The mystery that Elon Musk cleverly offers to solve when hiring at Tesla

Books about Elon Musk often talk about how a businessman hires people. Previously, he personally selected the staff. Each of the candidates Musk asked to solve the puzzle. This logic Not everyone can handle it — someone who could guess correctly got a chance to get a job at Tesla or SpaceX.



The problem of logic of Elon Musk can be safely called a modern genius, the inventor of new technologies and evolutionary solutions. Thanks to his work in the future, humanity will be able to colonize Mars, drive electric cars and create robots.

The book about the Mask "Elon Musk." Fantastic Future came out in 2015. It was written by renowned technology journalist Ashley Vance. The book has been translated into several different languages and reprinted many times. Biography of genius inspires many people.



GettyImages, however, we won't be going through the whole book today. Let’s talk about just one interesting episode. Vance writes that Musk, even when he was just starting his company, personally hired employees. Needless to say, during the interview, the most original questions, like Musk himself, sounded. One of the most interesting is mystery:

“You are at a certain point on earth. So you go a mile south, then a mile west, a mile north, and eventually you come back to your starting point. Where are you? What is this dot on Earth?



GettyImages Interesting, but the mystery has two correct answers. Think carefully before looking at the answer at the end of the article. You can ask family, friends, acquaintances, but do not google: it is not fair. In addition, the mystery is really interesting, but not as complex as it may seem.

The answer is, where are we going? What dot is that? Cold, wind, ice, snow and polar bears around – the right answer North pole. If you walk from the northern top of the Earth one mile to the south, another to the west and another to the north, you will return to where you started – to the North Pole.



Your trajectory will be like a triangle. Most candidates in interviews with Musk’s company answer this way. But this is not enough for a businessman, so he asks applicants: “Where else can there be such a point?”

Another answer is a little trickier, deeper. This version sounds like this: the point is near the South Pole one mile north of the parallel, the length of which is one mile. Is it hard? Let's try to figure it out.



If you walk a mile south from that point, that's the parallel. Then you go back to the west and go around the parallel in a circle (its length is a mile). Then you go back north and you're at the starting point. This is an integrated approach to solving the Mask problem.



GettyImages was a little difficult to solve? In order to work with geniuses, you need to show ingenuity and non-standard thinking. Write your options for solving the problem in the comment.