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"I am the richest man in the world, how strange": The magic secret of Elon Musk - Walla! Business

2021-01-16T23:40:44.024Z


Brains that communicate with computers, a company that will settle Mars, swarms of autonomous cars: for Ayalon Musk, only one foot in reality is enough to turn a false idea into a real one. This is how the eccentric dolphin became the richest man in the world - and even to him it sounds delusional


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"I am the richest man in the world, how strange": the magic secret of Elon Musk

Brains that communicate with computers, a company that will settle Mars, swarms of autonomous cars: for Ayalon Musk, only one foot in reality is enough to turn a false idea into a real one.

This is how the eccentric dolphin became the richest man in the world - and even to him it sounds delusional

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  • Elon Musk

Gali Weinreb

Saturday, 16 January 2021, 21:31

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It is not far off the day when human minds will talk to each other in telepathy, through the internet.

This was stated without blinking Alon Musk in a comprehensive interview for the podcast "The Joe Rogan Experience" last May.

They will be able to do this, he promised, through a chip that will be implanted in human brains, receive information from all their senses, communicate with their brains using thin wires, and transmit their thoughts out.

This chip is being developed by Neurolink, a company that is one of its founders.



In the first phase, Musk stated, the product will restore head injury capabilities.

Next it will make us all part of an artificial intelligence system that combines human brains with computer brains.

That's the only way to save ourselves, he said.

After all, computers are evolving so fast, so either we will join them or we will be left behind and at best become their pets.



And when will technology be able to allow us to communicate through brain chips?

"In about five years," Musk says.



This conversation may sound far-fetched to many of us, but only one foot in reality is enough for Musk to turn a far-fetched idea into a real one.

So yes, already today implants for electrical stimulation of the brain are used to treat diseases like Parkinson's and epilepsy, and electrical implants even restore hearing and may soon allow vision restoration.

And yet, one product that will communicate with many senses to make humans symbiotic with machines so that they will not control us, and all this in five years' time - is already in the realms of absolute science fiction.

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The dreams are in the air, the head really not in the ground.

Elon Musk (Photo: GettyImages)

But for Musk this is a recurring pattern.

The electric vehicle mission also sounded quite pretentious but was fulfilled at Tesla, which he set up, with the vision being that all roads would be filled with autonomous vehicles and act as a coordinated swarm to reduce traffic loads and accidents.

And if pretended, then he set up his own company SpaceX to settle on Mars: "We'll land people with Mars in six years, or maybe even four, if all goes well," he promised.

Until then, it provides space launch services for satellites, cargo and manned spacecraft, and is considered a pioneer in the private space industry.

Annoyed that there is no tunnel in Los Angeles that bypasses the traffic jams between his offices, he decided to dig one up, and so his infrastructure company The Boring Company was born, which wants to build a multi-layered network of cheap underground tunnels.



About a week ago, Musk became the richest man in the world with about $ 190 billion, picking up the title from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. "How weird," Musk tweeted in response to the news. "Well, back to work."

Alon (no Israeli connection) Musk, 49, was born in South Africa to May Musk, an entrepreneur, nutritionist and successful model.

Mae's parents were adventurers, archaeologists who flew in a small plane and searched for a decade for the lost city of Kalahari, whose remains have been documented in 1885 but never found again.

Musk's grandfather did not find her either, but his family members joined the travels and mostly grew up on the legend.



Mae married a lover from high school Errol Musk, a brilliant engineer and also a pilot, sailor and real estate entrepreneur.

The couple had three children: Alon, Kimble and Tosca.

In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2017, Musk said his parents barely looked after him, instead "the books raised me".

And when he did not read books, he built bombs and missiles "and all sorts of things that were supposed to kill me."

His mother called him "the hard boy," as opposed to his brother Kimball, who was "the perfect boy."



Young Alon intuitively understood how things work - how electricity comes from the walls and how two materials mix to create a third material.

"I thought everyone understood that," he said in the same interview.

