What Do I Do Now? 56
Canada wasn’t exciting enough to Elon and he decided
early on that he wanted to live where the really exciting
breakthroughs happened: United States. “If you want to
have a significant impact on the world, the United States
is the best place to do that,” he said.^316
“I’m not suggesting that things couldn’t be better,” Elon
said. “We should be asking ourselves, have we made the
environment better or worse?”^316 He compared it with
democracy. While democracy is the least bad government
system, the US is least bad at encouraging innovation
compared with other countries.^351 “However, if you look at
new technology, it’s crazy how much of it comes out of the
United States,” Elon said. “If you want to do cutting edge
stuff, you come to the United States. It’s not so much that
there aren’t great entrepreneurial opportunities in China
and India, they are huge – especially for people who were
born and raised there. But it’s not cutting-edge technology.
Name three things that came out of India or China in the
last 200 years.”^375
Winston Churchill had a saying, “You can always count
on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried
everything else.” The reason to why US is the country
where you succeed is that US is open to new ideas. Then it
becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. US attracts people with
new ideas because of its openness to new ideas and the
acceptance of failure.^354 “If I had been born in some cave, I
suppose I would still try to be innovative, but there would
be limits,” Elon said. “You have to have the environment