On the Lex Fridman podcast episode 333 Lex interviewed the former Director of AI at Tesla Andrej Karpathy, who had the opportunity to work with Elon Musk, and is currently working on AGI. (AGI is a hypothetical intelligent agent which can learn to replicate any intellectual task that human beings or other animals can.)
Lex asked: “What did you learn from working with Elon Musk?”
Andrej replied: I think the most I’ve learned is about how to sort of run organizations efficiently and how to create efficient organizations and how to fight entropy in an organization. (Entropy means gradual decline into disorder.)
He basically runs the world’s biggest startups. I would say Tesla and SpaceX are the world’s biggest startups.
Tesla is actually multiple startups. I think it’s better to look at it that way…
The Tesla tech tree is an awesome example of this.
In the interview with Lex, Andrej continues:
He has a very good intuition for streamline processes, making everything efficient. Best part is no part simplifying focusing and removing barriers moving very quickly, making big moves all this is very startup, but at scale.
Cybertruck is an example of bold Startup thinking since it breaks the mold of a traditional truck.
“Disruptive technology where you really have a big technology discontinuity…tends to come from new companies.” ~Elon Musk
The Startup ethos Elon cultivates is especially evident at SpaceX. Because SpaceX is still owned in majority privately Elon has the freedom to move rapidly and implement innovations without answering to investors.
Elon retains majority control of SpaceX and because of this he can tweet whatever he wants about SpaceX. By staying private Elon is able to steer SpaceX in whatever direction he chooses.
Elon’s majority control of SpaceX helps ensure the rapid roll out of new technology.
Hopefully Elon never loses majority ownership of SpaceX because he is clearly steering SpaceX rockets towards greatness and his accomplishments so far are nothing short of fantastic.
The problem with taking a company public is how investors tend to be solely concerned about ROI and quarterly shareholder meetings. And this might create conflict with SpaceX since SpaceX is optimizing to make human life multi-planetary rather than optimizing for maximum profitability. However interplanetary transit will certainly be big business one day if it can be achieved.
This is why Elon intends to IPO Starlink the Internet company, not SpaceX the rocket company.
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