Elon Musk - CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX | Entrepreneurship | Khan Academy

This reminds me of a very similar campaign Paypal did to help jumpstart the online payments market. Paypal offered $20 to anyone for opening an account or referring a new user[1]. This served to help rapidly grow a market of Paypal users before one existed. 1 (I highly recommend watching the full conversation as it's immensely interesting) - [VIDEO]

Paypal buying eBay items wasn't actually the primary method for stimulating growth. Initially, Paypal offered new users $20 for opening an account, and $20 for referring somebody to open an account. They then dropped the bonus to $10 for both, then $5, then $0. This allowed them to grow immensely, and they reached 100,000 users in one month. These bonuses weren't "cheap" though: they cost PayPal around 60-70 million. Here's a reference - an interview between Elon Musk and Salman Khan: [VIDEO] . It's worth a watch.

"With an advanced rocket you can do maybe two to three percent of your lift-off mass to orbit, typically. And then reusability subtracts two to three percent. So then you've got nothing toward or negative and that's also not helpful. So, the trick is to try to shift that from two to three percent in the expendable configuration, to make the rocket mass efficiency, engines efficiency, and so forth so much better so that it moves to around three and half to four percent in the expendable configuration and then try to get clever about the reusablility elements and try to drop that to around the the one and a half to two percent level so that you have a net payload of about two percent." [VIDEO] (Watch from 27m for about 50 seconds.)

All the famous entrepreneurs mentioned in this story have very light accents. I found YouTube videos with these entrepreneurs speaking, and none of them have "accents so strong that you have to interrupt the conversation to ask what they just said.": * Vinod Khosla, Sun Microsystems co-founder and now a venture capitalis: [LINK] * Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen: [LINK] * Tesla’s Elon Musk: [VIDEO] * Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google: [LINK]

Have you seen Batman (the Chris Nolan movie)? It's pretty frickin' awesome. You've got incredible special effects, great script, multiple takes, amazing actors, and great sound and it's very engaging. ... If instead of having movies- say we're going to have that script performed by the local town troupe. So in every small town in America (if movies didn't exist), they would have to then recreate The Dark Knight . You know, with home-sewn costumes and jumping across the stage and not getting their lines quite right, and not really looking like the people in the movie, and no special effects or anything. That would suck! It would be terrible. That's education. -- Elon Musk (chatting with Sal Khan)[1] I think there's a ton of improvement to be had in the education space. People have used technology to make many forms of entertainment more compelling, but education is pretty similar to half a century ago: classrooms, teachers, lectures, etc. A lot of the stagnation is due to bureaucratic and legislative inertia, which isn't such a big problem in countries lacking widespread public schooling. With regards to cost and bandwidth issues: Remember, Gates's predictions/goals are for the next 15 years. Technology is only going to get cheaper and faster. In 2000, iPods didn't exist. In 2030, even low-end tablets will put current hardware to shame. 1. [VIDEO]

> willing to work hard at things that aren't immediately obviously essential but you do them anyway. I view this as actually one of the biggest problems with current pedagogies and curriculum structures. They don't teach the why of things[1] and so students either are unmotivated because it seems meaningless to them, or the ones who follow blindly on faith, who think less for themselves, end up looking like the smart ones. But then maybe that's what some employers are looking for. As Musk puts it, they fail to teach to the problem instead of the tools.[2] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]

If you want to send up more propellant, you need to send up even more propellant to get the propellant you want up to space. Which means you have no room left for your actual payload. Back in 2013, before SpaceX had recovered any rockets at all, Elon Musk talked about how the way they were going to get reusable rockets was by making the rocket and the reusability more efficient: [VIDEO]

Sometimes parts from China get stuck in customs or are otherwise delayed, and this affects Tesla as much as the rest of us. Here's an interview Elon did with Sal Khan back in 2013. He literally had employees running around to buy as many USB cables as he could. [VIDEO]