how technoscientific imaginaries collide with social reproduction and religious afterlife cosmologies. In the context of Mormonism, heaven is always potentially present and speculative, just waiting to be built. Ostler explicitly contrasts her worldview with that of futurists such as Elon Musk, who imagine colonizing space as a means of escaping a warming planet earth. Unlike other branches of secular, disembodied transhumanism, for Mormon transhumanists, utopia and the afterlife are connected to a specific, earthly place. Ostler’s critique maps onto other feminist theories of male exit and survivalism, which both millennial Christian and secular technologist prepper men imagine to be untethered from care ecologies.68 Ostler’s philosophy echoes those of feminist theorists of technology like Donna Haraway who turn to DIY cyborg ingenuity in the face of hostile institutions and expertise.69 As Ostler puts it, there is a certain privilege inherent in thinking about flying to space rather than “caring for a sick grandmother, feeding three kids, and working multiple jobs.”

Longshot
by David Heath
Published 18 Jan 2022

“I’m the type of person who believes in what I believe and doesn’t really care what other people believe,” Bancel once said.1 One of Moderna’s cofounders, Kenneth Chien, told a writer for the French version of Vanity Fair: “You are going to hear a lot of things about Stéphane. Good: a visionary, a genius somewhere between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. And at least not so good: a bubbling, arrogant, unbearable boss.”2 From its earliest days, outsiders’ views of Moderna were wildly mixed. There were those who thought the company would one day revolutionize medicine. There were those who thought Moderna was all hype. For years it was hard to tell what was going on behind closed doors because the company was so secretive.

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 14 Jun 2023

The directors of Hibernia Atlantic patted themselves on the back: their fibre-optic cable connected the two terminals in 58.95 milliseconds — 5 milliseconds faster than the competition.46 (See appendix 11.) Wilkie popped a bottle of champagne and said: ‘We’ve killed the market!’ All the biggest traders switched to the Hibernia Express. ‘No one will beat us,’ he said. That is, unless the cable deteriorates, or the low-orbit satellite constellations, such those deployed by Elon Musk and his company Starlink, one day offer a service that is 30 per cent faster.47 Technically, it’s possible. Until then, clients are moving to Hibernia Atlantic in their droves. Trading companies will do whatever it takes to buy and sell faster than their competitors. ‘Accessing Hibernia Atlantic cost 100 times more than the “normal” route’, explains an anonymous source who operates the cable.

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
by Eric Kaufmann
Published 24 Oct 2018

In order to escape, people retreat behind visors and gloves into a virtual-reality fantasy world. Is the world real or a simulation? The problem has vexed metaphysicians for millennia and many techno-optimists point to a future in which the virtual and real have become blurred. The tech magnate Elon Musk, a thought-leader in this area, claims that we may already be living in a simulation. ‘40 years ago we had Pong – two rectangles and a dot,’ Musk told an audience at a tech conference. ‘Now 40 years later we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it’s getting better every year.

…

Duffy Toft, Political Demography: How Population Changes are Reshaping International Security and National Politics, Boulder, Colo., 2012: Paradigm, pp. 252–67. 24. Coleman, ‘The changing face of Europe’, pp. 188–90. 25. Sophie Warnes and Anna Leach, ‘How a white baby can be born to a black mother – the statistics of skin colour’, Mirror, 1 September 2014. 26. Andrew Griffin, ‘Elon Musk: The chance we are not living in a computer simulation is “one in billions” ’, Independent, 2 June 2016. 27. L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples and Languages, Stanford, Calif., 2001: University of California Press. 28. A. Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome, 2016: Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press. 29.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Sep 2014

Luxury-car makers like Infiniti, Mercedes, and Volvo are rolling out models that combine radar-assisted adaptive cruise control, which works even in stop-and-go traffic, with computerized steering systems that keep a car centered in its lane and brakes that slam themselves on in emergencies. Other manufacturers are rushing to introduce even more advanced controls. Tesla Motors, the electric car pioneer, is developing an automotive autopilot that “should be able to [handle] 90 percent of miles driven,” according to the company’s ambitious chief executive, Elon Musk.3 The arrival of Google’s self-driving car shakes up more than our conception of driving. It forces us to change our thinking about what computers and robots can and can’t do. Up until that fateful October day, it was taken for granted that many important skills lay beyond the reach of automation.

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small
by Steve Sammartino
Published 25 Jun 2014

The easiest way to get attention To get more attention, invest more in a product, build something amazing and let the collective sentience take over. If we qualify in the awesomeness stakes, then our audience will do the talking for us. The old model of under-investing in the product we sell so we could afford the distribution and media costs is now being reversed. If the product is amazing, is advertising really needed? Just ask Elon Musk of Tesla Motors. Tesla Motors is a Silicon Valley–based auto startup that makes all-electric vehicles. Tesla has no advertising, no agency and no chief marketing officer and it has no plans to run television advertisements any time soon. For 2012 and 2013 all of its production vehicles were presold.

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency
by Ian Demartino
Published 2 Feb 2016

Garza appeared to have allegedly stolen money from both Fraser and his own company, led employees on, fired an employee he was having an affair with after his wife got jealous, had an estate sale before disappearing, sold his three cars, lied to others about how he obtained those cars (he said the Tesla was a “gift from Elon [Musk]” even though a purchase receipt was found in his email), and had trouble paying his business partners, among countless other improprieties. In most scenarios, this would be the end of a company. It would dissolve, everyone would go their separate ways and the customers would be left hoping the SEC investigation would get them some return on their investments.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
by Julia Ebner
Published 20 Feb 2020

Available at https://archive.org/stream/TheCallForAGlobalIslamicResistance-EnglishTranslationOfSomeKeyPartsAbuMusabAsSuri/TheCallForAGlobalIslamicResistanceSomeKeyParts_djvu.txt. 2Alex Hern, ‘New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators’, Guardian, 14 February 2019. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/14/elon-musk-backed-ai-writes-convincing-news-fiction. 3Paige Leskin, ‘The AI tech behind scare real celebrity “deepfakes” is being used to create completely fictitious faces, cats, and Airbnb listings’, Business Insider, 21 February 2019. Available at https://www.businessinsider.de/deepfake-tech-create-fictitious-faces-cats-airbnb-listings-2019-2?

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

CHAPTER SIX WE ARE ALL DYING Is it possible that in their voluntary communication and expression, in their blogging and social media practices, people are contributing to instead of contesting repressive forces? Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration Silicon Valley calculates with, and not against, the Apocalypse. Its ever-implicit slogan is: ‘Bring it on’ Geert Lovink, Social Media Abyss Humanity rocks! Elon Musk to Sam Harris, Twitter.com I. ‘I’m going to kill all Muslims,’ he shouted, as almost a dozen worshippers and pedestrians lay injured and, in one case, dead. Almost as quickly, he retreated to a more grimly realistic declaration: ‘I did my bit.’ Darren Osborne killed one Muslim, fifty-one-year-old Makram Ali.

The New Class Conflict
by Joel Kotkin
Published 31 Aug 2014

Nigel Walton has dubbed “the Gang of Four” Internet companies—Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google—as fitting into the conglomerate model.74 Valley firms and investors, for example, now account for half of all venture funding invested in robotics; they also account for a whopping 90 percent of market cap in this sector. Facebook is making a similarly bold move, spending $2 billion on a startup that makes virtual reality gear.75 Others are turning to fields such as automobiles, which have been dominated in the past by older industrial firms. Elon Musk, billionaire co-founder of PayPal, founded Tesla, which has emerged as a dynamic player in the electric car market, with plans to build a $5 billion electric battery plant.76 Both Google and Apple have also made moves into the automotive market, focusing on driverless cars.77 In the long run, the most important drive by the Oligarchs is the one toward a field once dominated by one of the early Valley’s key contractors, NASA.

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income
by Guy Standing
Published 3 May 2017

Latterly, the idea has been taken up by Silicon Valley luminaries and venture capitalists, some putting up money for the cause, as we shall see. They include Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar, Sam Altman, head of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, Albert Wenger, a prominent venture capitalist, Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, Elon Musk, founder of SolarCity, Tesla and SpaceX, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, and Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent. Some people have rejected basic income on the rather crude reasoning that support from this quarter means it must be wrong!

