Andrew Baisley

How to Hand Darn

If you were as inspired as I was by Luke Deverell’s work over at Darn & Dusted, Reddit member AnalogDimitri has a pretty nice guide on how you can learn to hand darn something yourself. Tools you’ll need: some scissors, heavy sewing needles (maybe some darning needles), and heavy thread (such as topstitching thread). You can buy these supplies at Amazon or Wawak, although I recommend just going to your local sewing supplies store. 

Note, when you get to the image gallery, you may have to click the “load entire album” link at the bottom in order to see everything. The guide is pretty thorough, so there’s a lot of stuff here. 

wood-is-good:

Cabin Fog-2 (by mikeyasp)

It’s a wood thing :)

Boiled, scrambled, sunny side up -- the egg is prized for its versatility as a kitchen essential and a meal enhancer for both its delicious yolk and egg whites, and it's clear the simple egg should not be destined to be just a breakfast staple. Food, People, Places have created this video that highlights 12 different ways to prepare the beloved egg. Breakfast, lunch, dessert, drinks -- the possbilities are endless; what are your favorite ways to prepare eggs?

Read more at Hypebeast.com

Somewhere in the ever-flowing river of flotsam that is Twitter, a simple data point offered by a college commencement speaker jumped out at me before being borne away on the tide of immediacy. This bit of data:

The speaker was ABC journalist Martha Raddatz, and the point is the key one in the intro: The graduates have spent half their lives with America at war.

It's a startling idea, but an incorrect one. The percentage is almost certainly much higher than that.

Using somewhat subjective definitions of "at war" -- Korea counts but Kosovo doesn't in our analysis, for example -- we endeavored to figure out how much of each person's life has been spent with America at war. We used whole years for both the age and the war, so the brief Gulf War is given a full year, and World War II includes 1941. These are estimates.

But the beginning of the conflict in Afghanistan in (late) 2001 means that anyone born in the past 13 years has never known an America that isn't at war. Anyone born after 1984 has likely seen America at war for at least half of his or her life. And that's a lot of Americans.

These figures shift easily. An end to the conflict in Afghanistan (and, if you include it, the overlapping fight against the Islamic State) means that the percentage of time those young people have lived in a state of war will decline quickly.

But that state of war, we are told (I am too young to know better) feels different than America during World War II or, particularly for the college-aged, Vietnam. Moreso than those wars, war today is distant, fought on our behalf.

That's Raddatz's other, perhaps more important point: Young Americans have lived in a country at war for almost their whole lives, but they have to be reminded of it.

Welcome to In Focus, a feature where writer Hannah Frishberg profiles some of the great street photographers of New York City's past and present.

Native Brooklynite and chronicler of street fashion, Jamel Shabazz has spent the last 40 years photographing New York City. He defines himself as a documentarian of African-American culture, and his photos often exude a pure joy—"I'm drawn to happiness," he says—even though much of his work captures New York during the 1980s crack epidemic, an era often painted as dangerous and depressing. But this is when Shabazz picked up his first camera, at the age of 15. Inspired by his photographer father, he began taking photos of his peers in Flatbush, launching a career chronicling the nascent hip-hop movement and the street fashions it spawned. His work has a wide ranging appeal as to be in the permanent collections of the Whitney and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, as well as having been featured in the Addis Photo Festival in Ethiopia and Cheryll Dunn's 2010 documentary "Everybody Street." He has five photo books out (and one in the making) and a documentary about his life currently cycling through theaters internationally. He's best known for his artistic color portraits, spontaneously taken in the streets, that feel both fresh and full of nostalgia. Shabazz talked with us about his early years, and why he finds New York today so inspiring.

["The Righteous Brothers," Brooklyn, circa 1980.]

Why do you think street photography is important?
It's intriguing. It's real. There's just so much out there in the street, in the landscape. I've sat in a studio before and it doesn't have the energy of the street. So it's the spontaneity of the street that captures my eye. It's both the subject matter in New York City itself and also the urban landscape, the backdrops. That's why I like the streets. There are so many elements going on at one time.

[Right: "Hot Fun in the Summertime," Brooklyn, 1980. Right: "Tony Rome and Crew," Brooklyn, 1982.]

Do you find that New York's people speak louder than the city itself, in photography?
I think it's the combination of both. In the early days, I focused a lot on people, but as New York started to change, I looked at the contrast between people and landscape. So you'll find that in a lot of my work both have a very important voice. It's a collaboration.

[Left: "Rude Boy," Brooklyn, 1981. Right: "Sorority Sisters," Brooklyn, 1981.]

Most of your subjects seem very happy. Do you ask people to smile? Even in your photos from the 1980s, during what could be considered a dark time for New York, everyone in your photos seems animated.
I'm drawn to happiness. I never tell my subjects to smile. I capture them in that state, and as a photographer, that's the key. I approach the person having a good time. If a person's not smiling, that's not good language. Everyone I photograph for the most part was smiling before I approached them. People in my photographs are at peace.

["Back in the Days," the Lower East Side, 1982.]

What made you move on from photographing Flatbush, Brooklyn, where you grew up? Was there a single incident, or was it a more general transition?
It was time to move on. I spent my early 20s photographing that community. I was also photographing other areas as well, but Flatbush was my foundation. Of course, most of my subjects were at the local high school. But when they graduated I moved on too, although I would often return.

[Left: "Best Friends," Brooklyn, 1980. Right: Untitled, 1984.]

Your father was also a photographer. What did he think of your work?
My father was a trained documentary photographer in the navy. Once he came home from the navy, he got into wedding photography and the fine arts. For my photography, he was a bit apprehensive at first. He was my first teacher; he felt I needed to be more diverse in my creativity. He was very critical when I started developing my own prints. His critiques made me a better photographer. At first he thought my photos were just snapshots, but as time went on he was very impressed with the work I created.

["Street Photographers," Times Square, 1983.]

Although your photos never show it explicitly, do you feel your body of work speaks to drug culture?
I think that people know the time and the community. When I look at the photos, I see the crack epidemic. I see so many who were impacted by crack, both directly and indirectly. I might see a photo of a young man who lost his girlfriend to a crack overdose. There are so many photos centered around crack cocaine, and there are so many other photographs I've captured overtime that show the other side of the drug war.

["Diversity," 1997.]

Do you find New York less inspiring to photograph today than it was a few decades ago?
New York today is just as inspiring. If anything, it's more diverse. Back in the days, I shot one particular community for the most part. But today, with so many people visiting New York, I find it just as interesting as it was 20 or 30 years ago.

[Left: "Home Boys," Brooklyn, 1982. Right: "Fly Girls," Jamaica, Queens, 1990.]

Do you pose your subjects?
It depends. Every situation is really unique. In certain situations, a person is so natural I don't feel the need to change everything. Or sometimes I find someone who'll give me permission to photograph them, but they don't know what to do. Twenty or 30 years ago I did a lot of posing, but now I do a lot of documentary photography.

["Man and Dog," the Lower East Side, 1980.]

How did you catch the shot title Man and Dog? Were you already in the middle of the street when they started circling each other?
Pretty much. That's a clear result of my father's teaching. He told me, "When you travel, always have your camera out and at the ready." On that particular day, despite the rain, I knew something was going to happen. So I positioned myself at the right angle and all of a sudden he started to lift the dog off the street. It was being in the right place at the right time.

[Left: "Back in the Days," 1980. Right: Untitled, 1980.]

What about the shot of the man on the unicycle?
That's another example of just being ready all the time. I was on 42nd Street with my camera out, and saw him and the picture just made sense. It's pretty much a Saturday night on 42nd Street.

["Flying High," Brooklyn, 1980.]

And the series of the boys doing flips on the mattress?
Just like the man swinging the dog, those photographs were taken when my father was just starting to teach me the craft of photography. That particular photograph was taken in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. I saw these kids having fun on the mattress. I took three shots. Normally I just take one shot, but that day I took three very unique photographs, and each one was a winner. Anticipate the moment.

[Left: "Rush Hour," Brooklyn, 1980. Right: "Biker Boys," Brooklyn, 1980.]

If you had to pick - the subway or the streets?
It's a balance between the two. I'm in favor of the streets because they're a lot more vast and there's a lot more to see. The subway became like my studio for fashion.

["New York Underground," Brooklyn, 1980.]

Do you do anything different when you're photographing underground?
Not really. My process is pretty much the same. I have my camera out and at the ready. The only easy part about the subway is that the light is the same; on the streets it's changing. Most of the subway cars have similar lights, but when you're above ground you've got to study the light.

