Interview with Elon Musk. Part 1 - how he wanted to become a physicist, but became an entrepreneur

Elon Musk, founder and co-founder of companies such as PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, studied physics at the University of Pennsylvania. In the first part of the interview that Musk gave to Elena Levin, a columnist for the American Physical Society, APT News, he talks about how he uses thinking based on the principles that physics has given him and why he proudly calls himself nerdom

Levin : Recently, in one interview, you advised people who want to engage in innovative business, "to study physics and learn to think, guided by principles, not analogies." Can you tell me more about what you mean?

Musk : Physicists were forced to develop a way of thinking that allows you to understand the counterintuitive elements of reality. Things like quantum physics are not very intuitive, and in order to advance in their study, physicists have created a method of thinking that allows you to get the right answers, even if they are completely non-obvious. And this requires tremendous mental stress. In everyday life, one cannot be guided by principles all the time; it will require too much mental energy. So most of life has to act by analogy, simply copying the behavior of other people with minimal variations. But if you are trying to become a pioneer, invent something really new, then you have to go to the thinking based on the principles, identify the most fundamental truths in your industry, and derive your thought from them. It requires you to strain your head, and I can give a couple of examples of how this helps in rocket science.

Levin : Come on.
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Musk : Any technology in rocket production is estimated by how it reduces the cost of space transportation. But, if you study the history of rocket launches, you will see that this cost is almost unchanged, and in the USA it even increases with time. If you think patternly, by analogy, you will have nothing left but to admit that such is life. But it is not. If you think based on the principles, the first thing you need to know is what the rockets are made of, and how much these materials cost. When we did this, we were very surprised - the materials make up only a few percent of the cost of the rocket. This is definitely something wrong, and we are doing something very stupid. If we were smarter, we could have made rockets much cheaper.

Levin : How is your day going? Do you constantly use this method of thinking, or at some point you have to stop, because it requires too much stress?

Musk : I would be glad to say that I constantly think, relying on principles, but, unfortunately, I have too many things to do, and I save mental energy only for the most important of them, for example, to achieve some technological breakthrough, or with some serious gag in a business that requires creative solutions. Sometimes it goes away by itself - I wake up and suddenly there comes inspiration in my soul (laughs). It sounds patterned, but it happens often. I think my brain is working on a problem on a subconscious level, and in the morning the solution jumps into consciousness.

Levin : Why did you decide to study physics?

Musk : It was very interesting for me to understand how the universe works. And physics is doing just that - trying to understand how the world works at the most fundamental level. At some point I seriously thought about my career as a physicist, thought about some physical problems, but looking into the future, I began to fear that I would be bogged down in bureaucratic delays with some collider, and then the project could be closed altogether Svrehprovodyaschim Supercollider , and it will suck. From this simply hands down.

Levin : So you decided in advance that you love physics, you want to study it in order to know how the Universe works, but you are not going to work as a physicist?

Musk : For a while I wanted them to be. Somewhere between 12 and 13 I had an existential crisis, I tried to understand what this is all about, why we are here, whether there is meaning in life and so on. I came to the conclusion that the best that can be done is to improve the reach and scale of consciousness and to achieve higher insight, which, in turn, will allow us to ask more and more good questions, since it is obvious that the Universe is the answer, The main thing is to ask the right question. It's all about the questions.

Levin : It turns out to be interesting - you decided to study physics in order to understand how the universe works, but at the same time you began to study economics, that is, from the very beginning you thought about business education?

Musk : When I tried to decide what I want to do in life, I was convinced that if I did not study economics, I would have to work for someone who studied it (laughs), and they will know all sorts of special things that I don’t know . It didn’t look very nice, so I wanted to be sure that I would also know all this (laughs). Frankly, I can not say that I felt myself among the students of economists. I liked to hang out more with fellow students-physicists. I liked people from the departments of art and science. I do not know, maybe you should not publish it? (laughs) Yes, I was not in awe of the company of business students, I preferred artists and scholars.

Levin : Do you consider yourself a “nerd”?

Musk : Definitely, I was a nerd, and in many ways I remain with him until now. If someone made a list of everything that this botanists should do, then it would turn out that I did everything right on it. I spent many hours throwing dice at D & D.

Levin : And in the costumes of the characters dressed up?

Musk : (laughs) Yes, it was a couple of times, but not at home, but at D & D tournaments. It was cool. I loved it all. I grew up in South Africa and there was a very small community, I had few opportunities to share my hobbies with someone ... Nobody was interested in programming among my peers. I almost had to force them to play D & D. Some liked it, but the rest had to persuade for a long time, because a team of four was needed to participate in tournaments. I played computer games, wrote soft, and I had pants with ties. (laughs) Actually, I was having a hard time. The girls did not want to go on dates with me ... And I still did a lot of things - collected the radio, made rockets. In South Africa, they were not sold in stores, so I had to find out for myself the composition of the rocket fuel, crush the ingredients in the mortar, refuel the rocket and launch it - with an unpredictable result.

Levin : Yes, perhaps it is true - all according to the list of the present Nerd.

Musk : (laughs) Botan, 80th level.

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Translation of the second part of the interview - about why Musk believes that obtaining an MBA degree may be a mistake, how much a trip to Mars will cost, and how Tesla Model S creates a story.