Whilst Brown and Root were the core of Johnsons financing for the rest of his career, they were just one piece of the puzzle.
His cultivation of numerous older men was of far greater importance (there were plenty of other rich backers he could have had, there was only one Sam Rayburn), in particular Richard Russell and Sam Rayburn. Without them he would have never ascended beyond the house.
I investigated this a while back, Starship completely breaks the trendline. I arrived at $120/kg with an estimated 5 reuses.
I think you're missing a trick here purely focusing on waking seconds.
Demis explains this beautifully in this talk here:
TLDW:
The brain replays memories stochastically during sleep, and replays them OOMs faster than they were experienced. This "multi epoch training" allows the brain to learn much more from the environment, and it can prioritise salient experiences.
I had assumed most elite engineers are using spaced repetition?
I'm not elite but life would be much more difficult without it.