[Left: "Three the Hard Way," Queens, 1980. Right: "Phone Sex," 2000.]

You began photographing when you turned 15. What was your first camera?
My very first camera was my mother's cheap Kodak 110. It was a plastic camera. It was a small compact camera. Maybe 9 inches. It might have been smaller. Very small, very light. It was effective for that time.

What kind of camera do you use now?
I use a wide range of cameras. My primary camera is a Canon 5D, and I have a Contact G2, which I use for documentary photography.

["Call Me," Manhattan, 2005.]

· Jamel Shabazz [official]
· In Focus archives [Curbed]

This is Part 1 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies.

__________

PDF and ebook options: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview here), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series:

___________

Last month, I got a surprising phone call.

Elon Musk, for those unfamiliar, is the world’s raddest man.

I’ll use this post to explore how he became a self-made billionaire and the real-life inspiration for Iron Man’s Tony Stark, but for the moment, I’ll let Richard Branson explain things briefly:1

Whatever skeptics have said can’t be done, Elon has gone out and made real. Remember in the 1990s, when we would call strangers and give them our credit-card numbers? Elon dreamed up a little thing called PayPal. His Tesla Motors and SolarCity companies are making a clean, renewable-energy future a reality…his SpaceX [is] reopening space for exploration…it’s a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he’s building spacecraft to help us leave it.

So no, that was not a phone call I had been expecting.

A few days later, I found myself in pajama pants, pacing frantically around my apartment, on the phone with Elon Musk. We had a discussion about Tesla, SpaceX, the automotive and aerospace and solar power industries, and he told me what he thought confused people about each of these things. He suggested that if these were topics I’d be interested in writing about, and it might be helpful, I could come out to California and sit down with him in person for a longer discussion.

For me, this project was one of the biggest no-brainers in history. Not just because Elon Musk is Elon Musk, but because here are two separate items that have been sitting for a while in my “Future Post Topics” document, verbatim:

– “electric vs hybrid vs gas cars, deal with tesla, sustainable energy”

– “spacex, musk, mars?? how learn to do rockets??”

I already wanted to write about these topics, for the same reason I wrote about Artificial Intelligence—I knew they would be hugely important in the future but that I also didn’t understand them well enough. And Musk is leading a revolution in both of these worlds.

It would be like if you had plans to write about the process of throwing lightning bolts and then one day out of the blue Zeus called and asked if you wanted to question him about a lot of stuff.

So it was on. The plan was that I’d come out to California, see the Tesla and SpaceX factories, meet with some of the engineers at each company, and have an extended sit down with Musk. Exciting.

The first order of business was to have a full panic. I needed to not sit down with these people—these world-class engineers and rocket scientists—and know almost nothing about anything. I had a lot of quick learning to do.

The problem with Elon Fucking Musk, though, is that he happens to be involved in all of the following industries:

• Automotive
• Aerospace
• Solar Energy
• Energy Storage
• Satellite
• High-Speed Ground Transportation
• And, um, Multi-Planetary Expansion

Zeus would have been less stressful.

So I spent the two weeks leading up to the West Coast visit reading and reading and reading, and it became quickly clear that this was gonna need to be a multi-post series. There’s a lot to get into.

We’ll dive deep into Musk’s companies and the industries surrounding them in the coming posts, but today, let’s start by going over exactly who this dude is and why he’s such a big deal.12^{← click these}

The Making of Elon Musk

Note: There’s a great biography on Musk coming out May 19th, written by tech writer Ashlee Vance. I was able to get an advance copy, and it’s been a key source in putting together these posts. I’m going to keep to a brief overview of his life here—if you want the full story, get the bio.

Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa. Childhood wasn’t a great time for him—he had a tough family life and never fit in well at school.2 But, like you often read in the bios of extraordinary people, he was an avid self-learner early on. His brother Kimbal has said Elon would often read for 10 hours a day—a lot of science fiction and eventually, a lot of non-fiction too. By fourth grade, he was constantly buried in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

One thing you’ll learn about Musk as you read these posts is that he thinks of humans as computers, which, in their most literal sense, they are. A human’s hardware is his physical body and brain. His software is the way he learns to think, his value system, his habits, his personality. And learning, for Musk, is simply the process of “downloading data and algorithms into your brain.”3 Among his many frustrations with formal classroom learning is the “ridiculously slow download speed” of sitting in a classroom while a teacher explains something, and to this day, most of what he knows he’s learned through reading.

He became consumed with a second fixation at the age of nine when he got his hands on his first computer, the Commodore VIC-20. It came with five kilobytes of memory and a “how to program” guide that was intended to take the user six months to complete. Nine-year-old Elon finished it in three days. At 12, he used his skills to create a video game called Blastar, which he told me was “a trivial game…but better than Flappy Bird.” But in 1983, it was good enough to be sold to a computer magazine for $500 ($1,200 in today’s money)—not bad for a 12-year-old.3

Musk never felt much of a connection to South Africa—he didn’t fit in with the jockish, white Afrikaner culture, and it was a nightmare country for a potential entrepreneur. He saw Silicon Valley as the Promised Land, and at the age of 17, he left South Africa forever. He started out in Canada, which was an easier place to immigrate to because his mom is a Canadian citizen, and a few years later, used a college transfer to the University of Pennsylvania as a way into the US.4

In college, he thought about what he wanted to do with his life, using as his starting point the question, “What will most affect the future of humanity?” The answer he came up with was a list of five things: “the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.”4

He was iffy about how positive the impact of the latter two would be, and though he was optimistic about each of the first three, he never considered at the time that he’d ever be involved in space exploration. That left the internet and sustainable energy as his options.

He decided to go with sustainable energy. After finishing college, he enrolled in a Stanford PhD program to study high energy density capacitors, a technology aimed at coming up with a more efficient way than traditional batteries to store energy—which he knew could be key to a sustainable energy future and help accelerate the advent of an electric car industry.

But two days into the program, he got massive FOMO because it was 1995 and he “couldn’t stand to just watch the internet go by—[he] wanted to jump in and make it better.”5 So he dropped out and decided to try the internet instead.

His first move was to go try to get a job at the monster of the 1995 internet, Netscape. The tactic he came up with was to walk into the lobby, uninvited, stand there awkwardly, be too shy to talk to anyone, and walk out.

Musk bounced back from the unimpressive career beginning by teaming up with his brother Kimbal (who had followed Elon to the US) to start their own company—Zip2. Zip2 was like a primitive combination of Yelp and Google Maps, far before anything like either of those existed. The goal was to get businesses to realize that being in the Yellow Pages would become outdated at some point and that it was a good idea to get themselves into an online directory. The brothers had no money, slept in the office and showered at the YMCA, and Elon, their lead programmer, sat obsessively at his computer working around the clock. In 1995, it was hard to convince businesses that the internet was important—many told them that advertising on the internet sounded like “the dumbest thing they had ever heard of”6—but eventually, they began to rack up customers and the company grew. It was the heat of the 90s internet boom, startup companies were being snatched up left and right, and in 1999, Compaq snatched up Zip2 for $307 million. Musk, who was 27, made off with $22 million.

In what would become a recurring theme for Musk, he finished one venture and immediately dove into a new, harder, more complex one. If he were following the dot-com millionaire rulebook, he’d have known that what you’re supposed to do after hitting it big during the 90s boom is either retire off into the sunset of leisure and angel investing, or if you still have ambition, start a new company with someone else’s money. But Musk doesn’t tend to follow normal rulebooks, and he plunged three quarters of his net worth into his new idea, an outrageously bold plan to build essentially an online bank—replete with checking, savings, and brokerage accounts—called X.com. This seems less insane now, but in 1999, an internet startup trying to compete with the large banks was unheard of.

In the same building that X.com worked out of was another internet finance company called Confinity, founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. One of X.com’s many features was an easy money-transfer service, and later, Confinity would develop a similar service. Both companies began to notice a strong demand for their money-transfer service, which put the two companies in sudden furious competition with each other, and they finally decided to just merge into what we know today as PayPal.

