Peter Thiel on Elon Musk and risk-taking December 26, 2024 Peter Thiel, Elon Musk's old PayPal partner, reflects on Musk's appetite for risk — the contrarian, high-stakes bets on rockets and electric cars that most investors thought were doomed.
Peter Thiel, Elon Musk's old PayPal partner, reflects on Musk's appetite for risk — the contrarian, high-stakes bets on rockets and electric cars that most investors thought were doomed.
Transcript Peter Thiel
I certainly would never want to bet against Elon. I would never want to compete head on with Elon. You know, I'm, and that's, yeah. And probably a lot of what he says is correct. Certainly the Silicon Valley perspective on ELON in the 2000s was that, you know, he had, he was starting these two crazy companies. There was Tesla the car company and SpaceX the rocket company. They both sounded super crazy. If only one of them had succeeded, one might still have said that it was just extraordinarily lucky. The fact that to first approximation both have succeeded, have wildly succeeded. I always want to say it tells us something, that Elon knows something about risk the rest of us don't. So there's, there's some way it looks like it's this high wire crazy risk taking act. And, and somehow he, you know, it's somehow you can't have two companies succeed in such an extraordinary way without actually really not taking as many crazy risks as it looks. And so, so I don't know. There's, there's, you know, the conversation I've had with Elon is, you know, what did you know about, how do you understand risk in ways that the rest of us don't? And then I think there's something he understands about it, we don't. It's, it's hard to articulate. I don't know if he can articulate it, but that's, that's sort of where I'm at today.
Speaker B
He has like, I mean, I met him for the first time in France this summer and he did a little Q and A on a boat for about 15 of us. And then I had about an hour with him afterwards. Utterly fascinating just to be exposed to his brain close up like that. He was talking about colonizing Mars and why we had to do this and how it would be done. He talked about neuralink, he talked about humanoid robots. It was just one after another of these enormous big picture things, all of which I concluded as I was hearing them. He comes from a place, it seems to me he just wants to save the planet from itself, really. And he kind of has a brain that can get his head around this big picture stuff. But in relation to the risk, it, it just strikes me he's just prepared to back himself in a way. Sort of chilling self confidence, the like of which actually, I mean, Trump is one of the only people I've seen who has a similar sort of unbelievably thick skin and self confidence to do that, which is what you need because there are so many people out there when you do this stuff who want to knock you down.
Peter Thiel
Yes, that's. That's, that's certainly correct. And.