People and thinkers
Work I follow. Not a list of people who agree with me.
Three people whose public work I use as a way to think. None of them endorse me or work with me. What follows is the question I am studying, and where I stop. Following the work is not agreement with the person.
Debbie Rowe / The Royal Society, CC BY-SA 3.0 (opens in a new tab) Engineering and ambitious technical projects
Elon Musk
I follow his work because he treats a hard problem as a set of real constraints, not as a category someone else already named. The part I want is that habit: ask what the engineering actually allows, then iterate instead of defending the first design.
The companies are what I can study. Ambition by itself is not a method. I am interested in manufacturing, systems, and the speed of a build that has to meet physics. I am not interested in copying the public personality, and I do not take every claim he makes as something I should believe.
Where I stop
I agree that constraints should come before fashion. I do not agree that scale or confidence is evidence a system works. A bold project can still be the wrong problem, and a person can be worth studying without being right about the next thing they say.
Matthew Yohe, CC BY-SA 3.0 (opens in a new tab) Product, design, and focus
Steve Jobs
I follow the products more than the mythology. What I want from that work is taste: what to leave out, how design and engineering are one decision, and how the whole experience has to hold together for the person using it.
Focus is the part I am still learning. Saying no is not a slogan. It is the choice to keep a product pointed at one job. I study that because my own habit is to build many things, and I need the counterweight.
Where I stop
I agree that simplicity and the end-to-end experience are product decisions, not decoration. I do not think simplicity means removing the hard part of the problem, and I do not treat stories about him as instructions. The objects are the evidence. The legend is optional.
Public photograph from his Options Conclave page (opens in a new tab) Trading and options
P. R. Sundar
I follow his public options work because he talks about a position as something you construct and then adjust, not as a guess about direction. That is the question I care about: how the structure behaves when the market does not cooperate, and how risk is handled before the reward is discussed.
I want to understand the approach and then test it myself. A public explanation is a place to study, not a rule for my account. I have not published his methods as mine, and I am not claiming a result from following him.
Where I stop
I agree that adjustments and the losing case belong in the conversation. I do not treat a public comment as proof that a strategy survives stress, costs, or a bad regime. Following his work does not mean I share every view he holds, and it does not mean the approach is safe.