This brought together a lot of egos and conflicting opinions—Musk was now joined by Peter Thiel and a bunch of other now-super-successful internet guys—and despite the company growing rapidly, things inside the office did not go smoothly. The conflicts boiled over in late 2000, and when Musk was on a half fundraising trip / half honeymoon (with his first wife Justine), the anti-Musk crowd staged a coup and replaced him as CEO with Thiel. Musk handled this surprisingly well, and to this day, he says he doesn’t agree with that decision but he understands why they did it. He stayed on the team in a senior role, continued investing in the company, and played an instrumental role in selling the company to eBay in 2002, for $1.5 billion. Musk, the company’s largest shareholder, walked away with $180 million (after taxes).5

If there was ever a semblance of the normal life rulebook in Musk’s decision-making, it was at this point in his life—as a beyond-wealthy 31-year-old in 2002—that he dropped the rulebook into the fire for good.

The subject of what he did over the next 13 years leading up to today is what we’ll thoroughly explore over the rest of this series. For now, here’s the short story:

In 2002, before the sale of PayPal even went through, Musk started voraciously reading about rocket technology, and later that year, with $100 million, he started one of the most unthinkable and ill-advised ventures of all time: a rocket company called SpaceX, whose stated purpose was to revolutionize the cost of space travel in order to make humans a multi-planetary species by colonizing Mars with at least a million people over the next century.

Mm hm.

Then, in 2004, as that “project” was just getting going, Musk decided to multi-task by launching the second-most unthinkable and ill-advised venture of all time: an electric car company called Tesla, whose stated purpose was to revolutionize the worldwide car industry by significantly accelerating the advent of a mostly-electric-car world—in order to bring humanity on a huge leap toward a sustainable energy future. Musk funded this one personally as well, pouring in $70 million, despite the tiny fact that the last time a US car startup succeeded was Chrysler in 1925, and the last time someone started a successful electric car startup was never.

And since why the fuck not, a couple years later, in 2006, he threw in $10 million to found, with his cousins, another company, called SolarCity, whose goal was to revolutionize energy production by creating a large, distributed utility that would install solar panel systems on millions of people’s homes, dramatically reducing their consumption of fossil fuel-generated electricity and ultimately “accelerating mass adoption of sustainable energy.”7

If you were observing all of this in those four years following the PayPal sale, you’d think it was a sad story. A delusional internet millionaire, comically in over his head with a slew of impossible projects, doing everything he could to squander his fortune.

By 2008, this seemed to be playing out, to the letter. SpaceX had figured out how to build rockets, just not rockets that actually worked—it had attempted three launches so far and all three had blown up before reaching orbit. In order to bring in any serious outside investment or payload contracts, SpaceX had to show that they could successfully launch a rocket—but Musk said he had funds left for one and only one more launch. If the fourth launch also failed, SpaceX would be done.

Meanwhile, up in the Bay Area, Tesla was also in the shit. They had yet to deliver their first car—the Tesla Roadster—to the market, which didn’t look good to the outside world. Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag made the Tesla Roadster its #1 tech company fail of 2007. This would have been more okay if the global economy hadn’t suddenly crashed, hitting the automotive industry the absolute hardest and sucking dry any flow of investments into car companies, especially new and unproven ones. And Tesla was running out of money fast.

During this double implosion of his career, the one thing that held stable and strong in Musk’s life was his marriage of eight years, if by stable and strong you mean falling apart entirely in a soul-crushing, messy divorce.

Darkness.

But here’s the thing—Musk is not a fool, and he hadn’t built bad companies. He had built very, very good companies. It’s just that creating a reliable rocket is unfathomably difficult, as is launching a startup car company, and because no one wanted to invest in what seemed to the outside world like overambitious and probably-doomed ventures—especially during a recession—Musk had to rely on his own personal funds. PayPal made him rich, but not rich enough to keep these companies afloat for very long on his own. Without outside money, both SpaceX and Tesla had a short runway. So it’s not that SpaceX and Tesla were bad—it’s that they needed more time to succeed, and they were out of time.

And then, in the most dire hour, everything turned around.

First, in September of 2008, SpaceX launched their fourth rocket—and their last one if it didn’t successfully put a payload into orbit—and it succeeded. Perfectly.

That was enough for NASA to say “fuck it, let’s give this Musk guy a try,” and it took a gamble, offering SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to carry out 12 launches for the agency. Runway extended. SpaceX saved.

The next day, on Christmas Eve 2008, when Musk scrounged up the last money he could manage to keep Tesla going, Tesla’s investors reluctantly agreed to match his investment. Runway extended. Five months later, things began looking up, and another critical investment came in—$50 million from Daimler. Tesla saved.

While 2008 hardly marked the end of the bumps in the road for Musk, the overarching story of the next seven years would be the soaring, earthshaking success of Elon Musk and his companies.

Since their first three failed launches, SpaceX has launched 20 times—all successes. NASA is now a regular client, and one of many, since the innovations at SpaceX have allowed companies to launch things to space for the lowest cost in history. Within those 20 launches have been all kinds of “firsts” for a commercial rocket company—to this day, the four entities in history who have managed to launch a spacecraft into orbit and successfully return it to Earth are the US, Russia, China—and SpaceX. SpaceX is currently testing their new spacecraft, which will bring humans to space, and they’re busy at work on the much larger rocket that will be able to bring 100 people to Mars at once. A recent investment by Google and Fidelity has valued the company at $12 billion.

Tesla’s Model S has become a smashing success, blowing away the automotive industry with the highest ever Consumer Reports rating of a 99/100, and the highest safety rating in history from the National Highway Safety Administration, a 5.4/5. Now they’re getting closer and closer to releasing their true disruptor—the much more affordable Model 3—and the company’s market cap is just under $30 billion. They’re also becoming the world’s most formidable battery company, currently working on their giant Nevada “Gigafactory,” which will more than double the world’s total annual production of lithium-ion batteries.

SolarCity, which went public in 2012, now has a market cap of just under $6 billion and has become the largest installer of solar panels in the US. They’re now building the country’s largest solar panel-manufacturing factory in Buffalo, and they’ll likely be entering into a partnership with Tesla to package their product with Tesla’s new home battery, the Powerwall.

And since that’s not enough, in his spare time, Musk is pushing the development a whole new mode of transport—the Hyperloop.

In a couple of years, when their newest factories are complete, Musk’s three companies will employ over 30,000 people. After nearly going broke in 2008 and telling a friend that he and his wife may have to “move into his wife’s parents’ basement,”8 Musk’s current net worth clocks in at $12.9 billion.

All of this has made Musk somewhat of a living legend. In building a successful automotive startup and its worldwide network of Supercharger stations, Musk has been compared to visionary industrialists like Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. The pioneering work of SpaceX on rocket technology has led to comparisons to Howard Hughes, and many have drawn parallels between Musk and Thomas Edison because of the advancements in engineering Musk has been able to achieve across industries. Perhaps most often, he’s compared to Steve Jobs, for his remarkable ability to disrupt giant, long-stagnant industries with things customers didn’t even know they wanted. Some believe he’ll be remembered in a class of his own. Tech writer and Musk biographer Ashlee Vance has suggested that what Musk is building “has the potential to be much grander than anything Hughes or Jobs produced. Musk has taken industries like aerospace and automotive that America seemed to have given up on and recast them as something new and fantastic.”9

Chris Anderson, who runs TED Talks, calls Musk “the world’s most remarkable living entrepreneur.” Others know him as “the real life Iron Man,” and not for no reason—Jon Favreau actually sent Robert Downey, Jr. to spend time with Musk in the SpaceX factory prior to filming the first Iron Man movie so he could model his character off of Musk.10 He’s even been on The Simpsons.

And this is the man I was somehow on the phone with as I frantically paced back and forth in my apartment, in pajama pants.

On the call, he made it clear that he wasn’t looking for me to advertise his companies—he only wanted me to help explain what’s going on in the worlds surrounding those companies and why the things happening with electric cars, sustainable energy production, and aerospace matter so much.

He seemed particularly bored with people spending time writing about him—he feels there are so many things of critical importance going on in the industries he’s involved in, and every time someone writes about him, he wishes they were writing about fossil fuel supply or battery advancements or the importance of making humanity multi-planetary (this is especially clear in the intro to the upcoming biography on him, when the author explains how not interested Musk was in having a bio written about him).

So I’m sure this first post, whose title is “Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man,” will annoy him.

But I have reasons. To me, there are two worthy areas of exploration in this post series:

1) To understand why Musk is doing what he’s doing. He deeply believes that he’s taken on the most pressing possible causes to give humanity the best chance of a good future. I want to explore those causes in depth and the reasons he’s so concerned about them.

