I meant to do this a couple of days ago but you know how lazy I am. If you didn’t see his two hour interview with Tucker please do. It was fascinating just watching how his mind works and his command over multiple subjects. He is not a one trick pony which his competitors appear to be.

Steve Jobs didn’t even code. He had great ideas that others had to do the work to bring to fruition. Bill Gates was a brilliant coder and had the vision to monetize his work. But if you listen to him he only opens his mouth to switch feet these days. He may be rich and computer savvy but he’s a self important idiot.

Now Musk was an excellent coder and also an incredible visionary. And he demonstrated that on Tucker.

Here’s why I am envious of all of them. They have ideas and figure out how to capitalize on them. They would no doubt figure out a way to make money on my rants. I don’t even consider it. I just have no entrepreneurial skills. Some of you do but I don’t. And one reason that I have discussed previously is that I just assume, wrongly apparently, that everyone sees what I do.

Here’s my best example of my shortcoming in this area which I have discussed with at least one of you. My senior year in engineering, we’re talking 50 years ago now, we had to take a course called Numerical Methods Fortran in which had to develop Fortran computer programs to solve various mathematical problems. In case you don’t know it Fortran was a computer language back in the day. I have absolutely no idea what they are using today.

But anyway, we had to develop a program to determine the area under a curve and I won’t bore you with the details but basically you just keep dividing it into narrower and narrower rectangles. So the standard way you were supposed to do that was using if then statements and I looked at it and said that’s stupid and used a do loop which required far fewer code lines and remember back then we were using IBM punch cards that were then run through the computer. Anyway my way required many less cards and could be expanded to whatever degree of certainty you wanted by just changing one card. A do loop is basically a program where you tell the computer to perform a sequence from one to x times and at the beginning of the program you define x=10 or 100 or 1000 or whatever you want. All you have to do to fine tune the result is to replace the one card. You couldn’t do that with the way suggested in the text. My professor asked to see me and asked if he could use my program and being the naive idiot I was I said sure. I figured everyone would see what I saw. I have no idea what he did with it but I’m certain he got some money off it, and here’s what I didn’t even recognize until the last couple days. The standard textbook had a solution that my solution blew away and I didn’t realize it until a couple days ago. What was obvious to me was an order of magnitude better than the old way and I didn’t get one penny. That textbook had to be pulled and rewritten or it was bs. I guarantee you that the above three would have made a lot of money off it and that’s why they are where they are and I’m not.

Listen I don’t mean to suggest that I am Elon’s intellectual equal because I’m not but the other two outside of programming are not a concern. They are great marketers and I’m sadly not.