Saw this on FB: 🔥 🔥
On day 1 of my high school history class, our teacher got up and said:
“You are 15 or 16 years old. 200 years ago, people your age were married, planted crops, had children and built a cabin before winter.
You can do your homework. The bar is set embarrassingly low. You are not dealing with regional famine or plague. You do not have to save your family from marauders or go into battle to destroy your enemies.
You just have to sit down and learn from someone who cares about you in a safe air-conditioned room.
You have no excuses.”
This is the kind of teachers we need.
Elon Musk got rejected by Netscape. He walked into the lobby, was too shy to talk to anyone, and walked out. Never got the job.
At his first company Zip2, the board demoted him. Twice. They refused to let him be CEO.
He got fired from PayPal as CEO while flying to his own honeymoon. The board voted him out mid air.
He almost died of malaria in 2000. Ten days in intensive care. Lost 45 pounds. A day from death.
His first child died at 10 weeks old.
His first rocket exploded. Falcon 1, flight one. Burned on the pad.
His second rocket exploded.
His third rocket exploded. The last of his money was nearly gone.
Tesla nearly went bankrupt in 2008. The closest he ever came to a nervous breakdown.
Both companies almost died on the same Christmas Eve.
He was sued by investors. Mocked by the people who built cars before him.
His childhood heroes, the astronauts who inspired him, testified against his company to Congress.
The Cybertruck window shattered on live stage in front of the world.
He overpaid for Twitter by his own admission and watched its value collapse.
He was beaten unconscious as a child and thrown down a flight of stairs.
He has said he goes to sleep alone and it kills him.
He failed in public, over and over, for thirty years.
He is the richest man in the history of the world.
The difference was never the absence of failure. It was the refusal to stop after it.
Three decades ago, Elon Musk couldn’t afford to pay for repairs, so he fixed almost everything on his car using parts from the junkyard. This is him replacing a broken side window.
In the past, I have argued that I'm akin to a Rorschach Inkblot test, namely based on how you respond to my work, humour, books, personality, etc, I can usually tell a lot about you. I call it the Gad Projection Inkblot Test. Well, I shall now extend this theory to how people react to @elonmusk's success. Those who are steeped in the American ethos celebrate Elon's success. Those who are fuelled by socialist parasitic envy view his success as detrimental. Show me how you react to Elon's success, and I'll tell you who you are.
This is one of the saddest yet most inspiring clips of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk you’ll ever watch
“I don’t ever give up. I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated”
.@ScottJenningsKY just torched the liberal meltdown over Elon becoming the world's first trillionaire:
“All day long, I've been listening to liberals, count and spend Elon's money for him. This envy, jealousy, hatred of success. Why is it immoral? Why is it wrong for somebody in our system, our capitalist system, in the greatest nation on earth, to go out and build a company, build companies, build technologies, go into space, aim to go put a colony on Mars, give internet to half the world, all the things he's doing? Why is any of this wrong or bad? Why would we want to discourage entrepreneurship? Why would we want to discourage anybody building anything?”
Exactly. Success isn't a crime.
My favorite @elonmusk quote that I often send friends:
Do not fear losing. “You will lose,” Musk says. “It will hurt the first fifty times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion.” You will be more fearless, take more risks.
There you go. The United States is built on a limitless ethos of entrepreneurship, innovation, and excellence. Canada is built on feminized and "empathetic" parasitic taxation fuelled by envy and resentment toward those who produce.
This 60 Minutes clip seems most appropriate today:
"When you had that third failure in a row, did you think, 'I need to pack this in?'"
Elon Musk: "Never."
"Why not?"
"I don't ever give up."
"Elon Musk got kicked out of the company he founded, watched his rocket explode on live TV, and had every major investor tell him Tesla was going to fail. Most people would’ve quit after one of those. He went through all three. That’s the thing nobody talks about. Success doesn’t look like a straight line up. It looks like losing everything, rebuilding from zero, and showing up again anyway. Elon didn’t win because he was the smartest guy in the room. He won because he refused to stop."
THE NEXT TIME YOU FEEL LIKE GIVING UP, REMEMBER THIS PHOTO OF ELON MUSK.
IT WAS TAKEN AFTER HIS THIRD ROCKET EXPLODED.
HE HAD JUST LOST $100 MILLION OF HIS OWN MONEY. SPACEX WAS WEEKS AWAY FROM BANKRUPTCY. TESLA WAS STRUGGLING. HE WAS SLEEPING ON FRIENDS’ COUCHES.