2) To understand why Musk is able to do what he’s doing. There are a few people in each generation who dramatically change the world, and those people are worth studying. They do things differently from everyone else—and I think there’s a lot to learn from them.

So on my visit to California, I had two goals in mind: to understand as best I could what Musk and his teams were working on so feverishly and why it mattered so much, and to try to gain insight into what it is that makes him so capable of changing the world.

___________

Visiting the Factories

The Tesla Factory (in Northern CA) and the SpaceX Factory (in Southern CA), in addition to both being huge, and rad, have a lot in common.

Both factories are bright and clean, shiny and painted white, with super high ceilings. Both feel more like laboratories than traditional factories. And in both places, the engineers doing white collar jobs and the technicians doing blue collar jobs are deliberately placed in the same working quarters so they’ll work closely together and give each other feedback—and Musk believes it’s crucial for those designing the machines to be around those machines as they’re being manufactured. And while a traditional factory environment wouldn’t be ideal for an engineer on a computer and a traditional office environment wouldn’t be a good workplace for a technician, a clean, futuristic laboratory feels right for both professions. There are almost no closed offices in either factory—everyone is out in the open, exposed to everyone else.

When I pulled up to the Tesla factory (joined by Andrew), I was first taken by its size—and when I looked it up, I wasn’t surprised to see that it has the second largest building footprint (aka base area) in the world.

The factory was formerly jointly owned by GM and Toyota, who sold it to Tesla in 2010. We started off the day with a full tour of the factory—a sea of red robots making cars and being silly:6

And other cool things, like a vast section of the factory that just makes the car battery, and another that houses the 20,000 pound rolls of aluminum they slice and press and weld into Teslas.

And this giant press, which costs $50 million and presses metal with 4,500 tons of pressure (the same pressure you’d get if you stacked 2,500 cars on top of something).

The Tesla factory is working on upping its output from 30,000 cars/year to 50,000, or about 1,000 per week. They seemed to be pumping out cars incredibly quickly, so I was blown away to learn that Toyota had been on a 1,000 cars per day clip when they inhabited the factory.

I had a chance to visit the Tesla design studio (no pictures allowed), where there were designers sketching car designs on computer screens and, on the other side of the room, full-size car models made of clay. An actual-size clay version of the upcoming Model 3 was surrounded by specialists sculpting it with tiny instruments and blades, shaving off fractions of a millimeter to examine the way light bounced off the curves. There was also a 3D printer that could quickly “print” out a shoe-sized 3D model of a sketched Tesla design so a designer could actually hold their design and look at it from different angles. Deliciously futuristic.

The next day was the SpaceX factory, which might be even cooler, but the building contains advanced rocket technology, which according to the government is “weapons technology,” and apparently random bloggers aren’t allowed to take pictures of weapons technology.

Anyway, after the tours, I had a chance to sit down with several senior engineers and designers at both companies. They’d explain that they were a foremost expert in their field, I’d explain that I had recently figured out how big the building would be that could hold all humans, and we’d begin our discussion. I’d ask them about their work, their thoughts on the company as a whole and the broader industry, and then I’d ask them about their relationship with Elon and what it was like to work for him. Without exception, they were really nice-seeming, friendly people, who all came off as ridiculously smart but in a non-pretentious way. Musk has said he has a strict “no assholes” hiring policy, and I could see that at work in these meetings.

So what’s Musk like as a boss?

Let’s start by seeing what the internet says—there’s a Quora thread that poses the question: “What is it like to work with Elon Musk?”

The first answer is from a longtime SpaceX employee who no longer works there, who describes the day that their 3rd launch failed, a devastating blow for the company and for all the people who had worked for years to try to make it work.

She describes Elon emerging from mission command to address the company and delivering a rousing speech. She refers to Elon’s “infinite wisdom” and says, “I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that.  It was the most impressive display of leadership that I have ever witnessed.”

Right below that answer is another answer, from an anonymous SpaceX engineer, who describes working for Musk like this:

“You can always tell when someone’s left an Elon meeting: they’re defeated…nothing you ever do will be good enough so you have to find your own value, not depending on praise to get you through your obviously insufficient 80 hour work weeks.”

Reading about Musk online and in Vance’s book, I was struck by how representative both of these Quora comments were of whole camps of opinion on working for Musk. Doing so seems to bring out a tremendous amount of adoration and a tremendous amount of exasperation, sometimes with a tone of bitterness—and even more oddly, much of the time, you hear both sides of this story expressed by the same person. For example, later in the comment of the effusive Quora commenter comes “Working with him isn’t a comfortable experience, he is never satisfied with himself so he is never really satisfied with anyone around him…the challenge is that he is a machine and the rest of us aren’t.” And the frustrated anonymous commenter later concedes that the way Elon is “is understandable” given the enormity of the task at hand, and that “it is a great company and I do love it.”

My own talks with Musk’s engineers and designers told a similar story. I was told: “Elon always wants to know, ‘Why are we not going faster?’ He always wants bigger, better, faster” by the same person who a few minutes later was emphasizing how fair and thoughtful Musk tends to be in handling the terms for a recently fired employee.

The same person who told me he has “lots of sleepless nights” said in the adjacent sentence how happy he is to be at the company and that he hopes to “never leave.”

One senior executive described interacting with Musk like this: “Any conversation’s fairly high stakes because he’ll be very opinionated, and he can go deeper than you expect or are prepared for or deeper than your knowledge goes on a given topic, and it does feel like a high wire act interacting with him, especially when you find yourself in a [gulp] technical disagreement.”7 The same executive, who had previously worked at a huge tech company, also called Musk “the most grounded billionaire I’ve ever worked with.”

What I began to understand is that the explanation for both sides of the story—the cult-like adulation right alongside the grudging willingness to endure what sounds like blatant hell—comes down to respect. The people who work for Musk, no matter how they feel about his management style, feel an immense amount of respect—for his intelligence, for his work ethic, for his guts, and for the gravity of the missions he’s undertaken, missions that make all other potential jobs seem trivial and pointless.

Many of the people I talked to also alluded to their respect for his integrity. One way this integrity comes through is in his consistency. He’s been saying the same things in interviews for a decade, often using the same exact phrasing many years apart. He says what he really means, no matter the situation—one employee close to Musk told me that after a press conference or a business negotiation, once in private he’d ask Musk what his real angle was and what he really thinks. Musk’s response would always be boring: “I think exactly what I said.”

A few people I spoke with referenced Musk’s obsession with truth and accuracy. He’s fine with and even welcoming of negative criticism about him when he believes it’s accurate, but when the press gets something wrong about him or his companies, he usually can’t help himself and will engage them and correct their error. He detests vague spin-doctor phrases like “studies say” and “scientists disagree,” and he refuses to advertise for Tesla, something most startup car companies wouldn’t think twice about—because he sees advertising as manipulative and dishonest.

There’s even an undertone of integrity in Musk’s tyrannical demands of workers, because while he may be a tyrant, he’s not a hypocrite. Employees pressured to work 80 hours a week tend to be less bitter about it when at least the CEO is in there working 100.

Speaking of the CEO, let’s go have a hamburger with him.

My Lunch With Elon

It started like this:

After about seven minutes of this, I was able to get out my first question, a smalltalk-y question about how he thought the recent launch had gone (they had attempted an extremely difficult rocket-landing maneuver—more on that in the SpaceX post). His response included the following words: hypersonic, rarefied, densifying, supersonic, Mach 1, Mach 3, Mach 4, Mach 5, vacuum, regimes, thrusters, nitrogen, helium, mass, momentum, ballistic, and boost-back. While this was happening, I was still mostly blacked out from the surreality of the situation, and when I started to come to, I was scared to ask any questions about what he was saying in case he had already explained it while I was unconscious.

I eventually regained the ability to have adult human conversation, and we began what turned into a highly interesting and engaging two-hour discussion.8 This guy has a lot on his mind across a lot of topics. In this one lunch alone, we covered electric cars, climate change, artificial intelligence, the Fermi Paradox, consciousness, reusable rockets, colonizing Mars, creating an atmosphere on Mars, voting on Mars, genetic programming, his kids, population decline, physics vs. engineering, Edison vs. Tesla, solar power, a carbon tax, the definition of a company, warping spacetime and how this isn’t actually something you can do, nanobots in your bloodstream and how this isn’t actually something you can do, Galileo, Shakespeare, the American forefathers, Henry Ford, Isaac Newton, satellites, and ice ages.

