The Meaning of Life 65
medium which could completely change the economics of
the delivery of printed information.”^265
To find the same information before the Internet ex-
isted, we had to visit libraries or talk to wise men and
women. “It’s become a bit of a cliche recently to talk of it
as a breakthrough as important as the Gutenberg printing
press, but that doesn’t make it any less astounding. Or
less true,” Elon said. “You can be in the jungles of Kongo
and have a satellite link to the Internet and have access to
essentially the entire knowledge of humanity.”265,354
The best example of this collective knowledge of hu-
manity has to be Wikipedia, which is an online dictionary
written by anonymous Internet volunteers. Before Internet,
we had to spend hundreds of dollars on encyclopedias that
can’t be updated if something new happens. Wikipedia is
often updated within seconds after an event has happened.
But we must be careful. Knowledge found on the Internet
is not necessarily the truth. “Wikipedia is actually pretty
damn good,” Elon said. “It’s really incredible what you can
learn. It’s like 90 percent accurate. It’s just not clear what
90 percent.”^443
When Elon grew up in South Africa, he was exposed
to several energy crises. One of them occurred after United
Nations adopted a voluntary oil embargo against South
Africa to force the country to abandon the apartheid sys-
tem. “Between 1973 and 1984 the Republic of South Africa
had to pay R22 billion [The rand, R, is the currency of