A battery cost $600 per kilowatt-hour. The materials it’s made of, according to Elon Musk, cost about $80.
REPORTER: Where does that gap come from?
ELON MUSK: Most people reason by analogy. They say batteries will always be expensive because they’ve always been expensive. That’s pretty dumb.
REPORTER: Why?
ELON MUSK: If you applied that reasoning to anything new, you’d never get to the new thing. You can’t say, “Horses are great, we’re used to them, and there’s no gasoline to buy, so nobody will ever want a car.” And people did say that.
REPORTER: So how should you reason?
ELON MUSK: From first principles, not by analogy. Normally we do something because it’s like something that was done before, or because other people are doing it.
REPORTER: What are first principles?
ELON MUSK: The physics way of looking at the world. You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and reason up from there.
REPORTER: Why doesn’t everyone do that?
ELON MUSK: Because it takes a lot more mental energy.
REPORTER: Can you give an example?
ELON MUSK: Batteries. Historically it’s $600 per kilowatt-hour, and they say it won’t get much better. I ask something else: what is it made of?
REPORTER: And what is it made of?
ELON MUSK: Cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, some polymers for separation, and a sealed can.
REPORTER: And what does that cost?
ELON MUSK: At London Metal Exchange prices it comes to something like $80 per kilowatt-hour.
REPORTER: So that’s almost eight times less. What do you do with that?
ELON MUSK: Come up with clever ways to combine those materials into the shape of a battery cell. And then batteries can be much cheaper than anyone realizes.
ELON MUSK: “A conta de luz da IA é alta demais? Então, basta construir um data center no espaço”
“Em vez de economizar energia na Terra, a ideia de se mudar para o espaço”
REPÓRTER: “A IA consome uma quantidade absurda de eletricidade, né?”
ELON MUSK: “É verdade.”
REPÓRTER: “E isso vai aumentar ainda mais no futuro?”
ELON MUSK: “Se a IA evoluir, a demanda por energia também vai crescer, provavelmente.”
REPÓRTER: “Então a conta de luz vai ser um problemão!”
ELON MUSK: “Por isso vamos usar o espaço.”
REPÓRTER: “.... Hein?”
ELON MUSK: “Vamos construir um data center para IA no espaço.”
REPÓRTER: “Peraí, a gente tava falando de conta de luz, cara”
ELON MUSK: “E é exatamente isso que eu tô respondendo.”
REPÓRTER: “Por que raios no espaço, mano?!”
ELON MUSK: “Porque dá pra usar energia solar.”
REPÓRTER: “Energia solar a gente já usa aqui na Terra, né?”
ELON MUSK: “Mas na Terra tem noite, não tem?”
REPÓRTER: “É, tem sim.”
ELON MUSK: “E a geração varia por causa do clima.”
REPÓRTER: “Hmm, entendi.”
ELON MUSK: “No espaço, ajustando a órbita, dá pra captar luz solar por muito mais tempo.”
REPÓRTER: “Então você vai colocar painéis solares no espaço?”
ELON MUSK: “Exatamente isso.”
REPÓRTER: “Mas os computadores da IA não esquentam pra caramba?”
ELON MUSK: “Claro que geram calor.”
REPÓRTER: “No espaço não tem ar-condicionado, né?”
ELON MUSK: “A gente usa dispositivos de dissipação de calor.”
REPÓRTER: “Dispositivos de dissipação?”
ELON MUSK: “Os painéis solares ficam virados pro Sol.”
REPÓRTER: “Tá.”
ELON MUSK: “Do lado oposto, colocamos equipamentos que liberam o calor pro vácuo do espaço.”
REPÓRTER: “Entendi!”
ELON MUSK: “É a radiação do calor pro espaço sideral.”
REPÓRTER: “Então o resfriamento é de graça!?”
ELON MUSK: “Não, ainda precisa de equipamentos.”
REPÓRTER: “Que é que é isso?”
ELON MUSK: “Mas dá pra criar um sistema bem mais eficiente.”
REPÓRTER: “E aí, pra quando isso rola?”
