He then got into online payments (X.com, PayPal) and the sale of his shares allowed him to start SpaceX and buy Tesla.
So don't listen to what billionaires say and just look at what they do if you don't want to get deceived by them.
I argue that law is an adversarial profession - what matters is if you are smarter than the lawyer in the other side of the courtroom. If everyone was less good, outcomes would be much the same, and we as a society could redistribute those smart people to engineering problems where those IQ points will make the difference between inventing something useful or not.
It's an effect on the outcome that's orthogonal to the actual facts of the case itself. Unless the guy with a public defender has as much of a chance as the guy with a legal team with a million dollar budget. I'm a little doubtful that that's the case right now.
I'm not sure that the trials of either a wealthy defendant with deep pockets or an indigent defendant with a public defender significantly affect whether the finder of fact can obtain objective Truth with a capital T. The outcomes may indeed be different, but I also think it's orthogonal to the truth as well. They're more the result of the amount of resources you're willing or able to throw at a problem to make it go away.
Not a contradiction. This is exactly why the proportion of very smart people going into law is decreasing.
Can’t find it for the us, but you can see it rose consistently in ontario: https://www.ouac.on.ca/statistics/olsas-application-statisti...
[0] or took a shot at a career that didn't go anywhere, like in Hollywood or politics or any other industry built on an underclass of lied-to 21 year olds
I mean you can look and enrollment figures and law school closures over last few years. This isn’t just a “hunch”.
The whole “I don’t know what to do with my life so I’ll apply to law school” is like a meme from 2004.
1. It's possible that a 48-year-old might have a different perspective, and potentially more wisdom, than his 17-year-old self did? I'm sure many people would make different choices in hindsight, if they could go back to being 15-17 yrs old.
2. It depends what you're trying to optimise for. Even if you are trying to plot a path to being a billionaire, following Elon Musk's path just won't work - huge numbers of other factors and luck involved. But...
3. ...I don't think he was only talking about optimising for personal financial success. It's clear from other comments in the video (on Warren Buffett, for example) that Musk doesn't see the field of investing (to put it broadly - essentially making money by shifting money around better than other people) as an especially worthy pursuit. I interpret this as Musk (rightly or wrongly) seeing his companies (which innovate, and create new products which mostly being some sort of benefit to the world) as morally superior to (in this case) law and investment banking. Indeed, if we were to try to optimise for some sort of worthier goal, it's reasonable that you'd want the best and smartest in the industries where they would have the greatest net benefit for the world.
Musk's first love is/was physics and he intended to work on electric cars at the get-go. However, at the time (and as I can attest to) the Internet was JUST starting to boom - like a gold rush. There were millions of problems to solve and businesses to start. At the time we was at Stanford and there, more than any other place, this fact was the most obvious. He knew he could / should capitalize on the current opportunity -- and he did.
After he cashed out with PayPal, instead of doing the easy path of doing another Internet startup, he returned to his priorities. He's been trying to create the environment in his orgs, and the rest of the valley, for workers and investors to pursue the same type of opportunities / risks.
He's doing exactly what he says, and the world is rewarding him for making better stuff every day.
His words and actions are in complete agreement.
Don't forget that he's curing autism, blindness and paralysis, and will eliminate the need for humans to talk within 5-10 years with Neuralink!
The problem is that a lot of the money is in things like finance and advertising. We could absolutely restructure our economy so that wasn't the case.
Musk makes a lot of grandiose statements, but he's spot on with this one.
But so what? A lot of people believe that. What I have never heard is a realistic plan for restructuring the economy that makes things like finance and advertising less lucrative.
Technology naturally leads to a "winner take all (or most)" economic system. When it's so easy to switch to competitors, platforms that are even a tiny amount better than their competitors can take all the mindshare of an industry.
In that environment of extreme economic concentration, fields like finance and advertising (which is really controlling marketplaces) will always be extremely lucrative. Haven't heard any good proposals on how to change that.
1. I would like to see strong progressive taxation that explicitly taxes concentration of wealth. This would be aimed at all large companies and wealthy individuals, and ultimately based on which actual human persons have legal control of the company such that it can't be gamed by creating shell companies, etc.
