Justin Sun paid $4.6M to have dinner with Warren Buffet. Lately he offered $30M to Elon Musk for a one-on-one meeting. Here's the story how I got it for free.
@elonmusk is the most consequential person in the world right now. He cares deeply about two things: technological progress and globalization. He has succeeded in technological progress, but true globalization has not been achieved yet.
I’m 24 years old this year. Four years ago, when I was a sophomore, I worked for Musk in Twitter's advertising machine learning team as an intern and it changed my life forever.
I want to help Musk push forward his vision of globalization, because he is so busy driving technological progress that he has no time left for globalization.
2022: Twitter Intern
In 2021, at 19 years old, I made $200,000 in three days algo-trading on Musk-related news. The same money that paid for my school tuition at Berkeley.
In 2022, I rejected offers from top-tier hedge funds and chose to intern at Twitter — because at that time there were strong rumors that Musk was going to take over Twitter. Back then Twitter was a public U.S. company valued at over $40 billion. Musk bought it, took it private, and renamed it to X.
My first three weeks was rather uneventful. Until the expected buyout happened by Elon, there was a noticeable change in the workspace, almost immediately. The chatter about mass layoffs, scared employees. For a 20 year old Jerry, it was a life changing experience to witness history being made first hand.
Musk summoned all the mid-to-senior engineers and managers one by one, asking:
“How much code did you write in the past two weeks?”
If the answer wasn’t satisfactory, he fired them on the spot. I have been educated by my family to value merit, so none of this was surprising to me. It made sense.
Musk said only the strongest people could stay, and they could even work remotely.
The internship was only three months long. I never expected Musk would continue to appear repeatedly in my life afterward.
2024: Turned down xAI
After graduating in 2022, I worked at Databricks (valued at $134B) for 10 months, then spent 16 months at an AI data analytics startup backed by Bain Capital Ventures.
Time moved to October 2024.
A senior from my school who was among the very first engineers at @xai invited me to an xAI hiring party. I was shocked to see that more than 50 engineers reported directly to Elon. My friend was very happy with the company culture and the experience he was getting by working hands-on with Elon. Elon’s like “what’re your blockers” and just went ahead to leverage his global resources to unblock any major difficulties. It’s been the same across all Elon’s companies as he manages 5+ companies as the leader.
At that time the most advanced model was GPT-4. The future direction of AI seemed very clear: more data, more compute, more complex models — it was no longer a “0 to 1” game. As with all globally competitive games, Elon wanted to win at all costs.
xAI sent me four emails inviting me to interview. This was a massive opportunity, but I chose to follow my instincts and skipped the interviews. Because, at the exact same time, @a16z sent the first check to my startup. I chose the latter and jumped into the crypto industry.
Why the crypto industry?
By comparison, I believe the future of crypto is far less clear to the general public.
People say the crypto industry is dead. I think they are completely wrong.
The crypto industry carries a huge vision: globalization — the very thing that Musk wanted to do but couldn’t fully accomplish.
In 2024, Musk went all-in supporting Trump’s campaign. “After the rabbit is dead, the hunting dog is cooked.” The world is still racing headlong toward de-globalization:
China–U.S. decoupling, tariff wars, de-dollarization…
What the crypto industry is doing is something massive:
Unifying the global currency.
Bitcoin has already become a mainstream asset.
Stablecoins are eating the world.
Twitter is accelerating globalization
TikTok has caused people around the world to lose their ability to think deeply. A few days ago Twitter started heavily promoting long-form posts — this is a call for the return of deep thinking.
Besides Twitter, there is no other platform that can gather free-thinking people from every corner of the world. No matter whether you’re from Silicon Valley, London, Moscow, or Beijing, you can speak freely here, interact in the comments with the most cutting-edge minds of our time, and @Grok to generate whatever image you love.
This is the best era.
Many years from now, people will surely look back with nostalgia and thank Musk.
Epilogue
I grew up in Japan from 2002 to 2008. At 18 I went to university at UC Berkeley in California. At 20 I interned at Twitter. At 22 I started my company.
I hope for a future where anyone can freely move to any corner of the world, and forever maintain freedom of thought.
I’m a loyal Twitter user.
I have a shared vision with Elon.
Disclaimer:
I got to chat with Elon Musk in a public setting for an hour during my internship at Twitter when we had the group online breakfast with Elon Musk to talk about his vision of Twitter (now X) post acquisition as a digital town square.
During the hiring party of xAI, I got to spend a bit over an hour to group chat with Elon Musk on his vision of xAI and how he is going to leverage his mass distribution of Tesla and all his other companies to democratize the AGI built by xAI.
Despite of me not having 1 on 1 with Elon Musk yet (excuse the clickbait title), I'm sure there will be an opportunity to do so. Why not, right @elonmusk?
If you were to take my offer, I am willing to give you 1% of future o1.exchange token from my own token warrant, which I will do anything in my power to make sure it is worth way more than $30 million.