Elon Musk

"His mentality is closer to that of Elon Musk than to the Italian entrepreneurs of his time: get to the heart of the matter, the fundamental truths, to find answers to strategic questions, he explains to me."

"While at UPenn, he made a short list of the impactful fields of the near future: the internet, space exploration, and sustainable energy. But how would he—Elon Musk—best position himself to influence the fields that would “influence the future?”"

"That said, Musk demanded as much of himself as he did of his team. “We slept under desks,” Catlan said. “Even Elon slept under his desk. He didn’t pull himself away from that sort of thing.” The engineers recall their CEO working elbow-to-elbow with them through knotty technical challenges. “Most CEOs are not very transparent with their staff,” Spikes said. “Elon was like, ‘We’re in the trenches together. Let’s do this’... It was powerful to work with him because of that.”"

"“I like to have something to believe in,” she said, “and Elon was always about changing the world or doing something good for humanity.” She also appreciated Musk’s quirks. “When he has a hard problem on his mind—at least back in those days—he would spend a lot of time looking at his computer, like he was reading something or doing something, but I don’t actually think he was reading something. He was just thinking. Or more like just waiting for the answer to come,”"

"“The most amazing thing about Elon is his boldness,”"

"The tone was set from the top. Engineer William Wu remembered that Musk expected employees who worked late on a Friday night to return by Saturday morning. (Later, Wu purchased shares early in Tesla, just after its IPO, based on this experience. “[ Workaholism] does no good for me as an employee, but then I feel like, if Elon does that at Tesla, then Tesla’s going to succeed no matter what. It’s painful to work with him as an employee—but as an investor in his company, it’s a wise decision.”)"

"Hoffman recalled the moment with humor: a musing of a compulsively ambitious friend whose to-do list included electric vehicles, space technology, mass transit, solar energy, bespoke flamethrowers, and much else. “It’s like, Elon, let it go,” Hoffman said."

"“We need to figure out how to launch multiple times a day,” Musk said. “The thing that’s important in the long run is establishing a self-sustaining base on Mars. In order for that to work—in order to have a self-sustaining city on Mars—there would need to be millions of tons of equipment and probably millions of people. So how many launches is that? Well, if you send up 100 people at a time, which is a lot to go on such a long journey, you’d need to do 10,000 flights to get to a million people. So 10,000 flights over what period of time? Given that you can only really depart for Mars once every two years, that means you would need like forty or fifty years."

"The Musk brothers were not the most aggressive businessmen at this point. “I remember from their business plan that they were originally asking for a ten-thousand-dollar investment for twenty-five percent of their company,” said Steve Jurvetson, the venture capitalist. “That is a cheap deal! When I heard about the three-million-dollar investment, I wondered if Mohr Davidow had actually read the business plan. Somehow, the brothers ended up raising a normal venture round.”"

"Internet, renewable energy, and space as the three areas that would undergo significant change in the years to come and as the markets where he could make a big impact."

"‘The longer you wait to fire someone the longer it has been since you should have fired them,’”"

"“From that point on, he and I discussed settling Mars. It really impressed me that this is a guy that thinks big.”"

"“He points out that one of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask,” Musk said. “Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy. I came to the conclusion that really we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask.”"

"outfit their homes with solar panels. Tesla and SpaceX help each other as well. They exchange knowledge around materials, manufacturing techniques, and the intricacies of operating factories that build so much stuff from the ground up."

"What’s more, SolarCity is a key part of what can be thought of as the unified field theory of Musk."

"Each one of his businesses is interconnected in the short term and the long term. Tesla makes battery packs that SolarCity can then sell to end customers. SolarCity supplies Tesla’s charging stations with solar panels, helping Tesla to provide free recharging to its drivers. Newly minted Model S owners regularly opt to begin living the Musk Lifestyle and"

"Hollman was one of many engineers who arrived at this realization after facing one of Musk’s trademark grillings. “The worst call was the first one,” Hollman said. “Something had gone wrong, and Elon asked me how long it would take to be operational again, and I didn’t have an immediate answer. He said, ‘You need to. This is important to the company. Everything is riding on this. Why don’t you have an answer?’ He kept hitting me with pointed, direct questions. I thought it was more important to let him know quickly what happened, but I learned it was more important to have all the"

"“The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment,” he said."

"Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion,"

"“A friend of mine wrote to remind me that only 5 of the first 9 Pegasus launches succeeded; 3 of 5 for Ariane; 9 of 20 for Atlas; 9 of 21 for Soyuz; and 9 of 18 for Proton. Having experienced firsthand how hard it is to reach orbit, I have a lot of respect for those that persevered to produce the vehicles that are mainstays of space launch today.”"

"Craig Venter,"

"What Musk would not tolerate were excuses or the lack of a clear plan of attack."

"information.”"

"*   The Musk brothers were not the most aggressive businessmen at this point. “I remember from their business plan that they were originally asking for a ten-thousand-dollar investment for twenty-five percent of their company,” said Steve Jurvetson, the venture capitalist. “That is a cheap deal! When I heard about the three-million-dollar investment, I wondered if Mohr Davidow had actually read the business plan. Somehow, the brothers ended up raising a normal venture round.”"