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality
by Laurence Scott
Published 11 Jul 2018

So many of our largest anxieties have this retrospective, fictionalised quality to them, a dated twentieth-century kitschness that can make them feel somehow unbelievable. In circulation are Cold War pictures of Fifties children crouched under school desks. Scientists have just begun to show off broad-shouldered, humanoid robots that can do back-flips. It isn’t difficult to imagine them coolly armed and on a rampage. Elon Musk has called for a ban on ‘killer robots’, but isn’t this fear a back-flip to the storyline from Terminator? And, of course, the Nazis are regularly in the news again. These ironised, passé perils, which manage in their familiarity to feel both terrifyingly real and incredible, appear alongside omens of an unravelling reality.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?
by Aaron Dignan
Published 1 Feb 2019

Joining a camp is like joining a team, and you’ll be taking on duties and contributing to the camp’s vision, whatever that might be. The experiences and entertainment that participants bring to life are almost beyond comprehension. Massive art installations, mutant vehicles, and elaborate parties celebrate the ideals and values of the community. You may find yourself. You may find God. You may run into Elon Musk (no relation). And the total cost to participate in this cashless economy where you’ll be totally reliant on the people around you? It could be $2,000 or more. Tickets for last year’s event sold out in just thirty-five minutes. This isn’t Lollapalooza. It’s not a few hours in the sun with your friends.

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
by Tyler Cowen
Published 8 Apr 2019

Friedman thought that ends other than profit could be valuable for society, but in his mind those ends were better pursued through charity, nonprofit institutions, or government policy, as corporations could not perform those tasks efficiently or in accordance with their basic natures.14 Although I am a fan of Milton Friedman and I share his skepticism about socialist solutions, I think this article reflected significant ideological blinders. Goals other than simple profit maximization often end up boosting both business profits and social benefits. For example, the people who work at SpaceX, the Elon Musk company that launches satellites using advanced and sometimes revolutionary rocket technology, often really do believe in the dream of colonizing other planets and the stars. The founders of Skype and the managers who work there seem to believe in the ideal of bringing friends, families, and business associates together.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 5 Oct 2020

The movie was stunningly prescient in understanding the greatest dilemma posed by artificial intelligence. In the film, the computer, HAL, chooses to kill its human masters so that it can proceed with its mission. In the end, the human, David Bowman, was able to outsmart the machine—but in real life it seems far more likely that the opposite would happen. That is why Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and a slew of other luminaries, usually optimistic about technology, have echoed the warnings of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom: they now worry that the development of general AI could threaten the human species itself. AI-powered computers are already black boxes. We know that they get to the right answer, but we don’t know how or why.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Published 12 Aug 2020

This narrative relies heavily on the claim that technology will save us, in one way or another. For some, it is a simple matter of switching the global economy to renewable energy and electric cars; once we do that, there’s no reason we can’t keep growing for ever. After all, solar and wind power are getting cheaper all the time, and Elon Musk has shown that it’s possible to mass-produce storage batteries at a rapid clip. For others, it’s a matter of ‘negative-emissions technologies’ that will pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Still others bank on the hope of enormous geo-engineering schemes: everything from blocking out the sun to changing the chemistry of the oceans.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups
by Ali Tamaseb
Published 14 Sep 2021

About 42 percent of billion-dollar startups in my study were capital light, about 28 percent were medium, and another 30 percent had high CapEx business models. 58 percent of billion-dollar startups had business models with medium or high capital requirements. Take a business like SpaceX. Elon Musk started the spacecraft company in 2002, after a botched attempt to buy refurbished rockets forced him to build his own. Musk had a vision of exploring Mars, growing plants on Martian soil, and eventually sending humans to live there. To do that, he needed rockets, and rockets cost millions of dollars.

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century
by Jeff Lawson
Published 12 Jan 2021

What would happen if you could iterate on your key experiences and workflows on a weekly basis? That’s the software mindset at work, beginning by digitizing your physical reality, and then applying the software mindset to problem-solving. Every kind of company can become a software company—all you have to do is internalize the value of rapid iteration. You don’t need to be Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey; you just need to believe in the power of iteration, and Darwin will be on your side. But of course, to iterate, you first need to build. You can’t iterate on something you’ve bought off the shelf. That’s why it’s Build vs. Die. Why Buying Software No Longer Makes Sense The problem is that, by definition, a one-size-fits-all piece of software doesn’t suit anyone very well.

This Book Could Fix Your Life: The Science of Self Help
by New Scientist and Helen Thomson
Published 7 Jan 2021

Self-help manuals thrive on the desire of many people to get ahead in the world of work, providing all kinds of advice on the behaviours we need to adopt to maximise our potential and move onwards and upwards. The genre is often accompanied by a cult of celebrity. We love successful people, and often turn to the likes of Elon Musk, Richard Branson or Sheryl Sandberg to identify the secrets of success that we can apply to ourselves. Surely there must be some kind of rule, personality trait or way of working, we think, that we can emulate to achieve greatness? I hope I won’t be disappointing you at this stage if I say this isn’t that kind of book.

Know Thyself
by Stephen M Fleming
Published 27 Apr 2021

It was not long before other labs were able to decode these population codes and show that monkeys could be trained to control robot arms by modulating patterns of neural activity.16 Matt Nagle, a tetraplegic left unable to move after being attacked and stabbed, was one of the first patients to receive the benefit of this technology in 2002. After receiving an implant made by a commercial company, Cyberkinetics, he learned to move a computer cursor and change TV channels by thought alone. Companies such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink have recently promised to accelerate the development of such technologies by developing surgical robots that can integrate the implant with neural tissue in ways that would be near impossible for human surgeons. We might think that undergoing neurosurgery is a step too far to be able to control our AI devices.

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back
by Bruce Schneier
Published 7 Feb 2023

Traditionally, this scheme involved calling potential investors on the telephone. Today, it more often involves online trading message boards, social media groups, and spam emails. Whether it’s ringleaders on the Reddit finance forum r/WallStreetBets pushing retail investors to send GameStop’s price “to the moon” or Elon Musk tweeting about his bitcoin buys to millions of online followers, investors can use online communications to manipulate investor expectations and produce asset bubbles for their own profit (and others’ loss) with unprecedented speed and scale. The advent of online trading has made this particular hack even more profitable.

Badvertising
by Andrew Simms

There are also ‘ad-blocking’ programmes you can upload so that when browsing online, adverts are filtered out, but sometimes this comes at the cost of access to the website you might be trying to view. There are other alternatives in the online world specifically designed to filter out ads. The search engine DuckDuckGo, for example, makes a virtue of filtering out surveillance advertising. When the billionaire Elon Musk wreaked havoc on Twitter with his swaggering takeover of the micro-blogging and messaging site, users fled in herds to an alternative, Mastodon, that looks very similar, but is a not-for-profit, open source, decentralised and also ad free. So, there is already an emerging online ecosystem that means people can minimise their exposure to advertising.

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
by Brian Dear
Published 14 Jun 2017

— Welcome to PLATO. Turn the page to begin. Part I THE AUTOMATIC TEACHER Children seem to be such remarkable learners on their own, but then they enter school. —Seymour Papert There will always be naysayers. They’re the same people who go from saying it’s impossible to saying it’s inevitable. —Elon Musk Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission. —Peter Drucker 1 Praeceptor Ex Machina They sat in little wooden chairs in front of little wooden desks. Each desk had a hinged lid that opened to reveal a place to stash books, pencils, and papers.

…

Originally published in an unnamed 1951 children’s newspaper, then reprinted in the February 1954 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Retrieved 2014-06-19 from http://visual-memory.co.uk/​daniel/​funtheyhad.html. PART I THE AUTOMATIC TEACHER Epigraph Drucker. Adventures, 255. Musk, E. “Elon Musk Interview at World Energy Innovation Forum,” May 4, 2016. Retrieved 2016-05-05 from https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=LllF6WsmzFU [this website is no longer active]. Papert, “Computer as Mudpie,” in Intelligent Schoolhouse. 1. Praeceptor ex Machina Interview Sources Author interviews: Eliot (2013), Gilpin (1997), Papert (1987), Skinner (1987).