ELON MUSK: “Em 2 ou 3 anos, acho que o espaço vai ser o lugar mais barato pra rodar IA.”
REPÓRTER: “... 2 ou 3 anos!?”
ELON: “É o que eu prevejo.”
REPÓRTER: “Rápido demais, cara”
ELON MUSK: “O progresso da tecnologia é acelerado.”
REPÓRTER: “Mas pra levar tudo de foguete, gasta uma grana preta!”
ELON MUSK: “É aí que tá o pulo do gato.”
REPÓRTER: “Como assim?”
ELON MUSK: “Precisa reduzir drasticamente o custo de lançamento.”
REPÓRTER: “Ah, sei...”
ELON MUSK: “Se o transporte pro espaço ficar barato, as opções se abrem.”
REPÓRTER: “Ou seja, foguetes e IA tão todos interligados!?”
ELON MUSK: “É nesse futuro que eu tô pensando.”
REPÓRTER: “Cara, essa visão já não é de humano da Terra”
ELON MUSK: “Tem possibilidades fora da Terra também.”
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, at Stanford: the AI industry, he says, has gone too far into its own bubble and talks about the technology itself rather than the value it brings.
HOST: Outside the Bay Area, people ask: what does AI do for me? Electricity wasn’t sold, light was. What will be the light for AI?
SATYA NADELLA: We’ve perhaps gone too into the bubble we all live in. It’s more about hyping the tech and its progress for its own sake.
HOST: And what’s wrong with that?
SATYA NADELLA: At the end of the day, the world will evaluate us on the value we created for it, one community at a time.
HOST: What should that look like?
SATYA NADELLA: Not abstract. When AI in healthcare changes the cost of care, and it happens to someone in your community or family.
HOST: What about jobs?
SATYA NADELLA: Any disruptive technology brings real displacement. But there will also be new economic activity where people have agency and wages.
HOST: Why are you confident in that?
SATYA NADELLA: If current intelligence gets commoditized, humans stay the most adaptive: they create new value on top of the new commodity.
HOST: And when does that happen?
SATYA NADELLA: It can’t stay abstract, it has to become real. And it will happen.
HOST: What has to change?
SATYA NADELLA: The move from electricity to light is when the light is seen not only by the AGI-pilled people in one zip code, but by the world, as something they can thrive in.
A battery cost $600 per kilowatt-hour. The materials it’s made of, according to Elon Musk, cost about $80.
REPORTER: Where does that gap come from?
ELON MUSK: Most people reason by analogy. They say batteries will always be expensive because they’ve always been expensive. That’s pretty dumb.
REPORTER: Why?
ELON MUSK: If you applied that reasoning to anything new, you’d never get to the new thing. You can’t say, “Horses are great, we’re used to them, and there’s no gasoline to buy, so nobody will ever want a car.” And people did say that.
REPORTER: So how should you reason?
ELON MUSK: From first principles, not by analogy. Normally we do something because it’s like something that was done before, or because other people are doing it.
REPORTER: What are first principles?
ELON MUSK: The physics way of looking at the world. You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and reason up from there.
REPORTER: Why doesn’t everyone do that?
ELON MUSK: Because it takes a lot more mental energy.
REPORTER: Can you give an example?
ELON MUSK: Batteries. Historically it’s $600 per kilowatt-hour, and they say it won’t get much better. I ask something else: what is it made of?
REPORTER: And what is it made of?
ELON MUSK: Cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, some polymers for separation, and a sealed can.
REPORTER: And what does that cost?
ELON MUSK: At London Metal Exchange prices it comes to something like $80 per kilowatt-hour.
REPORTER: So that’s almost eight times less. What do you do with that?
ELON MUSK: Come up with clever ways to combine those materials into the shape of a battery cell. And then batteries can be much cheaper than anyone realizes.
A battery cost $600 per kilowatt-hour. The materials it’s made of, according to Elon Musk, cost about $80.
REPORTER: Where does that gap come from?
ELON MUSK: Most people reason by analogy. They say batteries will always be expensive because they’ve always been expensive. That’s pretty dumb.
REPORTER: Why?
