Elon's Best Week Ever?!

0:00Elon Musk might have just had the most impressive 72 hours that any human being has ever had uh i think that's fair so in the last week he uh on october 10th he unveiled the robo taxi yeah the robo vans um the optimus well he just kind of he'd kind of unveiled that before but like the new new generation of optimus he had them sort of going around proving their dexterity what they can deadlift and lift and serving people drinks all sorts of things like little humans basically and then on october the 13th he uh had the falcon heavy which is a rocket 19 stories high drop out of the sky at half the speed of sound and be caught by basically a pair of giant chopsticks and prove for the first time ever that reusable rockets as was his personal original theory against all the odds and everywhere every expert's points is physically possible as in the laws of physics allow that to be a concept that we can use in space exploration and he proved it to be true all of this quite the week in the last week yeah ridiculous what have you done this week i sent some emails um a little crowdfunding going saw my mum over the weekend it's been productive it's hilarious i actually feel like i had a productive week yeah yeah i mean it's amazing that uh entrepreneurs all of us sit here and we think we've got incredibly busy incredibly stressful incredibly important lives and there are some levels to this shit like i have a i have a friend that i do business with and we talk a lot about like how stressful and busy and stuff that we are and we always have this saying which is like elon's building fucking rockets so like whatever we're doing it can't be remotely the same and we must be going wrong somewhere and it must be something like at its core vision setting and delegation there's another level to elon musk when it comes to risk he's just the guy who puts all his chips on the table every single time and goes all in because he knows the probability at some point if he just keeps doing it he will win yeah but he just like well he'll take all the else he'll take all the losses along the way he doesn't care well so he's had the most impressive week ever um as entrepreneurs all incredibly inspired but hold on because amongst all of that yeah right he like he's launching this gig uh the the rocket in texas yeah right he um he's he's at the event um you know for tesla and you know this whole amazing pr event he's also going to republican rallies on stage in person to go with trump yeah to bounce around with trump that in itself like it's like he's a presidential candidate like person now as well like that usually takes like a complete marathon kind of energy he all in the same week yeah i mean he must have an absurd level of energy generally because to do what he does on a day-to-day basis to make it to the the rallies to act in the way that he does i wonder how much that man must sleep um because his output is unbelievable and in the same week uh he gets snubbed by the uk government yeah i don't know if you've seen this yeah so i mean their official stance is that they didn't snub him yeah um i don't think that's really quite true basically he actively said he wants to come to the uk's investment summit which happened on Monday and no word from them.