THE MEDIA CALLED HIM RECKLESS. INVESTORS PULLED BACK. EVERYONE TOLD HIM TO QUIT.
INSTEAD, HE BET EVERYTHING ON ONE FINAL LAUNCH. IF IT FAILED, SPACEX WAS DONE.
THE LAUNCH SUCCEEDED — AND CHANGED HISTORY.
TODAY, SPACEX IS WORTH OVER $1 TRILLION AND DOMINATES THE PRIVATE SPACE INDUSTRY.
MOST PEOPLE QUIT RIGHT BEFORE THEIR BREAKTHROUGH.
ELON KEPT GOING WHEN EVERYTHING WAS AGAINST HIM.
THAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SUCCESS AND ALMOST SUCCESS.
@profstonge@SuitablePolitic I just want to get the hell off this planet 😂
I wouldn't mind one of those cool brain chips to operate my computer either 🤔
Listening to @GadSaad break down Canadian taxes on Sean Hannity… aren’t you just excited to be Canadian??
From January 1st until the end of August, you work for free for the government.
Only starting in September do you finally get to keep what you actually earned.
Provincial tax capped at 25.75%. Federal tax at 33%. Already deep into the 50s before you even spend a dollar.
Then add the double sales tax, carbon tax, gas tax, property tax, and school tax — and you’re left with roughly 30 cents on every dollar you make.
This isn’t “contributing to society.” This is modern serfdom dressed up as compassion.
The same government that wastes billions on ArrivScam, failed apps, and fax machine replacement programs now expects you to hand over eight months of your life every single year.
And they still have the nerve to tell you there’s no money left for actual Canadians.
Wake up. This didn’t happen by accident.
#cdnpoli #TaxFreedomDay #LiberalFail #CanadaFirst
I couldn’t see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.
Elon Musk thinks the entire education system is built on a broken assumption.
That every student should learn the same thing. At the same speed. In the same order. At the same time.
Musk: “Everyone goes through from like 5th grade to 6th grade to 7th grade like it’s an assembly line. But people are not objects on an assembly line.”
The model was designed for a factory economy. Standardized inputs. Predictable outputs.
That economy is gone. The assembly line is gone.
But the education system still runs on its logic.
A student who masters algebra in two weeks sits through eight more weeks because the calendar says so. A student who struggles gets dragged forward because the schedule doesn’t wait.
Neither is being served. Both are being processed.
Musk: “Allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or are interested in, in each subject.”
AI doesn’t teach a classroom. It teaches a student.
One at a time. Every time.
It skips what a student already knows. It finds where they’re stuck and approaches it from a different angle.
It adjusts in real time. Not at the end of a semester when the damage is already done.
A student obsessed with basketball learns fractions through shooting percentages. A student who builds in Minecraft learns geometry through architecture.
The subject doesn’t change. The entry point does.
No teacher with thirty students can do this. Not because they lack skill.
Because the math doesn’t work.
AI doesn’t have that constraint.
Musk: “You do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day. So if you can make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education far more compelling.”
The brain isn’t broken. The format is.
Kids learn complex systems and strategic thinking for hours voluntarily. Then walk into a classroom and can’t focus for twenty minutes.
That’s not a discipline problem. That’s a design problem.
Musk: “A university education is often unnecessary. You probably learn the vast majority of what you’re going to learn there in the first two years. And most of it is from your classmates.”
Four years. Six figures of debt.
And the real value comes from the people sitting next to you. Not the institution charging you.
The degree doesn’t certify knowledge. It certifies endurance.
Musk: “If the goal is to start a company, I would say no point in finishing college.”
The system was built to train employees. If you’re not trying to be one, it has nothing left to offer you.
Every lecture. Every textbook. Every curriculum. Now available instantly. Personalized to any learner. Adapted to any pace.
The question isn’t whether the old model survives.
It’s how long we keep forcing students through it while the replacement already exists.
Elon Musk: Maybe we're the only intelligent species in this galaxy.
“I'm somewhat troubled by the Fermi paradox. Why have we not seen any aliens? And it could be because intelligence is incredibly rare and maybe we're the only ones in this galaxy, in which case the intelligence or consciousness is this tiny candle in a vast darkness. And we should do everything possible to ensure the tiny candle does not go out.
Being a multiplanet species or making consciousness multiplanetary greatly improves the probable lifespan of civilization. And it's the next step before going to other star systems. Once you at least have two planets, then you've got a forcing function for the improvement of space travel. And that ultimately is what will lead to consciousness expanding to the stars.”
Interview at Y Combinator, June 16, 2025