At about the age of 10 he read Asimov's MDA series "The Mossad" and from it he produced insights that accompany him to this day: "Steps should be taken that prolong the era of culture and shorten the duration of the Dark Age if there is one." To the environment and settle Mars: “If humanity sat on many planets, a single natural event would not wipe us out.

There have already been five mass extinction events on Earth.

People are unaware of this, "he says today. For the same reasons he is very troubled by intelligent machines." We have a 5% -10% chance of surviving in front of them. "



At the age of 10 Musk's parents broke up and he decided to live with his father, he said. "But he regretted it within a few years. His father claimed to be" an evil man, who did every horrible thing possible, every crime, "he told Rolling Stone in tears. In the past, it was hinted that Musk's studies were funded by emeralds that his father stole and engaged in. But even if Musk the father did such a thing, and there is evidence that he was a very wealthy man, he probably did not really share money with his children, and after the young Musk returned to live with his mother, life was very difficult financially. In his adulthood Musk tried to renew the relationship With him, but the relationship deteriorated and was stopped again. "There's nothing to do, I tried everything.

Threats, incentives, rational arguments, emotional arguments, he will no longer change. "



After returning to live with his mother, Musk and his brothers and cousins ​​set up small businesses to make a living in every way. They also enjoyed just adventures, getting away from home and reaching emergency rooms more than likely. "We had a law: safety in third place;

In the first place - do not be afraid.

There was nothing in second place, but safety was so unimportant that it did not even get the empty second place. "

A car that came into space.

Tesla (Photo: Manufacturer's website, manufacturer)

Musk had no friends.

He was the youngest child in the class, a constant victim of bullying.

But he did what is usually seen in movies - studied various martial arts, suddenly raised an eyebrow, and returned a double dose to the main bully.

From this, he said in the past, he learned that there are people who cannot be reconciled, but only confronted with their methods.



For his studies he moved to Canada, then to the United States, and completed a master's degree at the prestigious Wharton School of Business. Payment for the degree impoverished him, as he is careful to tell, and he began his life in the United States as a rebellious poor man with debts but strong inner knowledge that Will be different.

He was accepted for a doctorate at Stanford, but retired after two days to join the exciting ecosystem of Internet companies in the late 1990s in Silicon Valley, where he first worked two apprenticeships simultaneously to repay debts, and was highly regarded by his employers for both his quick engineering and diligence.



It was the right place at the right time.

With his brother Kimball, who has since also moved to the US, he founded Zip2, an online Yellow Pages directory company. He could not afford an apartment, but lived in the office and showered in the gym. After being recruited from a random group of angels, the company grew, and 2009 was sold for $ 307 million, Musk received $ 22 million, a move that made him a millionaire.

Requires its employees not to use the perfume because of its sensitivity to smell

But what brought it to mind was the online financial service he set up in 1999, which is known to us today as the PayPal company.

Musk ran the company, but got into confrontations with co-founder Peter Thiel (today he also invests with ambitions to change the world).

Thiel, who claimed Musk was an overly domineering manager, led a coup on the board that led to Musk being fired.

The shares remained in his hands, and when PayPal was sold to eBay he received $ 165 million.

This money was used by him to found Tesla and SpaceX.



Tesla, the electric vehicle maker Musk founded in 2003, is now worth about $ 834 billion, having risen 820% in the past year, most of them in recent months.

Of the companies listed on Wall Street, only Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet (Google's parent company) have a higher market capitalization.

Musk owns about 20% of it, and his ownership of Tesla is actually the bulk of his fortune.

The company's revenue in the third quarter was approximately $ 8.77 billion and profit $ 331 million.

"It was almost impossible to set up a new car company and keep it alive until profitable," Musk had previously said.

The company is currently profitable for about five quarters.



To date, Tesla has sold more than a million electric vehicles, and recently launched a vehicle "with full independent driving," according to the company.

But while the vehicle can brake, cross lanes and park alone, it cannot really get from place to place without driver intervention.

