Leader Megatron

@aelluswamy summarized the past decade very well. When I hopped in my friend’s model S in 2015, it hit me in a weird way: that car was running software all around, had a nice big touch screen (finally, an actual “screen”), was receiving frequent feature updates over the air, and came with a mobile app for essential remote controls. How could a big car company build something like this? Didn’t make sense back then (and still today for many). My interview with the Autopilot team early 2016 was very different than most interviews I’d ever taken. We first had a technical discussion on something I had built before, with several engineers and the executive in charge of the group at the time. An actual white board chat where we were all bouncing ideas on the matter together. The only places I’d ever seen the face of anyone above, at best, a team lead during interviews was at some small startups. Every 1:1 interview that followed was similarly practical. Real coding situations you’d encounter as an engineer, not useless LeetCode trick questions typically found in other big companies’ interviews. When we got done, the recruiter walked me through the office. Everyone was sitting literally next to each other: autopilot software, hardware, vehicle firmware, and many other teams interacting live without friction. Eventually, we walked past @elonmusk's desk and he was sitting right there, next to the engineering teams. Not in any separate ivory tower. One week in the job, and I was already in a team meeting with him brainstorming Autopilot technical challenges, exactly how it went during my interview. And that went on almost every single week, for the 8+ years that followed. It soon became pretty clear that Elon was directly behind that culture of pragmatic innovation, percolating through all aspects of the company. Week after week, I’ve witnessed that relentless drive to build features that make people’s lives better and safer, removing roadblocks and unnecessary layers one after another, systematically drilling down to the fundamental “why” - all of this while sleeping at the factory during Model 3 production hell, designing new vehicles, working on BOM reductions, and launching new factories across the globe. During that entire time, through all these chapters, news headlines and other difficult company-wide moments, and while landing rockets on drone ships in the ocean, Elon was still sitting with us in a room every week, often more, with the only objective of building things that will change humanity for the better. When he announced Tesla would soon start a humanoid robotics program to fuel a future of abundance at AI Day 2021, many once again laughed and doubted. Two years into the program, and Tesla is actively testing early versions of what could well be the first full-fledged humanoid robots equipped with articulated hands autonomously conducting real tasks in a real factory via an end-to-end neural net, running entirely on the bot’s compute hardware. And again, using 2D cameras only. Whether at Tesla or not, I’d say the same: without Elon, none of any of these amazing things would have ever happened. I can only imagine what a lesser future we’d be living without his involvement and dedication. If you own Tesla shares, please find 5 minutes to vote.