"Greg Kouri,"

"quantum probability"

"Musk came to see man’s fate in the universe as a personal obligation. If that meant pursuing cleaner energy technology or building spaceships to extend the human species’s reach, then so be it. Musk would find a way to make these things happen. “Maybe I read too many comics as a kid,” Musk said. “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.”"

"“My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail.”"

"“The Importance of Being Solar.”"

"‘Take it down to the physics,’”"

"I see how my restraint runs counter to the bet-it-all mindset of some of the current business stars. Elon Musk, a brilliant mind and inveterate risk-taker, has famously doubled down again and again. He poured roughly half of his entire fortune into SpaceX when it was near bankruptcy, as he did with Tesla."

"when you talk to him and find yourself discussing the prospects of Italian capitalism, the entrenched positions in the world of finance, the cross vetoes, the inability to look beyond one's own bell tower, Del Vecchio cites the new masters of Silicon Valley to highlight the difference in speed compared to some of our local managers. Del Vecchio speaks with Zuckerberg, follows Elon Musk, studies Bezos. He feels like one of them, a disruptor, not a fading industrialist."

"Those like Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, who changed the world of cars towards electric, or Jeff Bezos, who brought logistics into the Twenty-first century, revolutionizing global distribution."

"The first team that I built has become known in Silicon Valley as the “PayPal Mafia” because so many of my former colleagues have gone on to help each other start and invest in successful tech companies. We sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Since then, Elon Musk has founded SpaceX and co-founded Tesla Motors; Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn; Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim together founded YouTube; Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons founded Yelp; David Sacks co-founded Yammer; and I co-founded Palantir. Today all seven of those companies are worth more than $1 billion each. PayPal’s office amenities never got much press, but the team has done extraordinarily well, both together and individually: the culture was strong enough to transcend the original company."

"TESLA: 7 FOR 7 Tesla is one of the few cleantech companies started last decade to be thriving today. They rode the social buzz of cleantech better than anyone, but they got the seven questions right, so their success is instructive: TECHNOLOGY. Tesla’s technology is so good that other car companies rely on it: Daimler uses Tesla’s battery packs; Mercedes-Benz uses a Tesla powertrain; Toyota uses a Tesla motor. General Motors has even created a task force to track Tesla’s next moves. But Tesla’s greatest technological achievement isn’t any single part or component, but rather its ability to integrate many components into one superior product. The Tesla Model S sedan, elegantly designed from end to end, is more than the sum of its parts: Consumer Reports rated it higher than any other car ever reviewed, and both Motor Trend and Automobile magazines named it their 2013 Car of the Year. TIMING. In 2009, it was easy to think that the government would continue to support cleantech: “green jobs” were a political priority, federal funds were already earmarked, and Congress even seemed likely to pass cap-and-trade legislation. But where others saw generous subsidies that could flow indefinitely, Tesla CEO Elon Musk rightly saw a one-time-only opportunity. In January 2010—about a year and a half before Solyndra imploded under the Obama administration and politicized the subsidy question—Tesla secured a $465 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy. A half-billion-dollar subsidy was unthinkable in the mid-2000s. It’s unthinkable today. There was only one moment where that was possible, and Tesla played it perfectly. MONOPOLY. Tesla started with a tiny submarket that it could dominate: the market for high-end electric sports cars. Since the first Roadster rolled off the production line in 2008, Tesla’s sold only about 3,000 of them, but at $109,000 apiece that’s not trivial. Starting small allowed Tesla to undertake the necessary R&D to build the slightly less expensive Model S, and now Tesla owns the luxury electric sedan market, too. They sold more than 20,000 sedans in 2013 and now Tesla is in prime position to expand to broader markets in the future. TEAM. Tesla’s CEO is the consummate engineer and salesman, so it’s not surprising that he’s assembled a team that’s very good at both. Elon describes his staff this way: “If you’re at Tesla, you’re choosing to be at the equivalent of Special Forces. There’s the regular army, and that’s fine, but if you are working at Tesla, you’re choosing to step up your game.” DISTRIBUTION. Most companies underestimate distribution, but Tesla took it so seriously that it decided to own the entire distribution chain. Other car companies are beholden to independent dealerships: Ford and Hyundai make cars, but they rely on other people to sell them. Tesla sells and services its vehicles in its own stores. The up-front costs of Tesla’s approach are much higher than traditional dealership distribution, but it affords…"

"The paradigm shift Apple initiated was so consequential that it left Chinese officials convinced that its JV model was broken. In 2018, officials in Shanghai allowed Tesla to become the first foreign automaker to establish a manufacturing plant in the country without a local partner. It was characterized in the press as a sweetheart deal, as if government officials had succumbed to the charm of Elon Musk. But China was acting in its own interest. When Musk proposed to open the factory within two years, the mayor of Shanghai convinced him to fast-track the effort to just twelve months, offering big incentives, including affordable land and tax benefits. “It was probably the fastest and most CapEx-efficient factory ever built in the car industry, let alone EVs, in the world,” says Harsh Parikh, then the head of global supply management for CapEx at Tesla."

