I read Vance's biography of Musk a few years ago. A few highlights from memory, perhaps with minor errors:
Musk self taught himself BASIC when he was 11 or 12 years old, and within a year had written a game that he published in a hobby computer magazine. The game was bought by a game company and sold commercially.
After high school, he was accepted to U Penn where he obtained degrees in Economics and Physics in 4 years. He was then accepted to a PhD physics program at Stanford he started, and quit within days to instead start a business with his brother. Within a year he, programming alone, wrote a vector map program that displaced the bitmap electronic maps of the day (MapQuest, if memory serves.) The Musks sold that program for the better part of 50 million dollars.
Musk then, again I think working alone, wrote PayPal to leverage the new internet for financial institutions. He merged his company with Peter Thiel's payment system that expanded the reach of the software to individual peer to peer. The merged company was then sold to Ebay for hundreds of millions.
When Musk decided to found SpaceX, he sought out rocket scientists (that he later hired) and asked for a reading list. Per the estimate of those scientists working for him, Musk was able to learn about 90% of the material in 3 months and then collaborate in R&D.
----
Is Musk a genius ? Obviously. Anybody who thinks otherwise is an ignorant moron. To be clear, I use the Genius term as it is defined by IQ tests -- about 3 SD above the mean in a normal distribution. That works out to around the 99.7th percentile. My WAG is that Musk is more along the lines of 4 SD above the mean, or about the 99.99th percentile. Want some context for that ?
Anybody can be a LEAF owner, or an HR clerk.
About 1/50 can be a physician or an engineer
About 1/100 can be a physicist, and perhaps 1/300 can obtain a PhD in Physics
Musk is around 1/10,000. That makes him an extraordinary individual since it puts him at the top of a class of 30 PhD physicists. Few LEAF owners will ever have a chance to meet, let alone get to know, such a person. OTOH, in a population of 100M adults in the USA, there are around 10,000 people with Musk type abilities, each doing their thing. Some will stand out because their accomplishments affect a large section of the population. Others will stand out in the future when their accomplishments become useful are get recognized.
Is Musk an industrial titan, perhaps the greatest who has ever lived ? Probably, and certainly in a very, very select group of a few.
Is Musk a Nikola Tesla ? Not by achievement, but Musk took a different path and I don't think there is any way to compare those two..
Is Musk an Einstein ? I'd guess not.
Musk self taught himself BASIC when he was 11 or 12 years old, and within a year had written a game that he published in a hobby computer magazine. The game was bought by a game company and sold commercially.
After high school, he was accepted to U Penn where he obtained degrees in Economics and Physics in 4 years. He was then accepted to a PhD physics program at Stanford he started, and quit within days to instead start a business with his brother. Within a year he, programming alone, wrote a vector map program that displaced the bitmap electronic maps of the day (MapQuest, if memory serves.) The Musks sold that program for the better part of 50 million dollars.
Musk then, again I think working alone, wrote PayPal to leverage the new internet for financial institutions. He merged his company with Peter Thiel's payment system that expanded the reach of the software to individual peer to peer. The merged company was then sold to Ebay for hundreds of millions.
When Musk decided to found SpaceX, he sought out rocket scientists (that he later hired) and asked for a reading list. Per the estimate of those scientists working for him, Musk was able to learn about 90% of the material in 3 months and then collaborate in R&D.
----
Is Musk a genius ? Obviously. Anybody who thinks otherwise is an ignorant moron. To be clear, I use the Genius term as it is defined by IQ tests -- about 3 SD above the mean in a normal distribution. That works out to around the 99.7th percentile. My WAG is that Musk is more along the lines of 4 SD above the mean, or about the 99.99th percentile. Want some context for that ?
Anybody can be a LEAF owner, or an HR clerk.
About 1/50 can be a physician or an engineer
About 1/100 can be a physicist, and perhaps 1/300 can obtain a PhD in Physics
Musk is around 1/10,000. That makes him an extraordinary individual since it puts him at the top of a class of 30 PhD physicists. Few LEAF owners will ever have a chance to meet, let alone get to know, such a person. OTOH, in a population of 100M adults in the USA, there are around 10,000 people with Musk type abilities, each doing their thing. Some will stand out because their accomplishments affect a large section of the population. Others will stand out in the future when their accomplishments become useful are get recognized.
Is Musk an industrial titan, perhaps the greatest who has ever lived ? Probably, and certainly in a very, very select group of a few.
Is Musk a Nikola Tesla ? Not by achievement, but Musk took a different path and I don't think there is any way to compare those two..
Is Musk an Einstein ? I'd guess not.