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
by John Hagel Iii and John Seely Brown
Published 12 Apr 2010

Chapter 7 1 Zoe Baird and James Barksdale et al., “Creating a Trusted Network for Homeland Security,” Markle Foundation, December 2, 2003, http://www.markle.org/down-loadable_assets/nstf_report2_overview.pdf. 2 See Saxby Chambliss, “Counterterrorism Intelligence Capabilities and Performance Prior to 9-11,” Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security, A Report to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Minority Leader, July 2002, http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_rpt/hpsci_ths0702.html. 3 John Franke, “SAP CEO Heir-Apparent Resigns,” March 28, 2007, TechTarget.com, http://searchsap.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid21_gci1249379,00.html#. 4 This and other details are drawn from Daniel Roth, “Driven: Shai Agassi’s Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road,” Wired, August 18, 2008, http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi?currentPage=all. 5 An article in The New Yorker indicated that Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk may be no fan of Better Place. “I think Shai is going to spend a lot of money and not have a lot to show for it,” Musk said of Agassi. Nonetheless, to hedge his bets, Musk was making Tesla’s Model S with an exchangeable battery. Tad Friend, “Plugged In,” The New Yorker, August 24, 2009. 6 See Roth, “Driven.” 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Clayton M.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

Instead of attempting to mitigate the destructive power of a now digitally charged corporation on the world by inserting a socially beneficial purpose, we may better look at the underlying financial premise: The corporation was invented to extract circulating currency from the economy and transfer it into profit. No stated social benefit is likely to compensate for the social destruction caused by the corporate model itself. In other words, even if someone like Elon Musk or Richard Branson creates an earth-shatteringly beneficial new transportation or energy technology, the corporation he creates to make and market it may itself cause more harm than it repairs. Yes, such corporations bail some water out of the sinking ship, but they are, themselves, the cause of the leak.

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 14 Feb 2017

He also met with his sources at other companies that had branched out: Jony Ive at Apple, and in probably the best, if aspirational, model for what Chesky is trying to do, Jeff Bezos, who had turned Amazon from an online bookseller into a mega-retailer. Chesky also says he took some advice from Elon Musk of Tesla. Musk cautioned him against becoming a company that gets so big that it enters what he calls the “administration era”: a phase of 10 or 20 percent growth that a company settles into after the “creation era” and then the “building era” and signals a mature business. “Airbnb will never be in an administration era,” Chesky vows.

The Narcissist Next Door
by Jeffrey Kluger
Published 25 Aug 2014

Dwight Eisenhower led the Allies to victory during World War II, and for that he was rightly celebrated. But if you don’t think he quietly enjoyed wearing an explosively beribboned uniform and a title like Supreme Allied Commander, you don’t know much about human nature. It is the same confidence—sometimes arrogance—that has allowed inventors and industrialists like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Elon Musk to press on in improbable ventures against extraordinary odds and create things that improve the world in big and meaningful ways, even if they make few friends doing it. Still, the heroic narcissist, the ingenious narcissist, the courageous narcissist are not the most common breeds. It’s the everyday, self-obsessed, pay-attention-to-me narcissist who is.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

During the golden postwar era of research and development, two-thirds of research and development was publicly funded.10 Yet recent decades have seen corporate investment in high-risk technologies drastically decline.11 And with neoliberalism’s cutback in state expenditure, it is therefore unsurprising that technological change has diminished since the 1970s.12 In other words, it has been collective investment, not private investment, that has been the primary driver of technological development.13 High-risk inventions and new technologies are too risky for private capitalists to invest in; figures such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk slyly obscure their parasitical reliance on state-led developments.14 Likewise, multi-billion-dollar megascale projects are ultimately driven by non-economic goals that exceed any cost–benefit analysis. Projects of this scale and ambition are in fact hindered by market-based constraints, since a sober analysis of their viability in capitalist terms reveals them to be profoundly underwhelming.15 In addition, some social benefits (those offered by an Ebola vaccine, for example) are left unexplored because they have little profit potential, while in some areas (such as solar power and electric cars) capitalists can be seen actively impeding progress, lobbying governments to end green-energy subsidies and implementing laws that obstruct further development.

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less
by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou
Published 15 Feb 2015

Likewise, after spending millions on developing its Android operating system, Google gave away the technology so it could be incorporated into the maximum number of devices, thus securing a vast market for its search engine and other digital services. Google’s open-source strategy paid off: Android is now available in over 1 billion devices, overtaking Apple’s iOS as the world-leading mobile operating system. In June 2014, Elon Musk, the iconoclastic founder of Tesla Motors, an electric car manufacturer, shocked the markets by announcing that he was giving away its core technology to all companies in the sector, including Tesla’s rivals. Musk’s decision is motivated by “enlightened self-interest”; by opening up Tesla’s patent portfolio he can more rapidly expand the global market for electric cars – which today account for only 1% of US auto sales – and make electric vehicles more affordable and cost-effective to maintain.

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing
by Ed Finn
Published 10 Mar 2017

In this way we are evolving, as Hayles and others have argued, in conjunction with our technical systems, slowly moving toward some consummation of the algorithmic love affair. The risk of disaster haunts us—the consummation might become a collision, an explosion of the kinds we linger on in stories like the Terminator series and through institutions like the Future of Life Institute (funded by Elon Musk and others to avert the Terminator AI apocalypse). But there is a more optimistic vision as well, one where humans engage in productive collaboration with computational systems: the Star Trek future, or a more ambitiously AI-fueled society like science fiction author Iain Banks’s Culture novels.

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America
by Alissa Quart
Published 25 Jun 2018

At Presby, the pharmacy robots are freeing the hospital from having to hire a blend of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians—in other words, they are enabling the hospital to not employ highly trained human beings who make somewhere between $80,000 and $110,000 a year, plus benefits. The pharmacy workers are not unionized, he added. Concern about the rise of the robots has become widespread, the stuff of trend pieces and hand-wringing remarks by famed techno-positiveists like Elon Musk and Bill Gates. (Gates, for instance, thought that governments could tax companies that use robots as a way to generate alternative funds for displaced human workers and pay for training in jobs that won’t be replaced.) However, I’ve been encountering robots less as a TED Talk abstraction than as the literal professional rivals to the middle-class people I have met for Squeezed, whose jobs may be, will be, or have been replaced by automation.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

The disrupters can win big. Christensen’s peers credited him with discovering a motive force in contemporary capitalism, a sunny successor to the “creative destruction” that Karl Marx, and then Joseph Schumpeter, observed in the industrial age. Thus we deify serial disrupters like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. But what about the disrupted—those who endure the effects? In centuries past, among St. Clare’s nuns and the Diggers, among the Rochdale Pioneers and the Knights of Labor, cooperative economies have tended to take hold on the receiving end of economic upheavals. What cooperators built then became infrastructure for the new order, more or less in tension with it, a lifeline that enabled people who would otherwise be left behind to survive and flourish.

Everything's Trash, but It's Okay
by Phoebe Robinson
Published 15 Oct 2018

Only 18 PERCENT believed the heavier-set woman possessed leadership qualities. Worst of all, only 15.6 percent would even consider hiring the heaviest-looking woman. This was in 2017. Twenty seventeen! Not during the sixties. Not the fifties. But present day as hell. The same present day where Elon Musk watched the original Knight Rider and was like, “Car doors that open up to the sky like a yoga teacher going from a forward bend into mountain pose? #Goals,” and now we have Teslas. The same present day where you can use your bank’s mobile app to deposit a check while taking a dump. The same present day where everyone at Burger King collectively got on board with chicken being French fries?

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years
by Mike Berners-Lee
Published 27 Feb 2019

If a supermarket prefers to have humans at the check-out because of the social benefits they provide for both staff and customers, how long can they hold out against competitors who save money by replacing people with machines? Stephen Hawking described artificial intelligence as ‘either the best or worst thing to happen to humanity’4, whilst Elon Musk, one of the great entrepreneurs of the automated electric car, also looks on it as an it an existential threat. Whether or not the specific concern over AI is well founded, it is clear that technology as a whole has brought many good things over the millennia, but has now taken human-kind to a dangerous place and we need to handle it in a radically different way.

