Elon Musk post series

The Elon Musk post series was a series of blog posts by Tim Urban in collaboration with Elon Musk in 2015.

## History

As detailed in part 1, Elon Musk has been reading Wait But Why, and liked what he saw, sharing Tim’s post about AI on Twitter.

Later, a spokesperson for Elon Musk called Tim Urban in 2015, asking him to do a post series about Elon Musk. After picking up his head after falling off due to shock, Tim agreed. He spent several hours on a call with Elon Musk before visiting both the Tesla and SpaceX factories to learn more about Elon Musk's companies.

Tim and Elon remained great friends after this, with Elon promoting Tim's content and Tim praising Elon and having many private conversations with him, giving a good insight into his thoughts.

## Part 1: Elon Musk, the World’s Raddest Man

*Full article here.*

Part 1 details Elon Musk calling Tim asking him to do a post series about him.

The second part of the post summarizes Elon's life, such as immigrating to Canada then the US, going to Stanford and dropping out to pursue the internet, and after many trials successfully creating the websites Zip2 and Paypal and selling them, creating SpaceX and securing a contract with NASA at the nick of time, successfully gathering enough money to launch the first Tesla model in the midst of a recession, becoming a major success, and beginning construction of the Gigafactory, focusing on doubling the world's lithium battery supply using solar energy for solar panels and Tesla cars.

It also mentions him beginning SolarCity with his two cousins, becoming the largest installer of solar panels in the US.

The post continues with several quotes from employees of Elon's demanding work requirements, his own work ethic, and his hiring policy.

Finally, the end of the post shows Tim having lunch with Elon Musk and noting that he's very concerned with AI and the Fermi Paradox, disagrees with Tim on the nature of consciousness, and why he's not focusing on genetic engineering and the obstacles with that.

## Part 2: How Tesla Will Change the World

*Full article here.*

Part 2 opens with humanity's history of harnessing energy and the invention of the steam engine. It continues with laying down the facts of climate change and proving that it's real. It also notes how fossil fuels will run out someday and emphasized the urgency of switching. It also notes how transportation and electricity production emits most of America's carbon dioxide and how those are the most important areas to decarbonize.

The post then talks about the history of cars up to Henry Ford. It shows that electric cars existed in the early 1900s and were as expensive as petroleum cars, and were actually more likely at the time to be the dominant car, with electricity being dominant in all other areas of living and major figures, such as Edison and Tesla, pouring money to make electric cars more economical. The post then says that Henry Ford was the one who successfully made petroleum cars cheaper than electric cars, and cheap enough to be bought by the general public leading to the stagnation of the development of electric cars.

It then investigates what drives progress and why progress has stagnated in the last century, and concludes that the car industry is incredibly hard to break through, leading to no incentives for innovation, and that both the fossil fuel and car industries have been lobbying the government to not issue electric cars.

The next part of the post lists the main concerns with electric vehicles and the history of Tesla. It's written that Tesla began in Silicon Valley, showing that the company is more like an electronics company. In order to overcome the problem of both range and speed, Tesla began using the new lithium batteries used in electronics. It then describes the early tumultuous years at Tesla during which Musk fired two CEOs and had to take over and save Tesla while managing SpaceX. It also highlights the innovation Tesla made in making a touchscreen for their car before the invention of the Ipad.

The post describes Tesla's strategy of making expensive and fancy electric cars first because the engines and batteries were so expensive that it drove the price to near-luxury levels, so extra effort would be made to make them luxury cars, making them competitive against higher end cars, then use the profits and lessons from the first cars to innovate and make slightly cheaper cars that were still expensive though less so, and use the profits and lessons from those cars to make a widely affordable car, which would become the Model 3.

To completely solve the range problem, it's described that Tesla is partnering with SolarCity to create a nationwide network of refueling stations that are all free, powered by solar power, and won't take much longer to recharge a car than a normal gas car on a road trip.

In order to solve the pricing issues, Tesla has been constructing the Gigafactory in Nevada, a completely solar powered factory to double the world's lithium battery production and allow Tesla to increase production to 500000 cars a year. This mass economy of scale will make the car cheaper.

The post then describes the effects of Tesla on the car industry, and how Tesla's innovation and Tesla releasing all their patents to the public for free would force all car companies to develop electric vehicles or go bankrupt. It also shows how electric cars have every advantage over gas cars and almost no disadvantages. It then addresses the oil industry's attempts to cause confusion of climate change and electric vehicles and counters the tailpipe myth, that being that because the electric grid produces carbon dioxide, emissions are just being shifted to electricity production. Tim then writes how not only is electricity production going cleaner each year, but that even the dirtiest electric grids are still better than gas cars.

The post concludes with Tim writing that Tesla is one of those revolutionary forces of change making inventions, which you can just tell makes all their competitors, which seemed normal, be obsolete.

## Part 3: How (and why) SpaceX will Colonise Mars

*Full article here.*

Part 3 starts with the story of humans and space, how they started to discover more, the Space Race, why humans went to space in the first place, why humans stopped going beyond Low Earth Orbit, and what humans do with space now.

