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Scoop: SpaceX is aiming to IPO in 2026. No longer spinning off Starlink

The most overlooked predictor of extraordinary work is a person's capacity to completely vanish when a problem requires it. When Cambridge closed for the plague in 1665, Newton went home to a Lincolnshire farmhouse and saw no one for 18 months. In that single stretch of isolation he developed calculus, the theory of colour and the foundations of gravity. Andrew Wiles disappeared into his attic for seven years to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, telling only his wife. Bill Gates still does two “Think Weeks” a year, alone in a cabin in the Pacific Northwest with no visitors. These individuals will have stretches of normal life with meetings attended, emails answered and commitments kept. Then a hard problem appears and the person becomes unreachable. Calls unreturned for 10 days, colleagues vaguely informed with no further detail. They reappear with something nobody could have produced through availability. Breakthroughs need a level of immersion that only happens when nothing else is allowed in. Most workplaces are now engineered to make this impossible: Slack, shared calendars, the expectation that you'll respond by EoD. People who do truly original work sit at the edges of organisations and accept the social cost of going dark. The hardest thing to negotiate in a career is the right to vanish.