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement
by Rich Karlgaard
Published 15 Apr 2019

For some outliers, a high plateau may well last through our eighties. For a select few, a high creative plateau can last longer than that, as the amazing story below illustrates. One indispensable component in both smartphones and the electric car is the lithium-ion battery that stores electricity. While you’ve heard of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, you probably have not heard of John Goodenough. At the relatively late age of fifty-seven, the University of Chicago–trained physicist co-invented the lithium-ion battery. Decades later, in 2017, Goodenough filed for a patent on a new battery that the New York Times reported was “so cheap, lightweight and safe, it would revolutionize electric cars and kill off petroleum-fueled vehicles.”

Climate Change
by Joseph Romm
Published 3 Dec 2015

The world’s top-selling plug-in hybrid is the General Motors Chevrolet Volt (and similar cars sold under a different brand). Total sales exceed 88,000. The Toyota Prius plug-in is the number two seller, with more than 65,000 sold. Another game changer in the recent history of electric vehicles has been the emergence of Tesla Motors. The company was founded in 2006 as a Silicon Valley startup by Elon Musk to build a high-end electric sports car with a single-charge range of over 200 miles. By 2014, Teslas had become California’s “largest auto industry employer,” according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Its market capitalization (the total value of all its stock) was more than half that of GM’s, despite having a small fraction of GM’s sales or revenues.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
by Rory Sutherland
Published 6 May 2019

It’s true that logic is usually the best way to succeed in an argument, but if you want to succeed in life it is not necessarily all that useful; entrepreneurs are disproportionately valuable precisely because they are not confined to doing only those things that make sense to a committee. Interestingly, the likes of Steve Jobs, James Dyson, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel often seem certifiably bonkers; Henry Ford famously despised accountants – the Ford Motor Company was never audited while he had control of it. When you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic. And the modern world, oversupplied as it is with economists, technocrats, managers, analysts, spreadsheet-tweakers and algorithm designers, is becoming a more and more difficult place to practise magic – or even to experiment with it.

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
Published 7 Sep 2020

In addition, Netflix garnered seventeen nominations at the Golden Globes, more than any other network or streaming service, and in 2019 earned the No. 1 spot as the most highly regarded company in America on the Reputation Institute’s annual national ranking. Employees love Netflix also. In a 2018 survey conducted by Hired (a dot-com marketplace for tech talent), tech workers rated Netflix as the No. 1 company they’d most like to work for, beating companies like Google (No. 2), Elon Musk’s Tesla (No. 3), and Apple (No. 6). In another 2018 “Happiest Employee” ranking, based on over five million anonymous reviews from workers at forty-five thousand large US companies compiled by the staff of Comparably, a compensation and careers site, Netflix was ranked as having the second-happiest employees of the many thousands ranked.

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World
by David Sax
Published 15 Jan 2022

Futurists and “digital prophets,” like the elfin Australian David “Shingy” Shing, with his Vegas fountain of wild hair and Elton John glasses, were paid handsomely to interpret the transformative impact of the latest digital buzzword—big data, wearable, drone, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI)—and how it would change everything from the world’s economic order to pizza delivery. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg were widely regarded as oracles of digitization, and we paid careful attention to their latest projections about the future it would form. The promise of the digital future constantly shaped our culture. From books and stories to TV shows and blockbuster movies, we sat and watched this future projected with awe: the holodeck, transporters, and touchscreen interface of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the hoverboards and giant TV screens of Back to the Future II, the dystopian predictions of Maximum Overdrive, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Lawnmower Man, and, my personal favorite, Demolition Man, where a cryogenically frozen supercop (played by Sylvester Stallone) is thawed out in the future to hunt down his thawed supervillain nemesis (played by Wesley Snipes) in a digital utopia where commercial jingles dominate popular music and toilets automatically clean your bum with three magical seashells.

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do About It
by Alex Edmans
Published 13 May 2024

Even the £120 million figure ignores any indirect benefits the UK received from EU membership, such as increased trade. 8 Davenas, Elisabeth et al. (1988): ‘Human basophil degranulation triggered by very dilute antiserum against IgE’, Nature 333, 816–18. 9 National Health and Medical Research Council (2015): ‘NHMRC information paper: evidence on the effectiveness of homeopathy for treating health conditions’, March 2015. 10 Martin, Neil (2020): ‘Mars settlement likely by 2050 says UNSW expert – but not at levels predicted by Elon Musk’, UNSW Newsroom, 10 March 2021. 11 Edwards, Erika and Vaughn Hillyard (2020): ‘Man dies after taking chloroquine in an attempt to prevent coronavirus’, NBC News, 23 March 2020. 12 Santos, Laurie R. and Tamar Gendler (2014): ‘What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Knowing is half the battle’, Edge.org 13 Walker, Mason and Katerina Eva Matsa (2021): ‘News consumption across social media in 2021’, Pew Research Center. 14 Vosoughi, Soroush, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral (2018): ‘The spread of true and false news online’, Science 359, 1146–51. 1.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
by David Sax
Published 8 Nov 2016

While old industry giants such as General Motors and General Electric were pandering for bailouts, companies such as Twitter, which counted their staff in the dozens, were being valued at many billions of dollars. Why invest in a blue-chip company struggling to adapt, when a small investment in a tech startup could make you rich overnight? Today, it is the titans of technology—Tesla’s Elon Musk, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Uber’s Travis Kalanick—who are the new gods of capitalism. Their stories of rapid success are the subjects of best-selling biographies and Hollywood movies. Silicon Valley has supplanted Wall Street as the destination for the best and brightest. The Economist reported that in 2014, one fifth of American business school graduates went to work in technology.

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age
by David S. Abraham
Published 27 Oct 2015

The other jobs being offered are too exciting and lucrative to turn down.25 We need to bring prestige and romance to toiling with metals and to start companies that ask big questions, which only advances in material science can answer: for example, how to build a more fuel efficient car and commercialize space travel. Visionaries like Elon Musk, the cofounder of PayPal who was admitted into Stanford’s material scientist doctoral program, has started companies that ask just those questions, Tesla and Space-X. We need more of them. Simply, we need to create excitement around material science as we have for entrepreneurship. Now 70 percent of millennials want to work in more entrepreneurial endeavors outside a corporate structure.

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth
by Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato
Published 31 Jul 2016

The cost of lithium-ion batteries has fallen by more than 40 per cent in the past five years. This revolution has only just begun and has yet to play out. One of the leading innovators in energy storage is the electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors. The company has adopted a radical approach to the problem of network lock-in.21 In June 2014, Elon Musk, Tesla’s founder, announced that his company would effectively make their electric vehicle patents public. But this was not technological altruism. In order to be able to sell more of their electric vehicles Tesla simultaneously needs an entirely new vehicle-charging infrastructure. And for that to be built, the scale of the electric vehicle market needs to be greatly increased.

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
Published 14 Jan 2020

As with Pursuit, the cost of a $10,000 training program will be funded by “career bonds,” in which investors pay up front for the program and the students turn over a percentage of their earnings for a fixed period to repay the investors if their salary exceeds a certain minimum. Even in an age of automation, there will be jobs available for those who have the training. As Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, said in explaining the limits of automation: “Humans are underrated.” Yamhill-area schools are trying to provide a ladder up for children, including vocational and technical apprenticeship options, but they’re finding it a challenge. The local economy is humming and the wine industry is helping to create jobs, but teachers are seeing more kids who have experienced trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by Jonathan Tepper
Published 20 Nov 2018

Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (Random House, 2008). 5. https://businessmanagement.news/2017/05/05/warren-buffet-would-rather-invest-in-your-idiot-nephew-than-with-mark-zuckerberg-or-jeff-bezos/. 6. https://www.ft.com/content/fd27245a-9790-11e7-a652-cde3f882dd7b. 7. https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-uncontested-3-pointers-1519595032. 8. http://gawker.com/322852/is-peter-thiel-silicon-valleys-godfather. 9. https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536. 10. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 2nd ed. (Dancing Unicorn Books, 2016). 11. http://consumerfed.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Overcharged-and-Underserved.pdf. 12. https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-violations-brief-history. 13. https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-formally-rules-comcasts-throttling-of-bittorrent-was-illegal/. 14.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It
by Brian Dumaine
Published 11 May 2020

Bezos, who has libertarian leanings, hasn’t made up his mind yet on a UBI. In general, he is a social progressive who is not politically outspoken and has limited his public advocacy. That puts him at odds with his fellow tech titans, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his cofounder Chris Hughes, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, all of whom support some form of a universal basic income. The UBI is simply a logical response to a socially and politically complex problem. It’s designed to make sure that those holding jobs that will be disrupted by technology will have enough money to retrain for a new job or, if untrainable, survive on minimum-wage jobs.

