Back in 2007, I had the opportunity to meet Professor Stephen Hawking through the X PRIZE Foundation. In my first conversation with him I learned that he was passionate about flying into space someday.
My childhood dreams were focused on being part of the effort to make humanity a multiplanetary species.
What opened up the American West was the fact that you owned the real estate. You owned the gold mines, the oil wells. The creation of these, back then, million dollar industries drove the railroads and eventually the airlines to provide this kind of transportation.
My father, who grew up picking olives on the Greek island of Lesbos, was a doctor. So my family expected me to become a physician.
Technology is a resource liberating force!
What is grit? Grit is refusing to give up. It’s persistence. It’s making your own luck.
As you may know, I’m the co-founder and co-chairman of an asteroid company called Planetary Resources that is backed by a group of eight billionaires to implement the bold mission of extracting resources from near-Earth asteroids.
You’ve got to choose your horse ahead of time. So, if you’re interested in water technology, energy technology, you get to choose between the three or four companies that you have insight into. And you have to make a bet on them before they prove anything out.
In the space business, space had gotten very much to be the aerospace industry. This is something that governments only do and it’s where the Boeings and the Lockheed’s and the Northrop’s and so forth. And there’s no way these small companies could do it.
Go and try to start your own government in the United States today and you’ll be squashed very quickly.
Space is not a two-year objective. It used to be, in the early ’60’s, we had this eye candy of Mercury and Gemini and Apollo and every year we would do something more and more and it met those needs. But the easy stuff has been done.
NASA calls stuff nominal instead of phenomenal, like it really is. So I have given up that there is going to be a balance and NASA is going to do certain things and we are finally in a state of existence where small groups of individuals can do extraordinary things, funded by single people.
Today, a group of 20 individuals empowered by the exponential growing technologies of AI and robotics and computers and networks and eventually nanotechnology can do what only nation states could have done before.
I’m a nine-year old kid inside and my passion has been all my life to want to travel into space.
I believed that once we got to the Moon, there was no stopping us. But in fact, we did stop.
I ended up realizing that NASA was unlikely to get me into space, or get me to the moon or beyond, and I needed some other way to drive this.
I became very much, if I have to describe myself, I’m sort of a Libertarian Capitalist, and I was looking for, what’s the economic engine that’s going to drive us into space.
One of my goals is to reinvent philanthropy.
Today, philanthropy is a very unsophisticated, old world process where people who make a shitload of money go and give it away and when they’re making their money, they’re focused on 10x, 100x returns on the dollar.
You should command and demand the tenfold leverage on your dollars when you give it away as well.
The first trillionaire can be made in space.