"Musk thought about currencies “from an information theory standpoint,” a reference to the field founded by Dr. Claude Shannon in 1948. “Money is an information system,” he explained. “Most people think money has power in and of itself. But actually, it’s really just an information system, so that we don’t have to engage in barter and that we can time-shift value in the form of loans and equity and stuff like that.”"

"For Musk, Thiel, and other PayPal executives, urgency was the default posture on all things—including and especially its international expansion campaign. Braunstein had only just arrived in London when Musk dropped in for a speaking engagement. They agreed to meet at the small London office. “Within an hour, [Elon’s] grilling me about the regulatory environment,” Braunstein remembered. “And I said, ‘Elon, I’ve literally been here for a week!’ ”"

"Hindsight even allowed for Muskian humor. “Sneaky backstabbing bastards,” he joked. “Too scared to stab me in the front.… All of you guys, you still want to stab me in the back? C’mon! Come at me from the front! There’s twelve of you.”"

"The tone was set from the top. Engineer William Wu remembered that Musk expected employees who worked late on a Friday night to return by Saturday morning. (Later, Wu purchased shares early in Tesla, just after its IPO, based on this experience. “[Workaholism] does no good for me as an employee, but then I feel like, if Elon does that at Tesla, then Tesla’s going to succeed no matter what. It’s painful to work with him as an employee—but as an investor in his company, it’s a wise decision.”)"

"“The most amazing thing about Elon is his boldness,”"

"“I like to have something to believe in,” she said, “and Elon was always about changing the world or doing something good for humanity.” She also appreciated Musk’s quirks. “When he has a hard problem on his mind—at least back in those days—he would spend a lot of time looking at his computer, like he was reading something or doing something, but I don’t actually think he was reading something. He was just thinking. Or more like just waiting for the answer to come,”"

"That said, Musk demanded as much of himself as he did of his team. “We slept under desks,” Catlan said. “Even Elon slept under his desk. He didn’t pull himself away from that sort of thing.” The engineers recall their CEO working elbow-to-elbow with them through knotty technical challenges. “Most CEOs are not very transparent with their staff,” Spikes said. “Elon was like, ‘We’re in the trenches together. Let’s do this’… It was powerful to work with him because of that.”"

"At Musk’s home one day, Payne walked into the bedroom. “The room was literally filled with books—biographies or stories about business luminaries and how they succeeded,” Payne said, “In fact, I remember sitting there and at the top of this stack was a book about Richard Branson. It kind of clicked to me that Elon was prepping himself and studying to be a famous entrepreneur. He had some superordinate goal that was driving him.”"

"While at UPenn, he made a short list of the impactful fields of the near future: the internet, space exploration, and sustainable energy. But how would he—Elon Musk—best position himself to influence the fields that would “influence the future?”"

"When Eberhard had brought his idea for an electric sports car to Elon Musk, they had seemingly shared a vision for what the company might become. But with each hard-won milestone, the company’s—and Musk’s—ambitions grew ever larger. Those ambitions were running headlong into the realities of the moment: the Roadster was a mess, threatening to undo all of their future plans."

"Back in LA, Musk had dinner at a Beverly Hills steakhouse with a friend and early Tesla investor, Jason Calacanis. Musk was in a dark place. His third rocket had just exploded on liftoff, and SpaceX would go under if the fourth did. Calacanis had read that Tesla only had four weeks of money left; he asked Musk if that was true. No, Musk said. Three weeks. Musk confided that a friend had loaned him money so he could cover his personal expenses. There were other benefactors: Bill Lee, Al Gore’s son-in-law, invested $2 million, and Sergey Brin put in $500,000. Some employees were even writing checks, not sure they’d ever see the money again. Things looked bleak. Still, Musk said he wanted to show Calacanis something. He pulled out his BlackBerry and revealed a picture of a clay mockup of the Model S. “That’s gorgeous,” Calacanis said. “How much can you make it for?” “Well, it’s going to go 200 miles,” Musk said. “I think we can make it for $50,000 or $60,000.” That night Calacanis returned home and wrote out two checks for $50,000 each and a note to Musk: “Elon, looks like an incredible car…I’ll take two!”"

"As he reviewed the workflow, he realized there was no standardization of what was being done at workstations. This was because the design of the vehicle kept changing, and without standardized work, it was harder to know if the installation of parts was the problem or if there was a legitimate design flaw. Normally, the steps would have been plotted out years in advance; tested innumerable times; certified and documented in a picture book for workers to memorize. Tesla hadn’t done that—each worker had come up with their own process. Watkins thought he knew the answer. He ordered up GoPro cameras to attach to some workers to document their steps. They were going to reverse-engineer how they were building the car to figure out how to fix the problems. They also implemented a buddy system; subsequent stations down the line checked the work of preceding ones. As Chain, the quality executive, would later write about his experience: “What would have been deemed as unacceptable by any carmakers was seen as part of an ongoing process by Elon Musk who believed, rightly so, that the user experience of driving a truly innovative automobile would outweigh minor defects that will be eventually corrected.”"