“If you talk about risk, let me tell you about why there’s really no risk at all.” Peter Thiel explains how @elonmusk convinced him to bet Founders Fund on SpaceX: “The internal version in Silicon Valley of both Tesla and SpaceX were that they could never succeed.” “I had a conversation with Elon about this in the summer of 2008.” “I asked him when the last successful new car company had been created in the US?” “The answer was Jeep in 1941.” “You could say, ‘There’s been no new car company in 67 years, therefore it must be very hard and you should not do it.’” “The alternate version that Elon gave was, ‘It’s been 67 years. So it’s about time for a new car company.’” “One of the tremendous advantages that Tesla and SpaceX had was that they were competing with really sclerotic businesses.” “It turned out that the fact that nobody thought it was doable, and nobody had done it in a long time, paradoxically created a big opening.”