3:18Nothing. How would you exclude the world's greatest entrepreneur? Yeah, it's wild. And they say that they didn't stab him, but he wanted to come. You know, the UK is one of Tesla's key markets. You know, certainly one of the countries that views the Tesla launch as more than any country. And to put ourselves in a position where we're not doing everything we possibly can to try and get him in, I don't know. I'm thinking about personal agenda and then people so on a personal agenda side the labor government haven't invited him to the summit because they're annoyed by his inflammatory tweets over the uk riots about a month ago two-tiered kia two-tier kia that kind of stuff right that's right on the other side when he does the launch events yeah the number one views on earth for those launch events on tesla the cyber van like sorry the robo van um optimus etc it's all in the usa and the second greatest views come from the uk so even though these are just views and it's just twitter regardless you can say people have an interest right there's clearly people in the uk who are deeply interested in the technological advancements of this incredible entrepreneur and his amazing company and we're a huge purchasing block for tesla i mean fundamentally we do and so in the situation we're in now you know the uk day by day and we talk about this a lot in entrepreneur circles you and i do is wavering in how positive it is for businesses right now you know we're we've got the threat of capital gains tax going up from whatever it is like 20 ish to 39 percent and so immediately the UK is less exciting for entrepreneurship and so if I was in their position I would be doing everything physically possible to get him to want to invest in the UK gigafactories technology job creation inspiration all of those things I mean he employs thousands of people so he'd be great for an economy absolutely economy you may not like him personally but that doesn't mean that from a technology standpoint he's bad for the uk if i'm keir starmer i should be in a position of okay the man doesn't like me he's criticizing me i'm an adult i'm a politician as well prime minister i'm gonna get criticized all the time i'm gonna do the right thing for the economy and actually it would come out skin care would come out looking really good yeah actually i think people would really respect it if he was like you know what doesn't matter what he said about me if this is good for the country i want it and this is actually one of the problems that they've got into in the usa with the democrat party nasa and the government the government kept giving contracts to boeing for instead of spacex because of a personal attack against elon not wanting to support elon you know you got the boeing um aircraft there in the international space station the astronauts are stranded until march or april because of boeing fault for a government contract that was worth hundreds of millions if not billions and they've had to get elon elon is now sending people from spacex for free on his own dime to go and rescue the the astronauts from boeing amazing pr great peel but it's a perfect example of where you can't separate out politics yeah from economics and then you think to yourself why is he so publicly against um the the democrats you think to yourself well you can understand why he has been thwarted at every step possible and trump is kind of saying to him well you know you can be part of the solution and to me as an entrepreneur the idea of having an entrepreneur like trump in government oh it's exciting unbelievable take aside it's personal which again like is a consideration of course but from a technology efficiency revenue profit perspective i want that man in there so let's get into some of the actual things that they did so optimus yeah so have you had a chance to look at optimus have you seen optimus walking around i have yeah i mean impressive promises very good deadlift five miles an hour they walk they have a growing dexterity so i think they have did they have 12 fingers is that right or is that right yeah that's amazing he's saying that he reckons this is the world's first ever trillion dollar product right because every single person will have one why wouldn't they yeah which is a huge bet right that's like a massive massive thing i love elon mask i find him incredibly inspiring inspirational etc but i was always a little bit critical and cynical of him and weirdly i then bought a tesla because it was the most efficient thing for me to do and i honestly think it's one of the best things the best products i've ever bought i think to myself if i wanted someone building the product i'd probably want it to be him so the question is is he the guy that you want uh being in control of an autonomous robot in your home the switch a robot a robot who yeah exactly a robot who has a better deadlift than you yeah yeah exactly and then you do think to yourself it is a bit like terminator and i robot all coming together with AI and you're like with a lot of trust in one man yeah Christ his fingers on the button right it's scary because on the surface seems a great idea on behind the scenes yeah a little bit nuts so let's talk about the next thing which is so cool yeah cybercab it looks amazing I mean it got some it got some derision from people but I think that is the coolest looking thing so what's the derision based on fear haters I guess yeah also the design people thought was like weird i think it looks incredible well again like where do you let's say you have one chip to bet you do who do you bet the chip on elon every time like every time like i'd bet the chip and inhabit elon went on the idea of autonomous driving in teslas and so he installed all these little cameras and basically the de facto thought at the time for all the autonomous driving so this is waymo this is uber um they were using a certain way of doing it i can't remember or what the autonomous driving plan was, but essentially using like GPS, et cetera, right?

8:46And he was all about using 3D vision cameras. And he was like, basically the way to figure this out is not to map out all the maps and all of those things. It's to build 3D vision cameras with AI into all the Teslas. And once you do that, and everyone who's driving a Tesla is providing more insight and data into his map. So his idea was by doing that, you compound an understanding of what cars will understand in relation to other objects, each other, people, etc. And that'll be a better network. And once you do that, it's unique IP that other people can't beat. So again, he's thought 10 steps ahead of everyone else in how you do autonomous driving.

