Curry, Deep Tide TechFlow

After trading hours on May 20, Eastern Time, SpaceX submitted its prospectus to the SEC, valuing it at $1.75 trillion, with a goal to list on Nasdaq in June.

This will undoubtedly be the largest IPO in history, and Saudi Aramco's six-year record of $29 billion in fundraising is likely to be rewritten this time.

Less than a day after the prospectus was submitted, on the afternoon of May 21, Musk posted a job ad on X.

The gist was that SpaceX is recruiting world-class engineers and physicists, even if they have zero experience in AI, because smart people learn quickly. The application process is extremely simple:

Send an email listing three points to prove you have extraordinary abilities.

Additionally, Musk mentioned that having done "very complex and practically workable things" is a plus. Musk will personally review the emails that pass the basic screening. By the time I wrote this, the post had already garnered over 13 million views and 4,500 replies.

Musk's approach to recruitment seems very refreshing. Educational background, company name, and ten years of experience don't matter; what matters is whether you have "extraordinary abilities." But if you think about it, this is actually a much harsher screening process than conventional hiring.

Do you think, explaining your exceptional points in three bullet points is easy or difficult?

A conventional resume requires at least one page, listing past job positions and achievements, schools attended, tools used, awards received... all piled together looks impressive, but perhaps not a single line can directly prove your "extraordinary" nature.

In the comments section, you'll also find that the vast majority of people cannot do this.

A resume actually emphasizes "performance efficiency"

I scrolled through the comments section and got a general understanding.

With 4,500 replies, you can probably guess the style; most are probably clever quips. The most liked reply is from a user named Greg who posted a so-called "resume," which looks very absurd:

Purely playing with memes is quite entertaining; of course, the response is just a joke, but it's also a mirror. When I think deeply, the resumes I’ve submitted in the past seem essentially no different from this one?

If we swap the content of this resume to say: a 3.8 GPA from a renowned computer science department, two years on the university basketball team, proficient in Python and Java, self-studying CFA Level One, top fifty in the school sports meet...

The format is identical, the logic is identical, only the content is not that absurd, but essentially still just lists everything you have, one by one.

From Musk's perspective, your Python level and whether you can recite the alphabet while hiccuping are not much different.

In the comments section, there are not just jokers. Some people seriously posted their degree certificates, while others flaunted their Ivy League acceptance letters, some showed passport photos to request work visas, and others listed papers and conference speeches...

These individuals clearly have genuine aspirations to join.

But if you look closely, what they are doing is no different from that absurd, witty post: listing qualifications, piling experiences, indiscriminately enumerating any possible strengths, hoping to create an impression of "I am outstanding."

Musk is asking what you have made that is complex enough and useful enough. A typical interviewer might not have such stringent requirements, but still hopes the resume can be more relevant.

To put it plainly, a resume is a type of performance, and performance is about efficiency. Most of the time, what can effectively impress others is not necessarily long-winded.

A product is a better resume

There's actually a highly upvoted comment that I think perfectly fulfills Musk's request to "prove your excellence in three points."

This person even used just one point and wrote only one word:

codex.

Checking his profile, I found that Tibo (full name Thibault Sottiaux) is the engineering head at OpenAI and currently leads the Codex team. Codex is one of the most powerful AI programming tools currently in existence and is something that developers around the world use every day.

A product name is the entire resume.

The more you need to explain who you are, the less likely you are to be the person Musk is looking for. Those who have genuinely created something have names that are proof; the product itself is the point. However, you might say, he is the project leader at OpenAI, which is impressive enough; of course, he has the confidence to respond with just one word. What ordinary person has such confidence?

From a different perspective, Tibo can respond this way because he has something that has been used by others, validated and does not need self-explanation. This thing speaks for him.

Of course, elitism is not desirable, but most of us are not top-tier; sometimes we also just need to productize ourselves, proving what we have done in a more efficient way.

If we push this further down, it actually has nothing to do with level.

If you spent a weekend building a small tool using vibe coding, persistently shared it, and people are using it, that is a product; if you wrote a market research piece on social media that someone cited, that is also a product.

These things may be much smaller compared to Codex, but they have a commonality: they are all things you created, visible to others, and do not require self-explanation.

In the AI era, every piece of work you leave online, every output, every result that can be pointed to by others is in some way a living resume. It will speak for you.

You do not need to reach the scale of Codex, but you at least need to have something that can be pointed to.

So, the attachments in your resume now might actually be a better resume.

But is the recruitment real?

The story actually has a twist at this point.

Some people in the comments replied to Musk's post, carefully wrote an email, and sent it to the address ai_eng@spacex.com, only to find it bounced back, with the system indicating that this address does not exist...

Some suspect that Musk's account is automated, and the recruitment email is not yet active, but the job posting was sent out first; others believe that recruiting around the IPO is part of the hype to show that the company is attracting talent to expand the team.

Investors will certainly see Musk's post, so the reality of the recruitment can be set aside for now; the impression conveyed by this post is clear: "SpaceX is trying to attract talent."

So is this job post really about hiring or serving as a roadshow?

The distinction between the two may not be that significant. In Musk's world, a tweet can serve as a job posting, an investor relations statement, and brand advertising all at once. What you see are three points; what investors see is "this company has the ability to attract the world's best talent."

After reading the post and the comments, there’s a sense of realization, the witty jokes, the one-word self-qualification of Codex, the bounced back emails, are actually three different roles on the same stage.

Some come to perform, some to prove themselves, while others find that the backdrop of the stage seems to be made of paper...

In an era where attention is scarce and content output is cheap, finding your own place and value remains a long-term task for us.