Elon Musk: Don't Read Nietzsche in Your Teenage Years
During an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the 2023 New York Times DealBook Summit, Musk recalled a severe existential crisis he experienced as a teenager. He said he repeatedly asked himself, "Does it all have no meaning? Why exist?" He even contemplated, "Why not just end my life?"
He sought answers in philosophical books, but it backfired. He read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, stating, "These German philosophical books made me quite depressed." Years later, he advised, "People should not read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in their teenage years."
What helped him out of his predicament was the science fiction novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by British author Douglas Adams, which he read between the ages of 12 and 15. In the book, the supercomputer "Deep Thought" took 7.5 million years to calculate that the ultimate answer to "life, the universe, and everything" is 42; no one understood what this number meant, and the computer explained that the problem was they hadn't figured out what they were really asking.
This plot changed his way of thinking. Musk said Adams made him realize, "Many times the question is harder than the answer; if you can articulate the question clearly, the answer is the easier part." He concluded that humanity should expand the scope and scale of consciousness to better understand the universe and know what questions to ask. He once said on a CBS program, "My philosophical foundation is consistent with Douglas Adams." He called Adams his favorite philosopher.
This book later directly influenced xAI's products. In November 2023, xAI launched the chatbot Grok, which the company claims is based on "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," featuring "a bit of wit" and a "rebellious streak," willing to answer "spicy questions" that other AIs avoid. The name Grok comes from Robert Heinlein's 1961 science fiction novel "Stranger in a Strange Land," meaning "to understand profoundly." xAI's corporate goal is set as "understanding the true nature of the universe." Grok was bundled with the X platform's $16 monthly Premium+ subscription upon launch.
In market mechanisms, "understanding the universe" is both Musk's personal philosophy and xAI's fundraising narrative. In February 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI in an all-stock deal, with a combined valuation of $1.25 trillion; according to SpaceX's IPO documents, xAI's revenue in 2025 is projected at $3.2 billion, with a corresponding loss of $3.2 billion. The bill is footed by secondary market investors and subscription users betting on Musk's long-term vision, with funds flowing from SpaceX's Starlink cash flow and IPO fundraising into Grok's model training and computing power development. The beneficiaries are Musk's ecosystem, which attracts talent and capital with a "mission narrative"; the pressured parties are other AI companies that need to compete with more pragmatic revenue logic.
Source: Public Information
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Science fiction has run through Musk's entire entrepreneurial history. Growing up in Pretoria, South Africa, he taught himself programming at age 12 and sold a space shooting game called Blastar to a magazine for $500. Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series instilled in him an obsession with "continuing human civilization," directly leading to the founding of SpaceX. SpaceX's ocean recovery drones are named "Of Course I Still Love You" and "Just Read the Instructions," both taken from spaceship names in Iain Banks' "Culture" series. In 2018, during the Falcon Heavy rocket's maiden flight, he sent his Tesla Roadster into space with the dashboard reading "Don't Panic," a famous phrase from the cover of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," and included a copy of the novel inside the car.
The philosophical narrative ultimately translates into a capital path. In 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI with the mission to "prevent AI from being monopolized by a few companies," donating tens of millions of dollars personally; he left the board in 2018 and sued OpenAI in 2024 for deviating from its nonprofit origins. In July 2023, he founded xAI with the mission of "understanding the universe"; in May 2024, xAI raised $6 billion, with a valuation of $24 billion; subsequently, it built the Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, merged with X in March 2025 through a stock swap, and was acquired by SpaceX in February 2026. The goal of "understanding the universe" ties together rockets, satellites, social networks, and large models into a single narrative: orbital data centers power AI, and AI helps humanity explore the universe.
Similar cases are not uncommon in Silicon Valley. Bezos has been obsessed with "Star Trek" since childhood and even made a cameo in the 2016 film "Star Trek Beyond"; his vision for founding Blue Origin directly inherits the space colonization themes from science fiction. Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel "Snow Crash" coined the term "metaverse," which led Zuckerberg to rename Facebook to Meta in October 2021, after which the Reality Labs division accumulated losses of hundreds of billions of dollars. Science fiction provides founders with ultra-long-term goals and allows them to endure ultra-long-term losses. The AI industry is currently in a phase of "personality and mission competition": as the capability gaps between models narrow, product personality and company narratives become differentiation strategies.
At its core, it is about capital concentration. The mechanism is that goals like "understanding the universe" and "continuing human civilization" are unfalsifiable and have no deadlines, allowing returns to be pushed indefinitely into the future, which makes investors willing to accept ongoing losses. Founders maintain control through super voting rights, concentrating capital market funds into long-term projects driven by individual will. Musk holds 82% to 85% of the voting rights in SpaceX through Class B shares, meaning that philosophical inquiries like "What is the answer to the question of 42?" are effectively decided by one person. The grander the narrative, the more capital it can attract, and the higher the concentration.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
When you can't find an answer, treat the search itself as the answer.
If the question is asked correctly, half the answer is complete.
The grander the mission, the longer the losses it can accommodate.