[alibaba_x]

The first thing Musk did after arriving to Canada as a 17 year-old was call up senior bankers until he secured an internship at one of their banks.

He then got into online payments (X.com, PayPal) and the sale of his shares allowed him to start SpaceX and buy Tesla.

So don't listen to what billionaires say and just look at what they do if you don't want to get deceived by them.

[gpm]

I don't think Musk is saying "as a smart person it is in your self interest to not go into finance or law", rather I interpret the statement as "as a society we incentive too many smart people to go into finance and law".

[xoxoy]

I don’t think as many “smart people” go to law school any more. Pretty sure law school enrollment has been on the decline for awhile.

[curiousllama]

Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc. aren't seeing a drop in the quality of applicants. I get the impression there's a very elite group that Musk would consider "smart" - and they have no issues getting into a T-14 law school.

[xoxoy]

So what? That’s not “too many” - the collective enrollment per class of those 3 schools is like 1000 students.

[CydeWeys]

There are fourteen T-14 schools, not just three.

[xoxoy]

Still don’t see your point. We need some lawyers. We don’t need millions. If the only law schools that existed were the T-14 where aggregate enrollment is like 4000 a year then that’s hardly “too many”

[loufe]

I suppose that depends on where you live. In Canada, at least, law programs continue to have very competitive entry requirements and the market for lawyers is rather saturated meaning salaries are relatively low for post-graduate professions.

[MiroF]

> rather saturated meaning salaries are relatively low for post-graduate professions.

Not a contradiction. This is exactly why the proportion of very smart people going into law is decreasing.

[irishcoffee]

I don’t know if it’s on the decline, but I do know that a whole lot of people graduate college and have a “now what? Law school.” Moment

[xoxoy]

Maybe 15 years ago. Not today.

[graeme]

You’re wrong. There was a big drop in 2010-2012, but then it started rising again.

Can’t find it for the us, but you can see it rose consistently in ontario: https://www.ouac.on.ca/statistics/olsas-application-statisti...

[xoxoy]

I’m not talking about Canada

[diminish]

hope so - as US legal tradition is pretty much a negative-sum-game

[verelo]

...and they get trapped there! That’s the issue. But then again, if that’s the case are they really so smart?

[wutbrodo]

They presumably wouldn't agree with your definition of "trapped". To reiterate the GP comment, the claim is that going into finance or law is individually rational for many smart people, but globally suboptimal at the levels we currently incentivize it.

[diegoperini]

That's a harsh simplification. There can be other reasons.

[stjohnswarts]

I agree I think it's commentary that other industries should value them as much as finance and law.

[mft_]

That's a bit of an odd (knee-jerk?) challenge.

1. It's possible that a 48-year-old might have a different perspective, and potentially more wisdom, than his 17-year-old self did? I'm sure many people would make different choices in hindsight, if they could go back to being 15-17 yrs old.

2. It depends what you're trying to optimise for. Even if you are trying to plot a path to being a billionaire, following Elon Musk's path just won't work - huge numbers of other factors and luck involved. But...

3. ...I don't think he was only talking about optimising for personal financial success. It's clear from other comments in the video (on Warren Buffett, for example) that Musk doesn't see the field of investing (to put it broadly - essentially making money by shifting money around better than other people) as an especially worthy pursuit. I interpret this as Musk (rightly or wrongly) seeing his companies (which innovate, and create new products which mostly being some sort of benefit to the world) as morally superior to (in this case) law and investment banking. Indeed, if we were to try to optimise for some sort of worthier goal, it's reasonable that you'd want the best and smartest in the industries where they would have the greatest net benefit for the world.

[Balgair]

I dunno man, the wisdom of a 48 year old that names his seventh child 'X Æ A-12' may not be the best wisdom to follow.

[stjohnswarts]

It sounded more like his much younger partner wanted the name. It wasn't his idea originally. It's not a good idea to piss off a new mother.

[stjohnswarts]

It sounded more like his much younger partner wanted the name. It wasn't his idea originally

[guevara]

Is that "name" legitimately on the birth certificate or is he just memeing?

[Balgair]

Likely it's real, but we'll see. Still, that is ... well ... a bit unusual.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52557291

[cowmix]

I'm the same age as Musk so I can offer some perspective.

Musk's first love is/was physics and he intended to work on electric cars at the get-go. However, at the time (and as I can attest to) the Internet was JUST starting to boom - like a gold rush. There were millions of problems to solve and businesses to start. At the time we was at Stanford and there, more than any other place, this fact was the most obvious. He knew he could / should capitalize on the current opportunity -- and he did.

