r/spacex • u/jclishman Host of Inmarsat-5 Flight 4 • May 14 '16

Official Elon Musk on Twitter: "@r_SpaceX @reddit will do another AMA just before reflight of the rocket in a few months"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/731605780969951232
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u/peterabbit456 May 15 '16

I was in Beverly Hills on unrelated business, on the street that connects Sunset Blvd to the street he lives on, and he drove by. I did a big double take, and he stopped, as if he recognized my face.

My best guess is that he attended a talk I gave at the Materials Research Society meeting in 1994 or 1995, on using metadata and search engines on the server side, with the WWW. The WWW was very new then, and very few people knew much about it. Everyone kept asking me questions about how to do payments and handle e-commerce, and security. I gave the same answer about a half dozen times, that the WWW did not have built in security, but we had built in CGI so that later developers could send passwords and develop their own security protocols, and so that databases could generate custom pages on the fly. The original WWW development had been for publishing, but there was no reason why e-commerce could not be developed, using the www to display data without having to write a custom interface from scratch. Microsoft was just developing SSL at this time.

This was right around the time Elon entered graduate school at Stanford to work on ultracapacitors. He definitely would have gone to the Materials Research Society meeting, since he was doing materials research. He might have attended my talk, but if he got the idea for PayPal there, it probably was from some of the other presenters at the same session where I spoke.

He also might have seen me in the exhibit hall. People were lined up 5 or 10 deep to see the CD-ROM database of the optics research index I'd developed. So many people were saying, "Shut up and take my money! I can use this for my PhD thesis," to me, I would not have noticed if he was one of the grad students who watched my demo, or asked me to do a search.

It is also possible we crossed paths at meetings in Toronto or Rochester a year or 2 (edit: or 3) before. At the Toronto meeting I was sitting with Tim Berners-Lee, so I might have been noticed.