Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• One thing that Musk holds in the highest regard is resolve, and he respects people who continue on after being told no.
• But the techno-utopians do get tiresome with their platitudes and their ability to prattle on for hours without saying much of substance. More disconcerting is their underlying message that humans are flawed and our humanity is an annoying burden that needs to be dealt with in due course.
• “I think there are probably too many smart people pursuing Internet stuff, finance, and law,” Musk
• said on the way. “That is part of the reason why we haven’t seen as much innovation.”
• “He does what he wants, and he is relentless about it. It’s Elon’s world, and the rest of us live in it.”
• “In the comics, it always seems like they are trying to save the world. It seemed like one should try to make the world a better place because the inverse makes no sense.”
• “We were left with the impression that we were capable of anything. You just have to make a decision and do it. In that sense, my father would be very proud of Elon.”
• ‘If there was a way that I could not eat, so I could work more, I would not eat. I wish there was a way to get nutrients without sitting down for a meal.’ The enormity of his work ethic at that age and his intensity jumped out. It seemed like one of the more unusual things I had ever heard.”
• “I don’t think he makes friends easily, but he is very loyal to those he has,”
• “When Elon gets into something, he develops just this different level of interest in it than other people.
• “He was completely unflappable. After a short while, I don’t think anyone was giving him any direction, and he ended up making what he wanted to make.”
• “He had boundless energy,” Leak said. “Kids these days have no idea about hardware or how stuff works, but he had a PC hacker background and was not afraid to just go figure things out.”
• “My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail.”
• “You don’t get to where Elon is now by always being a nice guy, and he was just so driven and sure of himself.”
• That’s Elon. Do or die but don’t give up.”
• The process had been painful. Musk had yearned to be a leader, but the people around him struggled to see how Musk as the CEO could work. As far as Musk was concerned, they were all wrong, and he set out to prove his point with what would end up being even more dramatic results.
• “Don’t worry about the methods or if they’re unsound. Just get the job done. It comes from Elon. He listens, asks good questions, is fast on his feet, and gets to the bottom of things.”
• At Zip2 and PayPal, he felt comfortable standing up for his positions and directing teams of coders. At SpaceX, he had to pick things up on the job. Musk initially relied on textbooks to form the bulk of his rocketry knowledge. But as SpaceX hired one brilliant person after another, Musk realized he could tap into their stores of knowledge. He would trap an engineer in the SpaceX factory and set to work grilling him about a type of valve or specialized material.
• One of my favorite things about Elon is his ability to make enormous decisions very quickly. That is still how it works today.”
• He will outmaneuver you, outthink you, and out-execute you.
• The guiding principle at SpaceX is to embrace your work and get stuff done. People who await guidance or detailed instructions languish. The same goes for workers who crave feedback. And the absolute worst thing that someone can do is inform Musk that what he’s asking is impossible.
• “There is a fundamental problem with regulators. If a regulator agrees to change a rule and something bad happens, they could easily lose their career. Whereas if they change a rule and something good happens, they don’t even get a reward. So, it’s very asymmetric. It’s then very easy to understand why regulators resist changing the rules. It’s because there’s a big punishment on one side and no reward on the other. How would any rational person behave in such a scenario?”
• There’s a degree to which it’s just never enough for Musk, no matter what it is.
• Tesla was, in effect, willed into existence by Musk and reflects his personality as much as Intel, Microsoft, and Apple reflect the personalities of their founders.
• An argument could easily be made that spending money on this sort of thing at such a precarious moment in the Model S and Tesla’s history was somewhere between daft and batshit crazy. Surely Musk did not have the gall to try to revamp the very idea of the automobile and build an energy network at the same time with a budget equivalent to what Ford and ExxonMobil spend on their annual holiday parties. But that was the exact plan. Musk, Straubel, and others inside Tesla had mapped out this all-or-nothing play long ago and built certain features into the Model S with the Superchargers in mind.*
• “At some other company, it would be a public relations group putting something like this together,” Gracias said. “Elon felt like it was the most important problem facing Tesla at the time and that’s always what he deals with and how he prioritizes. It could kill the car and represented an existential threat against the business. Have there been moments where his unconventional style in these types of situations has made me cringe? Yes. But I trust that it will work out in the end.”
• They spent two years studying solar technology and the dynamics of the business, reading research reports, interviewing people, and attending conferences along the way.
• But there is now a degree to which you have to ask whether his success is an indictment on the rest of us who have been working on much more incremental things. To the extent that the world still doubts Elon, I think it’s a reflection on the insanity of the world and not on the supposed insanity of Elon.”
• Both companies were designed with this vision of motivating a critical mass of talented people to work on inspiring things.”
• Even in social settings, Musk might get up from the dinner table without a word of explanation to head outside and look at the stars, simply because he’s not willing to suffer fools or small talk.
• Tags: orange
• The people who suggest bad ideas during meetings or make mistakes at work are getting in the way of all of this and slowing Musk down. He does not dislike them as people. It’s more that he feels pained by their mistakes, which have consigned man to peril that much longer.
• They’re the ones who can identify with his vision yet challenge him intellectually to complete it.
• “Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not.”
• “The way Elon talks about this is that you always need to start with the first principles of a problem. What are the physics of it? How much time will it take? How much will it cost? How much cheaper can I make it? There’s this level of engineering and physics that you need to make judgments about what’s possible and interesting. Elon is unusual in that he knows that, and he also knows business and organization and leadership and governmental issues.”
• I mean we just have a single proof point now that you can be really passionate about something that other people think is crazy and you can really succeed.
• “Elon came to the conclusion early in his career that life is short,” Straubel said. “If you really embrace this, it leaves you with the obvious conclusion that you should be working as hard as you can.”
• Musk just seems to possess a level of conviction that is so intense and exceptional as to be off-putting to some.