After he cashed out with PayPal, instead of doing the easy path of doing another Internet startup, he returned to his priorities. He's been trying to create the environment in his orgs, and the rest of the valley, for workers and investors to pursue the same type of opportunities / risks.

[phkahler]

So took a low end job - internship. Learned about banking and money. Then built a payment system that was better than the available alternatives of the time. Then he took the money he earned from building better mousetrap and bought / founded two other companies that are killing it by making things better than anyone before them. And now starlink.

He's doing exactly what he says, and the world is rewarding him for making better stuff every day.

His words and actions are in complete agreement.

[aguyfromnb]

>bought / founded two other companies that are killing it by making things better than anyone before them. And now starlink.

Don't forget that he's curing autism, blindness and paralysis, and will eliminate the need for humans to talk within 5-10 years with Neuralink!

[nicoburns]

I think that's precisely his point though. It's a waste to society to have someone like Musk working in finance where he would largely be working on financial gain for a small number of individuals. It would be much better for society if our smartest individuals were working on real productivity gains and value creation.

The problem is that a lot of the money is in things like finance and advertising. We could absolutely restructure our economy so that wasn't the case.

Musk makes a lot of grandiose statements, but he's spot on with this one.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> Musk makes a lot of grandiose statements, but he's spot on with this one.

But so what? A lot of people believe that. What I have never heard is a realistic plan for restructuring the economy that makes things like finance and advertising less lucrative.

Technology naturally leads to a "winner take all (or most)" economic system. When it's so easy to switch to competitors, platforms that are even a tiny amount better than their competitors can take all the mindshare of an industry.

In that environment of extreme economic concentration, fields like finance and advertising (which is really controlling marketplaces) will always be extremely lucrative. Haven't heard any good proposals on how to change that.

[nicoburns]

Well:

1. I would like to see strong progressive taxation that explicitly taxes concentration of wealth. This would be aimed at all large companies and wealthy individuals, and ultimately based on which actual human persons have legal control of the company such that it can't be gamed by creating shell companies, etc.

2. On top of this, I don't see why we can't explicitly put tariffs on things like financial or advertising transactions. Somewhat similar to a Carbon Tax, it would correct for costs to society caused by the activity. I'd be particularly keen on seeing measures that make it extremely expensive to do short-term trading, forcing investors to take a much more long-term view.

[cowmix]

Only through action and example will this start to happen. Before Musk kicked the car and rocket industry both in the nuts, there were hardly any startups in both sectors. Now, there are many in both.

As he's showing, it won't be easy. EVERYONE will try to kill the earnest attempts. For all of Musk's faults, he is trying to show there is another way and how to get there.

[hn_throwaway_99]

But again, so what? I mean, on one hand I totally agree with you. But on the other it doesn't change the fact that, societally, the risk-reward profile of things like finance and advertising are much better than other "bigger" pursuits.

I mean, as many others have pointed out, Musk had to get rich first in the finance world before he could get enough F.U. money to indulge his real passions.

[nicoburns]

> the risk-reward profile of things like finance and advertising are much better than other "bigger" pursuits.

That's precisely the problem that I (and Musk it seems) are pointing out. These activities shouldn't have better reward profiles.

[ryandrake]

But it's obviously not a waste, because many people who end up doing actually-valuable things initially go that path.

If I could hit the reset button and do it all over again, knowing what I know now, I would 1. get into the most prestigious undergrad school (Ivy if possible) that I could, rather than just lazily apply for one state school and go to it, 2. Still majored in some kind of computer engineering track, 3. immediately go into finance after school and pump money doing the standard two-to-three-year grind as an analyst, 4. get into the most prestigious MBA school I possibly could, 5. pump money doing the standard grind as an associate, then 6. basically do anything I want as a 30 year old with the millions I've saved.

The nice properties of this career path are:

- It doesn't take any outlier talent, just learn excel and do grunt work.

- It minimizes the need for luck (as opposed to starting a business or interviewing at Google). I would argue the risk adjusted expected value of this path is higher than other careers like starting a business where you need to multiply by a low probability of success.

- The contacts/network you make doing 1, 3, 4, and 5 mean you will always have easy access to capital, a huge advantage for someone who wants to do that "actually-valuable" thing. As opposed to some rando dude who was "3rd engineer from the left" at Amazon wanting to quit and start his own business, who will have to pitch and pitch and pitch to get a single investor to listen to him.