The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World
by Sarah Stewart Johnson
Published 6 Jul 2020

AN INDELIBLE RECORD Prabal Saxena, Rosemary M. Killen, Vladimir Airapetian, Noah E. Petro, Natalie M. Curran, and Avi M. Mandell, “Was the Sun a Slow Rotator? Sodium and Potassium Constraints from the Lunar Regolith,” The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 876, no. 1 (2019), p. L16. A MILLION PASSENGERS, SENT ON Sarah Knapton, “Elon Musk: We’ll Create a City on Mars with a Million Inhabitants,” The Telegraph (London: June 21, 2017). HOME TO A RELICT RIVER DELTA Timothy A. Goudge, Ralph E. Milliken, James W. Head, John F. Mustard, and Caleb I. Fassett, “Sedimentological Evidence for a Deltaic Origin of the Western Fan Deposit in Jezero Crater, Mars, and Implications for Future Exploration,” Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 458 (2017), pp. 357–365; Timothy A.

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups
by Randall Stross
Published 4 Sep 2013

“There’s all these fantastic things you can do at stage two, but it depends on a really good execution of stage one,” Collison recalled Thiel saying. Nonetheless, Thiel offered to invest. At the end of the summer, the Collisons completed a $2 million round raised from Thiel, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Elon Musk—another PayPal founder—and a few others. The Collisons did not return to school in the fall. Then, barely eighteen months after the two had begun working full-time on Stripe, the brothers—still only twenty-three and twenty-one—raised an $18 million round, led by Sequoia, at what was reported to be a $100 million valuation.30 • The only remaining member of Auctomatic’s original team of four who had not come back to YC or started another startup was Kulveer Taggar.

A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner
by Chris Atkins
Published 6 Feb 2020

Lance, the outsized public schoolboy, also has several jobs, but never seems to do any of them. He mostly loafs about his cell, eating constantly and holding court. Today he recounts how he was given three and a half years over an unpaid bar tab at the Savoy. I’m shocked at the severity of the sentence, though I soon discover that he pretended to be Elon Musk and lived in a hotel suite for weeks. He was remanded in Wandsworth, and had to wait six months to get to court. Just before the sentencing, he gave all his possessions away on the wing, assuming that whatever sentence he received would be covered by the time already served. The hearing did not go well.

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs
by Reid Hoffman , June Cohen and Deron Triff
Published 14 Oct 2021

“So what would a 10-star check-in be? A 10-star check-in would be the Beatles check-in, in 1964. I’d get off the plane and there’d be five thousand high school kids cheering my name, with cards welcoming me to the country. “So what would an 11-star experience be? I would show up at the airport and you’d be there with Elon Musk and you’re saying, ‘You’re going to space.’ ” Obviously, those higher stars are imaginative and whimsical. But they serve a serious purpose. “The point of the process is that maybe 9, 10, 11 are not feasible,” Brian explains. “But if you go through the crazy exercise, there’s some sweet spot between ‘They showed up and they opened the door’ and ‘I went to space.’

Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success
by Scott Davis , Carter Copeland and Rob Wertheimer
Published 13 Jul 2020

For example, manufacturing excellence didn’t matter in Apple’s early days when it was completely dominant, but with rising global smartphone competition, it sure does now. It doesn’t matter much when pharmaceuticals are under patent protection, but it sure matters when those patents expire and generics come into play. Elon Musk at Tesla knew early on that his vision would fall apart without exceptional manufacturing capabilities. When Tesla has struggled, problems with manufacturing were at the heart of the challenge. As simple as manufacturing excellence sounds, the reality is quite different—and that makes it all the more critical in differentiating a cost base.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas
Published 27 Aug 2018

It had nothing to do with their being more luckily born than you, unburdened by racial and gender discrimination and with greater access to seed capital from family and friends. It was that they were braver, bolder than you—some might say ruthless—willing to take on power, no matter the cost. Citing Travis Kalanick of Uber and Elon Musk of Tesla, he said, “They are most comfortable in the uncomfortable places. What that means is, they’re very comfortable having uncomfortable conversations. And most of us want to just be kumbaya, everything’s great, I’m happy, you’re happy, we’re good, besties, BFFs—and it’s like, ‘No. Fuck that.

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity
by Amy Webb
Published 5 Mar 2019

We’re all suffering from a certain amount of malaise brought about by learned helplessness, new economic divides, and a sense that our real-world selves just can’t compete with the versions enhanced through AI. You seek solace in the form of brain-machine interfaces, which are high-throughput links that transfer data between your head and a computer. Although Facebook and Elon Musk announced a decade ago that they were working on special devices that would give us telepathy superpowers, Baidu was first with its “neuroenhancing headband.” Tucked away discretely inside a baseball cap or sun hat, the device can read and monitor your brainwave data and transmit feedback to enhance focus, create a sensation of feeling happy and content, or make you feel as if you have lots of energy.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Feb 2018

As we increasingly find machines to do both blue- and white-collar jobs, that will spark discussion over the “purpose” of life. One potentially constructive way to think about it is that we must design a post-industrial existence that puts at its center the encouragement of human creativity, regardless of whether that creativity is monetarily rewarded. The idea is that everyone, not just big-dreaming entrepreneurs like Elon Musk or mass-marketed artists like Jeff Koons, Beyoncé, or J. K. Rowling, is defined by their capacity to create. This is not a new idea. Some late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialists dreamed of a political economy in which communally owned technology freed human beings from the drudgery of work and allowed them to unleash their innate creative selves.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
by Eric Posner and E. Weyl
Published 14 May 2018

Even if we don’t sell you on all our ideas, we hope this book will open your mind to a new way of imagining the economy and politics. This challenging moment, when long-held assumptions are being overturned, is ripe for radical rethinking. 1 Property Is Monopoly CREATING A COMPETITIVE MARKET IN USES THROUGH PARTIAL COMMON OWNERSHIP As a child fascinated by Elon Musk’s Hyperloop, Alejandro Espinosa often pictured himself in the cab of the first supersonic train, sitting side by side with the conductor. It never occurred to him that these trains would have no conductors. Yet the topographic and economic maps displayed in the holographs he was peering at clashed even more powerfully with his childish dreams.

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World
by Craig Kielburger , Holly Branson , Marc Kielburger , Sir Richard Branson and Sheryl Sandberg
Published 7 Mar 2018

Companies will have to adapt to these new motivations that have employees using their day jobs to support causes, or risk losing top talent—and a huge customer base. CEOs today want to be seen as titans of business, but also as champions of social causes in their communities and among their peers. And increasingly, business people want to create companies that do good. Elon Musk could have sat on his PayPal fortune and never been heard from again. But he wanted to change the world for the better—and so we have Tesla and SolarCity and talks of colonizing Mars. Bill Gates could still be rolling out Windows updates, but instead we have the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think
by Marcus Du Sautoy
Published 7 Mar 2019

DeepMind was incorporated. The company needed money but initially Hassabis just couldn’t raise any capital. Pitching on a platform that they were going to play games and solve intelligence did not sound serious to most investors. A few, however, did see the vision. Among those who put money in right at the outset were Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Thiel had never invested outside Silicon Valley and tried to persuade Hassabis to relocate to the West Coast. A born-and-bred Londoner, Hassabis held his ground, insisting that there was more untapped talent in London that could be exploited. Hassabis remembers a crazy conversation he had with Thiel’s lawyer.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You
by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
Published 2 Apr 2018

