@ElonClipsX
Elon Musk: A lot of the negativity stems from the axiomatic flaw that the economic pie is static, that it's a zero-sum game. “At my first company I didn't have any money, I just had $100,000 in student debt. That was a company in the very early days, of the Internet, called Zip2. But for all companies subsequently, I basically doubled down. I took the money from Zip2, invested it in X.com-PayPal, and then took the PayPal money, invested that in creating Tesla and SpaceX. It didn't feel right that I should ask investors to invest if I was not prepared to invest my own money. I think the whole other people's money thing is not right. You want to have skin in the game. As a result of that, I own a lot of shares in the company. And the better the company does, the more valuable the shares are. But that's because the pie has grown. And so you have to say what's at the root of a lot of the negativity is an axiomatic flaw. That the pie is static, that it's a zero-sum game, that if someone else succeeds, it's because they took more than their fair share of this fixed pie. But it's not a fixed pie. Obviously, the economic pie has grown considerably from what it was in the past. The output of goods and services, the productivity per person is dramatically greater than it has been in the past. So when you create a new company and you create new products and services, you're growing the amount of goods and services available to people. So you've not taken anything away from anyone. You've created something new and you've given people new products and services they didn't have before. We didn't use to have an iPhone, we didn't use to have computers. We didn't use to have cars or be able to fly in airplanes. We didn't use to have many of the life-saving medicines that we have today. These are all new things. The pie has grown tremendously.” From: Interview with Ben Shapiro, January 24, 2024