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[Maiden Voyage]

The interview touches on the newly born X (for short), anime, history, AI, politics, the recent twitter hack, and more.

Elon Musk, Blasting Off in Domestic Bliss (Published 2020)

The billionaire space oddity on life with Grimes and Baby X, Trump, Tesla, tunnels, short shorts, stock surges, Facebook fumbles and everything else under the sun.

www.nytimes.com

A few highlights for me:
His philosophy on success as a rollercoaster, according to 'friends':

But his friends think it’s all part of the ride. They describe his internal narrative as going something like this: “I’m going to take over the world. That’s going to be a super-crazy process. And therefore, if the roller coaster ride isn’t incredibly scary, I’m doing something wrong.” And after Mr. Jobs, boards learned their lesson about pushing out visionaries in favor of gray-haired corporate suits.

On ideas:

“I have lots of ideas, more ideas than I can act upon,” said the man who insists he is an engineer, not a businessman or investor. “I tend to bite off more than I can chew and then just sit there with chipmunk cheeks.”

Indeed, Mr. Musk is a rare product of Silicon Valley who actually enjoys biting and chewing. Many people there, obsessed with living longer, chug Soylent or practice intermittent fasting, like Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter.

“I love going to a restaurant that’s doing something special with food,” Mr. Musk said, “and I think really if you are not appreciating this, then you are not appreciating one of the finest things about living.”

On AI:

Mr. Musk was painted as a Luddite, “hysterical” in the estimation of Mr. Zuckerberg, for what his friends called “Elon’s crusade,” his proselytizing that we should figure out safety features for A.I. before it gets smarter than us.

He may not be as fortissimo about it, but he still feels passionately about “the A.I. warning drama game,” as he dryly put it. In the past, talking about A.I. turning on us, he has used the Monty Python line, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.”
“My assessment about why A.I. is overlooked by very smart people is that very smart people do not think a computer can ever be as smart as they are,” he told me. “And this is hubris and obviously false.”
He adds that working with A.I. at Tesla lets him say with confidence “that we’re headed toward a situation where A.I. is vastly smarter than humans and I think that time frame is less than five years from now. But that doesn’t mean that everything goes to hell in five years. It just means that things get unstable or weird.”
He said his “top concern” is DeepMind, the secretive London A.I. lab run by Demis Hassabis and owned by Google. “Just the nature of the A.I. that they’re building is one that crushes all humans at all games,” he said. “I mean, it’s basically the plotline in ‘War Games.’”

On the call, he can’t resist “banging the A.I. drum” again, as he puts it, flatly stating about those who can’t imagine that a computer could be smarter than a human: “They’re just way dumber than they think they are.”

On Covid:

For many of the coastal elites for whom a Tesla is a status symbol, Mr. Musk’s laissez-faire approach to the pandemic was disappointing, and sounded way too Trumpian. In the spring, when his California factory was shut down, he called stay-at-home orders “fascist” and tweeted, “FREE AMERICA NOW.”

“I think the reality of Covid is that it is dangerous if you’re elderly and have pre-existing conditions,” he said, adding: “It absolutely makes sense to have a lockdown if you’re vulnerable, but I do not think it makes sense to have a lockdown if you’re not vulnerable.” He said he may have had Covid in January and he wears a mask on the factory floor.

On politics:

“You know, I’m not sure that everything is so political,” he said. “To be totally frank, you may be interpreting this through a lens where you think everything is totally political because you’re political. But I think the general public does not see everything through a political lens. I would say the amount of thought that the general public puts into politics is quite low. They’re mostly thinking about their day and their direct relationships and their work.”

On Biden & West's presidential hopes:

“I just haven’t had much interaction with Biden," he said. “I talked to Obama much more than Biden.” He notes that he was such a fervent Obama supporter that he once waited in line for six hours to shake Obama’s hand when he was running, adding, “the poor guy was so tired at the end of the night.”

Mr. Musk continued, “Obama was great. Biden, I just don’t know. It’s hard to see through the noise. But is he — are all his mental faculties there or not? I can’t quite tell. It would be helpful to see him in a debate scenario or something like that. Does he have his stuff together or not? I can’t tell.”

Despite the fact that he wants someone in the White House who has his stuff together, he encouraged Kanye West’s bid for the presidency.

“I’ve known him for at least 10 years, maybe longer,” he said, noting that while they see each other about once every six months, they text “fairly often.” Mr. West recently tweeted a picture of the pair — both wearing Yeezy sneakers — with Mr. Musk’s Sorayama sculpture of an android woman looking at a one-way mirror. Grimes, who took the picture, is reflected in the frame.

“I’ve done my best to convince him that 2024 would be better than 2020,” Mr. Musk said, so that Mr. West wouldn’t be accused of splitting the Black vote with Mr. Biden.

Note there is more on his relationship with Mr. West in the full article.

Worth the read if you find Musk an interesting figure. There is a rapid-response Q&A at the end as well.

 

[V2Tommy]

Musk and Joe Rogan would’ve made an amazing couple. Shame.

 

[JLMC469]

lol @ endorsing Kanye.

 

[Stiflers Mom]

So, it's Elon's fault we don't have a POTUS West for the next four years?
Damn it.