E157: DA Wallach: Spotting Genius in Elon & Zuck's Early Days
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How did D.A. Wallach meet Elon Musk and invest in SpaceX early on?
Well, I got to know Elon socially here in LA. He lived here at the time. And that was before SpaceX and Tesla were household names. So I think Tesla at that time just had the Roadster out. And SpaceX had been doing a bunch of launches, but they hadn't yet done their first reusable proof of concept, which was a major turning point for the company. So I was really excited to meet Elon. I met him at a dinner through friends and obviously was just super impressed by the kind of intrepid stuff he was doing and asked him if I could invest. So he facilitated that. And yeah, it was, I think, nine or 10 years ago. And Been a great investment. So this was around 2014, 2015, and you guys were talking about AI. Tell me about his views on AI a decade ago.
Well, no surprise. I mean, he was early to recognize that technology was going to have a major impact. And I think he at the time knew Demis Hassabis quite well, who had been the founder of DeepMind. And that's a company that Google ultimately acquired. Demis now runs an AI group within Google. Elon kind of opened my eyes to the advances that were starting to take place in that area. I think at the time, the major innovations had really been these things Demis had put together that enabled an AI to play certain human computer games. like video games. And Demis came out of a game development background. So he really understood that world. And I think to anyone who understood those games and how challenging they might be for a human player, it was really impressive that the AIs were able to start doing things successfully in that space. So it was kind of the proof of concept that years before had been reached with chess being demonstrated in much more complex games. And Elon rightly appreciated that was just the beginning.
And I think at that point had started to talk to Max Tegmark, who's at MIT, and other thinkers who were influential in sort of calling out the significance that AI was likely to have in the years ahead. Elon was already known in Silicon Valley. He had sold Zip2. He had started... paypal with peter thiel through a merger is but but he wasn't anywhere close to how prevalent he was today what did you see in elon that made you believe that he could build a rocket company he had already built a rocket company and it was already launching rockets so that alone was already amazing i think the big uncertainty at that moment was just whether he would be able to reuse the rockets And as he's always talked about, you know, air travel would be completely unaffordable if you had to destroy the plane every time you flew it. So that key inflection point was demonstrating that you could send a rocket up, bring it back down and then reuse the same rocket. And I didn't have any kind of special insight on that. I just thought he was amazing.
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Chapters
2 chaptersSpeakers
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