Our cultural heroes are increasingly scrappy disrupters, not corporate managers; the efficiencies of managerialism are seen as sand in the wheels of innovation; decades-loyal “company men” are being replaced by contingent and on-demand workers; and an amorphous “maker culture” is challenging long-standing norms about expertise. Old power managers are facing workplaces that can feel like they are full of wannabe Elon Musks, with vastly higher expectations and unending demands for feedback, with one eye on their next promotion and the other on their next job. Too often, this tension gets lampooned as Old Codger versus Young Turk. AARP versus ADD. But there is a deeper cultural shift playing out as old and new power values do battle at work.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

As Facebook’s stock slid, Zuckerberg remained out of sight. He finally emerged on March 21, with a Facebook post saying he was “working to understand exactly what happened” and saying there had been a “breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.” The hashtag #DeleteFacebook started trending on Twitter, with Elon Musk stoking the fire by tweeting that he’d deleted the Facebook pages of SpaceX and Tesla. As I prepared for my public testimonies, I listened to Cardi B, the American rapper who had released her debut album only a few weeks after the story broke. The record’s (purely coincidental) title, Invasion of Privacy, quickly prompted memes to circulate on social media with Mark Zuckerberg’s face appended to an edited version of the now-platinum album’s cover.

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
by Rebecca Henderson
Published 27 Apr 2020

In 2017, when Trump declared that he was going to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement51—joining Syria and Nicaragua as the only countries not committed to taking action against climate change—the CEOs of thirty US companies, including those from Apple, Gap, Google, HP, and Levi Strauss—published an open letter urging him to rethink the decision. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, and Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, resigned from the President’s Advisory Council in protest.52 An even more ambitious collaborative effort called “We Are Still In” now “includes 3,500 representatives from all 50 states, spanning large and small businesses, mayors and governors, university presidents, faith leaders, tribal leaders, and cultural institutions.”

The Road to Conscious Machines
by Michael Wooldridge
Published 2 Nov 2018

Of course, the scenario of our creations turning on us is by no means a modern idea: it goes back at least as far as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This narrative still dominates the debate about the future of AI, which is now routinely discussed in tones previously reserved for nuclear weapons. Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal and Tesla, was sufficiently worried by this idea that he made a series of public statements expressing his concerns, and donated $10 million research funding to support responsible AI; in 2014, Stephen Hawking, then the world’s most famous scientist, publicly stated that he feared AI represented an existential threat to humanity.

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice
by Jamie K. McCallum
Published 15 Nov 2022

The United Food and Commercial Workers union secured an increase in benefits and pay for workers in over a dozen food-processing plants, including $2-per-hour premium pay for Campbell’s Soup factory workers, a $1,500 bonus for workers at Smucker’s, and premium pay for thousands of grocery store workers. The United Auto Workers union pressured GM, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler to shut down plant operations for two weeks and provide all workers with PPE. Tesla, which does not have a union, was initially held open by CEO Elon Musk, but closed a few days later, facing intense public pressure. Perhaps no union better exemplified the power of organized labor than the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), which stood up for its rank and file while its industry struggled to stay afloat. Air travel plummeted by over 90 percent in the month from March to April 2020, and millions of workers were at risk of losing their jobs.

Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs
by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu
Published 23 Jan 2024

It is fully implemented today for musical performance (⇩242–3), and remains part of the platform of one of France’s noisiest left-wing parties today.95 However, in 1840 Vigny did not propose a term limit for such licence payments, and if his proposal had been adopted as it stood, it would have made the currently living great-great-great grandchildren of Victor Hugo almost as rich as Elon Musk. What did take place, in France, in England and eventually in the United States, was a progressive lengthening of post-mortem protection, otherwise known as P.M.A. (for post mortem auctoris). It was progressively adjusted upwards from life plus ten to thirty then fifty years in France, and from life plus twenty-five to fifty in nineteenth-century Russia and then Spain.

Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
by Elle Reeve
Published 9 Jul 2024

She said she’d joined those forums because she thought she could change the guys who were stuck on them, but she wondered if she’d somehow made it worse. I told her I didn’t understand why they were so angry. The meek had inherited the Earth. The nerds had gotten their revenge. The economy rewarded intelligence and technical skill over physical strength. Our modern legends were not Paul Bunyan and John Henry, but Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. The nerds had won, but they were mad about it. Anna thought the incels were acting out of envy. They mimicked the behavior of people who had hurt them. They wanted to be the strong men they’d seen dominate women. “The real world is the conscious,” Anna thought, and 4chan, Wizardchan, and their associated forums—“those spaces are the subconscious.”

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

But in the end, they are not equal; the handset is the ascendant vehicle, and the car is the architecture in slow disappearance.51 In conceptualizing how Stack transportation might evolve, it's tempting to suppose that the aggregation of systems into central platforms at the Cloud level would be replicated at the City layer such that atomized vehicles (such as cars) would be agglomerated into larger urban, regional, and continental megavehicles (such as high-speed rail). The economies of scale that are possible by regularizing and extending itineraries might parallel those of regularizing and monetizing other kinds of social interaction online. Elon Musk's perhaps real and perhaps speculative Hypertube project, which would send humans whooshing up and down California inside what is essentially a giant pneumatic tube, is exemplary, as is the tendency for cities to strategize economic growth through the enhancement of their airports (now “aerotropoli”) ensuring their inhabitants easy access to the rest of the global urban grid.52 Implementing such systems is obviously very expensive in both time and treasure.

…

Interview with Joan Didion in Shotgun Freeway: Drives through Lost L.A., directed by Morgan Neville and Harry Pallenberg (King Pictures, 1995). 50.  Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, directed by Reyner Banham (1972). 51.  Benjamin H. Bratton, “iPhone City (v.2008),” in Digital Cities AD: Architectural Design 79, no. 4 (2009): 90–97. 52.  Elon Musk and SpaceX, “Hyperloop Alpha,” August 12, 2013, http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha-20130812.pdf. 53.  Vicky Validakis, “Rio's Driverless Trucks Move 100 Million Tonnes,” Australian Mining, April 24, 2013, http://www.miningaustralia.com.au/news/rio-s-driverless-trucks-move-100-million-tonnes. 54. 

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out some new things and figure out: What is the effect on society? What’s the effect on people? Without having to deploy it into the normal world. And people who like those kinds of things can go there and experience that. It’s not only Page. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk dream of establishing Learyesque space colonies, celestial Burning Mans. Peter Thiel is slightly more down to earth. His Seasteading Institute hopes to set up floating technology incubation camps on the ocean, outside national boundaries. “If you can start a new business, why can you not start a new country?”

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly
Published 6 Jun 2016

Their character will dictate their economic value and their roles in our culture. Outlining the possible ways that a machine might be smarter than us (even in theory) will assist us in both directing this advance and managing it. A few really smart people, like astronomer Stephen Hawking and genius inventor Elon Musk, worry that making supersmart AIs could be our last invention before they replace us (though I don’t believe this), so exploring possible types is prudent. Imagine we land on an alien planet. How would we measure the level of the intelligences we encounter there? This is an extremely difficult question because we have no real definition of our own intelligence, in part because until now we didn’t need one.

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything
by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
Published 16 Oct 2017

As we were watching a launch, a reader of ours tweeted that although he had witnessed the moon landing as a young boy, he found the reusable rocket even more exciting. It sounds crazy, but he’s got a point—the moon landing was certainly the greater technical feat, but it was done at a cost that more or less guaranteed it couldn’t become commonplace. Exactly how much the cost can be dropped is a matter of debate. Elon Musk apparently claimed he could eventually get the cost down by a factor of 100. In the more near term, SpaceX’s president Gwynne Shotwell said their current Falcon 9 should be able to offer a 30% discount. But even if reusable rockets only mean a small price drop now, they may yet represent a path to greater future savings.

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins
by Garry Kasparov
Published 1 May 2017

Artificial intelligence is on a path toward transforming every part of our lives in a way not seen since the creation of the Internet, perhaps even since we harnessed electricity. There are potential dangers with any powerful new technology and I won’t shy away from discussing them. Eminent individuals from Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk have expressed their fear of AI as a potential existential threat to mankind. The experts are less prone to alarming statements, but they are quite worried too. If you program a machine, you know what it’s capable of. If the machine is programming itself, who knows what it might do? The airports with their self-check-in kiosks and restaurants full of iPads are staffed by thousands of human workers (most using machines) in the long security lines.