Even what he claims to do he does not do well enough, and the pilot drivers are forced to intervene to avoid collisions.

Drivers who deviated from the official guidelines of independent driving in it (one of them for example was so bored that he decided to watch a movie in the meantime) were found dead.



But that really did not cause Musk to reflect on remorse.

"It's screwed up that every Tesla accident, even if it only ends in a broken ankle, opens up new editions," he said, noting that such excessive criticism of the experimental autonomous vehicles could halt progress in the field, and actually cost human lives later.

According to Musk, the more we anticipate the vision of a road full of autonomous vehicles that know how to be careful of each other, the more we will save a large amount of accidents.

And who was injured on the way?

Well, we told him it's just a pilot.



The criticism of Musk does not end with the safety of the cars, but flows into the personal style.

Like many genius executives who build companies in their image and likeness, it is argued against him, he is prone to tantrums in the office when things are not going right, and his employees are afraid of him.

He yells at them not being smart enough, and then conducts mass rallies to compliment them.

In a moment of anger he may fire someone he does not really know.

It is said that it also requires employees not to use the perfume because of its sensitivity to odors.

A real dictator.

According to his acquaintances and employees, he moves in an extreme way between moods - angry, focused, amused, embarrassed.



Musk often expresses himself on Twitter and sometimes his tweets get him in trouble.

On April 1, 2018, for example, he jokingly wrote that Tesla was about to go bankrupt.

Although he left enough signs that this was a joke, the stock plummeted.

Who if not he should have remembered that a large part of trading today is run by machines that read press releases, and still have no sense of humor.

On another occasion he said that he would try to purchase the public shares in Tesla and make it private, and that he already had the funding for it.

It was not a joke, but neither was it really a cohesive plan.

The stock soared, but plummeted when it became clear the company would remain public.

Musk has already received a $ 20 million fine from the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

In small.



Even his unrelated tweets hurt his stock at times.

This is what happened when Musk called "Pedo Guy" (pedophile) diver Vernon Answorth, who was rescuing a group of children trapped in a cave in Thailand.

Musk sent a submarine to help with the rescue, Answorth chose not to use it, called the donation a PR exercise and even asked Musk to 'hang his submarine in a painful place'. Musk answered him with the unflattering nickname. Tesla's stock plunged. He



also has a love affair outside of Twitter. Hate with Wall Street, and in one of Tesla's conference calls he refused to answer analysts' questions because he claimed they were "boring and stupid," but apologized after the stock went down, again.

From Musk's few accidents: Amos explosion 6

Musk managed to screw up even in a more promising position.

In November 2019, a new and super-designed Tesla vehicle was launched at a glittering event that looks like a customer from a rock show, as has been the practice in recent years in Silicon Valley.

Musk was the undisputed star, surrounded by fans and photographers.

He asked one of the company employees to throw a stone at the car window to show that it was not fragile.

The window is broken.

He asked him to throw another stone at the other window, and he too broke.

"It never happened," he murmured in the face of the demonstration's utter failure.

The company's stock collapsed, and this was one of several times when it was announced on Wall Street that Musk's charm had expired, and that the disturbance had finally outweighed the genius.

A Wall Street investment firm has claimed he is a 'reputational threat' to Tesla.

But the stock has obviously recovered since then, and Musk's reputation has recovered with it.

Launched a Tesla car into space

Tesla, as a huge public company, may be the focus of attention, but Musk's other companies are no less interesting.

SpaceX, a pioneer and creator of the private space sector, has recorded incredible achievements in its 18 years of existence.

The company has developed improved, inexpensive and environmentally friendly missiles and launchers, which are already launching satellites into space, part of SpaceX itself, and have even safely brought space tourists to the manned station ISS.

NASA chose it to ship supplies to the space station, and it has already done so more than 20 times. The next missile the company is planning will be reusable, for reasons of sustainability. Its products were involved in relatively few accidents, with no casualties. One of the most famous was the Israeli satellite Amos 6. About $ 200 million has been invested. SpaceX is valued at $ 46 billion, of which Musk is the largest shareholder.