ELON MUSK: If you applied that reasoning to anything new, you’d never get to the new thing. You can’t say, “Horses are great, we’re used to them, and there’s no gasoline to buy, so nobody will ever want a car.” And people did say that.
REPORTER: So how should you reason?
ELON MUSK: From first principles, not by analogy. Normally we do something because it’s like something that was done before, or because other people are doing it.
REPORTER: What are first principles?
ELON MUSK: The physics way of looking at the world. You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and reason up from there.
REPORTER: Why doesn’t everyone do that?
ELON MUSK: Because it takes a lot more mental energy.
REPORTER: Can you give an example?
ELON MUSK: Batteries. Historically it’s $600 per kilowatt-hour, and they say it won’t get much better. I ask something else: what is it made of?
REPORTER: And what is it made of?
ELON MUSK: Cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, some polymers for separation, and a sealed can.
REPORTER: And what does that cost?
ELON MUSK: At London Metal Exchange prices it comes to something like $80 per kilowatt-hour.
REPORTER: So that’s almost eight times less. What do you do with that?
ELON MUSK: Come up with clever ways to combine those materials into the shape of a battery cell. And then batteries can be much cheaper than anyone realizes.
ELON MUSK: “A conta de luz da IA é alta demais? Então, basta construir um data center no espaço”
“Em vez de economizar energia na Terra, a ideia de se mudar para o espaço”
REPÓRTER: “A IA consome uma quantidade absurda de eletricidade, né?”
ELON MUSK: “É verdade.”
REPÓRTER: “E isso vai aumentar ainda mais no futuro?”
ELON MUSK: “Se a IA evoluir, a demanda por energia também vai crescer, provavelmente.”
REPÓRTER: “Então a conta de luz vai ser um problemão!”
ELON MUSK: “Por isso vamos usar o espaço.”
REPÓRTER: “.... Hein?”
ELON MUSK: “Vamos construir um data center para IA no espaço.”
REPÓRTER: “Peraí, a gente tava falando de conta de luz, cara”
ELON MUSK: “E é exatamente isso que eu tô respondendo.”
REPÓRTER: “Por que raios no espaço, mano?!”
ELON MUSK: “Porque dá pra usar energia solar.”
REPÓRTER: “Energia solar a gente já usa aqui na Terra, né?”
ELON MUSK: “Mas na Terra tem noite, não tem?”
REPÓRTER: “É, tem sim.”
ELON MUSK: “E a geração varia por causa do clima.”
REPÓRTER: “Hmm, entendi.”
ELON MUSK: “No espaço, ajustando a órbita, dá pra captar luz solar por muito mais tempo.”
REPÓRTER: “Então você vai colocar painéis solares no espaço?”
ELON MUSK: “Exatamente isso.”
REPÓRTER: “Mas os computadores da IA não esquentam pra caramba?”
ELON MUSK: “Claro que geram calor.”
REPÓRTER: “No espaço não tem ar-condicionado, né?”
ELON MUSK: “A gente usa dispositivos de dissipação de calor.”
REPÓRTER: “Dispositivos de dissipação?”
ELON MUSK: “Os painéis solares ficam virados pro Sol.”
REPÓRTER: “Tá.”
ELON MUSK: “Do lado oposto, colocamos equipamentos que liberam o calor pro vácuo do espaço.”
REPÓRTER: “Entendi!”
ELON MUSK: “É a radiação do calor pro espaço sideral.”
REPÓRTER: “Então o resfriamento é de graça!?”
ELON MUSK: “Não, ainda precisa de equipamentos.”
REPÓRTER: “Que é que é isso?”
ELON MUSK: “Mas dá pra criar um sistema bem mais eficiente.”
REPÓRTER: “E aí, pra quando isso rola?”
ELON MUSK: “Em 2 ou 3 anos, acho que o espaço vai ser o lugar mais barato pra rodar IA.”
REPÓRTER: “... 2 ou 3 anos!?”
ELON: “É o que eu prevejo.”
REPÓRTER: “Rápido demais, cara”
ELON MUSK: “O progresso da tecnologia é acelerado.”
