Erik Nordeus - The Engineer

“I’m not suggesting that things couldn’t be better,” Elon said. “We should be asking ourselves, have we made the environment better or worse?” 316He compared it with democracy. While democracy is the least bad government system, the US is least bad at encouraging innovation compared with other countries. 351“However, if you look at new technology, it’s crazy how much of it comes out of the United States,” Elon said. “If you want to do cutting edge stuff, you come to the United States. It’s not so much that there aren’t great entrepreneurial opportunities in China and India, they are huge – especially for people who were born and raised there. But it’s not cutting-edge technology. Name three things that came out of India or China in the last 200 years.” 375

Winston Churchill had a saying, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.” The reason to why US is the country where you succeed is that US is open to new ideas. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. US attracts people with new ideas because of its openness to new ideas and the acceptance of failure. 354“If I had been born in some cave, I suppose I would still try to be innovative, but there would be limits,” Elon said. “You have to have the environment that encourages innovation as well. Let’s say I had been constrained to live in South Africa, where I was born. I would not have been able to achieve a fraction of what I have here.” 52

Elon arrived to the US thanks to a scholarship and enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, also known as Penn. While studying at Penn, Elon shared a house with Adeo Ressi, who was another Penn student as well as an outsider like Elon. “He was the biggest dork I’ve ever met,” Ressi said of Elon years later.

Ressi, the son of an engineer and a social worker, grew up in New York. During the summer, while other children went on summer camps, Ressi lived in the experimental city Arcosanti in the middle of the Arizona desert. The Italian architect, Paolo Soleri, had designed the city. He used a concept called arcology – a combination of architecture and ecology. “I had the opportunity to experience a very utopian vision of the world,” the youngest inhabitant in the city, Ressi, said. While at Penn, Ressi ran a newspaper with a focus on environmental issues: The Green Times . As his final thesis, he tried to submit this newspaper, but his thesis professor didn’t accept it, so he never got a degree. 46

When Elon and Ressi first met, they lived in a giant campus dorm. But they didn’t like the environment, so they decided to rent a large house outside of the campus area. “We were both transfer students and they stuck us in these giant dorms and we just wanted to get out,” Ressi said. 60They would later move to an even larger house with fourteen rooms. Spent kegs with plywood on top became cheap furniture.

Only three of them lived in the larger house. 47The third person is unknown, but Elon and Ressi recalled they had forever changed this person’s life. It’s unknown if it was for better or worse. 349At one point, Elon’s mother felt a need to check on him to see if he had enough food to eat, and she also made sure he wore a fresh pair of socks each day. 117

“We weren’t connected to the fraternity scene, and we weren’t new students either,” Ressi said. “We had to meet people, so we decided to have parties, but since we also didn’t have money, we decided to make it a business.” While Ressi transformed their house into a club, Elon took care of the finances. Elon was the sober one who had to talk to the police when they arrived for unknown reasons. To take care of the guests, they hired bouncers, and to clean up, they hired a cleaning crew. 60Up to 500 guests could attend these wild parties. The guests had to pay five dollars each to drink as many beers as they wanted, but the profit each night could still be as high as a thousand dollars. 47

While not hosting parties, Elon played first-person shooter games on his computer. It’s unclear how much he studied and how much he played games, but Elon explained he earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and economics with an unofficial minor in first-person shooter games.

Elon earned two degrees: a degree in finance from the Wharton School and a degree in physics from the University of Pennsylvania. 262He already knew he wanted to create something big, so he didn’t have any other choice than to get two degrees. “I studied physics and business, because in order to do these things you need to know how the universe works and how the economy works and you also need to be able to bring people together to create something,” he said. “It’s very difficult to create something as individuals if it’s a significant technology.” 63

As an engineer before anything else, Elon thought the undergraduate business degree was easy. All business courses combined during the final year were not as difficult as one course in quantum mechanics from the degree in physics. 350But he would never regret the decision to also get a degree in finance. “I’m head engineer and chief designer as well as CEO, so I don’t have to cave to some money guy,” Elon said. “I encounter CEOs who don’t know the details of their technology and that’s ridiculous to me.” 50

While not studying, playing games, or hosting parties, Elon worked. He wrote business plans for an electronic book scanning service, and he worked two summers for an ultracapacitor energy storage venture called Pinnacle Research. 51

Elon also worked for the video game developer Rocket Science Games. 71He participated in the development of the games Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine , released in 1994, and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs: The Second Cataclysm , released in 1995. 118In the game manual, Elon was credited below the heading Rocket Scientists. 38“He [Elon] has that Bill Gates energy where his foot bounces and he’s wiggling just because he’s so smart,” one of his co-workers said. 51

Someone who Elon hadn’t forgotten was Justine. While visiting friends back at his old university, he convinced Justine to go to a dinner date with him. They fit together – both grew up as social misfits, bullied, and lonely. “I was a really lonely kid and he [Elon] was a really lonely kid and that’s one of the things that attracted me to him,” Justine said. “I thought he had this understanding of loneliness – of how to create yourself in that. A lot of the things that come naturally to people he had to think about. It’s more deliberate with him. The lessons he had to learn were different from most of us. I don’t think people understand how tough he had it growing up.” 278

“I see myself in you,” Elon told Justine. 182When Justine didn’t watch the television series Knight Rider , Fame , or A-Team , she read a lot of books. At age five, she had learned how to read, and her first teacher thought she just stared at the pages to appear bright. “Reading was my first and earliest drug,” she said. “I’ve been reading since first grade, when I used my allowance to purchase a book in a bookstore for the very first time.” Like Elon, she didn’t want to go out on the playground during recess and lunch hour. She hid somewhere in the school building and read. 141

After graduation, Justine moved to Japan for a year and then returned to Canada where she worked as a bartender while working on a novel as she was an aspiring writer. “If Elon ever calls me again, I think I’ll go for it. I might have missed something here,” Justine told her sister. Elon called her one week later. 182

“What’s the meaning of life?” a young Elon Musk began to wonder. The reason why he asked the question was that he had a dark childhood where he experienced an existential crisis because he had read several books within the philosophy area. “Which you should not read at age fourteen,” he said.