I’ll get into the specifics of what he had to say about many of these things in later posts, but some notes for now:

— He’s a pretty tall and burly dude. Doesn’t really come through on camera.

— He ordered a burger and ate it in either two or three bites over a span of about 15 seconds. I’ve never seen anything like it.

— He is very, very concerned about AI. I quoted him in my posts on AI saying that he fears that by working to bring about Superintelligent AI (ASI), we’re “summoning the demon,” but I didn’t know how much he thought about the topic. He cited AI safety as one of the three things he thinks about most—the other two being sustainable energy and becoming a multi-planet species, i.e. Tesla and SpaceX. Musk is a smart motherfucker, and he knows a ton about AI, and his sincere concern about this makes me scared.

— The Fermi Paradox also worries him. In my post on that, I divided Fermi thinkers into two camps—those who think there’s no other highly intelligent life out there at all because of some Great Filter, and those who believe there must be plenty of intelligent life and that we don’t see signs of any for some other reason. Musk wasn’t sure which camp seemed more likely, but he suspects that there may be an upsetting Great Filter situation going on. He thinks the paradox “just doesn’t make sense” and that it “gets more and more worrying” the more time that goes by. Considering the possibility that maybe we’re a rare civilization who made it past the Great Filter through a freak occurrence makes him feel even more conviction about SpaceX’s mission: “If we are very rare, we better get to the multi-planet situation fast, because if civilization is tenuous, then we must do whatever we can to ensure that our already-weak probability of surviving is improved dramatically.” Again, his fear here makes me feel not great.

— One topic I disagreed with him on is the nature of consciousness. I think of consciousness as a smooth spectrum. To me, what we experience as consciousness is just what it feels like to be human-level intelligent. We’re smarter, and “more conscious” than an ape, who is more conscious than a chicken, etc. And an alien much smarter than us would be to us as we are to an ape (or an ant) in every way. We talked about this, and Musk seemed convinced that human-level consciousness is a black-and-white thing—that it’s like a switch that flips on at some point in the evolutionary process and that no other animals share. He doesn’t buy the “ants : humans :: humans : [a much smarter extra-terrestrial]” thing, believing that humans are weak computers and that something smarter than humans would just be a stronger computer, not something so beyond us we couldn’t even fathom its existence.

— I talked to him for a while about genetic reprogramming. He doesn’t buy the efficacy of typical anti-aging technology efforts, because he believes humans have general expiration dates, and no one fix can help that. He explained: “The whole system is collapsing. You don’t see someone who’s 90 years old and it’s like, they can run super fast but their eyesight is bad. The whole system is shutting down. In order to change that in a serious way, you need to reprogram the genetics or replace every cell in the body.” Now with anyone else—literally anyone else—I would shrug and agree, since he made a good point. But this was Elon Musk, and Elon Musk fixes shit for humanity. So what did I do?

Me: Well…but isn’t this important enough to try? Is this something you’d ever turn your attention to?

Elon: The thing is that all the geneticists have agreed not to reprogram human DNA. So you have to fight not a technical battle but a moral battle.

Me: You’re fighting a lot of battles. You could set up your own thing. The geneticists who are interested—you bring them here. You create a laboratory, and you could change everything.

Elon: You know, I call it the Hitler Problem. Hitler was all about creating the Übermensch and genetic purity, and it’s like—how do you avoid the Hitler Problem? I don’t know.

Me: I think there’s a way. You’ve said before about Henry Ford that he always just found a way around any obstacle, and you do the same thing, you always find a way. And I just think that that’s as important and ambitious a mission as your other things, and I think it’s worth fighting for a way, somehow, around moral issues, around other things.

Elon: I mean I do think there’s…in order to fundamentally solve a lot of these issues, we are going to have to reprogram our DNA. That’s the only way to do it.

Me: And deep down, DNA is just a physical material.

Elon: [Nods, then pauses as he looks over my shoulder in a daze] It’s software.

Comments:

1) It’s really funny to brashly pressure Elon Musk to take on yet another seemingly-insurmountable task and to act a little disappointed in him that he’s not currently doing it, when he’s already doing more for humanity than literally anyone on the planet.

2) It’s also super fun to casually brush off the moral issues around genetic programming with “I think there’s a way” and to refer to DNA—literally the smallest and most complex substance ever—as “just a physical material deep down” when I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. Because those things will be his problem to figure out, not mine.

3) I think I’ve successfully planted the seed. If Musk takes on human genetics 15 years from now and we all end up living to 250 because of it, you all owe me a drink.

___________

Watching interviews with Musk, you see a lot of people ask him some variation of this question Chris Anderson asked him on stage at the 2013 TED conference:

How have you done this? These projects—PayPal, SolarCity, Tesla, SpaceX—they’re so spectacularly different. They’re such ambitious projects, at scale. How on Earth has one person been able to innovate in this way—what is it about you? Can we have some of that secret sauce?

There are a lot of things about Musk that make him so successful, but I do think there’s a “secret sauce” that puts Musk in a different league from even the other renowned billionaires of our time. I have a theory about what that is, which has to do with the way Musk thinks, the way that he reasons through problems, and the way he views the world. As this series continues, think about this, and we’ll discuss a lot more in the last post.

For now, I’ll leave you with Elon Musk holding a Panic Monster.

 

___________

If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site!

If you’re interested in supporting Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

Next up in this series: Part 2: How Tesla Will Change the World

Other posts in the series:

Part 3: How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars
Part 4: The Chef and the Cook: Musk’s Secret Sauce

Extra Post #1: The Deal With Solar City
Extra Post #2: The Deal With the Hyperloop

 

Some Musk-y Wait But Why Posts:

The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

The Fermi Paradox

What Makes You You?

Sources

A large part of what I learned for this post came from my own conversations with Musk and his staff. As I mentioned above, Ashlee Vance’s upcoming biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, is excellent and helped me fill in a bunch of gaps. Further info came from the sources below:

Documentary: Revenge of the Electric Car
TED Talks: Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity
Khan Academy: Interview With Elon Musk
Quora: What is it like to work with Elon Musk?
SXSW: Interview with Elon Musk
Consumer Reports: Tesla Model S: The Electric Car that Shatters Every Myth
Wired: How the Tesla Model S is Made
Interview: Elon Musk says he’s a bigger fan of Edison than Tesla
Interview: Elon Musk gets introspective
Business Insider: Former SpaceX Exec Explains How Elon Musk Taught Himself Rocket Science
Esquire: Elon Musk: The Triumph of His Will
Oxford Martin School: Elon Musk on The Future of Energy and Transport
MIT Interview: Elon Musk compares AI efforts to “Summoning the Demon”
Documentary: Billionaire Elon Musk : How I Became The Real ‘Iron Man’
Reddit: Elon Musk AMA
Chris Anderson: Chris Anderson on Elon Musk, the World’s Most Remarkable Entrepreneur
Engineering.com: Who’s Better? Engineers or Scientists?
Forbes: Big Day For SpaceX As Elon Musk Tells His Mom ‘I Haven’t Started Yet’

The post Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man appeared first on Wait But Why.

One of the technology industry’s biggest and most important IPOs occurred late last month, with a valuation of $25.6 billion dollars. That’s more than Google, which IPO’d at a valuation of $24.6 billion, and certainly a lot more than Amazon, which finished its first day on the public markets with a valuation of $438 million.¹ Don’t feel too bad for the latter, though: the “IPO” I’m talking about was Amazon Web Services, and it just so happens to still be owned by the same e-commerce company that went public nearly 20 years ago.

I’m obviously being facetious; there was no actual IPO for AWS, just an additional line item on Amazon’s financial reports finally breaking out the cloud computing service Amazon pioneered nine years ago. That line item, though, was almost certainly the primary factor in driving an overnight increase in Amazon’s market capitalization from $182 billion on April 23 to $207 billion on April 24.² It’s not only that AWS is a strong offering in a growing market with impressive economics, it also may, in the end, be the key to realizing the potential of Amazon.com itself.

Understanding Amazon, Part 1

Much of the analysis of Amazon tends to fall in two diametrically opposed camps that are strangely united in their lack of rigor and in-depth appreciation of the economics driving Amazon’s business. On one hand are the ardent skeptics, who see Amazon’s lack of paper profits as prima facie evidence that the company is dramatically over-valued by the stock market; on the other are the true believers who point to Amazon’s ever-increasing revenue numbers as equally obvious evidence that the company is undervalued and primed for ever bigger and better things.