It would be nice if society was set up such that there were more "work hard" paths to financial security as opposed to risky paths, but we collectively can't shake this risk-reward caveman mentality, so people go into law or finance.

[nicoburns]

You say it's not obviously not a waste, then you list 5 steps that are essentially time-consuming hoops that you have to jump through before doing the value-generating activity. How are those things not a waste?

> It would be nice if society was set up such that there were more "work hard" paths to financial security as opposed to risky paths, but we collectively can't shake this risk-reward caveman mentality, so people go into law or finance.

This is precisely my point. If we set things up so that finance and MBAs weren't the things that lead to financial security then things would be much more efficient. Because people would be rewarded for the things that are creating value, rather than having to make choice between creating value and earning more money.

[ryandrake]

I think we're agreeing. By "not a waste" I mean in the sense of baking a cake: the time spent mixing eggs and sugar and waiting for the oven is not a waste. Going to work for Wall Street in order to build up capital is like preparing the ingredients.

[tasuki]

> The problem is that a lot of the money is in things like finance and advertising. We could absolutely restructure our economy so that wasn't the case.

How?

[aguyfromnb]

>It's a waste to society to have someone like Musk working in finance where he would largely be working on financial gain for a small number of individuals.

Where on earth does this narrative come from that Musk isn't working for financial gain?

The guy rammed a pay package beyond anything the world has ever seen past a weak board, and just took his first payment, $700MM+ in equity, which is far beyond what the company has ever earned in GAAP profits in its entire existence.

If he doesn't care about money, how do you explain that?

[nicoburns]

I'm not saying that he isn't motivated by his individual financial gain. I'm saying that the output of his work isn't for peoples' financial gain. He makes cars, not financial instruments. And cars, unlike financial instruments actually provide value to society.

I'm not saying that people don't care about money. I'm agreeing that they do. And thus that it is important that as a society we distribute our money to enterprises that are actually doing useful work. Precisely so that people who are money-motivated (which is basically everyone to a greater or lesser degree) will choose to work for these enterprises.

[cowmix]

He is working for financial gain, but as a means to get to the end of his goals:

1) Going to mars. 2) Sustainable energy / transport

[generatorguy]

The company has to continue to exist and do well for the equity to be worth anything.

[coralreef]

You mean he built a startup to make online payments easier.

He didn't just graduate and get into finance.

[101404]

In reality, he graduated in physics.

I never heard that "banker" story before, but a month long internship is hardly a career.

He went on getting physics scholarships for UPenn and then Stanford.

[yowlingcat]

100% agree with you. See where he initially put his skin in the game and took his initial risks, and don't pay too much attention to what he's saying beyond it being his own brand of infotainment. Surprised by a lot of the replies to this that try to make it out like building a fintech company or going into online payments is not finance.

Of course it's finance, and a great way to tell is to ask the question does a big bank offer this service, albeit in a product I may not personally use? The answer is yes.

[cowmix]

At the time, this ventures were not "another" online payment venture. This class of startups were the first, period.

As I have stated in my other replies, at the time there was an opportunity like no other. Musk put his goals on hold to capitalize... then he returned to his priorities.

I'll say this, if other 'smart people' did this... made a truck load of $$$ off of their finance gigs and then did stuff like build EVs, rocket or whatever. That would be something. That's not the normal path at all, however.

[api]

Another lesson: to do cool stuff you need money to burn. Even if this cool stuff can be profitable eventually it will take years and years to get there. So the first thing any innovator should do is be purely mercenary.

If I had my life to do over I would focus on money and money alone first and defer heavy study into science or engineering or tackling actual hard problems. I did it backwards and so I made everything 10X harder on myself.

Part of the problem is that I was naive and thought the social structures and economic systems that drove this kind of progress in the past (a supportive university system with an academic career path, intelligently allocated science funding, a generally workable middle class economy that you could fall back on) still existed. They don't. We dismantled all that stuff starting in the 1970s because we didn't understand what we had built or why it worked.

[yowlingcat]

I took a similar trajectory and I couldn't agree more. In many ways, I really regret the time I invested into startups tackling actual hard problems. You are correct that the support systems do not exist, and so I wish I had worked at a bigcorp much earlier in my career than now. While I'm thinking I'm there now, I could have drastically accelerated my overall career progress if I had done things in the opposite order.

