Musk

"One of the next places Blankenship targeted wouldn’t offer such easy entree. Texas was among a handful of states that banned carmakers from selling directly to customers. Musk wasn’t about to lie down, though. Tesla simply needed to find a way around the law."

"For Musk, the Scotiabank internship proved “how lame banks are.” Fear of the unknown had cost them billions, and in his later efforts at X.com and PayPal, he’d return to this experience as evidence that the banks could be beaten. “If they’re this bad at innovation, then any company that enters the financial space should not fear that the banks will crush them—because the banks do not innovate,” Musk concluded."

"Fricker also became flummoxed by Musk’s promise that X.com would handle everything under the financial sun. “The description of what we were doing was... 10x what we were actually doing. And if there was frustration... it was that I wanted to get something built, regulated, and productized,” Fricker said. “The more we described what we were going to build, the more difficult the project became to do that.”"

"Of course, Musk wasn’t alone in thinking that offline banks were too slow to move online. By the late 1990s, the digital finance and banking space swarmed with start-ups. But Musk found those services lacking in one respect or another—he wasn’t keen on launching just another dot-com bank. Musk’s vision for his new financial services firm was—unsurprisingly—ambitious. What if, he wondered, a single entity unified a person’s entire financial life? In some of his earliest investor pitches, he called this idea “the Amazon of financial services”: finance’s one-stop shop, offering not just standard-issue savings and checking accounts, but everything from mortgages to lines of credit, stock trading, loans, and even insurance. Wherever money went, Musk believed his new company should go, too."

"To Musk, this “nervous system” fused science fiction with hard science—a cocktail of Adams and Feynman—and he spoke of it with unselfconscious amazement. “Previously we could only communicate by osmosis. One person would physically have to go to another person. For a letter, someone has to carry the letter,” he observed. “And now, you could be in the middle of the Amazon jungle, and if you had just one satellite signal to the internet, you’d have access to all the world’s information. That’s unreal.” Unreal—yet being made real all around him. Musk craved the chance to do more. He wanted to be responsible, as he put it, for constructing the internet’s “building blocks.” Zip2 was now behind him. More than a little cash lay before him. It was time for his next venture."

"“A lot of times,” Musk explained, “the question is harder than the answer, and if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part.”"

"Musk responded graciously—but rejected Fricker’s premise that he was asleep at the wheel. “Well said, although I think you may misread me a little. My mind is always on X by default, even in my sleep—I am by nature obsessive-compulsive,” Musk wrote back. “What matters to me is winning, and not in a small way.”"

"“My career had always been bricks-and-mortar,” he said, “and I hadn’t dipped my toe into the dot-com world.” Sullivan agreed to fly to Palo Alto and have lunch with Musk and Story. Musk quickly made his move. “We finished lunch, and [Musk] said, ‘So when can you get out here?’ ” Sullivan remembered. “Jesus, I wasn’t prepared for that!” Sullivan gave notice and moved to Palo Alto within weeks."

"(Well into his SpaceX years, Musk would propose a solution to this problem for a future Mars government, suggesting that all Martian laws include automatic sunset clauses.I)"

"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.”"

"Musk had learned that start-up success wasn’t just about dreaming up the right ideas as much as discovering and then rapidly discarding the wrong ones. “You start off with an idea, and that idea is mostly wrong. And then you adapt that idea and keep refining it and you listen to criticism,” he’d tell an audience years later. “And then engage in sort of a recursive self-improvement... keep iterating on a loop that says, ‘Am I doing something useful for other people?’ Because that’s what a company is supposed to do.” Too much precision in early plans, he believed, cut that iterative loop prematurely."

"Another of the “gray hairs” who joined shortly after was Sandeep Lal. He came by way of Singapore and Citibank, where he earned financial services expertise. His interview with Musk was memorable. “I remember that I used the words ‘change management.’ And he said, ‘Stop using bullshit words,’ ” Lal recalled. To check Lal’s competence, Musk offered a test. “He said, ‘Okay, if I were to do a funds transfer from Singapore to the United States, how would it work?’ ” Lal carefully outlined each step—and Musk made him an offer on the spot."

"[Musk] said, ‘I want you to understand this is a start-up company, and a lot is going to be expected of you. Like you can’t just come in and work a forty-hour workweek. I expect really long hours until we succeed, and you’re going to be asked to do the impossible.’"