Bit Rot
by Douglas Coupland
Published 4 Oct 2016

Really think this through: the best that can come from adopting a cheapskate persona is a low-level clerical job with no prospect of advancement because people want to elevate people who think big. Saving five bucks by ordering an inferior snack tray for the office Christmas party is something everybody notices—it’s a bad impression that, once made, is almost impossible to rectify. Would Richard Branson or Elon Musk order the cheaper snack tray? No. They’d hire Cirque du Soleil and dress them up in snack costumes and have them do trampoline acrobatics. People would probably die in the process, but everyone would treasure the memory, and they’d expect even crazier batshit the next time. When you meet self-made rich people who are cheap, possibly it’s cheapness that got them there—but maybe they could relax a bit and make it look like a blast, like Richard Branson does.

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business
by Ken Auletta
Published 4 Jun 2018

Think of the products you just purchased online that appeared constantly in ads on your Gmail screen. Why did it take Google until June 2017 to announce it would terminate these? Designing the Apple Store as a tourist attraction as well as a service center has been a brilliant marketing tool for Apple. Starbucks stores attracted more traffic by creating a community spirit with free Wi-Fi. Elon Musk’s Tesla does no advertising, yet news of this innovative and stylish electric car has propelled Tesla’s stock above that of most other auto companies. Advertisers have begun to recycle the “Brought to you by” approach once so popular that in 1950 three of the top-rated shows on television were NBC’s Texaco Star Theater, the Philco Television Playhouse, and The Colgate Comedy Hour.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
by Anne Case and Angus Deaton
Published 17 Mar 2020

Immigrants have a long history of innovation. Alexander Graham Bell was born and raised in Edinburgh. James L. Kraft, who invented a pasteurization process for cheese, emigrated from Canada. Products that were invented by immigrants include the PET scanner, the paddle-controlled video game, and lithium ion batteries. Elon Musk (PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX) is an immigrant, and so is Sergey Brin (cofounder of Google).2 All six of America’s 2016 Nobel Prize winners are first-generation immigrants; in 2015, when one of us was fortunate enough to win, three out of four were, and the other was the son of an immigrant. It is hard to believe that it would be a good idea for America to restrict such immigration—though the transmitting countries might feel differently.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

Even broadly sympathetic people still find it necessary to frame the idea humorously like this as if to admit that it is essentially nuts or at least crazy, new-fangled, snowflake thinking. So when you hear that Bernie Sanders supports it, you think, ‘That figures.’ When you hear that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Richard Branson support it, you wonder what’s in it for those creepy rich hippies/high-minded technocrats. But when you find out that the idea begins with Thomas Paine and came very close to being implemented in 1969 as US government policy by one Richard Nixon (rich and creepy maybe, but certainly no hippie and certainly no Thomas Paine) you begin to think again.

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z
by Deyan Sudjic
Published 17 Feb 2015

Sooner or later, a small box in the living room, or the shed, will have the power to allow an owner to select a design for almost anything and produce it for themselves. It’s hard to imagine this as a way to produce a chair or a laptop, but it is already the way in which America’s aircraft carriers replace spare parts while at sea. Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind the Tesla electric sports car, is determined to manufacture cars in this way. When this does become the norm, design will undergo another change of direction, one that will have consequences even more far-reaching in their impact than the coming of the factories. Design has more often been defined by what it is not than by what it is.

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
by Robin Wigglesworth
Published 11 Oct 2021

Chapter 16 THE NEW CAPTAINS OF CAPITAL TESLA’S STOCK WENT ON A wild ride in 2020, powered by the devotion of the electric car company’s army of ordinary investors, who were suddenly stuck at home and day-trading their stimulus checks to pass time while the coronavirus pandemic raged. But in November, the rally received another huge jolt that would help make Elon Musk’s company one of the most valuable in the world. Despite its dramatic stock market gains over the past decade, S&P Dow Jones Indices—one of the biggest providers of financial benchmarks—had long refrained from adding Tesla to its flagship index, the S&P 500, for one simple reason: To be included, a company has to be consistently profitable, a requirement that Tesla had struggled to meet.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
by Roger McNamee
Published 1 Jan 2019

Into the void stepped angel investors—individuals, mostly former entrepreneurs and executives—who guided startups during their earliest stages. Angel investors were perfectly matched to the lean startup model, gaining leverage from relatively small investments. One angel, Ron Conway, built a huge brand, but the team that had started PayPal proved to have much greater impact. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, Jeremy Stoppleman, and their colleagues were collectively known as the PayPal Mafia, and their impact transformed Silicon Valley. Not only did they launch Tesla, Space-X, LinkedIn, and Yelp, they provided early funding to Facebook and many other successful players. More important than the money, though, were the vision, value system, and connections of the PayPal Mafia, which came to dominate the social media generation.

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise
by Eric Ries
Published 15 Mar 2017

Chesky had once again learned from his original mentor, Walt Disney, who created Disneyland at a separate company that was later bought back and reintegrated into the parent company. Though Project Snow White was always operating within Airbnb, the concept remained the same. “This product was designed around the principles of Disneyland,” Chesky told Leigh Gallagher. Then, referring to some words of wisdom given to him by Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, who had described for Chesky the three “eras” of a startup—creation, building, and administration—Chesky added: “Airbnb will never be in the administration era. It will always be in a building era.”2 To that end, last year the company launched Samara, an in-house innovation and design studio made up of designers and engineers and headed by Gebbia.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
by John Carreyrou
Published 20 May 2018

Kent had just obtained a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford. Before that, he’d spent two years working for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena where he’d helped build Curiosity, the Mars rover. Kent in turn recruited Greg Baney, a friend he’d met at NASA who’d gone on to work for SpaceX, Elon Musk’s Los Angeles–based rocket company. At six feet five and 260 pounds, Greg was built like an NFL lineman, but his physique belied a sharp intellect and a keen sense of observation. For a period of several months, Kent and Greg became Elizabeth’s favorite employees. She sat in on their brainstorming sessions and made suggestions about what robotics systems they should consider using.

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution
by Gregory Zuckerman
Published 5 Nov 2019

That’s more than the annual revenues of brand-name corporations including Under Armour, Levi Strauss, Hasbro, and Hyatt Hotels. Here’s the absurd thing—while those other companies have tens of thousands of employees, there are just three hundred or so at Renaissance. I’ve determined that Simons is worth about $23 billion, making him wealthier than Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp, and Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow. Others at the firm are also billionaires. The average Renaissance employee has nearly $50 million just in the firm’s own hedge funds. Simons and his team truly create wealth in the manner of fairy tales full of kings, straw, and lots and lots of gold.

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions
by Jason Hickel
Published 3 May 2017

Species biodiversity will have declined by another 10 per cent.6 Stocks of all presently fished seafood will have collapsed by an average of more than 90 per cent from 1950 levels.7 Most major metal reserves will be exhausted, including gold, copper, silver and zinc, along with many of the key metals used in renewable energy technologies, like lead, indium and antimony.8 If Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Elon Musk are to be believed, we might be able to replace some of these metals by mining the moon and asteroids. But extraterrestrial extraction won’t help us much with the forests and the fish. Nor will it do much for our soil crisis: at present rates of depletion, the topsoils of the world’s farmlands will be more or less useless by 2050, and by 2075 they will be gone.9 Despite these obvious problems, for some reason we have come to believe that GDP growth is equivalent to human progress.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together
by Thomas W. Malone
Published 14 May 2018

.: Rossum’s Universal Robots—the 1920 play that introduced the word robot to the English language 17—to the film The Terminator and its sequels, stories of human creations turning against their creators have been a staple of science fiction. Even though these examples are pure fantasy, they have made it very easy for us to imagine this actually happening. But with recent progress in AI, some very smart people, including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and my MIT colleague Max Tegmark, have begun to believe that the risks of this actually happening are large enough for us to take them seriously. In fact, Hawking, Tegmark, and others have formed the Future of Life Institute to study these and other existential risks to humanity.18 One of the most complete and carefully reasoned descriptions of the problem is in the book Superintelligence, by Nick Bostrom.19 Bostrom carefully analyzes various ways that artificially intelligent systems (AIs) could eventually reach human-level intelligence.

