The Meaning of Life.
“What’s the meaning of life?” a young Elon Musk began
to wonder. The reason why he asked the question was
that he had a dark childhood where he experienced an
existential crisis because he had read several books within
the philosophy area. “Which you should not read at age
fourteen,” he said.
He read books by philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche
and Arthur Schopenhauer.^357 “The spirit now wills his
own will, and he who had been lost to the world now
conquers the world,” Nietzsche wrote in the bookThus
Spoke Zarathustra. But one of his favorite books wasThe
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxyby Douglas Adams. It
covers several philosophical aspects and the storyline can
be described as a combination ofMonty PythonandStar
Wars. While reading it, Elon found his favorite spaceship
of all times:Heart of Gold. What he really admired was the
starship’s engine. The engineer who designed the starship
equippedHeart of Gold with an Infinite Improbability
Drive – an engine faster than the speed of light.^342
What Elon learned fromThe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxywas that the tough thing is figuring out what ques-
tions to ask. But once you have it all figured out, the rest
is easy. He realized we humans should aspire to increase
the scope and scale of human consciousness to understand
what questions to ask. The only thing that makes sense