REPÓRTER: “Mas pra levar tudo de foguete, gasta uma grana preta!”
ELON MUSK: “É aí que tá o pulo do gato.”
REPÓRTER: “Como assim?”
ELON MUSK: “Precisa reduzir drasticamente o custo de lançamento.”
REPÓRTER: “Ah, sei...”
ELON MUSK: “Se o transporte pro espaço ficar barato, as opções se abrem.”
REPÓRTER: “Ou seja, foguetes e IA tão todos interligados!?”
ELON MUSK: “É nesse futuro que eu tô pensando.”
REPÓRTER: “Cara, essa visão já não é de humano da Terra”
ELON MUSK: “Tem possibilidades fora da Terra também.”
Elon Musk once put the probability that AI and robots would wipe out humanity at 10–20%. In a 2026 interview he now advises to “enjoy the ride”: stopping this progress, he says, is impossible, and the most likely outcome for humanity is abundance.
This is a conversation with Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. By his estimate, AI could exceed the combined intelligence of all humanity in about five years, and there would be nothing AI does worse than humans, apart from being human. He calls the most likely scenario “an age of amazing abundance” where anyone can have anything they can imagine.
He explains the control question with a comparison: if the gap between AI and humans ends up far greater than the gap between humans and chimpanzees, it is hard to imagine the chimpanzees staying in charge, and humans, he reminds us, are essentially an evolved form of chimpanzee. The risk, in his words, is not zero. But even if a stop button existed, he thinks we probably shouldn’t press it, because the most likely outcome is still abundance for all. Asked whether he would get into one of his own rockets with a 10–20% chance of it blowing up, Musk answered: “Yes.”
He describes his own role like this: he created OpenAI as a counterweight to Google, which then had more or less a monopoly on AI, and Anthropic later split off from OpenAI. Those moves, he says, accelerated AI, which was not his intention, so “all roads lead to acceleration.”
For managing the risks he suggests something simple: the leading AI companies should get on a call every week or two to discuss safety. Each would get a week or two of early access to rivals’ new models, because an official without technical depth struggles to assess a model, while competitors have every incentive to keep each other honest. If a company fails to address a risk, the government is told, and only then does the state step in. The system, Musk says, is needed immediately: he discussed it with Demis Hassabis for a few hours before Hassabis published his proposal for a public-private regulator.
On Sam Altman he is blunt: a nonprofit meant to be an open-source AI company “owned by the world,” he says, was turned into a closed-source for-profit company worth $800 billion, the opposite of what he donated for. He calls Dario Amodei of Anthropic a principled person, and says no one at Anthropic has set off his “evil detector.” And he adds: if they have to talk, they will talk, setting aside personal differences.
By MrBeast’s own observation, past $100,000 the number in a title stops adding clicks: between a $100K prize and a $1M prize he sees almost no difference. $100K, he says, gets more clicks than $10K, but after that the average person just hears “that’s a lot of money.”
This is Jimmy Donaldson on the Lex Fridman podcast, over two hours of conversation. At the time of recording, in early 2023, he is 24, his main channel has about 120 million subscribers, and his videos pull around 100 million views. He treats virality as a learnable skill and breaks it into concrete rules.
A title should stay under 50 characters, because on some devices anything longer gets cut off with dots. It has to match the length of the video: “I stepped on a bug” won’t work for a 20-minute video. The more extreme the claim, the higher the click rate, but only if the video pays it off. Negative clickbait, he says, is easier than positive: getting 10 million views on a video about helping people is harder than on one tearing down a celebrity.
He calls subscribers a vanity metric: by his account only a small share of views, if even a full percent, comes from the subscription feed, and the rest comes from the home page and recommendations.
He runs his team without checklists: the more constraints, the more repetitive the videos get. The company’s CEO, James, lived at his house for two years, and they talked about seven hours a day on average. For the first six months James only studied, for the next six he took on responsibility, and now he makes almost every decision the way Jimmy would. He stopped hiring from traditional media: four or five people from different parts of the industry didn’t get his approach, and one came from Disney. In interviews he asks where the candidate wants to be in ten years, and the answer “movies” means no.