"These weren’t wholly new ideas, of course, and industry analysts argued that incumbents would be able to sink X.com by simply building copycat products. But Musk had seen the big banks’ unwillingness to innovate from within—he wasn’t losing sleep over possible competition from the JP Morgans and Goldman Sachs of the world."

"Even Musk, for all his boasts, was clear that X.com and Confinity represented evolutions, rather than revolutions, on the era’s payment technology. “It wasn’t even that we invented money transfer. We just made it useful,” Musk said. “Other companies had the idea of doing payments before Confinity or X.com, they just didn’t do it right.” He pointed to Accept.com and Billpoint as two sites rendering similar services."

"“At X.com we had this philosophy: frameworks are good,” remembered Alexander. “Today, everybody uses frameworks. But back then, X.com said, instead of writing everything yourself, we should use frameworks. You can get a lot more done in little time.” Musk supported the decision because it swapped flexibility for efficiency. “If you fast forward like ten or twelve years, now Linux has a lot of tools,” Musk said. “But not then.” With Microsoft’s prewritten software libraries, he noted, three X.com engineers could do the work of dozens."

"Musk talked with venture capitalists interested in X.com. Two factors influenced him. First, the staggering sums pouring into internet start-ups, a mania he called “happy gas.”"

"When asked about his business plan by Mutual Fund Market News, he emphasized X.com’s “nonlinear” approach compared to existing financial services companies: “To have someone’s entire financial wealth on a single statement sheet—loans, mortgages, insurance, bank accounts, mutual funds, stock holdings—is revolutionary.” Musk declared that by year’s end, X.com would have an S& P 500 mutual fund, a US aggregate bond fund, and a money market fund all up and running."

"Narratives like Musk’s played well in the media, successfully tapping the public’s perennial interest in underdog stories. But Musk also had a special knack for capturing the press’s attention. He discovered that his willingness to veer into exaggeration often did the trick; X.com wasn’t even in existence yet, and it was already earning breathless press mentions."

"Musk, money merely represented “[ entries] in a database.” X.com was just uniting the world’s “entries” into one database—and cutting out the profit-seeking intermediaries. “My vision for [X.com],” Musk proclaimed, “was essentially the global center for all money.”"

"Musk gave employees ample freedom—“ the room to be everything they could be”—but set palpably high expectations for performance. “I have never worked so hard and fast in all my life,” she said."

"Musk remembered the myriad crises colliding at the point of the merger: “If the fraud thing is not solved, we’re gonna die. If customer service is not solved, we’re gonna die.... If we didn’t have a revenue model—if our business consists of only costs and no revenue—we were obviously dying.”"

"When he reclaimed the CEO title, Musk delivered a version of his May 2000 board presentation to the entire company, including a slide titled “Major Actions” that surveyed the most urgent to-dos. “If we make these items happen,” he wrote in a follow-up note to the full team, “I’m confident we will be unstoppable.”"

"Musk’s concern that the coverage would act like quick-drying cement—irreparably harming the company’s reputation and dissuading new customers."

"“When Moritz invested, he was like, ‘We should hire a CEO.’ And I said, ‘Great, I don’t want to be CEO,’ ” Musk said. “I had no desire to be a CEO. It’s really a lot of chores... Being CEO sucks.” (Musk added that he had “tried hard not to be CEO of Tesla.”)"

"“Peter is even less tolerant of bullshit than I am,” the famously administrivia-averse Musk remarked. “My bullshit tolerance is low, but Peter is like zero.”"

"Given its early success, Musk wanted to broadcast the triumph of X.com’s email product to the world. But Mike Moritz, his lead investor, advised otherwise. “He wanted me to keep talking about us being a bank as misdirection,” Musk explained."

"Musk had reservations. Everything looks great, but my gut feel is uneasy, he remembered thinking."

"Musk admired Steve Jobs and studied the period of his departure from Apple. “That ship was sailing really well,” Musk observed of the interregnum between Jobs’s departure and return, “... towards the reef.”"

"At one meeting during this period, Musk acknowledged the peril of charging for a previously free product. “In that meeting, [Musk] said, ‘We will charge. We will price. This is like throwing the dice. This is a gamble, but this is what it’s all about. This is like gambling’—I remember the word he used—‘ one hundred million smackeroos,’ ” Lal recalled."

