Cue comments about how Elon Musk is doing so much more with his money than everyone else, and how SpaceX/Tesla Motors/SolarCity are so much more valuable than anything else.<p>Cue complaints about how no one works on hard problems any more, and that everyone is just chasing instagram/facebook/twitter/groupon/zynga/social/local/mobile.<p>Forget that Elon Musk started an advertising/publishing company in 1995-1997, intelligently riding the bubble, and then created X.com (a more complex Mint.com), which he then merged with Confinity to create PayPal (from where he was essentially fired - unfortunately).<p>Forget that battery tech wasn't useful enough until just over 5 years ago (not nearly dense/cheap enough), and how we needed the massive production increases in laptop battery production for Tesla to make sense. Also forget that NASA had 0 use for SpaceX until the Space Shuttle program was shutdown - which is curiously lined up with the COTS program. Also forget that Solar panels required massive production gains thanks to China which only occurred within the past 5 years. Finally, ignore the fact that he would never have been able to do anything without the money from a stupid email payments thing.<p>Big problems are awesome. Little problems are better.<p>Everyone starts small. Even Elon (a personal hero of mine and a man I deeply respect).<p>Start on new small things, work hard, and TIME your entry/exit with extreme precision. Malcolm Gladwell says a lot of things which are "truthy", but his Outliers book was right on the money.<p>"Big things have small beginnings" (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB52xyaY4kk" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB52xyaY4kk</a>).
As a decade-long reader of Slashdot, who transitioned almost completely to HN several years ago, it's remarkable how good the visible comments on /. seem after a long absence.<p>On discussions of sufficient size, because of the depth-first nature of HN I almost inevitably bail out around the 2000 pixel mark. I just don't want to wade through that much garbage, and that's about as much space as it takes for HN threads to devolve into a pointless tête-à-tête these days.<p>I think when I switched to HN, there basically <i>weren't worthless comments</i>, but those days appear to be over. The transition here wasn't noticeable, but going back feels like a breath of fresh air.
Thank you. It's such a refreshing sight as just 3 months ago, Elon was visibly quite disappointed in this video: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJnW7vtqaf4&feature=related#t=11m40s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJnW7vtqaf4&feature=relat...</a><p>2 months later, the Dragon successfully docked with the space station. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjuvIlskUf4#t=7m20s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjuvIlskUf4#t=7m20s</a>
Just look at Elon's excitement at the 9:36 mark of this video as well as all of SpaceX employee's enthusiasm. This was truly a huge success despite the challenging odds.<p>Looking forward to the future Grasshopper mission. Perhaps it will fail at its first few attempts just like the Falcon1, but with Elon's determination and his excellent team of engineers, I believe they can do it. They have already proven themselves during the darkest times in SpaceX history. Skip to [38:30] to hear it from Elon himself. <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/video/73460184-elon-musk-profiled-bloomberg-risk-takers.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloomberg.com/video/73460184-elon-musk-profiled-b...</a> And his reaction after Falcon9 successfully launched on the very first try. [39:12] All that hardship and pain, totally worth it.<p>We will be victorious, indeed.
This video reminds me of another of Elon's strengths, beyond just a technical mind and an entrepreneurial mind: he's very well-spoken, and he's very charismatic -- and it comes off as very natural, so it helps to close the gap with his audience whenever he speaks. He doesn't come off as some egghead academic or engineer -- though clearly he can think like one. Instead he talks like he's a friend speaking casually and calmly, off-the-cuff, with a mixture of what you might call British-style humility. But backed by confidence and a sense of persistance. One of his repeated phrases across many interviews is that he's determined to make X thing happen, and he's confident he can, that they can. If they can't make something happen the first time perfectly out of the gate, then they'll learn, adjust and try again until they do.<p>He probably has a one-in-a-million combination of both a strong technical mind, a strong business sense, and strong personal charisma. There are a ton of folks out there that have maybe one of those things, and rarely two, but it's extremely hard to find all three. Plus he scored big early with Zip2 and PayPal. Arguably this fourth thing -- a huge war chest to draw from, beginning in the late 90's or so -- has made him even more rare. Indeed, a Tony Stark of his age.