About his own path, he says his first 500 videos didn’t deserve even a million views. His advice to newcomers is to make a hundred videos and improve one thing in each. One friend who earned $10,000 a month on YouTube was taken, by his account, to over $400,000 through weekly calls with him.
By his numbers, his main channel gets around 100 million views per video, his gaming channel 15 million, his reaction channel 10 million, and TikTok averages 20 million.
MrBeast’s company is valued at $5.2 billion, and only half of its revenue comes from videos. The other half is products.
This is the New York Times DealBook Summit: Jimmy Donaldson and Beast Industries CEO Jeff explain what the business is made of. Media (YouTube, Shorts on TikTok and Instagram, Beast Games on Amazon Prime, animation) brings in about half of revenue. The rest comes from consumer products: Feastables chocolate, a toy that became the number one action figure in America, Lunchly snacks. Next on the list are a phone carrier, a financial platform and a marketplace that connects creators with Fortune 1000 marketers.
By the host’s account, the first season of Beast Games cost so much the show lost money: a $10 million prize pool, a city built for the contestants. Management calls it an investment: the show became number one in over 80 countries, the audience is already acquired, so seasons 2 and 3 will be more efficient. Season two has fewer contestants: when two thousand people compete, 1,999 lose, and some of them sued.
On content: the average video gets 200 million views, while most other creators get a couple of million. Videos grew from 12 to 15 minutes to 25 to 30, because over 50% of YouTube watch time in the US is on TVs. After 6 to 7 years, viewers got used to money and spectacle, but never get used to a good story, so the 300-person team is focused on storytelling. Business is better built on YouTube: a 20-minute video gives an audience depth a 5-second clip never will. For selling $100 million of product, it is the number one platform by a mile.
Chocolate became a case study too. 1.5 million children work on cacao farms, and farmers earn under a dollar a day. Feastables pays them a living income reference price in exchange for ending child labor, has worked on this for three years, and builds schools. The goal is to get over a million children out of child labor.
MrBeast showed a $200M Lab where NO Chickens are harmed to make genetically grown chicken meat, a project that could potentially save billions of animals 😳🔥
Mr. Beast even ate real chicken vs the lab grown chicken and noticed NO DIFFERENCE 🐓👀
A rocket gets only 2% of its liftoff mass to orbit. Miscalculate by that same 2%, and it comes down in the Pacific.
With this explanation Elon Musk begins, in 2003, a talk about why spaceflight is so expensive. Before that he had sold Zip2 to Compaq in 1999 for over $300 million, and PayPal had gained a million customers in two years with no sales force and no advertising, before eBay bought it for about $4.5 billion. Then something else caught his attention: why space stalled after Apollo, when a computer from the 1970s that filled a room is outperformed by today’s phone.
At first he wanted to send a $15–20 million mission to Mars, but the cheapest American rocket, the Delta II, cost about $50 million. So SpaceX appeared, a team of around 30 people. The Falcon was to cost $6 million a flight against $25 million for its nearest competitor, the Pegasus. There is no single trick: hundreds of small improvements, a simple design and Ethernet instead of copper bundles as thick as an arm.
The company starts with satellites, because that market already exists, and leaves people, the Moon and Mars for later. He describes his way of working just as simply: pick a path and go, instead of vacillating, and run everything in parallel rather than in a queue.
Asked from the floor whether he would advise starting with space, his answer was no: for a first-time entrepreneur it is better to begin with something that does not need large capital.
When Chris Anderson asked Elon Musk what drives him every single day to do everything he does, Elon gave an incredibly deep and powerful answer
“I really want to make sure that there is a good future for humanity, and that we're on a path to understanding the nature of the universe, the meaning of life. Why are we here? How do we get here?”
And then he explained what motivates him more than anything:
“I'm motivated by curiosity more than anything, and just a desire to think about the future and not be sad”
1,000 computers, each running a year without a failure. That is still 3 breakdowns a day.