"Musk was unreserved in his praise for random deposit: “That was a fundamental breakthrough.” David Sacks captured the idea’s elegant simplicity in his launch announcement, calling it “an idea that, like Velcro, you wish you had thought of.”"

"With hindsight, Musk could appreciate the need for stealthiness. “Maybe they thought I would come back and convince the board of my original strategy and then just fire them,” Musk said. “I think that’s probably what they were concerned about happening.” By this point in his life, he was also self-aware about his effect on people. “I think they were all so scared that I would come back and just obliterate them,” Musk said, chuckling. “People are just, like, scared. I don’t know. I’m not going to murder them.”"

"In the space of four years, Musk had expanded his fortune from eight figures to nine—and laid the foundation for his future efforts. “PayPal going public is what allowed me to have the capital to start SpaceX, because I could sell stock or borrow against the stock,” Musk said. “Before that, I didn’t really have meaningful cash.”"

"Even before the merger in late 1999, David Sacks had put pen to paper on an early vision for a button product. Over time, that product spec incorporated countless ideas from team members and captured many of the concepts that propelled PayPal to internet ubiquity. In many ways, the document represents the ur-text of modern PayPal. In deference to Musk’s passion for the “X-” branding, the team initially called the button product X-Click, though later renamed it Web Accept. Its closest precursor was a PayPal feature called Money Request, which allowed users to send a personal request for money by email. That email contained a link to a PayPal page. X-Click would take this function and make it omnipresent, “by allowing PayPal users to paste the Money Request link on their own websites, personal home pages, auction listings, or other URLs... The result is a single-click payment system for the entire web.”"

"“The internal transaction... costs like a millicent,” Musk explained. “Basically zero. And this is why you want to maintain balances.”"

"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.”"

"Musk, “PayPal” was a fine name—for a stand-alone payments service. But “X.com” was (or at least, would be) the world’s financial nerve center. “There’s a decision,” Musk argued. “Do you want to go for the grand prize, or do you not want to go for the grand prize?”"

"Musk decreed that PayPal be referred to as “X-PayPal” and that all stand-alone references to PayPal be scrubbed. X would prefix the entire ecosystem—including products like X-PayPal and X-Finance. “If you want to just be a niche payment system, PayPal is better. If you want to, say, Let’s, like, basically take over the world’s financial system, then X is the better name, because PayPal is a feature, not the thing itself,” Musk said. To him, naming the company PayPal “would be like Apple naming itself the Mac.”"

"Had he been there, he believed he could have persuaded his critics of his path—or at least cowed them into submission. “Some combination of reassurance and fear would not have resulted in a coup, I think,” Musk said."

"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!’"

"At twenty-plus-years old, PayPal has arguably become the worldwide payment system that its founders imagined. And yet, for some, even this scale of success is insufficient. “PayPal should be the world’s most valuable financial institution by far,” Musk argued. Years after they had left all of it behind, Musk proposed to Reid Hoffman that PayPal’s founding team should reacquire the company and grow it into the world’s financial nerve center."

"The company’s success stemmed from other sources. One was a relentless focus on the product itself—not just on the technology that underpinned it. “We were really very focused on building the best product we possibly could... We were incredibly obsessive about how do we evoke something that is really going to have the best possible customer experience,” Musk said of his work on both Zip2 and PayPal. “That was a far more effective selling tool than having a giant sales force or marketing gimmicks or twelve-step processes or whatever.”"

"In Rawlinson, Musk found an engineer who enjoyed drilling down into the very basics of why and how a car worked, and what could be tweaked to make it better. Rawlinson saw in Musk the potential for an enthusiastic supporter."

"That night, more than just a sales pitch for the Roadster, Musk laid out his grander plan for Tesla. The cost of the car not only bought attendees an exceptional sports car, it would help generate money to invest in developing other green vehicles."

"A few days later, Musk would go further, posting on Tesla’s website his vision for the company, an elaboration on his simple three-step premise. Or, as he called it, “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan.”"

"Marks inherited the unenviable position of trying to answer what Tesla was in the moment. He didn’t have the luxury of considering what it might become; he needed to save it today. He would suggest a different road from the one Musk had envisioned, and in doing so, he would quickly seal his own fate."

"One engineer recalled using the time on the flight to ask Musk his opinion on the suspension characteristics for the Model S, a subject they had been debating. Because Tesla was building their car from scratch, such questions were purely up to them. Was the car’s handling going to be sporty, like a BMW, or more giving, like a Lexus? Musk paused, looking directly at his engineer. “I’m going to sell a fuck load of cars, so whatever suspension you need so I can sell a fuck load of cars—that’s the suspension I want.”"

