Kimbal Musk
speaker
257 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Kimbal Musk’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So I know the whole gamut, but the thing that I found most powerful about it, and profoundly powerful, I would say, first of all, it's non-recreational, so no one should do this for a good time. This is not a good time.
I was actually going to say that word, but it's not traumatic. It's profound. So it's more like you don't have, you really leave who you were before behind. and then you become the person you will be afterwards. And that's never an easy thing. Yes, exactly. And sometimes what I recall was arguing with Brother Aya and saying, No, I'm fine. What are you talking about? Leave me alone.
How did that work out?
Yeah, so in 94 we actually did a road trip around the U.S. to brainstorm about what we wanted to do after college. What was the road trip like? It was awesome. So we went from Silicon Valley to Philadelphia. Nice. My brother's old, like really cool, you know, it's one of those very old BMWs, not ones from the 60s or 70s. But the car didn't work. It would break down all the time.
But we had a blast. You know, we just, I remember going through needles. On the border of California and Arizona, it's a town called Neils. It's the hottest place in America. And the engine was not cooling, so we had to put the heat on. So we've got the heat blasting to keep the engine cool and keep the windows down because you can't stand the heat in the car.
But actually the outside heat is hotter than the inside heat. So you're just in a furnace.
I can't imagine doing that in the day. Yeah, it was wonderful. It took us a few weeks, I think three weeks maybe.
First, like a road trip like that. Yeah, for sure. But it was really not a road trip for tourist sites. We went to the weirdest places. And actually, I would say we didn't go to them. We broke down in the weirdest places. Because that's when we stopped.
Did you meet any interesting people? I remember we broke down in the badlands of South Dakota about an hour from Rapid City. And that road is empty. And so we actually slept in the car because there was just no one around. There were no cell phones in those days. And eventually a trucker picked us up. I was just like, man, you guys are the dumbest kids on the planet. I was like 21.
He was maybe 22. Yeah. But he was so nice to us and so kind to us and found us a mechanic in Rapid City and then found us a tow truck. You find the most wonderful people. When you're in a place of distress, people do want to take care of other people. They help you. Yeah, they want to help.
Yeah, exactly. This was not tourist related. We did, of course, one, we stopped at Mount Rushmore at night, which you can see nothing.
Yeah. So, I had an experience in college running a house painting business that, for me, was my first experience with success. It was very, very hard. It was a franchise where they teach students how to paint houses. Yeah. But I was good at it. I built a team of 30 people after about two years. And so I was like, I had a taste of, hey, I'm not unable to do this.
In fact, my most vulnerable place I remember as an entrepreneur was I just loved the idea of Wall Street and finance. I was kind of allured by it. This was in late 80s. I'm in high school and there was a lot of these books, Liar's Poker and others that came out. I was like, oh man, this is awesome. These people must be amazing.
So I went to business school and I busted my ass to get like a kick-ass summer job. And I got a job in one of the main banks and it was in Toronto, but it was like the original Wall Street. And I was so disappointed. with the people that I was around. I was just like, whoa. I totally misunderstood what the banking world is. It was a very large bank.
I'm sure if I'd gone to a more aggressive one, maybe I would have had a better experience. When I say aggressive, meaning... someone was paying attention. Like this was just a, just people kind of showing up and not doing much, you know. And actually, this is funny. So this is great. So 1991, 92, so one of those summers, the summer job was
Literally, they print out the sales for all brokerage houses for the whole company, like a pile of papers that's maybe four or five feet tall. And you have a pencil and you add things up using your pencil and a calculator. And I had known about Lotus 1, 2, 3 forever. Excel was coming out, and I was like, hey, guys, you know that there's a different way to do this.
And they're like, don't talk to us. Just do your job. Yeah, just use the pencil. So I went to the head of the database. I just asked. Those days you had the manila envelope where you just write the name of the person that you want this to go to, and it'll go to them. It's like email, I guess, but there's no filter. There's no spam filter. There's no spam filter. So I sent a note.
I wrote a nice letter to the database administrator who I didn't really know. And I said, would you be open to me saying hi and maybe I can get access to the file rather than print the damn thing out and use a pencil. And she responded right away. And we hit it off. I mean, she was great. And so she's like, of course you can. I can't believe these guys are… doing what they're doing.
So for the first couple of weeks of the summer, I wrote code in Lotus 1-2-3 that would, it's going to sound crazy, but you type in the date range. You type in the geography, and you type in which part of the bank you care about, and it will literally just create a new spreadsheet, and the macro would print it out. It was like a magic trick for these guys. Incredible. No, no. It's astounding.
For me, I was like, guys, this is… So obvious. And so I got all that done. And this job was supposed to take three or four months because it's really, you're doing this with a pencil.
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