2. On top of this, I don't see why we can't explicitly put tariffs on things like financial or advertising transactions. Somewhat similar to a Carbon Tax, it would correct for costs to society caused by the activity. I'd be particularly keen on seeing measures that make it extremely expensive to do short-term trading, forcing investors to take a much more long-term view.
As he's showing, it won't be easy. EVERYONE will try to kill the earnest attempts. For all of Musk's faults, he is trying to show there is another way and how to get there.
I mean, as many others have pointed out, Musk had to get rich first in the finance world before he could get enough F.U. money to indulge his real passions.
That's precisely the problem that I (and Musk it seems) are pointing out. These activities shouldn't have better reward profiles.
If I could hit the reset button and do it all over again, knowing what I know now, I would 1. get into the most prestigious undergrad school (Ivy if possible) that I could, rather than just lazily apply for one state school and go to it, 2. Still majored in some kind of computer engineering track, 3. immediately go into finance after school and pump money doing the standard two-to-three-year grind as an analyst, 4. get into the most prestigious MBA school I possibly could, 5. pump money doing the standard grind as an associate, then 6. basically do anything I want as a 30 year old with the millions I've saved.
The nice properties of this career path are:
- It doesn't take any outlier talent, just learn excel and do grunt work.
- It minimizes the need for luck (as opposed to starting a business or interviewing at Google). I would argue the risk adjusted expected value of this path is higher than other careers like starting a business where you need to multiply by a low probability of success.
- The contacts/network you make doing 1, 3, 4, and 5 mean you will always have easy access to capital, a huge advantage for someone who wants to do that "actually-valuable" thing. As opposed to some rando dude who was "3rd engineer from the left" at Amazon wanting to quit and start his own business, who will have to pitch and pitch and pitch to get a single investor to listen to him.
It would be nice if society was set up such that there were more "work hard" paths to financial security as opposed to risky paths, but we collectively can't shake this risk-reward caveman mentality, so people go into law or finance.
> It would be nice if society was set up such that there were more "work hard" paths to financial security as opposed to risky paths, but we collectively can't shake this risk-reward caveman mentality, so people go into law or finance.
This is precisely my point. If we set things up so that finance and MBAs weren't the things that lead to financial security then things would be much more efficient. Because people would be rewarded for the things that are creating value, rather than having to make choice between creating value and earning more money.
How?
Where on earth does this narrative come from that Musk isn't working for financial gain?
The guy rammed a pay package beyond anything the world has ever seen past a weak board, and just took his first payment, $700MM+ in equity, which is far beyond what the company has ever earned in GAAP profits in its entire existence.
If he doesn't care about money, how do you explain that?
I'm not saying that people don't care about money. I'm agreeing that they do. And thus that it is important that as a society we distribute our money to enterprises that are actually doing useful work. Precisely so that people who are money-motivated (which is basically everyone to a greater or lesser degree) will choose to work for these enterprises.
1) Going to mars. 2) Sustainable energy / transport
He didn't just graduate and get into finance.
I never heard that "banker" story before, but a month long internship is hardly a career.
He went on getting physics scholarships for UPenn and then Stanford.
Of course it's finance, and a great way to tell is to ask the question does a big bank offer this service, albeit in a product I may not personally use? The answer is yes.
As I have stated in my other replies, at the time there was an opportunity like no other. Musk put his goals on hold to capitalize... then he returned to his priorities.
I'll say this, if other 'smart people' did this... made a truck load of $$$ off of their finance gigs and then did stuff like build EVs, rocket or whatever. That would be something. That's not the normal path at all, however.
If I had my life to do over I would focus on money and money alone first and defer heavy study into science or engineering or tackling actual hard problems. I did it backwards and so I made everything 10X harder on myself.
Part of the problem is that I was naive and thought the social structures and economic systems that drove this kind of progress in the past (a supportive university system with an academic career path, intelligently allocated science funding, a generally workable middle class economy that you could fall back on) still existed. They don't. We dismantled all that stuff starting in the 1970s because we didn't understand what we had built or why it worked.
