Elon used to sleep on the floor.
When Elon started out as an Entrepreneur in Silicon Valley with his brother Kimbal they were so hard up for cash they rented a small office. They slept on the couch, and a beanbag on the floor.
When you’re just starting out the odds are you don’t have a ton of capital to work with. This is why Elon recommends starting out online:
“I think for somebody who’s just starting out as an Entrepreneur,I think the Internet is a great place to start because if you’re just starting out, unless you’ve got a ton of capital that somebody gave you or you inherited or something you have to start a company that requires a small amount of capital…
Where it’s heavily weighted toward the intellectual capital in your head…so I think anything to do with software and with the Internet is a really good starting point.”
When Zip2 was acquired by Compaq Elon got $20,000,000 out of the deal.
It would have been impossible for Elon to have done electric cars or rockets right out of the gate because it requires plenty of capital to enter those industries.
In fact even with the over $100 million Elon earned from being the largest shareholder of PayPal when they were acquired by Ebay he went all in with SpaceX and Tesla to the point where he invested every single dollar and had to borrow money to pay his bills.
Elon’s heroic investments of capital, blood, sweat and tears are a big part of the reason why SpaceX and Tesla have been able to survive, thrive and dominate.
The Paradigm Shifting Power of The Internet
When Elon describes the birth of the Internet he often exclaims the invention of the Internet is like humanity acquiring a nervous system.
In his 2020 AxelSpringer Award Talk Elon said of the Internet:
“The Internet…Really the Internet is like a nervous system for humanity.
Whereas previously communication was more like osmosis. For information to travel someone would have to call someone over the phone. Or write them a letter. And then that letter would be carried by a series of people to the destination.
Now communication can happen instantly from any place in the world to anyone and does not need a human to carry it.
This is sort of like at a cellular level you see say a primitive small multicellular creature will communicate via osmosis from one cell to the next or diffusion essentially.
But once you have a more sophisticated organism you have a nervous system. The speed at which information can travel is much faster. And the accessibility of information is fundamentally different.
If you want in the middle of the amazon jungle with a satellite connection and you have access to all the world’s information…
Whereas previously even if you live in the library of congress in the US where all the books are, you still would only have access to a fraction of the world’s information.
This is basically humanity becoming a super organism. To the degree that’s not possible unless you have essentially instant live speed communication from anywhere to anywhere, as opposed to osmosis. Diffusion.”
The above statement from Elon puts into powerful perspective the power and importance of the Internet.
And Elon lived near the heart of Silicon Valley for decades. Only recently did Elon move to Texas, where SpaceX now launches rockets from Boca Chica (AKA Starbase).
