Elon Musk & the Midwit Meme - Y Combinator  ## Metadata - Author: **Y Combinator** - Full Title: Elon Musk & the Midwit Meme - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/e9d7312b-2831-41fa-853d-d23333ffa290 ## Highlights - Elon Musk: Genius or Idiot? Key takeaways: (* Depending on how you tell the story, Elon Musk's achievements can be seen as genius or stupid., * Tesla is an example of a successful startup car company., * Drilling holes under the ground to drive places faster is clearly the idiot option, but it could be the genius option.) Transcript: Speaker 1 Depending on how you tell the story. And it almost doesn't matter, right? Cause he's winning. But you know, to me, the first example that I always loved is that, you know, I read some book about the starting of SpaceX and it started with Elon going to Russia trying to buy like rockets and like the Russian government being like, there's this American billionaire guy who wants to buy rockets and kind of not believing it, but Elon just looking really serious. So they like considered it and like they've actually said, no, but like he got to talk to people about buying rockets from that. He's just a dude with money. He was like, go to Russia, buy rockets. Like that's the extreme. Is that genius or stupid? I can't tell. I can't tell. And like with Tesla itself, like to me, the mid-wet is, is electric cars. Electric cars are good. That's the extreme. Electric cars is good. Or on both in the middle, it's like, no one has successfully done a startup car company since the 50s. And every, you know, if you look at all prior attempts to build an electric car, like there's all these words. And the infrastructure, yeah. Yeah. Yes. And I think the, the one that we find most funny, which we'll see, this video we'll see if we sent Sanitas of Time is, is the boring company, right? Drilling holes under the ground so that you can drive places faster is very clearly the idiot one, but like it could be the genius one. ([Time 0:02:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/25bd2479-ef41-4f2c-9d9f-11517efba1f4)) - How to be a successful YC applicant Key takeaways: • Different founders have different strategies for applying to YC. • The Jedi founder move is to apply and then get feedback on your application. Transcript: Speaker 1 The on the dumb side, the founders like it's fun to work with my friends. So I'm just going to say my friend. Right. On the smart side. Justin Coe likes to put a camera on his head. You know, let's go. Let's start. We were drinking. Why did they pick you? Is there co-founder? Wasn't it like, well, because I helped them find an apartment and open it like a goat. There we go. This guy helped us find an apartment. All right. He's the co-founder of Twitch. Done. There we go. Done. And then like the super smart experience founders like, oh, having co-founders viable for emotional support. And this is going to be tricky. They have all the like sophisticated reasons. Same answer. Same answer. I love that. Okay. Next, this is a classic one, especially because you have to do with so many admissions questions. Applying to YC Dalton. What is the, what is the Jedi founder move to apply to YC versus the Midwitt founder? Yeah. The extremes of this and the Midwitt meme are, I filled out my application and submitted it. Like, like I applied. And the Midwitt founder is like, gee, I don't know if now is the right time to apply. I don't know if we're ready. Oh, I'm going to, I'm going to write a draft of my application and send it to 15 people. And I'm going to get feedback on my application. ([Time 0:09:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f531f413-1dcc-4d69-bc0d-babc0f8b9e31))