Elon Musk talks about what makes work worth doing. He argues you don't need to change the world to be good, discusses whether PhDs matter, and explains why he focuses on making life multi-planetary and sustainable energy.
You famously said when you were younger there were five problems that you thought were most important for you to work on. If you were 22 today, what would the five problems that you would think about working on be?
Well, first of all, I think if somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest of society, I think that's a good thing. It doesn't have to change the world. Even if it's something, if it's just a little game or the some improvement in photo sharing or something, if it has a small amount of good for a large number of people, I mean, I think that's fine. Stuff doesn't need to be changed the world just to be good. I think first of all I should say that I do not expect to be involved in all these things. So the five things that I thought about at the time in college, making life multi planetary, accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, the Internet, broadly speaking, and then genetics and AI, I think I didn't expect to be involved in all of those things actually at the time in college I thought helping with electrification of cars was how I would start out. And then I put that on hold to start an Internet company in 95 because there does seem to be like a time for particular technologies when there are at a steep point in the inflection curve. And I didn't want to, you know, do a PhD at Stanford and watch it all happen. And I wasn't entirely certain that the technology I'd be working on would actually succeed. You can get a doctorate on many things that ultimately do not have a practical bearing on the world. And I wanted to, you know, just, I really was just trying to be useful. That's the optimization. It's like what are, what can I do that would actually be useful?
Do you think people that want to be useful today should get PhDs?
Mostly not. So what is the best way to use them? Some yes, but mostly not.
How should someone figure out how they can be most useful?
Whatever this thing is that you're trying to create, what would be the utility delta compared to the current state of the art times how many people it would affect. So that's why I think having something that makes a big difference but affects a sort of small to moderate number of people is great, as is something that makes even a small difference but affects a vast number of people. The area under the curve would actually be roughly similar for those two things. So it's actually really about just trying to be useful and.