"Musk was out selling not only a cool sports car but the notion that one could power it without fossil fuels."

"With investors suitably wooed, Musk huddled with his bankers on a call to discuss what they’d price Tesla’s stock at. The bankers recommend starting at $15 a share. Said Musk: “No. Higher.” Goldberg hadn’t been doing IPOs for very long but in his three years at it, he’d never seen any CEO push back on price like that. After all, these bankers from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were the experts. Now the experts were stunned. They muted their phones, filling their side of the conversation with profanity as they debated their next steps. Who the fuck does he think he is? Who here can convince him otherwise? Is this whole thing going to fail? Is it too late to pull out? In the end, they had gone too far to back down. Musk had them over a barrel, and after watching him for months as he pushed back against custom, they knew it was well within his MO to walk away if he didn’t get what he wanted on arguably the most important part of the IPO—the decision that would impact how much money Tesla took away from the arrangement."

"Each time Musk raised more money for the company, his grasp on the company grew tighter. Tesla was a game of control, and Eberhard had lost."

"He added that there would be a “modest reduction” in headcount that he described as “raising the performance bar at Tesla to a very high level.” “To be clear, this doesn’t mean that the people that depart Tesla for this reason wouldn’t be considered good performers at most companies—almost all would,” Musk wrote. “However, I believe Tesla must adhere more closely to a special forces philosophy at this stage of its life if we aspire to become one of the great car companies of the 21st century.”"

"As Blankenship began working closely with Musk, he found some similarities to Steve Jobs, but also key differences. Jobs had likewise been super focused on many aspects of the business. With Jobs, he had spent their hours-long meetings delving into such details as the wood grains to be used for the legs of the tables that the stores would need to showcase their products, or else weighing the position of the holes that would be cut into those tables to accommodate cords—even discussing the size and shape of those holes. While Musk could be super focused on engineering issues or car design, he had less interest in other parts of the business, such as how the stores should look. He wanted it to be like Apple—he wasn’t up to picking wood grains. With Jobs, Blankenship had gone through several iterations of the store design in a physical warehouse; for Musk, all that was needed were some renderings. “Is that what it should look like?” Musk would ask Blankenship, sincerely. Blankenship explained there would be graphics on the walls and places for storage for apparel and brochures. It would be reasonably inexpensive to build—an open layout with the car at the center of attention. “OK,” Musk said, and left it at that."

"Musk wanted to know what Rawlinson would do differently. “Elite fighting forces,” Rawlinson said. “Take the paratroop regiment. The big difference in a paratroop regiment is the leader is on the ground…You have direct leadership which adjusts to battlefield conditions.” Musk’s eyes widened. “Paratroopers! You mean special forces?” “Oh—” Rawlinson paused, realizing he had struck a vein. “Yes!”"

"The company’s success stemmed from other sources. One was a relentless focus on the product itself—not just on the technology that underpinned it. “We were really very focused on building the best product we possibly could… We were incredibly obsessive about how do we evoke something that is really going to have the best possible customer experience,” Musk said of his work on both Zip2 and PayPal. “That was a far more…"

"At twenty-plus-years old, PayPal has arguably become the worldwide payment system that its founders imagined. And yet, for some, even this scale of success is insufficient. “PayPal should be the world’s most valuable financial institution by far,” Musk argued. Years after they had left all of it behind, Musk proposed to Reid Hoffman that PayPal’s founding team should reacquire the company and grow it into the world’s financial nerve center."

"In the space of four years, Musk had expanded his fortune from eight figures to nine—and laid the foundation for his future efforts. “PayPal going public is what allowed me to have the capital to start SpaceX, because I could sell stock or borrow against the stock,” Musk said. “Before that, I didn’t really have meaningful cash.”"

"Had he been there, he believed he could have persuaded his critics of his path—or at least cowed them into submission. “Some combination of reassurance and fear would not have resulted in a coup, I think,” Musk said."

"With hindsight, Musk could appreciate the need for stealthiness. “Maybe they thought I would come back and convince the board of my original strategy and then just fire them,” Musk said. “I think that’s probably what they were concerned about happening.” By this point in his life, he was also self-aware about his effect on people. “I think they were all so scared that I would come back and just obliterate them,” Musk said, chuckling. “People are just, like, scared. I don’t know. I’m not going to murder them.”"

