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7) I'm going to go ahead and throw out "be born into the Saudi royal family" as a life choice. And what's left is: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Alibab, Tesla, Berkshire, TSM, Visa, ...

8) There are a few outliers here, but the theme is: Build a company with 1B+ users. In fact, that matches up pretty well. statista.com/statistics/272 Every social media network with 1B+ users is worth $100B+. And in fact most companies of any sort with 1B+ users are.

9) The smartphones, operating systems, computer chips, credit cards, retail stores, etc. used by 1B+ are all part of companies worth $100B+; And most companies worth $300B+ have at least 100m users.

10) So how do you build something worth a ton? Build something 1B+ will use; be born into the Saudi royal family; build Tesla; or build Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire is an interesting case: become the most popular investment vehicle, and you can scale massively.

11) And then there's Tesla. Tesla doesn't currently have 1B cars sold; that's not what Tesla's about, really. Maybe it will be, soon: to some extent, Tesla is about the future, and the possibility that it will come to dominate the auto industry. And space, and tunnels...

12) To a large extent, Tesla is about the person behind the company. Tesla is a bet on

@elonmusk

. It's a bet that the same person who defied the auto industry and came out winning--and now looks poised to do that in space--will keep winning.

13) A bet that the man whose shitposts took on shortsellers and the SEC; whose speeches pitted him against MBAs and regulators; whose public pot puffing belies a fanatical obsession with his products-- that he will keep thinking big. And that when

builds, he delivers.

14) Which brings us full circle, sort of. Eventually Tesla's biggest product might be cars, but right now it's not. Right now Tesla's biggest product is TSLA, which is possibly the world's most popular investment vehicle. Sort of like BRK.

15) Because to some extent the world knows the potential of thinking big. Tesla may not be the Facebook of cars yet, but TSLA is the Facebook of stocks.

11:44 AM · Dec 17, 2020Twitter Web App

16) As an aside:

@SpaceX

is raising right now. If

@FTX_Official

can get an allocation: a) FTX will list SpaceX stock for customers across the world b) We'll donate 95% of gains to the world's most effective charities, and 5% to the Dogecoin foundation

@elonmusk

Replying to

17) So anyway: I don't want to overgeneralize too much here, but roughly speaking: If you build a product used by 1B people, that's worth a fortune. And how do you do that? I don't know, I've never done it before! But you have to identify something 1B people *could* use.

18) And then you have to build it. And then you have to find your 999,999,999 closest friends and get them to use it too.

19) This post started off about having huge impact on the world. And donating a fortune is one way, but it's not the only way. And in fact it's not the most common way. You *do* need to do something that touches 1B people, though, somehow.

Norman Borlaug - Wikipedia

20) You can single handedly stop a nuclear war: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Ar You can feed billions of people: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Bo For better or for worse, you can be the leader of the US, or China.

en.wikipedia.org

21) Generally, you can try to identify the most important things in the world, and try to maximize your impact on them. Some of those people are famous. Many aren't, and might never be. The people I respect most in the world often aren't, because that's not their goal.