9:23Totally. So here's what I don't get. CyberCab looked like the coolest thing ever. Right. He said it's going to go to$30 ,000. Again, so another product that could be$30 ,000 and cheaper on the mile than basically anything else in the market so far. What happened to their share price? Is it 9 % slump? 60 billion dollars of tesla value i mean yeah i mean the you know probably back soon what i think is probably happening is the market is kicking back and saying we don't think what you're saying is feasible we think that you're marketing right and who's smarter the market or elon musk it's just a matter of timing and so like you say he's been talking about autonomous driving for 10 years yeah but he's right yeah he's right and it's going to happen and people laughed him and they were wrong yeah and then also he obviously just casually brought out this like insane van the robo van which can carry up to 20 passengers and you could also turn it into like an RV and all sorts of incredible stuff.

10:14Yeah. It's ridiculous. Yeah, it is ridiculous. And again, like it's all met with so much criticism and negativity because of what we were talking about before the show, which is that he is now both Elon Musk, the person incredibly politicized now. And then obviously like everything with Twitter, I think has done an unbelievable amount of damage, but also probably positives to his name and power. Yeah, he often says that the price of Twitter wasn't$44 billion. The price of Twitter was free speech, preserving free speech for humanity. Yeah, and he's very good at statements like that, isn't he? And to an extent, he's right.

10:49Like, there isn't free speech available on the other social media platforms, rightly or wrongly. It's one place where it still exists en masse, two people, unfiltered. That is a libertarian view on whether that's good or bad for society, but it's his view. And I suppose it's a fair point to say, if all other social media is like this, it's only fair to have something looks like that and let the free market decide where they want to spend their time. But I think what's interesting is how he's personally using that platform, you know, is not necessarily appropriate. Right. And so his personal political views, he now has over 200 million followers on that platform.

11:25I mean, that's wild. That's wild power for someone with that kind of power. The Musk stuff is weird with, you know, some of his public brand stuff. You know, he was so involved in like the crypto stuff publicly, like so many jokes about it. You know, he like cultivated a entire part of his fan base that are like, you know, I suspect not the most liberal people in the world that are probably quite counter to, you know, the Democrats and whatever. And so weirdly, I feel like he's been curating this like insane fan base who worship him as like always godlike figure. His words carry so much power.

12:08Yeah, they can galvanize people as well. Right. You know, do you think that his businesses are so good that it won't even matter what his policies are, what his personality are? Or do you think that he can actually have a really negative long term impact for companies like Tesla? He's probably one of the few people I'd never bet against. even with twitter i sit there and be like i feel he's gonna work it out he's also he's great at sort of uh reminding people he has a lot of things sometimes when he's criticizing the left where he's like you know the left is very protective over words you know like the the words are the most hurtful thing right and so they're trying to protect humanity from harmful words yeah i'm trying to protect humanity from harmful actions yeah from actual things actual things will actually hurt people and the actual existential threat so if you think like on a you know oh i'm offended by the thing that you say he's like i get it but that has no place in my companies because we're trying to create rockets that send people to the moon or to mars in case the world so if you are a bigot and you work at my company but you can send humans to the to mars yeah what's more important to me my hr department or getting humanity to mars i look at the bigger picture and i think that's a really interesting dichotomy you know at what point as leaders do we have a responsibility to take care of our teams the culture the you know the things that you and i definitely really care about is part of the reason we care about that because we care so much about people because we're not able to think in such grandiose terms like him where the mission is everything yeah yeah i and i care i care so much if someone's upset in one of our companies and it will consume me for days and so like i do not have the capacity to think about the rocket and i think you know he's like the ultimate example of like founder mode really isn't he he's like all in cares about nothing but success and if i'm honest with you i feel like the world does need both yeah love to know what you think is this the beginning for a new era for tesla are the markets right in correcting this you think they're absolutely bonkers um is must going to get us to mars in the next uh well in his lifetime i guess is the real challenge so let us know let us know in the comments would you go to mars who would you rather work for chris and i will be nice to you but we're not sending you to Mars or Musk, you know, where you can actually change the world.

14:21What kind of company, what kind of leader are you looking for? Let us know in the comments. Hope you enjoyed the episode today. I'm Dan. I'm Chris. And this is Secret Leaders. See you next time. See you next time.