Elon Musk's Ultimate advice for students & college graduates | With BIG SUBTITLES

ELON MUSK ADVICE

uh so what, what advice do i have for college graduates ? certainly i' d invite you to apply for a job at solar city or tesla or space x and if not then, if if that doesn't work for whatever reason then apply to jobs at other companies in that arena or try starting a company. if you study engineering and and you figure out how to design new things um then it's relatively easy to start a company um you just need to get a few like-minded people um with you. although i have to say that the space business is quite it's quite hard to start a company in the space business because it's such a

 capital intensive business so it may be better to do something in um solar power or if you're going to do it in cars do it in, as kind of a component supplier for cars or something like that .Musk has college degrees in business and physics but space x is his first venture in aerospace. How did you get the expertise to be the chief technology officer of a rocket ship company? 

Well,i do have a physics background that's helpful as a foundation and then i read a lot of books and talk to a lot of a lot of smart people don't just follow the trend you may have heard me say that it's good to think in terms of the physics approach the first principles which is rather than reasoning by analogy you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there and this is a good way to figure out if  something really makes sense or if it's just what everybody else is doing it it's hard to think that way you can't think think that way about everything it takes a lot of effort but if you're trying to do something new it's the best way to think and that framework was developed by by physicists to figure out counterintuitive things like quantum mechanics so 

it's really a powerful powerful method and i want to know what is the one thing that has surprised you about your life well i certainly i' m surprised by the whole thing honestly i certainly didn't expect to be to be uh for any of these things to happen honestly um yeah i just you know i know i wanted to be involved in technology um and uh in fact the only reason i started a company back in 95 an internet company was because i couldn't get it there were only a few internet companies and i couldn't get a job at any of them i tried to get a job at net scape and sent my resume and i tried hanging out in the lobby but i was too shy to talk to anyone and and then i was like okay well i guess i' ll  have to start a company because i can't get a job anywhere i wouldn't say i' m fearless in fact i i think i fear i feel fear quite strongly but i um if the if if what we're doing isn't for what you know what i' m doing is i think is important enough then i just uh override the fear so but it's not as though i don't i feel like more strongly than i would like what drives you what what is it that when you wake up in the morning do you see a problem and you want to solve it the thing that drives me is that i want to be able to think about the future and uh you know feel good about that so that uh you know we're doing what we can to have the future be be as good as possible to be inspired by what is likely to happen 8and to look forward to the next day so that's that's what really really drives me is is trying to figure out uh how do we how to make sure that things are great and i' m gonna be so and um that's the underlying principle behind tesla and space x is that i think it's it's pretty important that we accelerate the transition to sustainable generation and consumption of energy it's inevitable but it's it matters if we if it happens sooner or later and then space x is about helping make life multi-planetary and doing what we can to continue the dream of     Apollo and ultimately make contribution to life becoming multi-planetary let's talk a little more about that i think everyone's very interested that 

when you say making life multi-planetary yeah that's exciting it is exciting so what's your vision there you know i think you know particularly for uh Americans you know like you think about America is a nation of explorers uh people came here from other parts of the world that you know uh chose to give up the known in favor of the unknown so i think exploration like i think united states is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration and so that's why it appeals to Americans so much you know you can see this when say there was a shuttle tragedy um and seven people died and that's that's terrible but you know a lot of people die all the time but why do we care so much because it was the dream of exploration that was dying along with those people 

that's why i mean i thought both tesla and space x would fail at the beginning you saw it yeah sure really of course companies yeah and then had to borrow money for friends to pay living expenses yes you know just looking just for evidence of exceptional ability and if there's a track record of exceptional achievement then it's likely that that will continue into the future well it really depends on the stakes if the stakes are high if it's really important then one should then i you know will overcome the fear and just do it anyway um but essentially i mean i just drive overrides fear but i feel the fear it's kind of annoying i should not okay i wish i felt it less you