[pkaye]

Reminds me of D.E. Shaw. Became a billionaire hedge fund manager but now does research in computational biochemistry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Shaw

[Rerarom]

Yitang Zhang didn't need money to burn. Neither did Linus Torvalds.

[api]

Linus did most of his initial work in a country with a healthy middle class and a strong social safety net. Not sure about Zhang's situation but one thing I do see after looking him up is that he hit a home run pretty early and got a clear path toward a real academic career. That's nice if you can pull it off but it's not something I would advise a young person to bet on.

Both of these people also did their work in low capital cost areas with fast revision cycles: CS/software and math. Those are areas where individual scale bootstrapping is actually a possibility. There are no garage spaceships, automobile plants, novel surgical procedures (I hope), or nuclear reactors (excepting that wacko who tried to make one from material from hundreds of smoke detectors and turned his yard into a superfund site).

In America you must support yourself and pay for college (unless you go 100% autodidact, which is very hard in its own way). That relegates any additional work to moonlighting, which is very sub-optimal for concentration and is only possible in a few fields anyway. As you get older you may want to start a family, which eliminates most moonlighting time and demands even higher income for support and long term savings.

So the only way to do it in America is to (a) earn a ton of money early and achieve financial independence and then do your innovative work, or (b) take a vow of poverty and celibacy and live like a monk. I guess there's also (c) which is to find a benefactor or find some way to make your work viable as an angel/VC investment, but the former is extremely rare and the latter is only workable in a few fields that have low barriers to entry (like software) and a fairly rapid time from prototype to potential market. For "atoms" rather than "bits" type stuff the initial investment and time horizon are too big for angel/VC and there are very few benefactors/patrons with pockets that deep.

[Rerarom]

> There are no garage spaceships, automobile plants, novel surgical procedures (I hope), or nuclear reactors (excepting that wacko who tried to make one from material from hundreds of smoke detectors and turned his yard into a superfund site).

The thing is, when I realized this, these things stopped being cool.

I think there was a lot of hope a long time ago that future technological progress was going to be a lot more open to individuals than it actually is now.

[tasuki]

Very much this! Depends what one considers "cool" I guess. If sending cars to the orbit is "cool", one might need a lot of money indeed.

In my guesstimate, there aren't many people alive who have contributed more to humanity's technological progress than Linus.

[forgot_again]

>"we dismantled all that stuff"

Not intentionally though. Globalization has led to most of it.

Manufacturing leaving for cheaper climes hollowed out the middle class, made unions impotent, etc.

Hypercompetition has forced companies to be ruthless.

In academia, administrators have taken absolute power for themselves and now enrich themselves at the expense of education and research.

It's quite a mess we've stumbled into.

[api]

That's part of something larger I've heard best described as market fundamentalism: the belief that markets and markets alone can take over and handle all aspects and functions of society.

Globalism was implemented in a market fundamentalist way. No special attention was paid to rights, fairness of trade, etc. because it was assumed that trade and markets and then (magic happens here) and then everything is great and liberal democracy spreads everywhere.

What really happened was corporations and international finance going trans-national and exempting itself from the rule of law and then leveraging foreign totalitarian or lawless regimes to break workers power at the wage negotiating table.

The real long term winners were totalitarians and would be totalitarians though, not the corporations or finance. Capitalists selling nooses and rope, as Marx quipped.

[toyg]

Pretty sure unions were nuked by Reagan and Thatcher before globalization and outsourcing were even a thing.

As a society, the boomers made a choice in the late '70s / early '80s: egoism should be rewarded and money is the measure of all things. Everything else was a consequence.

[api]

You are both right. Labor was crushed by multiple forces.

[amiga_500]

This doesn't negate his point. The criticism is that too many people are going into "industries" that do not create any wealth. The fact that he also got well paid in finance demonstrates that the current system rewards finance.

https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-dc8c42a6725776dfc54ed8...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/NYUGDPFi...

Correlation/causation yeah, but you can't have more people doing nothing of value and more middle class.

[selimthegrim]

He also quit in frustration after they wouldn’t listen to his pitch about an arbitrage opportunity

[w0m]

so you're saying he had first have experience in the area before leaving it therefore his comments on the arena are invalid?

[dvtrn]

Careful. You’re getting awfully close to having a nuanced opinion here.

[GuB-42]

That quote from the article is also somewhat contradictory.