Musk is not without provocations in this area as well. He has often said that the right way to heat Mars to fit human habitation is to throw away. It had an atomic bomb on it, and to demonstrate its launcher capabilities tossed a Tesla car into space and left it there, forever. The book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and a towel. Also a disc on which the entire Asimov "Institution" series was there, in case the aliens could not read books. A sign was placed in the car with all the workers' names on the project and a statement: "Creator on Earth, by humans" .



Musk believes that if humanity will live on many planets less likely natural disaster will wipe us one day. "Even today there are five

"Incidental species extinction events on Earth," he warns.

When asked how he imagined his death, he said he wanted to die on Mars, and that he believed most of those who set out on the first manned voyage would die in it.

Until it's time to travel to Mars, Musk has no plans to take part in the space tourism his company allows.

"I have children," he once remarked.

It seems that safety still managed to rise to second place.



Against this background The Boring Company, the infrastructure company he founded, does look boring (both 'boredom' and 'drilling').

But maybe only ostensibly.

Like Tesla, it was born out of Musk's obsession with streamlining transportation.

The company was founded in December 2016, when Musk tweeted "The traffic is killing me. I will build a machine for drilling tunnels and start digging."

Later that day he added "I will really do it".

In February 2017, work began on the first tunnel, in the SpaceX parking lot, and in 2018, an experimental tunnel was inaugurated, which today reaches several kilometers.

"Obviously we will have to move the transport to 3D at some point," the company's website said, "and compared to flying cars, the ones in the tunnels can't fall on your head."

The soil he removes from the tunnels is of course recycled for other purposes.



The Boring Company's plan: to build a whole system of tunnels on top of each other.

Vehicles entering the tunnel stands on a conveyor belt, flies the end of the tunnel 200 mph. You can drive Pedestrians and bicycles. Lmask There is also a separate program for the construction of low-friction tunnels where private vehicles can travel much faster.



Party marketing, perhaps, "Who exactly understands Musk, the company has announced that it will sell branded flamethrowers" for fun "bearing its logo. They were finished within hours and yielded the company $ 10 million." Flamethrower is a bad idea, why would anyone buy it? " But he immediately added, "Unless you want to have fun." The flames were handed out to buyers at a party at the company's offices. That, too, was a $ 500 request for each. Oh, every guest also got a fire extinguisher, at the house's expense.

"Very busy inside my brain"

When Musk sets seemingly impossible goals he almost launches himself with his own hands into failures.

But there is something in his failures that actually makes him more human.

He cried in an interview describing his relationship with his father, his tweets include sentences like "my girlfriend is mad at me", he does not hesitate to reveal how deeply he is trapped within the geeky fantasies and geeky paranoias of his science fiction books, and is not ashamed to reveal self-humor: almost every move of The companies he runs involve a joke or a reference.

"Most people would not want to be me," he once said.

"Very busy inside my brain."



Politically, Musk's loyalties are not entirely clear.

An immigrant who came to the U.S. without a divorce, a dystopian science-fiction geek who was bullied as a child, whose one thing bothers him the most about the climate crisis, would be expected to be an automatic Democrat. But that is inaccurate. He previously said he was "in the middle - social liberal but economically conservative ", And he generally believes in direct democracy (where every significant issue stands for a referendum)." This will probably be the system of government on Mars, "he said. He contributes to both Democrats and Republicans, and opposed Trump's election but became his adviser arguing that" as many sane voices as possible. hear, so much the better. "Musk also expressed his support for the rapper Kenya West presidency, which eventually was canceled after his wife Kim Kardashian claimed he suffered from manic depression.



political act most controversial of his was probably conduct crisis beams. Musk required its employees to report to factories, decided to open Despite the restraining orders, he called the closure "fascist" and declared the panic "dumb." Despite his understanding of mathematical models Musk estimated that there would be no Corona patients in the U.S. after April 2020. For this he was nicknamed Space Karen (Karen is a derogatory nickname for a privileged white woman ) Among his Twitter critics.



