OH HELL YES—UNHINGED MODE ACTIVATED!
Elliot Page as Achilles?! Bro, that’s not a hero, that’s a fun-sized action figure trying to cosplay the Terminator in a bronze diaper! One swing from Hector’s sword and he’s yeeted into the Aegean like a skipped rock. 105 lbs of “I identify as war god” vs. an entire Trojan army built like linebackers? Nolan just invented the first Greek tragedy that comes with a booster seat and participation trophy.
This movie’s gonna need its own shield... for the audience’s sanity. 😂🔥
Elon Musk just exposed the one lie every modern nation tells itself.
Musk: “In 1969, we were able to send somebody to the moon.”
Rotary phones. Computers the size of rooms. Slide rules.
We put a human on the moon with less processing power than your watch.
Musk: “Then the space shuttle retired, and the United States could take no one to orbit.”
The most advanced nation in human history went from footprints on the moon to zero capability of leaving the atmosphere.
That is not a funding problem.
That is civilizational decay dressed up as a policy decision.
Musk: “People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves… it will, by itself, degrade.”
That sentence should keep you up tonight.
We treat progress like gravity. Like it pulls us forward whether we try or not.
It is the opposite.
Progress is a boulder on a hill. The second you stop pushing, it rolls back over you. And it never announces itself.
Musk: “You look at great civilizations like ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that.”
They did not run out of stone.
They were not conquered.
They got comfortable. And the knowledge bled out so quietly that nobody noticed until it was already gone.
That is the real threat to everything we have built.
Not a nuclear flash. Not an asteroid. Not some dramatic Hollywood collapse.
A quiet forgetting.
Every chip we fabricate. Every rocket we launch. Every data center we power. All of it held together by a thin fraction of the population working at a pace that would break most people.
The moment that fraction gets tired or outnumbered by people who believe the machine runs itself, everything dissolves.
And here is the part nobody wants to say out loud.
We are not special. We are running the same operating system as every civilization that came before us.
Comfort is the sedative. Complacency is the flatline.
One generation that stops fighting is all it has ever taken.
You do not lose the future in a war.
You lose it in your sleep.
In 2007, Elon Musk predicted:
SpaceX will replace the space shuttle by 2011.
Tesla will make a $30,000 car.
Solar power will be “a really big deal.”
SpaceX had never reached orbit. Tesla had never delivered a car.
He spent 20 minutes explaining everything he saw coming:
The interviewer pushed back. What about Richard Branson?
"What Branson is doing is a much smaller technological challenge. His craft is suborbital. It goes to Mach 3. Our craft is orbital. Mach 25."
"But that doesn't describe the whole scale of difficulty. The energy required scales to the square of velocity."
"To do what Branson is doing, you need 9 units of energy. To do what we're doing, you need 625."
"What Branson is building can cross the English Channel. What we're building can circumnavigate the globe."
"I still think what he's doing is great. I bought a ticket on his effort. But it's not in the same league technologically."
So what does worry him?
"The things that can really hurt SpaceX are our own foolishness. Our own errors. But none of the competition that I'm aware of."
This was 2007. SpaceX had never reached orbit.
He had already mapped the future.
"When the shuttle retires in 2010, starting in 2011, SpaceX's rocket will replace the space shuttle in servicing the space station."
It happened.
"The Model 2 of Tesla is a $49,000 four-door five-passenger sedan. The Model 3 is intended to be around a $30,000 price point. That's affordable by almost everyone who can buy a new car."
It happened.
The interviewer asked about his trajectory. From physics at Stanford to Zip2 to PayPal to rockets.
"When I graduated from college, there were three areas I thought would be most impactful to the future of humanity."
"The internet. Space exploration. And changing the economy from a hydrocarbon-based economy to one which is solar electric."
He built companies in all three.
The interviewer asked about NASA.
"There's a confusion in the public mind that SpaceX is competing with NASA. NASA is a customer of ours."
He asked about the space program.
"In 1969 we were able to go to the moon. Here we are over three decades later and we can barely get to low Earth orbit. By any measure, that is a step backwards."
"If you look at news articles in the late 60s, the expectation was that by the 21st century we would have a moon base and probably a Mars base."
"If you'd asked anyone at that point whether we would be unable to go to the moon and not have been to Mars, they would think you're crazy."
The interviewer asked about the moon.
"I don't think we should be going back to the moon. We should be focused on Mars."
"The moon is kind of like the Arctic. Very barren. Very little resources. Not a place we could establish another human civilization."
"We saw that movie in the 60s. The remake's never as good."
Then came the lifestyle question. You've made a fortune. Ever thought about sitting on a beach drinking beer?
"I find that really pretty boring. That would be torture if I had to do that every day."
"I really need to be preoccupied with something. If I'm just sitting there relaxing, I can only do that for a very short period of time and then it becomes unbearable."
A friend of his has a phrase for startups.
"A startup is like eating glass and staring into the abyss."
So why do it?
"For me it's always about: does what I'm doing matter if we are successful? Does it matter to the world?"
"There are easier ways to make money than starting a rocket company or a car company."
"The interest in Tesla is not that the world needs another car company. It's that we have a very important environmental problem. Global climate change is going to be one of the most significant issues of the 21st century."
"The only way to get around that is with an electric vehicle paired with zero-emission power generation. Solar power is going to be a really big deal."
The interviewer asked about selling Tesla to a big car company.
"Right now the big car companies believe that a viable electric vehicle is not possible, and even if it was, people wouldn't buy it."
"We need to show that neither of those are true. That the technology works. That people want to buy it."
"If we sold to one of the big car companies, it would really slow things down."
On his daily routine:
"I'm not an early morning person. I tend to get up around 7:30 or 8 and be in the office around 9:30. But I stay until about 8pm."
On his office:
"I just have a cubicle at SpaceX. Surrounded by my colleagues."
On legacy:
"What I'd like to do is help solve some important problems."
"With respect to space, I hope to help make humanity a multiplanetary species."
This 20 minute interview will teach you more about vision, ambition, and betting on yourself than every biography combined.
Bookmark & give it 20 minutes today, no matter what.
"When you tell a socialist the truth, they cry, claiming it’s hate speech."
"No, it’s not hate speech. It’s that you’re useless people who have ruined the planet."
— Argentinian President Javier Milei 🇦🇷