Moving into the minds of Silicon Valley elites is rarely simple, however a Slovenian political scientist lately tried to “sketch out a interesting few basics” about three distinguished billionaires.
Samo Burja, president of the political threat consultancy Bismarck Evaluation, shared his ideas about Tesla CEO Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and tech investor Peter Thiel on the inaugural episode of the Stay Gamers podcast launched this week. Burja describes “live players” as individuals who step away from norms, improvise, and assume from first ideas, saying such people are instrumental to stopping societal stagnation.
Burja stated that upon listening to the frequent knowledge, Altman’s response may be “yes, and” whereas Thiel’s could be “no, but.” As for Musk, Burja laughed, “I don’t think Elon’s even listening.”
Altman, he stated, will “see where the enthusiasm and energy lies, and it’s like, ‘Okay can we harness this and even further develop it, even grow this and push it somewhere real.’ He sees cryptocurrencies, and he’s like, what about…a coin for the world that changes the world economic system to prepare for the post-scarcity future.”
He cited Worldcoin, which Altman cofounded a few years ago. The thought behind the startup is that individuals will be capable of show their personhood in a web-based world that may very well be quickly be overrun by AI bots. They’ll do that by scanning their irises utilizing a shiny metallic orb. Whenever you’re scanned, verified, and onboarded, you’re given some proprietary crypto tokens, additionally known as Worldcoins. Later the system might change into a solution to implement common fundamental revenue, an thought which may acquire traction if AI results in large-scale unemployment. Worldcoin, maybe not surprisingly, has sparked widespread privacy concerns.
As for Musk, Burja continued, “Elon’s perspective is so first-principles driven that while he does recognize what is popular and not and can work with it, his decisions as to what to do next are not tied at all to the mainstream but are following, I don’t know, like a technology tree chart derived from basic physics or his favorite science fiction story.”
Musk, he stated, will go straight into an trade that’s broadly thought of hopeless, too crowded, or too mature—akin to electrical automobiles or house—“but have it work this time.”
To make one thing like Tesla succeed as Musk did, he stated, “you would have to think of it not terms of car companies, but the raw energy potential of batteries…the batteries keep getting better, so logically eventually a car company would work.”
Musk offered insights into how he thinks about physics versus engineering in a recent episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast, saying: “Physics is just deepening one’s insight into how reality works. Then there’s engineering, which is inventing things that have never existed…Once you figure out the rules of the universe…you can then build technologies that are really almost limitless.”
As for Thiel, Burja continued, “Thiel’s question is ‘How is the mainstream wrong and what can we do about it to make it correct?’ Which makes him a great technology investor—a great technologist, but also a great investor.”
Thiel, he stated, “is extremely good at noticing when the common consensus is correct or wrong for basically bad reasons—and I do include correct here—where whenever you think that even if people are directionally making the right bet for the wrong reasons, there’s some, you know, financial alpha there, there’s some possibility of finding that distinction.”
Thiel, a conservative libertarian who’s donated closely to right-wing politicians, is understood for making daring swings on uncommon concepts. He was satisfied nicely earlier than most individuals that funds would go digital and Bitcoin would take off, and he wrote a $500,000 examine to a Harvard scholar on one thing known as “Thefacebook.”
