What Do I Do Now? 57
that encourages innovation as well. Let’s say I had been
constrained to live in South Africa, where I was born. I
would not have been able to achieve a fraction of what I
have here.”^52
Elon arrived to the US thanks to a scholarship and
enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, also known as
Penn. While studying at Penn, Elon shared a house with
Adeo Ressi, who was another Penn student as well as an
outsider like Elon. “He was the biggest dork I’ve ever met,”
Ressi said of Elon years later.
Ressi, the son of an engineer and a social worker, grew
up in New York. During the summer, while other children
went on summer camps, Ressi lived in the experimental
city Arcosanti in the middle of the Arizona desert. The Ital-
ian architect, Paolo Soleri, had designed the city. He used
a concept called arcology – a combination of architecture
and ecology. “I had the opportunity to experience a very
utopian vision of the world,” the youngest inhabitant in the
city, Ressi, said. While at Penn, Ressi ran a newspaper with
a focus on environmental issues:The Green Times. As his
final thesis, he tried to submit this newspaper, but his thesis
professor didn’t accept it, so he never got a degree.^46
When Elon and Ressi first met, they lived in a giant
campus dorm. But they didn’t like the environment, so
they decided to rent a large house outside of the campus
area. “We were both transfer students and they stuck us
in these giant dorms and we just wanted to get out,” Ressi
said.^60 They would later move to an even larger house with
fourteen rooms. Spent kegs with plywood on top became