A more nuanced approach considers the fact that Amazon is not a monolithic operation, but rather a collection of businesses sharing resources, including a channel (Amazon.com), logistics, and a common technological foundation. These businesses range from bookshops to video game stores to home furniture to clothes to shoes to consumer electronics to auto accessories…the list is quite extensive at this point! True, consumers experience all of these different businesses as a unified Amazon.com, but inside the company some of these businesses are mature and (theoretically) throwing off cash, while others are reliant on investment as they work to get off the ground.

This view is a more sophisticated take on the aforementioned bull argument: it’s not that Amazon is not making money, it’s that the company is reinvesting every dollar it makes into growing new businesses; were the company to stop investing, it would start throwing off cash. This is exactly how Jeff Bezos has represented the company — except for the stop investing and throw off cash part, of course.

Why Amazon Started with Books

In The Everything Store, Brad Stone explains that while Jeff Bezos had always planned to build a site that sold, well, everything, he started with books for a very particular reason:

Bezos concluded that a true everything store would be impractical — at least at the beginning. He made a list of twenty possible product categories, including computer software, office supplies, apparel, and music. The category that eventually jumped out at him as the best option was books. They were pure commodities; a copy of a book in one store was identical to the same book carried in another, so buyers always knew what they were getting. There were two primary distributors of books at that time, Ingram and Baker and Taylor, so a new retailer wouldn’t have to approach each of the thousands of book publishers individually. And, most important, there were three million books in print worldwide, far more than a Barnes & Noble or a Borders superstore could ever stock.

If he couldn’t build a true everything store right away, he could capture its essence — unlimited selection — in at least one important product category. “With that huge diversity of products you could build a store online that simply could not exist in any other way,” Bezos said. “You could build a true superstore with exhaustive selection, and customers value selection.”

There was one more critical factor, though, that Stone only mentioned in passing a few chapters later: despite the fact that books were a commodity, they were exceptionally high-priced. The list price of a new book contained a 50 percent markup for the retailer, which meant Bezos — who a few years later would coin the famous phrase, “Your margin is my opportunity” — could sell books at a significant discount while still making money on each transaction (and over time, Amazon would not only bypass the wholesalers but eventually become large enough to dictate terms to publishers).

Moreover, the nature of Amazon’s business — customers paid for books with credit cards immediately, while Amazon paid book wholesaler invoices months after delivery — resulted in a negative cash conversion cycle that freed up much more cash for investment than would otherwise be warranted by Amazon’s margins, an effect that was greatly magnified by Amazon’s growth rate.

This made books, over the long-run, a truly profitable business for Amazon, and the company repeated the trick for many of the exact same reasons in CDs, DVDs, and video games: commodity products with massive selections traditionally sold at a significant markup and paid for 90 days later allowed Amazon to have a superior selection and lower prices and make money to boot.³

Understanding Amazon, Part 2

The problem with the bull case for Amazon is the assumption that all of Amazon’s different businesses are essentially the same: selling books is like selling DVDs is like selling clothes is like selling TVs, etc. However, while that may be true from an infrastructure perspective (same channel, logistics network, and technology stack), it’s absolutely not the case from an economic one.

Consider books versus TVs: there are an effectively infinite number of books, but a relatively small number of TVs, which means it’s more likely a competitor will have the same TV, leading to lower prices and reduced margins. TVs are also relatively infrequent purchases, and customers are likely to research the best price, leading again to lower prices and reduced margins. Moreover, while an individual book is a commodity, that same book is highly differentiated from another book; not so with TVs, where the most expensive TV still accomplishes the same thing as a cheaper one, which leaves little room for luxurious 50% retail markups. This again leads to lower prices and reduced margins. And, on the flip side, while a book is a book is a book, so you can buy it anywhere with confidence, many consumers consider a TV worth checking out in person, and it’s expensive to ship to boot.

That said, TVs are, relative to books anyways, expensive, as are computers, furniture, car accessories, and all the other businesses that Amazon has been developing over the last decade. In other words, all of this stuff that Amazon is selling is perfect for increasing revenue, but not so great at producing profit (that said, the benefits of a negative cash conversion cycle very much apply to these items as well; they are not being added in vain).

That leaves the old stand-bys — books, CDs, DVDs, and video games — to produce the actual profit that funds all of the new businesses Amazon wants to build, and they have done just that for 20 years now. The problem, though, is obvious: each of these categories is being replaced by digital distribution, and Amazon has only been successful in reaping the benefits of that shift in the case of books and the Kindle (although they’re competing in all four areas with Amazon Music, Amazon Prime Video, and the Amazon App Store). Moreover, the impact of digital distribution is showing up in the financial results; Amazon has long broken out the sales of ‘Media’ and ‘Electronics and General Merchandise’ in their financial reports, and in the last quarter ‘Media’ declined three percent even as ‘Electronics and General Merchandise’ increased 20%. This raises the long-run question for Amazon: if ‘Media’ is in secular decline, how will they fuel eternal investment into their business, much less the fabled returns that at least theoretically underpin their sky-high stock price?

Enter Amazon Web Services

The incredible potential of Amazon Web Services is as clear as its initial prospects in 2006 were, well, cloudy. AWS only came about after Amazon had experimented with more full-service offerings like powering the websites of Target or Toys-R-Us,⁴ and there were plenty of skeptics as to whether companies would entrust critical operations to a 3rd party. It soon became apparent, though, that both economics and simplicity were overwhelmingly in the public cloud’s favor, and Amazon was years ahead of everyone.

Today, public clouds are the future for the vast majority of businesses; the economics of scale achieved by Amazon (and its closest competitors, Google and Microsoft) are so incredible that multi-billion dollar companies like Netflix view it as more efficient to pay Amazon than to build their own data centers. The calculus is even more stark when it comes to any sort of startup: it’s so much easier and cheaper to get started with AWS that the idea of buying your own server infrastructure — an expense that consumed the majority of venture capital in the dot-com bubble era — is preposterous. This is great from Amazon’s perspective: the company effectively has a stake in nearly every significant startup, and for free; if the company succeeds, Amazon will be paid, handsomely, and if they fail, well, Amazon covered their own costs of providing cloud services along the way.

The big question about AWS, though, has been whether Amazon can keep their lead. Data centers are very expensive, and Amazon has a lot less cash and, more importantly, a lot less profit than Google or Microsoft. What happens if either competitor launches a price war: can Amazon afford to keep up?

To be sure, there were reasons to suspect they could: for one, Amazon already has significantly more scale, which means their costs on a per-customer basis are lower than Microsoft or Google. And perhaps more importantly is the corporate culture that results from a “your-margins-are-my-opportunity” mindset: Amazon can stomach a few percentage points of margin on a core business far more comfortably than Microsoft or Google, both fat off of software and advertising margins respectively. Indeed, when Google slashed prices in the spring of 2014, Amazon immediately responded and proceeded to push prices down further still, just as they had ever since AWS’s inception (the price cuts in response to Google were the 42nd for the company). Still, the question remained: was this sustainable? Could Amazon afford to compete?

This is why Amazon’s latest earnings were such a big deal: for the first time the company broke out AWS into its own line item, revealing not just its revenue (which could be teased out previously) but also its profitability. And, to many people’s surprise, and despite all the price cuts, AWS is very profitable: $265 million in profit on $1.57 billion in sales last quarter alone, for an impressive (for Amazon!) 17% net margin.

A New Foundation for Amazon

The profitability of AWS is a big deal in-and-of itself, particularly given the sentiment that cloud computing will ultimately be a commodity won by the companies with the deepest pockets. It turns out that all the reasons to believe in AWS were spot on: Amazon is clearly reaping the benefits of scale from being the largest player, and their determination to have both the most complete and cheapest offering echoes their prior strategies in e-commerce.

Moreover, Amazon has cleverly found a way to approximate the negative cash conversion cycle trick: instead of paying billions to build data centers up-front, before they are ever used to earn revenue, Amazon is building its data centers with capital leases that effectively let the company pay for the data centers as they use them. True, this is a riskier strategy, and one that casts a pessimistic hue on Amazon’s admonition that investors look at free cash flow,⁵ but it’s also a strategy that presumes growth, an excellent assumption to make when it comes to AWS — provided the company’s investment can keep up. Contrary to my initial skepticism (members-only), I think the capital leases are a win-win.

Perhaps the biggest implication of AWS, though, is its impact on Amazon.com. Last summer I lost my patience with the company, wondering when if ever Amazon would fully focus on seizing what looked to be a massive e-commerce opportunity, instead of dallying with devices and video. More importantly, would they do so before the ‘Media’ money train ran out of steam?

