The Outsider 83
fit perfectly inside of electric vehicles. The large drawback
with them is that it takes a long time to charge the battery
compared with the time it takes to fill up the tank in a
gasoline car.
At the same time as when Elon decided to save the
world from its dependency on oil, Internet had begun to
grow. His choices now were to either remain at Stanford
and just watch as the Internet changed the world or leave
Stanford and come back later. He thought the probability
to succeed was much higher if he pursued the Internet
compared with the research he made, so after 48 hours,
Elon said goodbye to Stanford. “I thought that if I spend
five to six years working on a PhD at Stanford and then
came up with the idea that this wasn’t possible. That would
really be terrible,” Elon said.^233 In hindsight, he thought
that failure would have been the most likely outcome of
the PhD studies – the technology wouldn’t have worked as
expected.^350
Elon decided not to quit the graduate program, but to
get a deferment to give the Internet a chance for six months.
If this Internet turned out to be a flaw, or if his ideas failed,
he could always return and pursue the graduate program.
“It was a tough decision,” Elon said. “I’m not a born risk
taker. I also had a scholarship and financial aid, which I’d
lose. Being young helped. So did the fact that the field was
literally brand-new, with no experts. But I’m a realist, so I
hedged it and took a deferred admission from September
to January.”^265
When Elon told the chairman of the department at