Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–53
concurrent computers, was an Imagineer, you know. Danny’s wonderful. So I said, “OK,
Danny, he’s available.” I know Elon Musk. I said, “Elon, guess what? I’ve got another kid,
he’s the only one in my fifty years here that reminds me of [Richard P.] Feynman [Tolman
Professor of Theoretical Physics, d. 1988].” Immediately, Elon’s in there. Elon is wonderful.
He’s totally compulsive. He immediately got Dario’s e-mail address and propositioned him.
“Come out here. I want to talk to you. I want you to see SpaceX. We’re going to colonize
Mars. How’d you like to be part of colonizing Mars?” Interesting story.
I also give his name to Larry Page, co-founder of Google. Larry Page waits, maybe an
hour, and says, “I’m in.” But now he’s in with a vengeance, because he has assigned it to
somebody I know, named Sebastian Thrun. He’s the professor at Stanford who won the [2005]
DARPA Grand Challenge—you know, the race across the desert? He also was the inventor of
Streetview. Sold it to Google and seems to spend a lot of time at Google, and now he’s been
given the job of capturing Dario. Very interesting. And I said, “Maybe I should have put this
kid up on eBay.” But that’s the other thing I try to do: I try to make the future happen for these
kids. I’m not the least bit afraid to put my reputation on the line. And that’s what you have to
do. That’s the reason I could get jobs for those people at Schlumberger, as I described. I’m
willing to tell people the absolute truth about this person and say, “I wouldn’t be giving you this
person if I thought they would fail. In fact, I’m giving you to them, because I think they’ll do a
lot better than fail. They’ll be highly successful wherever they go.” I think it’s very unfortunate
that more people aren’t doing that. Most people play it very safe. A few people compete with
their students. That’s true in some fields, probably more in the humanities than in the sciences.
But mentors are always hard to find. You know, there’s that marvelous last line in Goodbye, Mr.
Chips—the Hilton book?
ASPATURIAN: I know the book.
TOMBRELLO: The last line is—he’s dying, and somebody in the room says, “It’s such a shame
that he and his wife never had children.” And his last words are, “I’ve had thousands.” It’s
another piece of parenthood. You’ve got all these protégés. Some of them are your students. I
was, I think, unusual at Schlumberger in that I had protégés, and they still call me. They call me
from the Far East. They’re sitting in some airport and they think, “Let’s call the boss and see
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