Robert Morris opens MIT’s distributed systems course 6.824 with this arithmetic, and over 80 minutes he leads from a single server to computation on thousands of machines. The first thing he advises: if a problem can be solved on one computer, solve it on one, because distributed systems are never simpler. Thousands of machines are justified by only 4 reasons: speed, fault tolerance, geography and security.
The ideal of speed is this: twice the computers give twice the throughput, because computers can be bought with money, while programmers must be paid to optimize. In practice a site that grows to 100 million users adds web servers, and after 10, 20 or 100 of them the database becomes the bottleneck.
At this scale failures are not the exception but the norm, so the system must hide them from the programmer. The main danger of replication is that two copies quietly drift apart. Morris draws it on the board: key 1 holds the value 20 on two servers, a client sends 21 to the first and crashes before sending it to the second. Now a read may return 21 or 20 depending on the server, and a week later it may suddenly return the old value.
Guaranteeing freshness is expensive. If the copies sit in different cities, every operation waits 10 to 30 milliseconds, while a processor executes a billion instructions per second. So many systems deliberately allow reading a stale value.
Then comes MapReduce. In 2004 Google built an index of the entire web on terabytes of data, and on a single machine that would have taken weeks or months. The programmer writes only map and reduce, which know nothing about distribution: to count words, map emits the word and 1, and reduce returns the length of the array. The framework does everything else.
The bottleneck was the network. Morris divided the root switch’s throughput by the 2,000 servers in the paper and got 50 megabits per second per machine. So Google split files into 64-megabyte chunks and ran each map on the machine where its chunk lives. Only the shuffle crossed the network: sorting 10 terabytes moves the same 10 terabytes.
By 2020 a single root switch was replaced with many, networks became far faster, and modern MapReduce no longer looked for data on the local disk. By his account, Google stopped using it a few years ago.
99% of options traders are gambling because they never learned the fundamentals.
This 1-hour Yale lecture changes everything.
In just 60 minutes, you’ll learn more about options trading than most overpriced trading courses ever teach.
No hype. No fake gurus. Just real knowledge.
Save this and watch it without distractions. 📌
For over 50 years, one system has shaped prices, energy and the policies of states. It is not the banks and not the stock market, but the petrodollar.
The video’s presenter walks through it on a diagram titled “How Petrodollars Work” and starts in 1944. After the war the US was the only major power with its economy and manufacturing intact, and at the Bretton Woods conference countries made the dollar the centre of the global financial system: the US promised to exchange dollars for gold, and other currencies were tied to the dollar.
In 1971 President Nixon decoupled the dollar from gold, and the world moved to paper money with no backing. The dollar stayed dominant because the US economy was huge, the government was seen as stable, and most international transactions were already made in dollars.
In 1973 Arab oil-producing countries stopped supplying those who backed Israel in the Yom Kippur War, and oil prices quadrupled. In response the US struck a deal with Saudi Arabia: it would sell oil only in dollars, and the US would provide military protection. The other producers had to follow the largest one.
From this comes a logic in 3 steps for a country like Japan, which produces little oil: get dollars, keep dollar reserves, trade with the US or hold US assets. Constant demand keeps the dollar strong, lets the US government borrow more cheaply, and makes sanctions possible, because international payments pass through American banks.
The producers’ money returns too. Oil countries invest it in US Treasury bonds and buy American companies and real estate. This makes a loop of 4 links: oil is bought in dollars, producers earn dollars, invest them in American assets, and the dollar stays strong.
There are attempts to leave. Venezuela, India and Pakistan have tried trading oil in euros or yuan, and BRICS openly aims to reduce dependence on the dollar. Yet even countries hostile to the US still trade oil in dollars, because the switch is not just a change of currency but a change of contracts, hedging, insurance and pricing models. The dollar offers high liquidity: billions can be moved without crashing the market, plus strong legal protection. The presenter compares it to Threads trying to pull people off a platform they already use.
So China cuts its dollar use selectively. It promotes oil contracts in yuan and encourages its trading partners to settle in yuan. China keeps the dollar where it is more convenient, and moves away from it where politics demands it, above all because of sanctions.
