This content was created by Eric Siu. This content was uploaded by Eric Siu. This is a YouTube video titled "Elon Musk Plays Life in Hardcore Mode!?" (uploaded August 9, 2025) containing an English conversational transcript between Eric Siu and Neil Patel. They discuss Elon Musk—criticizing Tesla's car build/comfort while praising Tesla's technology and charging infrastructure, and highlighting SpaceX, Neuralink, humanoid robotics, manufacturing achievements, and Musk's approach to hard problems. The exchange also compares M&A strategies of major tech companies and includes a promotional mention of Neil Patel's agency NP Digital and its SEO tools.
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If you look at what he did with Tesla, you already know my opinion on the Tesla car. I don't think it's a great car.
I love the car.
I, I, I hate the car. I think the seats are crap and he won't put in more parts because he doesn't want to make the manufacturing more complex. But I'll give him credit for 2 amazing things that Tesla has done with the cars. The first is I think they have some of the best technology and I think they're going to end up being a technology company that's licensing out that technology to all the other car companies over time, especially with like things like self-driving. The second thing that he did is he pretty much owns all the gas stations for electric. He has the infrastructure. You want to charge your electric car, it doesn't matter if it's a Chinese one or a German one or a US one, you're probably using the Tesla network in Europe and in America and probably in LATAM as well.
You know what's interesting too? So this, this retreat. So 3 people drove there. All 3 people had electric cars. None of them were Teslas. One was an Audi, actually 2 were Audis, and then there was my car, right? But when I used to have a Tesla, it was so easy to charge everywhere and it's fast charging everywhere, right?
No, it's still fast for Porsche. Porsche is compatible with their network.
Yeah, but the thing though, I've tried charging it in those networks. You have to find specific places. Like they're only opening up specific ones. Not every charging station is open to like an outsider car like mine.
But eventually I believe he'll change it.
He said that years ago, but he's still not active.
Yeah, but, and he'll make more money from it. He'll juice the revenue.
I think that's— I think the most impressive thing about Elon is not even just the tech, it's more so the manufacturing stuff, right? Like, you look at how quickly he's built these Colossus centers, and, but you look at the factories he's built for Tesla, he's actually proudest of that. And I actually think that's harder. I don't, I don't think, I think that it would take me years and years and years to learn that. And the same thing for you too. And I still don't even think we'd figure it out.
Yeah, I don't know if I could actually learn that.
I don't think we'd figure it out. Yeah.
But like, I look at like what he did with SpaceX is revolutionary. I think of what he's doing, not with Grok, but with the humanoids or whatever he wants to end up calling it, that'll end up being revolutionary, right?
The robots.
Yeah. He ends up focusing on stuff that is innovative and really, really hard to do.
He just wants to make humanity better, honestly. Yeah.
Same with like Neuralink. If you look at what he's doing as an entrepreneur, I don't think, And I'm not saying Zuck's done a terrible job. I don't think it's challenging to pay people a lot of money. I think it's challenging to do stuff that no one else has done.
I just wish before, you know, Elon does the next thing or whatever, someone releases a book on how he works, because that is worth studying for everybody in the world. You get what I mean? To work on so many different things and play Diablo and have 12 kids, like, How, how does it work? And that, that is worth, like, I wish one of the biographers revealed that.
All right.
So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.
Yeah, but if you look at his company versus the competitors, Like if you look at Facebook, what Facebook's done really well is M&A.
Yeah.
Microsoft has done M&A really well. Look at GitHub, what they bought GitHub for. I believe it has roughly that much now in revenue annually or something like that. It was crazy the numbers I saw. Look at YouTube. They bought YouTube for what, $1 point something billion?
$1 billion.
And it did what, almost $10 billion in revenue last quarter?
I think more, it does more revenue than Netflix.
Yeah. So it's just like, if you look at Google, they've done extremely well from M&A. So has Microsoft. So has Facebook. WhatsApp, Instagram. I know people talk about like, oh, WhatsApp, they haven't monetized yet. The user base, the amount of people that use WhatsApp is ridiculous. Majority of the world. But if you look at Elon, what has he done well from an M&A standpoint?
SolarCity?
Exactly.
Cousin's company.
All right. Like what he's done well is not M&A. What he's done well is build.
He likes doing things the hard way, it seems. It's always the hard way, maximum difficult. I mean, even when he plays Diablo, like I mentioned last time, Diablo 4, he plays on hardcore mode, which means if you die, you lose it all. And I think that's how he plays life too. Like, might as well just go for it all. Yeah. So anyway, you guys can choose how to do it. You pay one person $1 billion or buy $1 billion more compute. That's how you play it. Yeah.
