ELON MUSK DOESN’T HAVE TIME - ISSUE #2
Or, how businesspeople engineer progress.
Hello, it's Emmanuel again.
I hope you enjoyed reading yesterday's letter. If you didn't see it, you can check emmanuelpaulmaah.substack.com
So, here …
I watched a YouTube Short of Elon Musk on Joe Rogan’s podcast. JR asked him if he ever looked at planes and thought, “I bet I could fix these.”
I thought, “Fix?”. What is ‘wrong’ with planes?
JR’s tone reflected to me, a veiled condescension for the state of the world and an utter belief in the ability of people like Musk to perfect, or at least, improve it.
Well, Musk said, yeah.
JR added that maybe, Musk doesn’t have the time.
I thought, of course, he doesn’t. Elon Musk runs six companies now when you add his new AI company, xAI Corp. That’s three times the companies Steve Jobs ran at his peak (Apple and Pixar).
Musk didn’t say this though, that he runs six companies but, he nodded that indeed didn’t have the time to reengineer planes.
But, Musk said he has definitely discussed improving planes with his friends and his exes. After JR’s light prodding, he blurted that planes could be VTOL and hyper-speed. Just take off, no need for a runway, and shoot into the distance.
For me, it was like a copter rising into the air at twice the current speed snd shooting forward with the speed of a Concorde.
Wow. We NEED that. And who’s going to build it now that Musk has his hands tied?
That snippet of the conversation reinforced an idea:
Businesspeople aren’t greedy people intent on taking our money; they are solutions to problems. Society only incentivizes or rewards them for their value with money.
This is why I think capitalism is a healthy environment for development and progress. When multiple people compete to provide goods and services to society, they seek ways to improve their offerings, and as a result, they upscale the quality of utility.
If we have a pain and someone gives us medicine - something to relieve that pain, they have a business when we give them money and say, “Hey, can I have some of those?”
With AI, regular people have superpowers. They can generate text that they could never have written themselves; they can create images limited only by their imagination, without having to draw, paint or sculpt in any medium at all, and so on.
It is surreal. But it is also reality.
With this, “ordinary” unskilled people can offer services to other people and be rewarded monetarily.
It is the ease, flexibility and inexpensiveness of AI-as-a-service that makes me believe that indeed, we are getting closer to a world where there’ll be 8 billion people and 8 billion businesses.
In coming letters, I’ll explore AI further.
Thank you for reading.
With love & ink,
Emmanuel.
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Interesting read. Keep it up, bro.
At least, I learn a thing or two from your letters everyday.
Good read.
I do believe that with time, humans will be able to travel at speed to long distances with commercial planes in less time than it usually takes.