MrBeast has 500 million subscribers, a $5 billion company and a $2.6 billion fortune on paper. He keeps less than $1 million of it, about 0.04%, says he has "negative money," and borrowed from his mom to pay for his own wedding.
He spends around a quarter of a billion dollars a year on videos that cost $3 to $5 million each. His Amazon show had a $100 million budget and a $10 million prize he doubled with a coin flip, and he says it cost him tens of millions of his own money.
In the video below, MrBeast tells the Wall Street Journal that everyone watching has more money in the bank than he does.
Forbes put his yearly earnings at $85 million. He owns just over half of Beast Industries, and almost all of it goes straight back into content.
Beast Games had 1,000 contestants. 50 million people watched in the first month. "It was not a good financial decision to make Beast Games," he said. "I lost money."
In June 2025 he posted that he was borrowing from his mom for the wedding. In June 2026 he became the first creator ever to pass 500 million subscribers.
On paper he's a billionaire. In real life, his mom is the bank.
Is MrBeast the smartest reinvestor alive, or a billionaire one bad year away from broke?
10 of the 12 tribes of Israel vanished from history after 722 BCE. The other 2 survived the fall of Jerusalem in 586 and still exist today.
This is how Christine Hayes, a professor of religious studies at Yale, opens her course on the Hebrew Bible. The Israelites, she explains, were a small and relatively insignificant group: around 1000 BCE they built a kingdom, in 922 it split in two, the north was destroyed by the Assyrians in 722, and the south, Judah, by the Babylonians in 586. Among the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Hittites and Phoenicians, only the Israelites survived the death of their state as a community and a culture that can be traced right into our own time.
The reason is an idea. Ancient peoples regarded forces of nature as gods, and no single god was all-powerful. The Israelites arrived at one God who stands above nature and acts in history. So they read the destruction of their capital not as the defeat of their God but as part of his plan.
Next she shows that the Bible did not grow out of a vacuum. The creation story in Genesis 1 draws on the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish, the Eden story in chapters 2–3 echoes Gilgamesh, and the flood comes from Atrahasis. A Sumerian flood story from the 3rd millennium BCE matches Noah’s in every detail: a decision by the gods, one chosen man, instructions for a boat, a landing on a mountain, birds sent out to scout, a sacrifice after disembarking. The difference is the motive: in Mesopotamia the gods cannot sleep because humans are too noisy, while in the Bible the flood becomes a punishment for corruption.
Then Hayes crosses out 5 myths on the board. The Bible is not a book but a library of narratives, laws, prophecies, love poetry, proverbs and psalms. Its heroes are not saints: Jacob is a deceiver, Joseph an arrogant spoiled brat. It is not for children, because it contains treachery, incest and murder. It is not a textbook of theology, since biblical Hebrew has no word for “religion.” And the Pentateuch nowhere claims that Moses wrote all of it.
The corpus consists of 24 books. The Hebrew name Tanakh is an acronym of Torah, Nevi’im and Ketuvim. The Greek translation, the Septuagint, made in Alexandria in the 3rd–2nd centuries BCE, arranged the books by time: past, present, future. The last book of the Hebrew Bible was written in the 160s BCE.
Until the middle of the 20th century, the oldest manuscripts dated to about the year 900. The Dead Sea Scrolls from the 4th–3rd centuries BCE are 1,300 to 1,400 years older, and their text corresponds to the later one to a high degree.
Shaquille O'Neal reveals he expects to receive $1,000,000 a month from annuities when he turns 55
“I would always see this filthy rich guy. I'm talking rich, Four Seasons, Rolls-Royce”
“I asked him, I was like, ‘How do you stay rich?’”
“He said, ‘Shaq, if you have $100, you want to save $50 but if you want to be wealthy, you play with $25 and you save $75’”
“So after I heard him say that, I would start to get endorsement checks and not even turn them in”
“I had so much money coming in, I put a lot into annuities”
“Next year I get a lot, almost for the rest of my life. So 55, 60, and 65. That was my failproof, just in case the investments don't work and this and that”
“I don't like to brag but I think at 55 I'll probably get $1,000,000 a month”