Today that is a moot point: the sky is the limit for AWS, and if the service is profitable at its current scale, what expectations should we have for five years from now, or ten? More importantly, that profitability can over time replace the role of ‘Media’ in the Amazon engine: cash to build new e-commerce businesses, or to explore what is next (a la AWS), or both of the above. Or, in the fantasy of Amazon’s investors, to actually provide a return to shareholders.⁶

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Discuss this post in the Stratechery Forum (subscribers-only)

1. With an ‘m’!
2. Amazon’s market cap has since decreased to $197 billion; like I said, I’m being facetious — this isn’t a real proxy for AWS’s value — but the spike was meaningful
3. This was the foundation of my bullish article on Amazon in 2013 called Amazon’s Dominant Strategy
4. but ultimately, why help your competitors?
5. Amazon is now reporting “Free Cash Flow Less Finance Principal Lease Repayments and Capital Acquired Under Capital Leases” which is what their cash flow would be if they purchased data centers up-front; it’s significantly lower than the number the company trumpets publicly
6. So yes! As predicted, I am changing my mind about Amazon. Again.

The post The AWS IPO appeared first on Stratechery by Ben Thompson.

Swiss luxury watch brand IWC Schaffhausen have revealed their new accessory, the IWC Connect. A digital device, that is set to fit onto the strap of IWC's mechanical watches, the Connect will provide full activity tracking and promises to control other certain devices that are connected to "the internet of things." Very little information is currently available about the IWC Connect aside from an enigmatic teaser video. However George Kern, brand CEO, has described the device as "an intelligent design solution which perfectly integrates and underlines our product worlds.” Keep an eye on IWC's channels and website for more information in the coming months.

Read more at Hypebeast.com

Japanese architect Tokujin Yoshioka has offered up his own reinterpretation of the classic culture of a Japanese tea ceremony with the stunning "Kou-an Glass Tea House" in Kyoto. A testament to the famous Japanese attention to detail in design and architecture, the weights and angles of the transparent glass design plays on the concept of Japanese history as well as its position in today's society. The Kou-an allows visitors to appreciate the natural world by blending into their surroundings, while being able to view the entire Kyoto landscape from its position 220 meters above ground.

Click here to view full gallery at Hypebeast.com

The Queens International Night Market we hoped would land in Flushing Meadows Corona Park is becoming a reality! Creator John Wang and his team have announced that they'll put on their inaugural market this Saturday, April 25th, as planned in the parking lot of the New York Hall of Science beginning at 6 p.m. Though their Kickstarter campaign ultimately wasn't a success, the team has found other funding sources that allowed them to keep prices low for both the vendors and the visitors. [ more › ]

Budapest-based designer Oszkar Vagi has created Little Nest, a hanging cradle made from felt and leather.

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one moment please...2nd Avenue, New York, NY, United States+ Expand- collapseWhen we last wrote about the Second Avenue Subway back in February, word was that Phase I was about 79 percent complete and still on track for its December 2016 opening. Earlier this week community members and MTA officials gathered once again to go over progress, with MTA Capital Construction President Dr. Michael Horodniceanu toting a slew of new photos and renderings of the line. While the new images certainly give us a better look at some of the exciting architecture taking shape deep below our streets—in fact, the southern section is now 82 percent complete, Horodniceanu relayed—several […]

Saharan camp in Morocco.

Contributed by Christina Cesarz.

verticalfood:

Crispy bacon & brie grilled cheese sandwich with caramelized onions

[All photos by Max Touhey.]

One World Trade Center is the tallest building in New York City. More symbolically, it's the most obvious physical marker of downtown's fraught, complex redevelopment. The 1,776-foot-tall tower opened in November to much fanfare; at the moment, Conde Nast and other tenants occupy the lower floors. But on April 1, Servcorp, a company that sets up and then leases out luxury office space by the month to high-flying business types, opened its New York flagship on the 85th floor. Though offices will go up to 90—and One World Observatory will occupy the 100th, 101st, and 102nd stories when it opens in May—right now Servcorp occupies the highest point in the building you can go without wearing a hard hat. What follows is a diary, accompanied by scores of photos and even an awesome time-lapse video, of a work day spent floating above the city. For all the former Freedom Tower's travails, it is a very special place that offers an unmatched vantage point to soak up New York's glory.
—Hana R. Alberts, Jessica Dailey, Jeremiah Budin, and Zoe Rosenberg

9 a.m.: In awe of the looming skyscraper above and jarred by the crowds streaming out of the temporary PATH station, we arrive and are greeted in the lobby, which looks exactly like the renderings and photos promised, with soaring white stone-clad walls that make the room feel more like something out of a utopian fantasy novel than a real-life place in the Financial District. The wall-sized art is wildly colorful, a contrast to the atmosphere of a Serious Office Building that is Very Tall. We're herded to get our day passes, which for better or worse have very unflattering pictures of each of us printed on them. They look like really weird receipts. We finally figure out how to scan the passes and get through the gates to the elevator banks. Entering their elevator bank, the flawless employees of Condé Nast flash some serious side-eye.

9:13 a.m.: In the elevator, we make small talk about said unflattering pass pictures and silently regret our breakfast decisions (or lack thereof) as the elevator whizzes up to the 64th floor, where we have to transfer to yet another elevator. For a few of us, this is first time we've ever had to take an elevator to another elevator. The elevator bank opens into a stunning atrium with views up the length of Manhattan, a.k.a the Sky Lobby.

All of us exercise incredible restraint and wait to post the views online until later.

We pick our jaws up off the floor, and get into the second elevator.

9:14 a.m.: The elevator opens into a regal hallway with shiny, bronze-colored floors and wood-paneled walls.

The office just opened on April 1, and it still has that "new house" smell. Servcorp's reception area opens onto the holy grail of New York City views; as soon as you turn away from the elevators, there is the Empire State Building.

We shake hands politely with Servcorp's reception people, and make casual jokes about that view (best we'd ever seen, all around, although we play it cool and don't say as much because professionalism).

9:20 a.m.: We're led down a hallway to where we will be working from for the day. The hallway is lined with offices, which have glass walls and sliding doors with a frosted "river pebble" pattern for privacy.

Servcorp's COO Marcus Moufarrige later tells us that the carpet in all of their offices has the same pattern and is made of New Zealand wool. "I wanted black in here," he says, "But we had a lot of red made, so it's red."

9:26 a.m.: Our office, we discover, also has totally bonkers views of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Santiago Calatrava-designed Transportation Hub, the Woolworth Building and everything in between and out beyond Queens, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean and Nassau County.

We send photos to our colleagues in Midtown. Everyone is jealous.

9:28 a.m.: We each have our own large, wooden desk with our own phones, and they have our names on them, like, digitally on the screen. To put our feelings about this in perspective: our real office does not have phones.

Servcorp offers clients a telephone answering service, which means that a real, human person will also answer your calls. You can have your cell phone, office phone, or really any number you like set up in their system so a receptionist answers. They did this for our cell phone numbers, but sadly, no one called us, so we didn't get to experience it.

Our desk chairs are another delight. They are custom Herman Miller swivel chairs with plush leather seats. Moufarrige says that this is the first time they've used this type of chair, but every design is chosen because it will last. The overall aesthetic of all Servcorp offices is "modern classic." They never want the offices to feel dated or rundown.

9:32 a.m.: If you'd think it would be difficult to concentrate with views of the entire city three feet to your left, you'd be right. We settle into the normal blogging routine after eyeing the complimentary goodies in the room, which include two sleeves of really delicious Australian chocolate cookies, a bottle of Shiraz, and a stuffed wombat in a suit and monocle named, in full, Sidney, The World's Wisest Wombat. Sidney, we later learn, has his own website, which chroncle his travels.

He's chill—way more so than we are. The air up here must be making us dizzy.

9:40 a.m.: Our Servcorp rep Sharon offers us morning beverages. An inquiry about soy milk results in Sharon offering to go down 85 floors and get some from the outside world. We're all really, really impressed and feel important, and politely decline. We enjoy the Australian cookies and the coffee, which are both delicious, and orient ourselves.

10:04 a.m.: We go on a tour of Servcorp's office, which covers the full floor. We learn that the office has over $3 million worth of art in it, and notice that most of it is paintings of naked people.

