Everyone believes they’re special. Everybody.
But nobody escapes physics and probability. This Friday’s posting is a short excerpt from a NYT interview with Peter Thiel. It wasn’t an interview about being special, but this funny little nugget was in there about his pal Elon Musk thinking he was exempt from what could happen.
Then there was the time they were driving in Mr. Musk’s McLaren F1 car, “the fastest car in the world.” It hit an embankment, achieved liftoff, made a 360-degree horizontal turn, crashed and was destroyed.
“It was a miracle neither of us were hurt,” Mr. Thiel says. “I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, which is not advisable. Elon’s first comment was, ‘Wow, Peter, that was really intense.’ And then it was: ‘You know, I had read all these stories about people who made money and bought sports cars and crashed them. But I knew it would never happen to me, so I didn’t get any insurance.’ And then we hitchhiked the rest of the way to the meeting.”