Both of these people also did their work in low capital cost areas with fast revision cycles: CS/software and math. Those are areas where individual scale bootstrapping is actually a possibility. There are no garage spaceships, automobile plants, novel surgical procedures (I hope), or nuclear reactors (excepting that wacko who tried to make one from material from hundreds of smoke detectors and turned his yard into a superfund site).
In America you must support yourself and pay for college (unless you go 100% autodidact, which is very hard in its own way). That relegates any additional work to moonlighting, which is very sub-optimal for concentration and is only possible in a few fields anyway. As you get older you may want to start a family, which eliminates most moonlighting time and demands even higher income for support and long term savings.
So the only way to do it in America is to (a) earn a ton of money early and achieve financial independence and then do your innovative work, or (b) take a vow of poverty and celibacy and live like a monk. I guess there's also (c) which is to find a benefactor or find some way to make your work viable as an angel/VC investment, but the former is extremely rare and the latter is only workable in a few fields that have low barriers to entry (like software) and a fairly rapid time from prototype to potential market. For "atoms" rather than "bits" type stuff the initial investment and time horizon are too big for angel/VC and there are very few benefactors/patrons with pockets that deep.
The thing is, when I realized this, these things stopped being cool.
I think there was a lot of hope a long time ago that future technological progress was going to be a lot more open to individuals than it actually is now.
In my guesstimate, there aren't many people alive who have contributed more to humanity's technological progress than Linus.
Not intentionally though. Globalization has led to most of it.
Manufacturing leaving for cheaper climes hollowed out the middle class, made unions impotent, etc.
Hypercompetition has forced companies to be ruthless.
In academia, administrators have taken absolute power for themselves and now enrich themselves at the expense of education and research.
It's quite a mess we've stumbled into.
Globalism was implemented in a market fundamentalist way. No special attention was paid to rights, fairness of trade, etc. because it was assumed that trade and markets and then (magic happens here) and then everything is great and liberal democracy spreads everywhere.
What really happened was corporations and international finance going trans-national and exempting itself from the rule of law and then leveraging foreign totalitarian or lawless regimes to break workers power at the wage negotiating table.
The real long term winners were totalitarians and would be totalitarians though, not the corporations or finance. Capitalists selling nooses and rope, as Marx quipped.
As a society, the boomers made a choice in the late '70s / early '80s: egoism should be rewarded and money is the measure of all things. Everything else was a consequence.
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-dc8c42a6725776dfc54ed8...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/NYUGDPFi...
Correlation/causation yeah, but you can't have more people doing nothing of value and more middle class.
> The CEO also addressed his recent vow on Twitter to sell the majority of his physical possessions, which he said weigh him down. “I have a bunch of houses, but I don’t spend a lot of time in most of them. That doesn’t seem like a good use of assets. Somebody could probably be enjoying those houses and get better use of them than me.”
I interpret it as encouraging finance over ownership. It is a sensible, if debatable position. Instead of owning things you don't use, it is smarter to invest your money in more productive ways. Which is a roundabout way of saying "if you are smart, go into finance".
Otherwise, I know a whole lot of very smart people who aren't into finance. It is just that no one talk about them because they are not rich. They probably could have been rich if they wanted to, and had a bit of luck, but instead they have chosen to use their intelligence to do what they like.
Being able to do what you enjoy and making enough money to live decently and maintaining a good work/life balance is a huge privilege. Doing that when the thing you enjoy doing is an already saturated market or something that is hardly marketable is even more so, and it may be considered as desirable as being a billionaire.
statistics, economics, finance, and accounting should be required courses in high school so that we have a more financially literate populace.
When I think of the finance careers that many of my peers are going in to, I do not think of the online payment ecosystem or fintech writ large.
He didn't mean don't explore multiple fields when you're a teenager.
He was already specialized as a coder and went on to build startups, as engineer. I don't really see your point.
I understand your point, and I wouldn't just blindly take this advice, but I'm not sure this is the right comparison.
Because in Canada, he went to school and university, studying physics, and then got a scholarship for a master's at UPenn, and later for a PhD in Stanford. All was in physics.
Now in general human beings love giving out hypocritical advice so him being a human is far more relevant than his being a billionaire, at least if our goal here is to talk about his advice and not just use this opportunity to bash billionaires.