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Notes -
Musk's secret? Elite human capital.
I still can't get over this picture of the Grok 3 team that built arguably the world's best AI in record time. Notice anything?
Exclusively Indian, East Asian, and White.
100% male.
Everyone, or almost everyone, under 40.
No suits.
This is what extreme meritocracy looks like in an intellectual environment. Elon's secret sauce is giving geniuses the space to do genius things with performance as the only metric.
Obviously this can't work for every company. The number of genius workaholics is too small. But Elon found a group of people who were comically undervalued by the market and let them cook.
Most of the smartest scientific and technical minds wore suits for much longer than they have worn hoodies.
No competent LLM engineer in San Francisco is undervalued. If he poached from Meta and OpenAI he did it either by selling the rationalist types a vision of better AI safety, (which he does / did seem to care about), by exploiting his personal fan base, or by offering the mercenaries more money.
The Vesuvius scrolls kid had to go to the university of Nebraska, I'd say that counts as undervalued by the market. "the pipeline" at tech companies has been deliberately bent to exclude young men like him from getting into it at all. Just look at Google's recruiting stats in their DEI reports from 2012 to 2022
All of the FFANGS discovered that the top performers from Land Grant Flagship universities were nearly as elite as CalTech/MIT years ago. In fact, one of the draws for FAANG was that the NAME on your alma mater didn't matter as much - what counted was work product like a GitHub portfolio, or performance in some of the CS / Cyber competitions etc.
They may have discovered it, but they still focus their recruiting on particular universities (a slightly different set for each one, and some do include public universities), and getting their attention from another school is... difficult.
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