"When he reclaimed the CEO title, Musk delivered a version of his May 2000 board presentation to the entire company, including a slide titled “Major Actions” that surveyed the most urgent to-dos. “If we make these items happen,” he wrote in a follow-up note to the full team, “I’m confident we will be unstoppable.”"

"Musk, “PayPal” was a fine name—for a stand-alone payments service. But “X.com” was (or at least, would be) the world’s financial nerve center. “There’s a decision,” Musk argued. “Do you want to go for the grand prize, or do you not want to go for the grand prize?”"

"At one meeting during this period, Musk acknowledged the peril of charging for a previously free product. “In that meeting, [Musk] said, ‘We will charge. We will price. This is like throwing the dice. This is a gamble, but this is what it’s all about. This is like gambling’—I remember the word he used—‘one hundred million smackeroos,’ ” Lal recalled."

"“The internal transaction… costs like a millicent,” Musk explained. “Basically zero. And this is why you want to maintain balances.”"

"Even before the merger in late 1999, David Sacks had put pen to paper on an early vision for a button product. Over time, that product spec incorporated countless ideas from team members and captured many of the concepts that propelled PayPal to internet ubiquity. In many ways, the document represents the ur-text of modern PayPal. In deference to Musk’s passion for the “X-” branding, the team initially called the button product X-Click, though later renamed it Web Accept. Its closest precursor was a PayPal feature called Money Request, which allowed users to send a personal request for money by email. That email contained a link to a PayPal page. X-Click would take this function and make it omnipresent, “by allowing PayPal users to paste the Money Request link on their own websites, personal home pages, auction listings, or other URLs… The result is a single-click payment system for the entire web.”"

"Musk was unreserved in his praise for random deposit: “That was a fundamental breakthrough.” David Sacks captured the idea’s elegant simplicity in his launch announcement, calling it “an idea that, like Velcro, you wish you had thought of.”"

"Musk decreed that PayPal be referred to as “X-PayPal” and that all stand-alone references to PayPal be scrubbed. X would prefix the entire ecosystem—including products like X-PayPal and X-Finance. “If you want to just be a niche payment system, PayPal is better. If you want to, say, Let’s, like, basically take over the world’s financial system, then X is the better name, because PayPal is a feature, not the thing itself,” Musk said. To him, naming the company PayPal “would be like Apple naming itself the Mac.”"

"Musk remembered the myriad crises colliding at the point of the merger: “If the fraud thing is not solved, we’re gonna die. If customer service is not solved, we’re gonna die.… If we didn’t have a revenue model—if our business consists of only costs and no revenue—we were obviously dying.”"

"Musk admired Steve Jobs and studied the period of his departure from Apple. “That ship was sailing really well,” Musk observed of the interregnum between Jobs’s departure and return, “… towards the reef.”"

"Musk had reservations. Everything looks great, but my gut feel is uneasy, he remembered thinking."

"“When Moritz invested, he was like, ‘We should hire a CEO.’ And I said, ‘Great, I don’t want to be CEO,’ ” Musk said. “I had no desire to be a CEO. It’s really a lot of chores… Being CEO sucks.” (Musk added that he had “tried hard not to be CEO of Tesla.”)"

"“Peter is even less tolerant of bullshit than I am,” the famously administrivia-averse Musk remarked. “My bullshit tolerance is low, but Peter is like zero.”"

"Musk’s concern that the coverage would act like quick-drying cement—irreparably harming the company’s reputation and dissuading new customers."

"Given its early success, Musk wanted to broadcast the triumph of X.com’s email product to the world. But Mike Moritz, his lead investor, advised otherwise. “He wanted me to keep talking about us being a bank as misdirection,” Musk explained."

"Even Musk, for all his boasts, was clear that X.com and Confinity represented evolutions, rather than revolutions, on the era’s payment technology. “It wasn’t even that we invented money transfer. We just made it useful,” Musk said. “Other companies had the idea of doing payments before Confinity or X.com, they just didn’t do it right.” He pointed to Accept.com and Billpoint as two sites rendering similar services."

