On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver

It’s not that Musk had made some rational calculation—that if you’re worth $22 million, you can just afford to buy a new one. Rather, Thiel said, Musk hadn’t bothered to consider the possibility of a crash. “The first thing Elon told me as we were in this totaled car was, ‘You know, wow, that was really intense, Peter. I read all these stories about people who made money in Silicon Valley, who bought sports cars and crashed them. And I knew this would never happen to me.’ ”

My concern, as I observed at the beginning of our tour, is that our risk preferences have become bifurcated. Instead of a bell curve of risk-taking where most people are somewhere toward the middle, you have Musk at one extreme and people who haven’t left their apartment since COVID at the other one. The Village and the River are growing farther apart.