We later learn that all of the paintings belong to Moufarrige's father-in-law. The man is a serious art collector, and he bought these pieces decades ago but had never seen them. Before the lot came to One World Trade Center, most of the 55 pieces had just been sitting in storage.

10:18 a.m.: There's a kitchen with dining counters, two dishwashers, microwave, coffee maker, and refrigerator. It's stocked with drinks and snacks, but they are not free. That said, sales of the snacks are "on an honor system," so if you're a horrible person, that could be interpreted as "free."

10:30 a.m.: A Chinese firm will take up a portion of Servcorp's southwest offices. We admire their commitment to feng shui, and wish we knew anything about it.

10:45 a.m.: We get back to work, but, as we mentioned, it's kind of hard to do that when there's a floor-to-ceiling glass wall 85 stories in the air an arm's length away.

11:00 a.m.: A friend notices a Facebook photo that we posted. "Are you in the Freedom Tower?" "Nobody calls it that." "What do they call it?" "One World Trade Center.' "No, that's the address. It's called the Freedom Tower."

12:03 p.m.: Our Servcorp rep comes by to "refresh our water."

12:30 p.m.: As the sun moves over the building, our views start to improve. The East River looks delightfully glittery today.

Our window looks directly over the temporary PATH station, and the future site of 2 World Trade Center, so once Norman Foster's tower goes up, the river will be a lot less visible. Ah, and there's the future PATH station: Calatrava's "bird in flight," or stegosaurus skeleton, or something. The "glorious boondoggle" is costing $4 billion, and it's supposed to be complete this year after many delays.

Just to the south, 3 World Trade Center (pictured below) is also on the rise.

12:50 p.m.: Lunchtime! A friend who works at Conde Nast can only get one of us into the cafeteria, which is on the 35th floor. It involves going down to the lobby, going to another check-in desk, and going through security again. It faces south and west, is crowded and serves quinoa bowls (as one would expect from Vogue types) and a wide array of salads and juices as well as a grill with burgers and fries. The rest of us venture outside to Hudson Eats at Brookfield Place. The downtown lunch crowd seems a lot younger and better-dressed than the Midtown lunch crowd. Hudson Eats is crowded, but amazingly, we're in and out in 20 minutes.

1:32 p.m.: It's impossible to pass through the 64th floor, which we do again, without stopping. A 10-minute photo session ensues. We stop again in Servcorp's perfectly north-facing reception area, and take it all in.

2 p.m.: The men's room has complementary mouth wash and little plastic cups, which is cool, and a comb, which is… less cool. Have other people used this comb? Hard pass on the comb. The women's bathroom has no comb or mouthwash, but it does have dry shampoo, lotion, hairspray, and a lint roller.

2:46 p.m.: A Servcorp rep is showing around a prospective client. She tells him they can knock the wall in our office down to make it a larger space. He hangs back by the door, hesitant, until she says, "Would you like to see the views?" He grins and heads to the window. Really, it is the only thing to do in a space like this. With absolutely nothing on the walls (though clients can hang their own art), the room would be kinda depressing if it was any other office, but that is not a concern here.

3:30 p.m.: This is probably the best our view has looked all day. It's so clear, you can easily see planes taking off and landing at JFK. 4 World Trade Center's uber-reflective facade is practically camouflage, reflecting the city around it.

4 p.m.: We sit down to talk with Moufarrige in a conference room that holds a massive granite table. "Our goal is amazing presentation," he says, noting that granite was chosen because it won't scratch. "Not amazing presentation for our clients, but for their clients." He adds, "We're a premium brand with a premium fit out for a premium clientele." Ah, premium is important.

The stone tables, leather furniture, and private offices are contradictory to what most people think of when they hear "co-working space": large rooms filled with millennial tech workers and their laptops. But Servcorp is most definitely not that (though they will offer a open-plan option for the first time at One World Trade). Servcorp has been around since 1978, and it's better described as a company that sells fully serviced office space (i.e. with a phone service, receptionist, internet, etc.), rather than a company that rents desks.

One World Trade Center is Servcorp's fourth location in New York City. When asked why the building was attractive to them, Moufarrige says they want "the most premium addresses in cities," so it was a natural fit. Plus, as someone who spends a lot of time working in Asia—the company has 21 centers in Tokyo alone—Moufarrige says that it is extremely hard to find new, glassy office buildings in the United States, which is what they want. (He said they will look at Hudson Yards when it's ready.)

Servcorp has 70-plus offices available at One World Trade, and they are currently about 30 percent leased, with monthly fees ranging from $2,500 to $6,000.

Tenants come from a broad range of sectors—they've signed financial firm, web strategists, tech companies, and hedge funds—and they are seeing a lot of interest from China. (It helps that the China Center is opening an outpost a few floors up, but they haven't yet built out the space.) Moufarrige also predicts that they will see a lot of interest from the fashion industry. "Brands will want to be close to Conde," he says. Burberry, for example, may want to send their top two executives to New York, but they won't have a need for a whole satellite office—enter Servcorp.

4:37 p.m.: Moufarrige takes us to a south-facing office, with stunning views of the harbor, Governors Island, and the Statue of Liberty.

He thought that most clients would want views up to Midtown, but it's been "about 70/30" with the majority wanting to look at Lady Liberty.

4:45 p.m.: We walk through the south portion of the floor, which will hold what most people would consider a "traditional" co-working space. It's still under construction, but it will have one large communal table, as well as "meeting nooks" and storage lockers. There will be an art gallery and library, too. Desks will cost $750 per month.

Then there's this view to sell it, of course.

5:02 p.m.: Near the elevators, there's an art gallery with more of Moufarrige's father-in-law's pieces. The floors have the same shiny brown finish as the lobby. Moufarrige explains that they wanted marble floors, but the slabs were too thick to fit under the doors. Building officials told them they could do polished concrete or carpet tiles, which, to put it lightly, Moufarrige thinks are horrible. Declasse, if you will. So the floors are finished with Flowcrete. It's concrete mixed with color, and "a donut thing gloops the concrete onto the floor," says Moufarrige. Sounds weird, looks cool.

5:16 p.m. Then, we evaluate Jersey, determining that we can see some sort of brush fire. The westerly views also include a birds-eye view of Battery Park City and Brookfield Place.

5:24 p.m.: Time to crack open the wine! And eat more Australian cookies. Should we be embarrassed that we ate both packages? To make up for it, we assess neighboring office buildings 7 World Trade Center and 4 World Trade Center from above. We've spent the day towering over the stages of World Trade Center redevelopment that were completed earlier, and they should get their due.

6:03 p.m.: It's harder to leave the office when it's this pleasant. We linger in the Sky Lobby, capturing those last few panoramas. But we finally decamp for the subway, strolling along Vesey Street as the sun sets behind us, and One World Trade Center.

1WTC - Time Lapse from Curbed on Vimeo.

· Servcorp [official]
· A Day of Unreal Views From the Top of the World Trade Center [Curbed]
· All One World Observatory coverage [Curbed]
· All One World Trade Center coverage [Curbed]

Don’t Mess With My Bacon, Egg and Cheese

It is a hero among sandwiches, although it is not the one called a hero. It is not called by any name that everybody agrees on, although it sometimes appears on menus as the breakfast sandwich.
A name isn’t necessary in conversation because nobody bothers to talk about it, even though the sandwich makes the first few hours of the working day in New York City possible. Almost everybody has untucked one from its double wrapping of wax paper and foil, but almost nobody mentions it unless an order for one is being placed. (via NY Times)

Just look at it. It almost brings a tear to your eye, or a palpitation to your heart. Either way, now I want a BE+C real bad.

A favored version of the Air Pegasus silhouette for its more relaxed midsole, the Air Pegasus '83 here gets the requisite summer treatment with the "Summit White" colorway. Here we find the resurgent retro runner outfitted with a clean combination of off-white suede and mesh through the upper, which is further complimented with a pure white midsole and black outsole. Pick up this version of the Air Pegasus '83 at retailers such as Titolo now for about $80 USD.

Click here to view full gallery at Hypebeast.com

Michaelis Boyd Associates, together with Diapo, and Webb Yates Engineers, created this unique hanging staircase for a home in London.

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“ I enjoyed this! A novelty product that seems like a pretty fun thing to surprise your friends with. If people are paying $10 for glitter I can't see why this wont work! Only US & CAN for now though. ”
– Mike Holford

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HGA Architects have designed a group of cottages to provide senior musicians accommodation at the Marlboro College campus in Marlboro, Vermont.

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