2026.06.01 16:03

Elon Musk says one millionth of the Sun's energy is 100,000X Earth's economy. Yes you read that right. For a century, every advance had run on a tiny fraction of the Sun's output. Oil. Coal. Solar. Natural gas. Combined, they powered everything every human had ever built. The total: about half a billionth of what hit the planet each day. "Earth only receives about half a billionth of the Sun's energy." Then Musk pulled up the Kardashev scale: "The Sun is essentially all the energy." He named the framework: **the Kardashev scale**. A Soviet astronomer's idea from 1964, repurposed for AI scaling. Musk, who needed a terawatt a year, knew civilization ran on a rounding error. A Kardashev Type I civilization harnesses all the energy that reaches its home planet, a Type II harnesses the full output of its star, and Earth in 2026 sat at neither. Earth was nowhere close to Type I. Not 1%. Not 0.1%. Not 0.001%. "Let's say you wanted to harness a millionth of the sun's energy, which sounds pretty small." "That would be about, call it roughly, 100,000x more electricity than we currently generate on Earth for all of civilization." A million times Earth's economy. From one millionth of the Sun. Take a billionth and you still have a thousand-Earth economy. After Musk did the math, modular nuclear reactors looked like rounding errors. Musk, on what scale required: "Obviously, the only way to scale is to go to space with solar." P.S. Pull the thread on any story like this and you'll find the hidden incentive at the other end. As Munger said: "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." So I wrote a short book on how to spot them and design your own. Comment "INCENTIVES" and I'll send you the details. If you're new here, @GeniusGTX is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content. — Elon Musk ( @elonmusk ), CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, on Dwarkesh Patel's ( @dwarkesh_sp ) podcast

显示更多

GeniusThinking@GeniusGTX

2026.05.25 09:56

Elon Musk says he underweighted one trait in hiring and learned it the hard way. For decades, talent acquisition built its scorecards on three pillars. Skills. Experience. Cultural fit. Resumes were ranked accordingly. Then the bad hires happened anyway. "Generally, I think it's a good idea to hire for talent and drive and trustworthiness." Talent. Drive. Trustworthiness. The first three felt obvious. The fourth had cost Musk careers. Hires he'd defended. Hires he'd promoted. Hires he eventually fired. Then Musk named the trait most rubrics skipped. "And I think goodness of heart is important. I underweighted that at one point." Musk named the trait: **goodness of heart**. Polished. Predictable. Almost useless without it. Musk, who had interviewed the first few thousand SpaceX hires himself, knew the longest training set. A high-talent, high-drive, trustworthy employee with bad intent could ship more damage to a company over a quarter than a low-output engineer could in a decade, because the same competence that delivered the win also delivered the harm. "Are they a good person? Trustworthy? Smart and talented and hard working?" You can teach domain knowledge. You can teach a process. You cannot teach a person to be kind. Or to mean well when nobody's watching. After Musk made the correction, his hiring filters added a layer most rubrics never named. Goodness of heart became a yes/no gate. Musk, on the four traits that can't be unlearned: "Those fundamental properties, you cannot change." What's the trait you keep meeting in great hires that doesn't show up on any resume? P.S. I made a playbook breaking down 100+ most powerful decision making mental models used by history's greatest thinkers. 5,000+ downloads. 113 five-star reviews. Grab a free copy here: — Elon Musk ( @elonmusk ), CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, on Dwarkesh Patel's ( @dwarkesh_sp ) podcast

显示更多