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs
by Guy Raz
Published 14 Sep 2020

What was even more surprising, to me at least, was that I was at all interested. In high school and college, I used to think that “business” was a dirty word. To me, it was the realm of hucksters and pitchmen selling cheap consumer products on late-night infomercials. Even though my generation produced people like Elon Musk and Larry Page, most of my cohort subscribed to an anticorporate, anticommercial ethos, perhaps best illustrated in a famous 1992 cover of Rolling Stone featuring Kurt Cobain wearing a shirt that read CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK. Why would I care about the story of some business? It’s not like business was ever going to be my thing.

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol
by Holly Glenn Whitaker
Published 9 Jan 2020

Those failures weren’t some setback; they were rungs on a ladder—precious, painful, and defeating experiences I had to endure in order to learn the things I needed in order to succeed. If you are Steve Jobs and you get fired from Apple, your failure sets you up for your comeback; it’s part of your legend, or your canonization. If you’re Elon Musk and you blow up the first few rockets you launch and lose millions upon millions of dollars—and years—in the process, you’re just working out the kinks. If you’re Elizabeth Gilbert and you write the wildly unsuccessful Committed after publishing the epochal Eat, Pray, Love, nothing bad has happened—you’re just practicing for your TED Talk, your Oprah tour, your next New York Times best seller.

California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--And What It Means for America's Power Grid
by Katherine Blunt
Published 29 Aug 2022

Though he had never considered himself much of a progressive, he had been thinking seriously about what climate change meant for a company like PG&E. He decided to explore the question exhaustively. Part of the process involved a series of events in which Darbee invited academics and thought leaders to share their perspectives on climate change. Elon Musk, then new to Tesla, appeared at one to talk about electric vehicles. Peevey, sometimes a speaker, sometimes in the audience, developed a certain respect for Darbee. The two men began spending more time together—environmental events, a San Francisco Giants game. Climate was always on the agenda. In 2006, Darbee told shareholders that the company had an urgent responsibility to source more renewable energy, which at the time supplied just a fraction of its generation.

Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick
by J. David McSwane
Published 11 Apr 2022

Next, Kennedy conflated disparate anxieties to suggest a broad conspiracy to control freethinking Americans. “We’re seeing an onslaught of authoritarian clampdown and a giant shift of wealth from the middle class, which is just being obliterated by the quarantine, to the wealthiest people, the people like [Bill] Gates and Elon Musk and [Mark] Zuckerberg and all of the people who kind of own Silicon Valley and own 5G, and many of them also own vaccines.” In one breath, Kennedy managed to evoke our deepest societal fears and resentments and associate them with outlandish fantasies such as that Microsoft founder Bill Gates had sneaked microchips into the vaccine or that COVID-19 was actually caused by the advent of 5G cellular infrastructure.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It
by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris
Published 10 Jul 2023

Not recognizing how much data are needed for a precise answer is an even more common problem outside science. For several years, Twitter estimated in its regulatory filings that 5 percent or fewer of its accounts were operated by bots. Less than a month after concluding his April 2022 agreement to buy the social media company for $44 billion, Elon Musk tweeted that the deal was “temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.” To know that percentage with absolute certainty, you’d need to accurately classify virtually all of the more than 214 million unique daily users as bots or nonbots.

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children
by Susan Linn
Published 12 Sep 2022

“Real Time Billionaires,” Forbes, www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires. These are updated every five minutes daily when the stock markets are open. When I first checked in November 2020, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates ranked number 1 and 2 respectively and Mark Zuckerberg ranked number 4. By March 2022, Mark Zuckerberg dropped down to the teens and Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates were 1, 2, and 4 respectively.   2.  See for instance, American Heritage Medical Dictionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/technophobe; Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge University Press, dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/nstagr/technophobe; Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/technophobia.   3.  

Invention: A Life
by James Dyson
Published 6 Sep 2021

You can’t make them for a reasonable price, although the reason existing car companies were willing to make them is that electric cars help to achieve specified exhaust emissions across their product range. So, if they take a loss on electric cars, they make a profit on polluting cars while appearing virtuous. Tesla, meanwhile, had been through $23 billion of shareholder money, grants, and the rest of it, grants of which we wouldn’t necessarily get even a small fraction. At the time of writing, Elon Musk is raising a further $6 billion. Because of this shifting commercial sand, we made the decision to pull out of production at the last minute. N526 was a brilliant car. Very efficient motors. Very aerodynamic. Wonderful to drive and be driven in. We just couldn’t ever have made money from it, and for all our enthusiasm for the project, we were not prepared to risk the rest of Dyson.

Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are
by Rebecca Boyle
Published 16 Jan 2024

The “terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity,” as James Joyce described the Moon, was literally close at hand. The Moon’s surface was well-trodden now. We sifted it in our very real hands, its dead soils slipping through fingers pulsing with life. Thanks to Apollo, it is here, among us. A bit of Earth returned triumphant, our patrimony brought home, to tell us all our own story. * * * *55 Elon Musk launched his Tesla into space to demonstrate the launch capability of a new SpaceX rocket, the Falcon Heavy. *56 This is technically called a Kelvin-Helmholtz cloud, and they form when the atmosphere is unstable, such as when the air above the clouds is moving more quickly than the air below them

AI in Museums: Reflections, Perspectives and Applications
by Sonja Thiel and Johannes C. Bernhardt
Published 31 Dec 2023

Hamber, Anthony/Miles, Jean/Vaughan, William (Eds.) (1989). Computers and the History of Art. London, Mansell Pub. Hao, Karen (2020). The Messy, Secretive Reality behind OpenAI’s Bid to Save the World. MIT Technology Review, 18 February 2020. Available online at https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai-moonsho t-elon-musk-sam-altman-greg-brockman-messy-secretive-reality/. Mitchell, Margaret/Wu, Simone/Zaldivar, Andrew et al. (2019) Model Cards for Model Reporting. FAT* ’19: Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 29–31 January 2019, 220–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/3287560.3287596. Nygren, Christopher/Drimmer, Sonja (2023).

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You
by Sangeet Paul Choudary , Marshall W. van Alstyne and Geoffrey G. Parker
Published 27 Mar 2016

Tesla, most famous for its electric vehicles, is currently building a so-called gigafactory in Nevada that is expected to manufacture a new generation of powerful batteries that are capable of supplying energy to a home for up to two days. Sister company SolarCity—run by a cousin of Tesla chairman Elon Musk—which already controls 39 percent of the residential solar market, has announced that, within a decade, all of its power units will come complete with battery storage. The disruptive potential of this technology for the traditional utility industry is enormous; in fact, a 2013 report by the Edison Electric Institute warned, “One can imagine a day when battery storage technology or micro turbines could allow customers to be electric grid independent.”

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna
Published 23 May 2016

Companies and entrepreneurs that are showing the way include: IBM, which in 2014 announced a five-year plan to bet 10 percent of its net income on post-silicon computer chips;30 Google (Alphabet), whose recent long-term bets include a new quantum artificial intelligence lab, self-driving cars and research into anti-aging drugs;31 and Elon Musk, a co-founder of PayPal whose moon shots include SpaceX (a space transport firm whose eventual goal is to colonize Mars) and Tesla (whose diverse aims include the mass-market adoption of electric cars, household battery packs to store renewable energy, and a 600-mile-per-hour hyperloop to transport people between Los Angeles and San Francisco).

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 12 Jun 2017

Take artificial intelligence (AI), something which most politicians barely mention. The overwhelming majority of transhumanists think that AI is a positive development: it will help humans become more intelligent, help us make better decisions and will open up amazing new avenues of knowledge and understanding. Perhaps it will. But perhaps it won’t. Elon Musk, the billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur, declared AI to be comparable to summoning the Devil and donated $10 million to research to make sure the super-machines of the future will be kind to us. Stephen Hawking said ‘the development of artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.’