The Finance Journal

Descartes invented the method in 1637. Elon rediscovered it in Silicon Valley. The results are comparable. 1. Most people reason by analogy. They look at what exists, what the consensus says is possible, and iterate from there. The result is usually just a better version of the same thing – 10% ahead of the field, moving in the same direction as everyone else. This is how industries calcify. This is how the car industry looked at the electric vehicle in 2003 and said: not possible. 2. Descartes’ method was different. Strip everything back to what cannot be doubted. Discard inherited assumptions. Rebuild from the foundations. The method requires not genius but a specific intellectual courage: the willingness to look idiotic while the reconstruction is underway. 3. Elon asked a simple question: why does a laptop battery last 10 hours while an electric car barely covers 100 kilometers? Same physical problem. Different chemistry. The entire impossibility of the electric car was a chemistry choice, not a physical law. First principles, not analogy, revealed this in an afternoon. The consensus was wrong because the consensus had never bothered to check. 4. First principles give you the direction, not the solution. Then come the iterations – the prototypes that fail, the cash burned, the problems nobody had solved because nobody had tried. The Cartesian method is not a shortcut. It is a compass. The road is still the road. 5. Most people stop at the first prototype that fails. The ego interprets failure as refutation. First principles reasoning makes failure informational rather than existential. The battery exploded. Interesting. Why? Fix it. Continue. 6. Descartes sat alone in a heated room in Bavaria and doubted everything until he found what he couldn’t doubt. Three hundred and seventy years later, an engineer in California asked why a car battery couldn’t work like a laptop battery. The method is identical. It requires no special intelligence – only the removal of ego, and the willingness to follow the reasoning wherever it leads, including to conclusions that make you look like a fool for the three to five years before they make you look like a genius. The Finance Journal 📈