Ngoni Mujuru

Ron Baron asked Elon Musk how many CEOs live on site in an Airstream and work hands-on with everyone. MUSK: “Airstreams are actually pretty nice... It’s parked right next to the power plant.” “We built this power plant that’s producing over a gigawatt... in about a year, as opposed to normally about five years.” “There is no upstairs.” He walks the entire site up to five times a day. He’s pulled power cables “the size of an anaconda,” run fiber, wired switches, and worked on the power plant software. “I try to do at least a little bit of everything, so that I’m not numb to the pain of the people who are actually doing it.” “It’s not as though I’m sitting in an office and somebody has to come to me. I’m walking the floor, asking them questions actively.” There’s a reason SpaceX is winning the compute race.

Ron Baron is 83. In front of thousands of investors in New York, he looked at Elon Musk and asked the one question an 83-year-old asks. "How do you want people to think about you?" For the full hour before, it had been trillion-dollar chip fabs. Starship. Starlink. The business of the richest man alive. Then Baron added, quieter: "Nobody would work the way you work just to accumulate money." Elon paused. "I'd like the reality to be that I made a significant contribution in the furtherance of civilization." One sentence. Civilization. And then, in the same room, he told them about Jose. Jose is the guy in the meme. One man digging a hole in the road. Eight men standing around watching him dig. "Unless you increase the number of Joses in the country, the amount of work done does not increase." "I aspire to be Jose." "We do actual work." This from a man who lives in an Airstream parked next to his power plant in Memphis. Who pulls power cables "the size of an anaconda" with his own hands. Asked how he wants history to remember him, he said civilization. Asked who he wants to be, he said the guy with the shovel. The richest man in the world wants to dig. 🇺🇸🚀