"“At X.com we had this philosophy: frameworks are good,” remembered Alexander. “Today, everybody uses frameworks. But back then, X.com said, instead of writing everything yourself, we should use frameworks. You can get a lot more done in little time.” Musk supported the decision because it swapped flexibility for efficiency. “If you fast forward like ten or twelve years, now Linux has a lot of tools,” Musk said. “But not then.” With Microsoft’s prewritten software libraries, he noted, three X.com engineers could do the work of dozens."

"Musk gave employees ample freedom—“the room to be everything they could be”—but set palpably high expectations for performance. “I have never worked so hard and fast in all my life,” she said."

"Musk, money merely represented “[entries] in a database.” X.com was just uniting the world’s “entries” into one database—and cutting out the profit-seeking intermediaries. “My vision for [X.com],” Musk proclaimed, “was essentially the global center for all money.”"

"Another of the “gray hairs” who joined shortly after was Sandeep Lal. He came by way of Singapore and Citibank, where he earned financial services expertise. His interview with Musk was memorable. “I remember that I used the words ‘change management.’ And he said, ‘Stop using bullshit words,’ ” Lal recalled. To check Lal’s competence, Musk offered a test. “He said, ‘Okay, if I were to do a funds transfer from Singapore to the United States, how would it work?’ ” Lal carefully outlined each step—and Musk made him an offer on the spot."

"These weren’t wholly new ideas, of course, and industry analysts argued that incumbents would be able to sink X.com by simply building copycat products. But Musk had seen the big banks’ unwillingness to innovate from within—he wasn’t losing sleep over possible competition from the JP Morgans and Goldman Sachs of the world."

"When asked about his business plan by Mutual Fund Market News, he emphasized X.com’s “nonlinear” approach compared to existing financial services companies: “To have someone’s entire financial wealth on a single statement sheet—loans, mortgages, insurance, bank accounts, mutual funds, stock holdings—is revolutionary.” Musk declared that by year’s end, X.com would have an S&P 500 mutual fund, a US aggregate bond fund, and a money market fund all up and running."

"Musk talked with venture capitalists interested in X.com. Two factors influenced him. First, the staggering sums pouring into internet start-ups, a mania he called “happy gas.”"

"[Musk] said, ‘I want you to understand this is a start-up company, and a lot is going to be expected of you. Like you can’t just come in and work a forty-hour workweek. I expect really long hours until we succeed, and you’re going to be asked to do the impossible.’ ”"

"“My career had always been bricks-and-mortar,” he said, “and I hadn’t dipped my toe into the dot-com world.” Sullivan agreed to fly to Palo Alto and have lunch with Musk and Story. Musk quickly made his move. “We finished lunch, and [Musk] said, ‘So when can you get out here?’ ” Sullivan remembered. “Jesus, I wasn’t prepared for that!” Sullivan gave notice and moved to Palo Alto within weeks."

"Narratives like Musk’s played well in the media, successfully tapping the public’s perennial interest in underdog stories. But Musk also had a special knack for capturing the press’s attention. He discovered that his willingness to veer into exaggeration often did the trick; X.com wasn’t even in existence yet, and it was already earning breathless press mentions."

"Musk responded graciously—but rejected Fricker’s premise that he was asleep at the wheel. “Well said, although I think you may misread me a little. My mind is always on X by default, even in my sleep—I am by nature obsessive-compulsive,” Musk wrote back. “What matters to me is winning, and not in a small way.”"

"(Well into his SpaceX years, Musk would propose a solution to this problem for a future Mars government, suggesting that all Martian laws include automatic sunset clauses.I)"

"“A lot of times,” Musk explained, “the question is harder than the answer, and if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part.”"

"To Musk, this “nervous system” fused science fiction with hard science—a cocktail of Adams and Feynman—and he spoke of it with unselfconscious amazement. “Previously we could only communicate by osmosis. One person would physically have to go to another person. For a letter, someone has to carry the letter,” he observed. “And now, you could be in the middle of the Amazon jungle, and if you had just one satellite signal to the internet, you’d have access to all the world’s information. That’s unreal.” Unreal—yet being made real all around him. Musk craved the chance to do more. He wanted to be responsible, as he put it, for constructing the internet’s “building blocks.” Zip2 was now behind him. More than a little cash lay before him. It was time for his next venture."

"Of course, Musk wasn’t alone in thinking that offline banks were too slow to move online. By the late 1990s, the digital finance and banking space swarmed with start-ups. But Musk found those services lacking in one respect or another—he wasn’t keen on launching just another dot-com bank. