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In 1993 Jensen Huang started Nvidia with two co-founders and $600. Years later he told a room of engineers the number behind the company's culture: Nvidia makes offers to only 10 percent of the people it interviews. 95 percent of them say yes. The question from the audience was about motivation. Huang had just said that competitors have equally brilliant engineers working on similar products. So how do you stay on top? He answered with one word, repeated again and again: choice. "It is true there are great engineers everywhere. But it is the company's choice to decide who to let in and who not to." Not just talent. Character. Personality. Value systems. He said all of those choices end up in one bucket he calls culture. Then the test. In every interview Nvidia tries to figure out three things: brains, guts and heart. That is why people complain the process is so rigorous. It is supposed to be. He explained it with football. A quarterback releases the ball before the receiver turns around. "You want to know that when you let the ball go, the wide receiver is going to be there to catch the ball. You don't want to be questioning it." The best receiver in the world is useless if he is not also your teammate. Trust first. Respect second. Talent is the entry ticket, not the whole game. Then he split culture into two jobs. Selection is what culture does. Retention is what culture permits. And he said the line that should be on the wall of every startup: "We're not a church or a prison. Not everybody gets to come. Not everybody has to stay." He admitted openly that not everyone likes working at Nvidia. He did not apologize for it. The people who stay, he said, love it for three reasons: terrific projects, extraordinary resources and teammates they know they can count on. That filter is why Silicon Valley considers Nvidia one of the best engineering organizations in the world. And it is the same filter that carried the company from video game graphics chips to the hardware behind artificial intelligence. Nvidia is now worth more than $5 trillion.. Every company has access to great engineers. Very few have the discipline to say no to most of them.

In 1993 Jensen Huang handed a lawyer the $200 he had in his pocket and got 20 percent of a company called Nvidia. His two co-founders each paid $200 for the same. Nvidia is now worth more than $5 trillion. His first official day of work was his 30th birthday: 17 February 1993. He had never taken a business class. Never taken a marketing class. Never made a presentation. PowerPoint barely existed, so he bought a Mac just to use a program called Persuasion and build a pitch for venture capitalists. Then came the first six months. Three engineers in a townhouse in Fremont. Every day they met and had nothing to do. "What did you guys do last night? What did you have for dinner?" He says they talked about that for about six months. The big decision of the day was lunch: Philly cheesesteak or Chinese food. Then it was who would put donuts in the fridge in the morning. "I know it sounds pathetic," he says. "But it's true." Meanwhile he was reading books on how to start a company. What is a venture capitalist. How do you incorporate. A lawyer at Cooley Godward needed money to price the shares. He asked how much Huang had in his pocket. $200. "Okay, give me $200." Huang went back to the condo and the other two founders handed over $200 each. That was the deal: $600 for 60 percent of Nvidia. He also admits something most founders never would: he never finished the business plan. He bought a thick book at Borders on how to start a high-tech company. Read the first three or four chapters. Stopped. "If I would have read the whole thing, I would have been dead now. We would have run out of money, run out of time." He got funded anyway. And he explains why in three points. VCs do not invest in business plans. Business plans are easy to write: "I couldn't write it, but other people could." They invest in people. Do they trust you. Your reputation and your history matter. Huang had spent years doing good work with the founders of Sun, Synopsys and LSI Logic. That reputation walked into the room before he did. Second: the market has to be big enough. If a VC puts in $10 million and the market is only $20 million, they never get their money back. A $200 billion market is a different conversation. Third, and least important in his view: a clever idea nobody has done before. Least important because you will probably have to reinvent the company anyway. And reinvention needs great people. He was right about that too. Nvidia started in graphics chips for video games. Three decades later the same chips power artificial intelligence. In 2026 Nvidia became the first public company in history to reach a $5.5 trillion valuation. forbes Three guys, six months of lunch debates, $600 and an unfinished business plan.. Investors do not buy the plan. They buy the person who will throw it away and still win. Follow for more stories like this.

In 1972 Warren Buffett almost walked away from a $25 million chocolate company because the price looked too high. Charlie Munger talked him into it. That company has since produced more than $2 billion in pre-tax profit. Before Munger, Buffett bought like his teacher Benjamin Graham. Find a mediocre business trading below its liquidation value. Buy it cheap. Squeeze out whatever is left. Graham called them cigar butts: one free puff, then throw it away. It worked. It also gave Buffett a textile mill that lost money for twenty years. Munger saw it differently. He did not care how cheap a business was. He cared how good it was. A great business at a fair price would beat a fair business at a great price, every time, because the great one keeps compounding long after the bargain is gone. See's Candies was the test. The owners wanted $30 million. The company had about $8 million in tangible assets and earned around $4 million a year before tax. To a Graham disciple, paying three times book value was insane. Buffett said he would go to $25 million and not a dollar more. The sellers took it.. What Buffett bought was not chocolate. It was pricing power. Every year See's could raise prices and customers kept buying, because nobody gives a box of discount candy on Valentine's Day. The business needed almost no new capital to grow. The cash went straight back to Omaha, where Buffett used it to buy more great businesses. He has said See's taught him more than any other purchase. Coca-Cola, Apple, the whole modern Berkshire came out of that lesson. The other half of the lesson was what not to do. Trying to turn a bad business into a good one. Buffett calls it trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Great managers do not fix bad economics. The business wins. The two had met at a dinner in Omaha in 1959. Buffett was 29. Munger was 35. They talked for decades almost daily. Buffett later called him the architect of Berkshire as it exists today. Munger died on 28 November 2023, 33 days before his 100th birthday. Cheap is a price. Great is a business. Buffett needed Munger to learn the difference.. Follow for more stories like this.

In 1992 Archie Karas arrived in Las Vegas with $50 and turned it into more than $40 million. When he was down to his last few million, a pool hustler posing as an eccentric billionaire took $100,000 off him in one night. The trick that sealed it cost $21. The hustler tells it himself, decades later, laughing. First the legend. Karas was a Greek kid who showed up in Vegas broke. He beat the best poker players in the world heads up. He beat them at pool. Then he ran out of opponents and moved to the craps tables at Binion's Horseshoe. He won so much that the casino ran out of $5,000 chips and had to create a $25,000 chip just for him. Then he started losing it back. That is when a crew of hustlers saw the opening. They told Karas about a degenerate billionaire industrialist from a small town in Pennsylvania. A man who bet enormous money and lost it. No jewelry. No fancy clothes. Just a gambler with bottomless pockets. With $40 million, Karas would not have cared. With a few million left, a rich fish was exactly what he wanted. The billionaire was the hustler. They met in a cheap bowling alley pool room. Empty. Karas brought about $200,000 in Horseshoe chips. They started with eight-ball for tens of thousands of dollars a game. The hustler admits he was shaking. He had no money to cover a loss. His backup plan was simple: "I'm a billionaire. I'll owe you." They switched to one pocket, his specialty. By the end of the first night he was up $100,000. Karas paid him in four of his special $25,000 chips. Then came the table fee. $21. The hustler had the money. He chose not to find it. He patted his pockets. Slowly. Front, back, jacket. A billionaire who could not dig up $21 for pool time.. Karas laughed and paid it himself. That was the moment, the hustler says. Now Karas believed the story completely: a cheap, eccentric billionaire. Exactly the kind of man who loses millions and does not notice. Next problem: the chips were only good at one casino. So the billionaire invented a diplomatic trip to Japan with a group of industrialists. While Karas waited, a partner flew to Vegas and cashed the chips. A week later they played again. Karas lost the rest of his chips and kept betting on credit. By the end he owed about $800,000. He never paid it. Back in Vegas he started asking questions. A guy who limps. Plays one pocket. Sounds a lot like a hustler called The Beard.. Karas lost almost everything by 1995. Years later he was arrested for marking cards at a blackjack table in California. The man who had been conned became a cheat himself. The $100,000 was the bet. The $21 was the con. Follow for more stories like this.

Steve Jobs was asked on television in early 1996 what had gone wrong at Apple. Toy Story had just crossed $180 million at the US box office and his Pixar stake was worth more than $1 billion. Ten months later Apple bought his other company for $429 million and let him back in. The interviewer set it up gently: "We won't blame you for what's happened in the last 10 years." Jobs had been gone since 1985. Apple was in free fall. It had just reported a quarterly loss, its CEO was on his way out, and the press was calling it one of the great failure stories of American business. His diagnosis took about thirty seconds. "When I left Apple 10 years ago, we were 10 years ahead of anybody else." Microsoft had needed a decade to catch up with the Mac. The problem was that Apple stood still. It spent billions on R&D and the output was not there. Competitors caught up. The differentiation eroded. Then the prescription: "The way out is not to slash and burn. It's to innovate. That's how Apple got to its glory, and I think that's how Apple could return to it." He also said he still believed in the company: awfully good people, tremendous brand loyalty. The interviewer moved on to NeXT and asked him to explain object-based software to someone who was not a computer nerd. Jobs said most software was still built by hand, custom, from scratch, every time. Objects let you reuse code an order of magnitude or two more efficiently. "It's sort of the Industrial Revolution of software." Interchangeable parts, the way factories got them a century earlier. Nobody watching knew that sentence was the future of Apple. In December 1996 Apple bought NeXT. In 1997 Jobs became interim CEO. The NeXT software he described in this interview became the foundation of Mac OS X in 2001. The same frameworks later became the base of the iPhone's operating system. Every app on every iPhone is built on the tools he was trying to explain on that couch. And the slash and burn? When he came back he did cut: about 70 percent of Apple's product line, down to a handful of machines. But he cut to make room for innovation, not instead of it. The iMac shipped in 1998. Apple returned to profit that same year. He also talked about the internet. He loved that nobody owned it. A free-for-all, like the early days of the PC. He warned that if any one company got a dominant position in it, the rate of innovation would drop precipitously. He was 40 years old. Pixar had gone public a few months earlier. NeXT had never become the company he wanted. And he was explaining, calmly, exactly how he would save a company he did not run anymore.. He did not have the job yet. He already had the plan. Follow for more stories like this.

Steve Jobs was asked in October 2008, one month after Lehman Brothers collapsed, whether Apple would ever overtake the PC in market share. The Mac held a single-digit share of the market. He answered with five words: "We just can't ship junk." The question came at the end of the event. Molly Wood from CNET stood up and put it plainly: Apple's pricing and design appealed to a small elite, not the mass market. So once and for all: was the goal to beat the PC? Jobs did not say yes. He did not say no. He said the goal was to make the best personal computers in the world. Products Apple would be proud to sell. Products they would recommend to their own family and friends. At the lowest prices they could manage. Then the line: "There's some stuff in our industry that we wouldn't be proud to ship.. We just can't ship junk." He said there were thresholds Apple could not cross "because of who we are." And he pushed back on the premise. Price out a competitor's laptop, he said, add the features you need to make it actually useful, and in some cases it costs more than the Mac. The difference was not the price. Apple simply did not make stripped-down products. Context: the world economy was in free fall. The cheapest category in computing was exploding. Netbooks were selling for $300 to $400 and every PC maker was racing to ship one. Analysts told Apple to follow. Investors wanted volume. The safe move in a recession was a cheap laptop. Jobs refused. Fifteen months later he walked onstage with the iPad. Netbooks were dead within a few years. Apple never won the market share fight in PCs. It did not need to. The same rule went into the iPhone: never the cheapest, never the biggest share of units, and still taking most of the smartphone industry's profits year after year. Apple was worth around $3 trillion by the time the 2008 question was answered in full. He looked visibly thin onstage that autumn. Three months later he took a medical leave. In 2009 he had a liver transplant. He kept coming back to the same principle until he resigned in August 2011. The question was about market share. The answer was about identity. Most companies decide what they make by asking what will sell. Apple decided by asking what it could live with shipping.. Market share is what you win. Standards are what you refuse to lose. Follow for more stories like this.

Richard Hatch won $1 million on the first season of Survivor in 2000 while 51 million Americans watched the finale. Six years later a federal judge sentenced him to 51 months in prison over the taxes on that check. He tells the story himself, and he starts with a joke: "Let's talk taxes. Anybody asleep yet? How about prison?" His version goes like this. He got the check months after the show. A year later his accountant sat down to file. Nobody on the team had ever put a million dollars on a tax return. Hatch says the first question was simple: who had already paid what, and to whom. According to him, taxes on the prize were supposed to be paid in Malaysia, where the show was filmed, before the cast left the island. He says he asked CBS. He asked the producers. He asked the IRS. Communication went silent. Then the IRS turned a civil inquiry into a criminal one. Prosecutors offered a plea deal. He would have to say he attempted to evade taxes. He refused: "I can't stand up and tell a court I attempted to evade taxes when I didn't." The charge was dropped.. Eight months later it came back. This time with ten counts: tax evasion, bank fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, charity fraud. He says he faced around 43 years. He refused to plead again and took it to trial. The jury acquitted him on the fraud charges. It convicted him of tax evasion. He says he was cuffed in the courtroom. Leg irons. Waist chains. Driven out of state the same day with no chance to go home. His first weeks were spent in solitary confinement. He wrote every day and watched a flock of robins pull worms out of the snow through a slit in the wall. 51 months. He says it was longer than anyone in US history had received for a similar amount. Inside the federal prison in Morgantown, West Virginia, he lived with about 1,500 men. He says he met only one other man who claimed to be innocent. Almost everyone else admitted what they had done. What they talked about instead was how the system treated them once they were in it. That became his subject. Not his own case. The machine around it: plea deals, sentencing, probation, phone calls that cost families hundreds of dollars, a country that has not decided whether prison is the punishment or the place where punishment happens. You can believe his version or not. A jury did not. But the arc is real: the first reality TV winner in history went from the most watched finale of the year to a federal cell in six years, and the thing that put him there was not the game. It was the paperwork after it.. The prize comes with a camera crew. The tax bill comes alone. Follow for more stories like this.

Steve Jobs was 42 years old and running a company on its way to losing $1 billion that year when a developer stood up at WWDC in May 1997 and told him he did not know what he was talking about. Then he asked Jobs what he had personally been doing for the last seven years. The room went quiet. Jobs sat on a stool and said nothing for several seconds.. Context matters here. Apple had bought NeXT in December 1996 for $429 million and Jobs had come back with it as an adviser. Two months before this conference Apple killed OpenDoc, a software project hundreds of developers had built on. The man at the microphone was one of them. He had lost his work and wanted Jobs to answer for it. Jobs started with a concession: "You can please some of the people some of the time." Then he admitted the developer was right. OpenDoc probably did things nothing else could do. You could build demos with it. Maybe a small app. The hard part, Jobs said, was fitting it into a larger vision that could sell $8 to $10 billion of product a year. Then came the line that became Apple's operating system for the next 25 years: "You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it." He did not blame anyone. He blamed himself: "I've made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I've got the scar tissue to prove it." He told a story about the LaserWriter. The box was full of world-first technology: the first cheap Canon laser engine, Adobe PostScript, AppleTalk. None of it mattered. He remembered picking up the first printed page and realizing they could sell it without explaining anything. Just hold up the page and ask: do you want this? Then he apologized. To the developer. Out loud. "There are many things in life that I don't have the faintest idea what I'm talking about. So I apologize for that too." And he defended his team. Engineers were getting offers at three times their salary. None of them were leaving. Some mistakes would be made, he said, and that was good: "At least some decisions are being made along the way." The numbers behind that stage: Apple lost $816 million in fiscal 1996 and about $1 billion in fiscal 1997. The company was worth around $3 billion. Jobs later said it was roughly 90 days from bankruptcy. Four months after this answer he became interim CEO. In August 1997 Microsoft invested $150 million. In August 1998 the iMac shipped. That fiscal year Apple made a profit of $309 million. Apple is worth more than $3 trillion today. About a thousand times what it was worth the day a developer insulted its future CEO in public. He could have fought back. He had every reason to. Instead he conceded the point, explained the strategy, owned his mistakes and protected his people. In under six minutes.. The strongest answer to an insult is not a better insult. It is a clearer vision. Follow for more stories like this.

Elon Musk sat in West London around 2013 and told a BBC reporter that solar power would eventually become the single largest source of electricity in the United Kingdom. The reporter laughed and asked if he had ever been outside. Musk was 42 years old and running two companies that had both nearly gone bankrupt five years earlier. The reporter walked him through the front trunk of the Model S first. Musk opened the empty space where the engine should have been and smiled. The car had just arrived in Britain. 0 to 60 in under four seconds. Range over 200 miles. Price starting around £49,000. He said Tesla would install Superchargers across the UK, make them free forever for Tesla owners, and run them on solar panels that would generate more energy over a year than the cars consumed. The reporter did not quite believe him. Then came the solar line. The reporter asked about the UK energy crisis. Musk said: "Mark my words, solar will be the single largest producer of energy in the UK long term." The reporter raised an eyebrow and asked about clouds. Musk said even on a cloudy day 80 to 90 percent of the sun's energy still reaches the ground. He pointed out that plants are solar-powered chemical reactions and that the UK is one of the greenest countries on Earth. In 2013 solar produced around 2 terawatt-hours of electricity in the UK, less than one percent of total generation. By 2024 UK solar produced over 17 terawatt-hours and the country had installed more than 17 gigawatts of solar capacity. The National Grid now routinely runs full days without any coal and large portions of sunny days on majority renewables. Solar is on track to become the largest single generator in the UK before 2040. Then the reporter asked about Hyperloop. Musk had published the Hyperloop Alpha white paper in August 2013, a 58-page open-source design for a tube-based transport system that would move pods at 760 miles per hour between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 35 minutes. He had refused to patent it. He had told anyone willing to build it that they could use the designs for free. The reporter asked if the UK was being unambitious with its HS2 high-speed rail project. Musk said: "They did better things in Japan 30 years ago. They got something way better in China. Why are we doing this and spending so much money on it, and it's going to take 20 years, and by that time we'll be 50 years behind what they've got in Japan? This just doesn't make sense." HS2 was approved in 2012. The original full plan was £33 billion. By 2023 the UK government cancelled the northern leg after costs had ballooned past £100 billion. The remaining London to Birmingham section is now expected to open sometime between 2029 and 2033. Then the reporter asked about Mars. Musk said humanity had two paths: become a multi-planet species or wait around for an eventual extinction event. He said setting up a base on Mars would be "the greatest adventure ever." SpaceX had just completed its first commercial cargo delivery to the ISS the year before. Starship did not exist yet. In November 2023 Starship first reached space. In October 2024 Starship caught its booster back on the launch pad with mechanical arms. SpaceX now launches more mass to orbit than every country on Earth combined. The reporter closed with Jeremy Clarkson and Top Gear. In December 2008 Top Gear had run a segment on the original Tesla Roadster showing it running out of charge and being pushed into the garage. Musk had sued the BBC for libel in March 2011 claiming the segment was staged and had damaged Tesla's reputation. Musk lost. The High Court threw out the case in October 2011 and the Court of Appeal upheld the dismissal in March 2013. Musk said on camera that Clarkson was more about entertainment than truth, that Clarkson hated two things in life, American cars and electric cars, and Tesla was both. He said converting Clarkson seemed unlikely. Tesla is now the most valuable car company in the world. The Roadster has outlasted the Top Gear segment that mocked it. Clarkson left Top Gear in 2015 after punching a producer and has spent the last decade running a farm. Pretoria, 1971. Son of a Canadian model and a South African engineer. Bullied so badly in school he was once thrown down a staircase and hospitalized. Taught himself to code at 10. Sold his first video game, Blastar, to a magazine at 12 for $500. Moved to Canada at 17 to avoid South African military service. Transferred to Penn. Enrolled at Stanford for a physics PhD and quit after two days to start Zip2 with his brother Kimbal in 1995. Sold Zip2 to Compaq for $307 million in 1999. His cut was $22 million. Put $12 million into X.com, which became PayPal. eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002. His cut was $180 million. Put all of it into SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity. By 2008 all three were weeks from bankruptcy. He borrowed money from friends to pay rent. The fourth Falcon 1 reached orbit on 28 September 2008. Tesla closed emergency funding on Christmas Eve 2008. Fifteen years later Musk was worth more than $400 billion, the largest personal fortune ever recorded. The reporter in that London interview was trying to figure out whether Musk was serious. Musk kept answering as if the questions were already answered and the reporter had just not noticed.. Follow for more stories like this.

In 1989 Fred Langan stood in a Maryland shopping center for CBC News and held up a credit card with a tiny gold chip glued to it. He said the chip had the same processing power as an Apple IIe computer. Today more than 10 billion of those chips are in wallets around the world. The report opened in a restaurant north of Toronto. A machine the size of a desk telephone was reading credit cards, dialing the bank over a phone line, checking the account balance, and returning a yes or no in about ten seconds. The reporter called it electronic wizardry. The restaurant owner said the machine was catching about eight fraudulent charges a day on lunch bills averaging $20 a head. The crew filmed a real transaction going wrong in front of them. The machine told the waitress to hold the card. The bank was on the line. The customer, who had thought he was paying for lunch, arrived to explain that his real card had been switched at another restaurant the night before. The machine had caught it in ten seconds. The reporter said on camera: we did not stage this. Then they moved to the smart cards. John Elliott, a MasterCard executive in New York, peeled back a card to show the chip inside. One section stored data. Another section was the processor itself. 64 kilobytes of memory. 8-bit chip. The exact specifications of the Apple IIe that had launched in January 1983, six years earlier, and was then sitting on desks in schools across America. The chip could not be overspent. It remembered every transaction. It required a PIN to authorize. Fraud, Elliott said, would be almost impossible. Only 6,000 of these cards existed in North America when the report aired. By the end of 1989 another 30,000 would be deployed for testing. The reporter estimated it would take four years to begin replacing the 170 million magnetic-stripe cards in circulation in the US and Canada. It actually took 25 years. The first chip-enabled MasterCard was rolled out broadly in the US in 2015, after a 2013 fraud wave at Target that exposed 40 million card numbers forced the industry to switch. By 2024 there were more than 10 billion EMV chip cards active worldwide. The chip inside each one is thousands of times more powerful than the Apple IIe that MasterCard put inside the 1989 prototype. The chip inside each one is the direct descendant of the one Fred Langan held up in Maryland. The segment also covered things that did not have names yet. Interoperable ATMs that let a Royal Bank card withdraw from a Bank of Commerce machine. Machines that would print your bank statement on demand. ATMs in the United States that would dispense American cash to Canadian cards. The reporter called this the future. The goal, he said, was to get these machines into bank lobbies and tellers off the payroll. Three decades later the tellers are mostly gone. US bank branch employment peaked around 2007 at over 600,000 and has been falling ever since. ATMs are a $20 billion global industry. Interoperable withdrawals in a foreign currency on a foreign bank's machine are so routine that nobody mentions them anymore. Nobody mentions anything in the segment anymore. It all works, so nobody notices. The lunch scene is the clearest piece of the tape. A waitress in Toronto, a bank operator on the line, a customer who had been robbed and did not know it until a machine told everyone in the room. In 1989 that was a nine-minute news story. In 2026 it happens 700 million times a day on Earth and nobody writes it down. The future always arrives as a weird demo in a shopping center in Maryland. By the time it stops looking weird, you have been using it for years without noticing.

Elon Musk was 27 years old, sleeping in his office and showering at the YMCA when CBS News sent a camera crew to Silicon Valley in 1998 to interview him for 40 seconds. He is worth more than $400 billion today. The segment was not even about him. CBS was reporting on the US government's antitrust case against Microsoft and needed a scrappy young entrepreneur to represent the David against Bill Gates's Goliath. They picked Musk because his startup Zip2 was one of the few online companies Microsoft had tried to crush and failed. The reporter walked into the office. Musk, in a cheap button-down, grinned at the camera and described the space as "the nastiest place you can imagine." The office cost $200 a month. The roof leaked. He slept on a futon on the floor next to his computer because he could not afford an apartment. He showered at the YMCA down the street. He had co-founded Zip2 with his brother Kimbal in 1995, using $28,000 from their father Errol and a few thousand of their own savings. The pitch was simple: an online city guide that newspapers could license to offer their readers restaurant listings, maps, and directions. The New York Times signed up. So did Knight Ridder, Hearst, and the Chicago Tribune. Within a year the brothers had moved from their futon office to real headquarters. Within four years Compaq bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash. 7 February 1999. Musk's personal cut was $22 million. He was 27. He put $12 million of it into a new online bank he called X.com. X.com merged with Confinity in March 2000 and renamed itself PayPal. eBay bought PayPal in October 2002 for $1.5 billion. Musk's cut was $180 million. He put $100 million into SpaceX. $70 million into Tesla. $10 million into SolarCity. By 2008 all three companies were weeks from bankruptcy and Musk was out of personal cash. He borrowed money from friends to pay rent. His divorce lawyer said in court filings that he had negative liquid net worth that year. The fourth Falcon 1 reached orbit on 28 September 2008. NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion resupply contract three months later. Tesla closed emergency funding on Christmas Eve 2008. Fifteen years after that funding round: Tesla crossed $1 trillion in market cap in 2021 and is worth around $1.4 trillion today. SpaceX is valued at around $400 billion in private markets and launches more mass to orbit than every other country on Earth combined. Starlink has over 7,000 satellites in orbit and more than 5 million subscribers. Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022 and renamed it X. His xAI venture is valued at over $75 billion. His personal net worth crossed $400 billion in 2024, the first time in history any human being has held that much private wealth. Pretoria, 1971. Son of a Canadian model and a South African engineer. Bullied so badly in school that he was once thrown down a staircase and hospitalized. Taught himself to code at 10. Sold his first video game, Blastar, to a magazine at 12 for $500. Moved to Canada at 17 to avoid South African military service. Transferred to Penn. Enrolled at Stanford for a physics PhD and quit after two days to start Zip2 with his brother. The CBS clip is 40 seconds long. Nobody who watched it in 1998 remembered his name. The reporter moved on to Peter Dougherty and TJ Rogers and the big Microsoft trial that was supposed to decide the future of the internet. The future of the internet turned out to be the kid they interviewed for 40 seconds who was sleeping on the floor. The most expensive mistake a camera crew can make is deciding who the main character is before the story is over.. Follow for more stories like this.

Steve Jobs looked into a camera in 1995 and said that everything around you was built by people no smarter than you, and that once you understood that, you could never be the same again. He was 39 years old, running a failing computer company called NeXT, and had been out of Apple for a decade. The interview was recorded in February 1995 for the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association. The tape sat in a garage for most of the next twenty years. One copy made it onto the internet in the 2000s and has been viewed hundreds of millions of times since. What he said in the clip was simple. When you grow up, you are told the world is the way it is and your job is to live inside it without bashing into the walls. Have a nice family. Save a little money. Try not to make trouble. He called this a very limited life. Then came the line. "Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use." He said once you understood that, you could poke life and something would pop out the other side. You could mold it. And once you learned that, you would never be the same again. The man saying this had just failed in public, twice. He had co-founded Apple in a garage in 1976 at 21. Taken it public at 25. Been pushed out by John Sculley and his own board in September 1985 at 30. Founded NeXT in late 1985 with $7 million of his own money and ambitions to build the next generation of personal computers. By February 1995 NeXT had sold around 50,000 computers in total. Microsoft was selling that many copies of Windows every day. NeXT had already shut down its hardware division in 1993. The company was pivoting to software. Jobs's net worth had dropped from $200 million to under $25 million. He was reportedly borrowing against his Pixar stake to keep NeXT alive. Pixar had been losing money for ten straight years. Jobs had put $50 million of his own money into it. Toy Story would not come out until 22 November 1995, nine months after this interview. When it did, it made $373 million at the box office. Pixar IPO'd one week after Toy Story's release. Jobs's stake was worth $1.2 billion overnight. Apple bought NeXT for $429 million in December 1996. Jobs came back as interim CEO in September 1997. Over the next 14 years he launched the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad and App Store. Apple's market cap went from $3 billion in 1997 to over $350 billion when he resigned in August 2011. He died on 5 October 2011 at 56. The 1995 clip is the one piece of tape that has outlived every product he ever launched. It is quoted at commencement speeches, in startup pitch decks, at the top of self-help books, in classrooms where the teacher is younger than the recording. He said it when he had nothing to prove it with. No iPhone. No Pixar victory. No comeback. Just a failing computer company and a certainty that the world was built by people who were not special, and that if they could do it, anyone paying attention could. The people who shape the world are not usually the ones with the most proof when they start talking. They are the ones who already believe the thing they will later be famous for proving.. Follow for more stories like this.

Elon Musk sat down for a two-minute interview and gave three pieces of advice to entrepreneurs. The last one was that if you work 100-hour weeks while your competitor works 40, you will do in four months what takes them a year. He was running Tesla and SpaceX at the time and reportedly sleeping on the factory floor. The three pieces of advice were simple. Focus on something that provides real value to someone else. Be ruthlessly honest about whether your idea actually has merit, because the natural human instinct is wishful thinking. Then work like hell: 80 to 100 hours a week, every week, for years. The math he laid out on camera: a 100-hour week against a 40-hour week is a 2.5x multiplier. Your competitor's year becomes your four months. Their decade becomes your four years. He was describing his own life. In 2008 Musk was running SpaceX and Tesla simultaneously. Both companies were weeks away from bankruptcy. SpaceX had failed three Falcon 1 launches in a row and had money for one more attempt. Tesla had delayed the Roadster three times and was burning cash. Musk was personally sleeping on couches, borrowing money for rent, and taking Ambien to stop his mind racing at night. He later said the stress gave him physical chest pain for months. The fourth Falcon 1 reached orbit on 28 September 2008. NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract three months later. Tesla closed emergency funding on Christmas Eve 2008, hours before payroll would have bounced. Musk put his last $35 million of personal money into the two companies and had to borrow from friends to pay living expenses. He kept the schedule. In 2018 he slept at the Tesla factory in Fremont during Model 3 production ramp. He told interviewers he had not taken a week off since 2001 and had worked through his own brother's wedding. His divorce lawyer once said in court filings that Musk averaged 100-hour weeks. The output: SpaceX became the first private company to land an orbital rocket (2015), send humans to the ISS (2020) and dominate global commercial launches (over 60 percent market share by 2024). Tesla became the most valuable car company in the world by 2020. Musk became the richest person on the planet. Starlink. Neuralink. The Boring Company. xAI. The acquisition of Twitter. Pretoria, 1971. Son of a Canadian model and a South African engineer. Bullied so badly in school that he was once thrown down a staircase and hospitalized. Taught himself to code at 10. Sold his first video game, Blastar, to a magazine at 12 for $500. Moved to Canada at 17 to avoid South African military service. Transferred to Penn. Enrolled at Stanford for a physics PhD and quit after two days. Started Zip2 with his brother in 1995. Sold it to Compaq for $307 million in 1999. His cut was $22 million. He put $12 million into X.com, which became PayPal. eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion. His cut was $180 million. He put all of it into SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity by 2004 and had almost no personal cash by 2008. The two-minute clip is one of the clearest explanations he has ever given of how he works and why. No tricks. No hacks. Pick something real. Be honest with yourself about whether it actually matters. Then outwork everyone until the math bends. Most people hear the 100-hour-week line and reject it. The ones who hear it and accept it go on to compound time the rest of their life does not know how to compete with.. Follow for more stories like this.

George Soros earned $1.1 billion in 1993, the highest Wall Street paycheck ever recorded at that point. In February 1994 he sat with Charlie Rose for 23 minutes and said he spends 80 percent of his time giving it away. 21,000 people have watched the tape. Five months before that interview he had broken the Bank of England. On 16 September 1992 Soros shorted the British pound. The Bank of England spent £27 billion defending the rate. By evening Britain quit the ERM. His personal cut was more than $1 billion in a single night. The press called it Black Wednesday. He called it a trade. His Quantum Fund returned 63 percent in 1993. The S&P that year returned 10. The average American salary was about $24,000. Soros earned 46,000 times that. The clip is Charlie Rose's February 16, 1994 interview on PBS. Soros was 63. He had just become the most famous investor in the world. He spent the half hour explaining he was already handing most of his time and most of his money to something called the Open Society Foundations. The name came from his old professor at the LSE. Karl Popper's 1945 book is titled The Open Society and Its Enemies. Soros read it in 1947 as a Hungarian refugee waiting tables at Quaglino's. He had survived the Nazi occupation of Budapest at 14 under a false Christian name. The book argued that no society that silences doubt can last. He never let it go. In 1979 Soros started his first foundation with $3 million. By 1994 he was funding dissidents in Prague. Universities in Budapest. Independent press in Moscow. He had founded Central European University in 1991 with his own money. He would eventually give more than $32 billion to Open Society Foundations across his life. More than any living person at the time. The 1994 interview is one of the only places you see him talk about why. Not what he bought. Not what he shorted. Why. Budapest, 1930. In 1944 the Germans invaded. His father bribed a Hungarian official to pose as the family of a Christian godson. George was 14. He survived the war carrying a false name and watching neighbors disappear. He arrived in England in 1947 with nothing. Worked as a railway porter. Worked as a waiter at Quaglino's. Got into the LSE. Started his first fund in 1969 with $4 million. The man who made more money in one year than anyone on Wall Street before him was the same man giving more away than anyone alive. He did not become a philanthropist after he got rich. He treated them as the same project from the first dollar. Price your scoreboard before you build the career. What you measure is what you become.

Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in 1976 and spent the next three decades telling the Federal Reserve it had caused the Great Depression. In 1999, at 87, he sat for 20 minutes on camera and gave his verdict on what central banks were about to break next. 11,000 people have watched the tape. Thirty-six years earlier he had published the book that would eventually force the Fed to apologize. In 1963 Friedman and Anna Schwartz released A Monetary History of the United States, 1867 to 1960. Nearly 900 pages. The core claim fit in one line: the Fed turned the 1929 recession into the Great Depression by letting the money supply collapse by a third. The economics profession dismissed it for a generation. On 8 November 2002 Ben Bernanke stood at a conference honoring Friedman's 90th birthday and said: "Regarding the Great Depression. You're right. We did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again." Bernanke was then a Fed governor. Six years later he was running the Fed through the worst crisis since the one Friedman had explained. The clip is from 1999. Friedman is 87. He has already advised Reagan and Thatcher. He has already won every award economics gives out. He is sitting at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, where he had worked since 1977. The Asian Financial Crisis had just ended. Thai baht in July 1997. Indonesia next. South Korea needed a $58 billion IMF bailout. Dozens of banks collapsed from Jakarta to Seoul. The NASDAQ was going parabolic. It would peak at 5,048 on 10 March 2000. Then lose 78 percent. Friedman had seen every version of this before. His whole career was watching governments and central banks try to control what they could not. Print what they should not. Bail out what they should have let fail. Brooklyn, 1912. Son of Jewish immigrants from a town in what is now Ukraine. His father ran a small textile business and died when Milton was 15. He got into Rutgers on a scholarship because he was good at numbers. Went to Chicago for his master's. Columbia for his PhD. Worked for a New Deal agency in 1935. Then spent the rest of his life taking it apart. Capitalism and Freedom in 1962. A Monetary History in 1963. Free to Choose in 1980: PBS series and book. Both bestsellers. He stayed outside government on principle. Advised presidents and prime ministers but never took a desk inside a cabinet. He died 16 November 2006 at 94. Sixteen months later Bear Stearns collapsed. Six months after that, Lehman. The Fed printed trillions. His book sold out again. The economists who get it right rarely get it right in the room. They get it right in print. Thirty years before anyone opens the book.

Milton Friedman was 67 and three years into being a Nobel laureate when a Stanford student told him to his face that poverty was a market failure. Friedman answered for five minutes without looking down at a note. The lecture was called "The Role of Government in a Free Society." It was the same title as a chapter in Capitalism and Freedom, the book he had published in 1962. In 1962 nobody in power was reading him. By 1979 everyone in power was. Paul Volcker had become Fed chairman on 6 August 1979. US inflation was running above 11 percent. It would peak at 14.8 percent the next March. Margaret Thatcher had won the UK election in May. Ronald Reagan would win his in November 1980. Every one of them was borrowing from the man standing on that Stanford stage. Friedman was also filming Free to Choose that year. Ten episodes. PBS. The book of the same name came out in 1980 and sold more than a million copies. He had been arguing the same thing since 1962. Governments do not solve poverty by redistributing it. Markets lift people out of it by letting them produce. He had written it. Debated it. Taught it at Chicago for thirty years. Those five minutes at Stanford were what that argument sounded like when he was challenged live, without notes, three years after the Nobel committee had agreed with him in writing. Brooklyn, 1912. Son of Jewish immigrants from a town in what is now Ukraine. Father died when Milton was 15. Rutgers on scholarship. Chicago for his master's. Columbia for his PhD. He never ran for office. Never took a cabinet seat. Advised presidents and prime ministers from the outside until he died in 2006 at 94. The student is not named. He does not come back to the microphone. Friedman walked him through the question. Through the definitions. Through the assumptions. And left the room with the conclusion. The best arguments do not need to be loud. They need to be ready. Friedman had been building that answer for seventeen years before anyone asked him the question.

Warren Buffett ran a dying textile business inside Berkshire Hathaway for twenty years before he shut it down. He has said he was twenty years too late. He had taken over the company by accident in 1965. The mills had been one of the great New England textile operations. They made more than half of the linings in men's suits sold in America. They had come through the Second World War supplying the military and won awards for it. Sears Roebuck named them supplier of the year. Then Buffett asked to raise the price of the linings by a quarter of a cent per yard. The Sears buyer told him there were ten other mills ready to sell at the old price. Nobody had ever walked into a Sears store asking for a blue serge suit with half of a lining. Buffett has said that was the moment he understood the business. The product had no connection to the consumer. The customer was Sears. Sears could switch any time. Any price above the lowest bid was a losing position. He kept the mills running anyway. Twenty years. He laid off workers in waves. He kept trying new strategies. He kept the plant lights on because the people on the floor had worked there for decades and he could not bring himself to shut them off. Every dollar reinvested in those mills was a dollar not invested in insurance. Not in See's Candies. Not in Coca-Cola. Not in the holdings that eventually turned Berkshire into a trillion dollar company. In the early 1990s he made the same error again. He paid more than $400 million in Berkshire stock for a company called Dexter Shoe. Dexter was making money the year he bought it. Then foreign competition hit and the business went to zero. The Berkshire shares he used to pay for it are worth billions today. He has written about both mistakes in letter after letter. Not as regret. As the lesson he keeps paying forward: when you have a good manager and you are still getting bad results, the business is the problem. Admit it and move on. Omaha, 1930. His father was a stockbroker and a four-term congressman. Warren was reading his father's securities manuals at age 8. He filed his first tax return at 14 on income from a newspaper route. He got rejected from Harvard Business School. He went to Columbia instead because Benjamin Graham taught there. He opened his first investment partnership in 1956 with $105,000 from seven friends and family members. In 1969 he returned the money. He said the market had gotten too expensive and he could not find anything to buy that made sense. The hardest thing in business is not spotting a bad business. It is admitting one you already own. The sooner you can say it out loud, the more money you keep for the next one.

Jeff Bezos was 33 years old and running a $438 million bookstore when he sat down in front of a camera in 1997 and described exactly how Amazon would become a $2 trillion company. He said the whole plan rested on one number: web usage was growing 2,300 percent a year. He had quit a quant hedge fund in New York two years earlier because of that number. He had made a list of twenty products that could be sold online and picked books for one reason: books had more SKUs than any other category. Three million titles in print worldwide. A million and a half in English. Versus 200,000 active music CDs. The physics made a store possible that could not exist in any other form. He described the operation: 2,000 bestsellers in Amazon's own warehouse, 400,000 titles ordered overnight from wholesalers, 1.1 million more pulled directly from 20,000 publishers, a million out-of-print books searched for case by case. Catalog of 2.5 million books total. In 1997 the biggest Barnes and Noble superstore carried around 175,000 titles. He explained his advertising: tiny ads at the bottom of the front page of the New York Times with a URL you had to type into your browser.. That was it. The rest of Amazon's growth came from word of mouth and press coverage because the thing itself was new. He said attention was the scarce commodity of the late twentieth century and the only way to earn it was to do something that had never been done before and was actually useful. That line became the operating philosophy of the next 25 years at Amazon. Then he said the thing nobody has stopped quoting since: "This is day one. This is the very beginning. This is the Kittyhawk stage of electronic commerce." Day 1 would become the title of his annual shareholder letter, the name of the building he worked in, the mindset he reportedly reread to employees every single year until he stepped down as CEO in 2021. He closed with a prediction: "A millennia from now people are going to look back and say the late 20th century was a great time to be alive." Amazon lost 95 percent of its market cap in the dot-com crash two years later. Barron's ran a cover in 1999 called Amazon.bomb and said the company would be bankrupt within a year. Amazon kept building. AWS launched in 2006. Prime in 2005. Kindle in 2007. The company crossed $1 trillion in market cap in 2018 and $2 trillion in 2024. Bezos is worth more than $200 billion today. Albuquerque, 1964. Son of a 17-year-old mother and a biological father he never met. Adopted by a Cuban immigrant named Miguel Bezos who had come to America at 16 as part of Operation Peter Pan. Dismantled his crib with a screwdriver as a toddler because he wanted to sleep in a real bed. Valedictorian at his Miami high school. Princeton for electrical engineering and computer science. Went to Wall Street. Became the youngest senior vice president at D.E. Shaw by 30. Walked away from a $1 million bonus in 1994 to drive across the country to Seattle with his then-wife MacKenzie and start Amazon out of a garage. His parents put $245,000 of their savings into the company. He told them there was a 70 percent chance they would lose everything. In 1997 he sat in front of that camera and described the exact architecture that would eventually swallow retail. Pick the hardest category first. Build infrastructure most people cannot see. Treat every day like day one. Hold the fifty-year view while everyone else is clipping the quarterly coupon. The people who get rich on big ideas are rarely the ones who guess them. They are the ones who stay in the room long enough to collect.. Follow for more stories like this.

Steve Jobs sat on a stage next to Bill Gates on 30 May 2007 and told him their memories together were longer than the road that stretched out ahead. It was a line from a Beatles song. He died four years later. The two of them had not shared a stage in public for almost twenty years. The venue was D5, the All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, California. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher moderated. Gates was 51. Jobs was 52. Between them they had built the two companies that had defined personal computing for a generation and had spent most of that generation suing, mocking and undermining each other on television. Jobs had just launched the iPhone four months earlier at Macworld in January. Shipping date was 29 June, exactly four weeks after this interview. Nobody in the room had held one yet. Apple's market cap was around $100 billion. Today it is over $3 trillion. Gates had announced in June 2006 that he would step away from day-to-day work at Microsoft to run the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation full time. He would make the handover official in July 2008, thirteen months after this interview. Microsoft was worth about $290 billion that night. Today it is over $3 trillion. Both companies would be worth 30 times more by the time one of the two men on that stage was dead. They told the story of how Microsoft wrote the floating point BASIC that shipped inside the Apple II. Apple paid $31,000. Woz would not finish it. Gates and his team did. Jobs flew out personally to pick up the cassette tapes. In 1977 that software made the Apple II usable. The deal was done on a handshake. They described negotiating the 1997 investment that saved Apple. Gates was in the middle of talks with Gil Amelio, Apple's CEO at the time. Jobs called him and said: "Don't worry about that negotiation with Gil Amelio. You can just talk to me now." Gates said he looked up and realized Jobs had just taken back the company. The $150 million investment and the five-year commitment to keep making Office for the Mac were announced at Macworld Boston a few weeks later. Apple stock jumped 33 percent that day. The company had been months from bankruptcy. They joked about the Mac vs PC ads. Jobs admitted he liked the PC guy. Gates admitted it was fine because the point of the ads was that the two guys like each other. Then Mossberg asked what the greatest misunderstanding about their relationship was. Jobs paused. Gates deadpanned: "We've kept our marriage secret for over a decade now." The room laughed for a full seven seconds. Then Jobs quoted the Beatles line. "You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead." Gates's eyes were visibly wet. Mossberg ended the interview on the spot. Jobs was diagnosed with a neuroendocrine tumor in October 2003, four years before this interview. He had already had surgery in 2004. He kept the recurrence private. He would get a liver transplant in 2009. He resigned as Apple CEO on 24 August 2011 and died on 5 October 2011 at 56. Gates has said in multiple interviews since that the D5 conversation is the one he thinks about most. The two of them had spent their twenties and thirties as rivals, their forties circling each other, and arrived at their fifties finally able to say in public what they had privately understood for decades: nobody else alive knew what the other one had built, because nobody else alive had built it with them. The hardest conversations to have are the ones you only get once. The best ones to find on tape are the ones where both people in the room already know it..

Elon Musk told a Wired Science interviewer in 2007 that SpaceX had no serious competition. SpaceX had never successfully reached orbit. The company's first three rockets had already blown up. He was 36 years old and about four months away from running out of money. He opened the interview joking that he was 12. The host walked through his resume: Stanford physics for two days, Zip2 sold for $37 million, PayPal sold to eBay for $1.5 billion, now rockets. Musk corrected him on a few numbers and then started describing a world nobody in the studio in 2007 was ready to buy. A reusable orbital rocket that would replace the Space Shuttle after NASA retired it in 2010. SpaceX did it: Dragon flew to the ISS in 2012, Crew Dragon in 2020.. A fleet of electric cars sold through showrooms designed like Apple stores. Tesla had not shipped a single vehicle yet. In 2007 the entire company was one unfinished Roadster prototype. He described the Roadster going 0 to 60 in under 4 seconds and told the host the cars would be serviced behind glass partitions with a coffee bar out front. A plan for Model 2 at $49,000 and Model 3 at $30,000. He called it "driving to mass market as rapidly as possible." Model S launched in 2012. Model 3 in 2017. Tesla is now worth more than Ford, GM and Toyota combined. A civilization on Mars. He called it "the holy grail." He said we should skip the Moon. "We saw that movie in the 60s: the remake is never as good." Starship first flew to orbital altitude in 2023.. Then the host asked who was chasing him. Musk said nobody serious. On paper this was absurd. SpaceX had failed three launches in a row. The company had enough cash for one more attempt. If Falcon 1 failed a fourth time, SpaceX was done. Tesla was burning money and would nearly go bankrupt the next year. Musk later said he was sleeping on friends' couches and borrowing money for rent by late 2008. Falcon 1 flew for the fourth time on 28 September 2008 and reached orbit. The first privately built liquid-fueled rocket ever to do it. NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion resupply contract three months later. Tesla closed a critical funding round on Christmas Eve 2008, hours before payroll would have bounced. Pretoria, 1971. Son of a Canadian model and a South African engineer. Bullied so badly in school that he was once thrown down a staircase and hospitalized. Taught himself to code at 10. Sold his first video game, Blastar, to a magazine at 12 for $500. Moved to Canada at 17 to avoid South African military service. Transferred to Penn. Enrolled at Stanford for a physics PhD and quit after two days to start Zip2 with his brother Kim.. in 1995. Sold it to Compaq in 1999 for $307 million. His cut was $22 million. He put $12 million of it into X.com, which became PayPal. eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion. His cut was $180 million. He put all of it into SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity. In 2007 none of those three companies had shipped a working product. In 2008 two of them nearly went bankrupt in the same week. Then the Falcon reached orbit and the Tesla funding closed.. The interview is a man describing a future he had already paid for in cash and could not yet prove to anyone else. The host kept asking how he would compete. He kept answering as if he already had. The confidence that reads as arrogance before you ship reads as foresight after.