> The CEO also addressed his recent vow on Twitter to sell the majority of his physical possessions, which he said weigh him down. “I have a bunch of houses, but I don’t spend a lot of time in most of them. That doesn’t seem like a good use of assets. Somebody could probably be enjoying those houses and get better use of them than me.”

I interpret it as encouraging finance over ownership. It is a sensible, if debatable position. Instead of owning things you don't use, it is smarter to invest your money in more productive ways. Which is a roundabout way of saying "if you are smart, go into finance".

Otherwise, I know a whole lot of very smart people who aren't into finance. It is just that no one talk about them because they are not rich. They probably could have been rich if they wanted to, and had a bit of luck, but instead they have chosen to use their intelligence to do what they like.

Being able to do what you enjoy and making enough money to live decently and maintaining a good work/life balance is a huge privilege. Doing that when the thing you enjoy doing is an already saturated market or something that is hardly marketable is even more so, and it may be considered as desirable as being a billionaire.

[clairity]

it's not contradictory: learn finance (and how to wield it), don't make it your profession.

statistics, economics, finance, and accounting should be required courses in high school so that we have a more financially literate populace.

[simonsarris]

You are being extraordinarily silly if you think what musk did there is the same as "going into finance."

[yowlingcat]

I think you're ignoring reality if you think that online payments is somehow not finance. That he built companies that successfully competed with big banks on their own turf doesn't preclude the fact that he built on their turf.

[MiroF]

> online payments is somehow not finance

When I think of the finance careers that many of my peers are going in to, I do not think of the online payment ecosystem or fintech writ large.

[yowlingcat]

If you don't see a mass exodus of traditional finance industry refugees into FinTech, you're not looking closely enough. Having worked at multiple growth stage FinTech companies (some in the online payment space), they have always been some of our most fruitful recruiting grounds.

[onemoresoop]

Yeah, redistribute those smart minds to do algo optimization for behaviour addiction and advertising click algos. That’s ll we needed. For whoever doesn’t get it, I am being sarcastic. It would be ideal if people followed their passions and interrests without the need to excell in Ivy Leagues.

[AznHisoka]

Perhaps by finance, he means investment banking and trading, rather than fintech products like payment solutions. The first arguably doesn’t involve value creation (it’s often a zero sum game) while the latter provides convenience and value to consumers.

[tim333]

Wikipedia has he moved to Canada June 1989 and Musk entered Queen's University in 1989. So the banking must have been brief. He then studied physics, worked in tech and made his first money in Zip2, "a web software company".

[not_a_moth]

That's a shallow take.

He didn't mean don't explore multiple fields when you're a teenager.

He was already specialized as a coder and went on to build startups, as engineer. I don't really see your point.

[AndrewKemendo]

The financial industry is completely different now than it was 20+ years ago.

I understand your point, and I wouldn't just blindly take this advice, but I'm not sure this is the right comparison.

[ericmcer]

Yeh you are agreeing with him, it sucks that he had to spend 15 years in finance so that he could eventually build things like Tesla and SpaceX. That is the reality of our world though.

[101404]

Do you have a source?

Because in Canada, he went to school and university, studying physics, and then got a scholarship for a master's at UPenn, and later for a PhD in Stanford. All was in physics.

[alibaba_x]

It’s in his biography.

[101404]

So how does a few weeks in banking compare to several decades in physics, battery tech, software development, rocket engineering? Why are a couple of weeks decades ago so important to you?

[zarkov99]

Yes, we all should be judged at 47 by how consistent we are with our 17 year old selves.

[BubRoss]

You left out that he double majored in economics and physics in Pennsylvania after he was in Canada, started and quit a PhD in material sciences at Stanford, sold zip2 to Compaq for $340 million and only then started a finance company.

[forgot_again]

Why are you generalizing from Musk to "billionaires"? How is that relevant?

[yowlingcat]

Why wouldn't you generalize from Musk to billionaires? The amount of agency and power that billionaires hold is not shared by anyone outside of that socioeconomic class. There is a whole category of things that can be done and lifestyles that simply do not exist for those who are extremely wealthy but have, say, 1/10th of that level of wealth.

[forgot_again]

Agreed, but the fact that Musk is a billionaire has nothing to do with him giving out hypocritical advice. It's a non-sequitor.

Now in general human beings love giving out hypocritical advice so him being a human is far more relevant than his being a billionaire, at least if our goal here is to talk about his advice and not just use this opportunity to bash billionaires.