It then talks about the likelihood of an existential threat and why Elon Musk is doing what he's doing, that being settling people on Mars (he said the other planets are all too inhospitable) to decrease the risk of an existential disaster on Earth wiping out he human species. It also notes the significance of humans being the first species on Earth to live on another celestial body.

The next part covers the history of SpaceX, what it does, and how it does it. Elon Musk believes that if space travel becomes cheaper, the goal of 1 million people on Mars will work. To do that, after successfully testing his rockets, SpaceX will work for the government to deliver cargo and passengers to the ISS, using the profits and lessons learned to continue to innovate.

After 3 failures and a majorly successful launch, SpaceX continued making larger and larger rockets, all of which were much more efficient than their competitors, which, having had a monopoly on rocket production until very recently, only innovated incrementally. SpaceX has also had been having a much better success to failure ratio than any of their competitors. SpaceX also saved NASA by making all their own parts, which allowed NASA to keep launching rockets after Russia cut rocket engine sales to other companies.

The post also talks about how SpaceX's rockets work and how they get into orbit.

The post then gets into SpaceX's ultimate goal of lowering the cost of bringing people to Mars and says that the two main methods would be to bring more people per rocket at once and to make rockets reusable and able to land themselves, a major improvement and design leap. The goal would be to decrease costs to 500000 dollars per trip.

The next part of the post covers all the specifics of colonizing Mars, such as when it might happen, what will be needed, how people will go, and most importantly, why people will go to Mars. Elon believes that people will go to Mars to be able to set up a new world, and that the other reason to go to Mars is to give humanity the excitement of the adventure of a lifetime like the moon landings.

The final part of the post covers how Mars will support humans, eventually being terraformed.

## Part 4: The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce

*Full article here.*

Part 4 covers why Elon Musk is able to do what he does.

Tim boils it down to the chef vs the cook:

In essence, chefs look at the world around them and reason independently, not being influenced by others. While they might agree with others, they agree with them by reasoning independently and deciding that they agree with the person. All the major innovators of the modern world are chefs.

Cooks copy others. They may adopt someone else's opinion without thinking about whether they agree with it, not create completely original ideas, and are usually not major world changing people.

In other words, chefs use other opinions to supplement their thinking. Cooks use other opinions to become their thinking.

Reasoning from first principles is simple. You look at what you want to do, what is possible, then do one thing that overlaps. The most important thing is knowing what is possible and what you want to do, and keeping those categories accurate. Most of the population reasons what is possible from conventional wisdom, which is often outdated. In contrast, chefs see the present situation for what it really is and takes action accordingly. This also leads to tribalism.

This problem is prevalent throughout society, with most school systems not designed to have students independently think, leading to most people being cooks. The prevalence of outdated conventional wisdom affects many areas of life, such as marriage (as explained in Tim's  Choosing a Life Partner posts), and most importantly, creativity.

This limits even the most creative cooks, forcing a limit on the impact they can make.

Due to most of society being cooks and not realizing that they're cooks, most people mistake why impactful people make an impact and have an outdated idea of what is possible. As explained in Tim's Choosing a Job That Actually Fits You post, conventional wisdom and influence from others leads to people not having an authentic idea of what they want.

The post explains that, along with tribalism, being a cook was beneficial in the past due to the need for conformity.

It then shows how to be a chef. The first epiphany needed is knowing that you don't know stuff and to root out any illogical or irrational reasoning. The second epiphany requires knowing that society is also outdated and doesn't know anything either. The third epiphany requires you to not be afraid to fail, be able to see what really is possible and not dangerous rather than what conventional wisdom says is possible and not dangerous and to be open to changing your opinions.

There are several examples with Tesla and SpaceX of Elon Musk reasoning from first principles. For example, conventional wisdom stipulated that no battery was good enough for an electric car, but Elon saw the new invention of the lithium battery and was able to utilize it to create electric cars with a long range. Conventional wisdom also said that rockets could not be made any more cheaply than they already were, but Elon figured out that the materials for a rocket only made up 2% of the costs, and then came up with ways to make the assembly of a rocket more efficient.

Another example of first principles was when Elon Musk decided to create a car from scratch. Normally, car companies just improve on their last car. But for Tesla, Elon thought "What should the ideal car be like?" rather than "How can this car be improved?" . This also applied to Steve Jobs, who thought "What should a phone be?" rather than "How can we improve upon a flip phone?".

The post concludes by reminding people that the chef and the cook are a spectrum, with no one being a complete chef and no one being a complete cook. It also mentions how the blog being called Wait But Why is fitting because of the blog's purpose of deconstructing everything in the world to get to the truth.

## Full posts

Full compilation: https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/03/elon-musk-post-series.html

Part 1: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html

Part 2: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html

Part 3: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html

Part 4: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html

## Trivia

* Tim also wrote a post about Elon Musk’s new company in 2017, Neuralink. You can find the post here and the G-rated version here.
* A G-rated version of part 4 is available here.
* In addition to these posts, a mini post about SolarCity was written here.
* Another mini post was written about his project for the hyperloop here.
* The blog series was compiled into an ebook available here.
* A comic of Tim examining Elon Musk up close can be found here.
* Tim made a post about the progress of the SpaceX post available here.