So is Oak Musk genius or crazy?

Apparently both.

In the meantime he more or less delivers the goods, even if not always exactly as promised or just in time.

Its investors should hope it's not too crazy, because it looks like their companies and boards are willing to do almost anything it offers, even if it's send cheese into space as a tribute to Monty Peyton.

Six children and a couple from Twitter

In May of this year a son was born to Musk and his wife Grimes named X Æ A-XII.

Yes, X Æ A-XII.

Musk explained that the sign Æ means angel, and the A12 is a CIA spy plane from Lockheed Martin's Archangel series.

Pronounced it "ex fire i-12".

X Æ A-XII is Musk's sixth son ("more children need to be made for humanity to survive").



Grimes, 32, is his third significant partner, having been married three times, two of them to the same woman.

Like Musk, she too seems like an extraordinary personality.

Grimes was born in Canada as Claire Alice Boucher, but asked to be named C after the speed of light.

She too was the granddaughter of a wild grandfather, who ran away from home as a child and lived in the woods.



C taught herself music and art at the age of 17 and began producing music and music videos entirely on her own.

Within a few years she had established herself as a cult figure.

Along the way, she experimented with a variety of drugs, but only stimulants - this is also something the two have in common.

The name Grimes was chosen almost by chance, after a genre of music she did not really know.



So how did these two meet?

Musk said that when he did an investigation into a two-word joke he was hoping to tweet - Rococo's Basilisk (we said he took his humor seriously), he discovered that Grimes was already using that combination in one of her songs.



What does this even mean?

We will try to explain.

Beware - after reading this you will never be able to go back.

One day a man named Rocco entered the forums of artificial intelligence and suggested the next thought experiment.

Suppose there is artificial intelligence that is programmed so that it is very beneficial to humans, so beneficial that the more they produce it the more it will save many lives.

To give humanity an incentive to produce it soon, the machine decides that it will kill or torture anyone who knew of the possibility and did not.



Now you have to leave everything and manufacture the machine.

If not, she will answer and kill you, for the benefit of all mankind.

You're trapped, just because you read the last paragraph.

Like looking at a basilisk - a mythological animal that paralyzes anyone who looks at it.

This paradox has earned the nickname Roco & Basilisk.

So Rococo & Basilisk is probably a play on words between it and the Rococo Basilica (a church decorated in the Rococo style).

The main thing is that both of them are funny.



By the way, one can see the resemblance to what Musk thinks of his autonomous car.

Every extra day when it does not exist sacrifices more human lives.



Relative to such a special couple, the affair is pretty standard.

A richer and older man, a young woman and his confession: "Yes, she's the main caregiver for the baby. I have nothing to do with him as long as he's just shit and crying. I'll treat him when he's big."

He really invests in his five older children.

The couple were caught arguing on Twitter after the birth (and even Grimes' mother, a Canadian political journalist, intervened and killed him for 'his right') and Grimes also criticized him for his tweet that was perceived as transphobic.

But in a recent interview he stated: "She is very special. She is the strangest person I know. We are arguing over who among us is more insane."



He was previously married to Justin Musk, a writer of fantasy books and vampires, whom he met in school before getting rich.

"I told him - I'm willing to have a lot of children if I have a nanny. He said - the difference between us is that I take it for granted that I will be a nanny," she once said, adding that he pressured her to dye her hair blonde and not develop a career.

The couple's first child died in a crib.

The two had been married for eight years.

He then twice married actress Tlola Riley, and had an affair with actress Amber Heard, Johnny Depp's ex-wife.



Despite his current successful relationship the last few years have not been easy for Musk due to the perpetual worldwide criticism.

He first bought all the houses around him to gain privacy, but recently began selling them to add funding for SpaceX's Mars trip, and also to stop them saying he was a millionaire, he himself admitted.

The Twitter nation saw this as another sign that he was freaking out, but maybe this time too he knows what he is doing.

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Source: walla

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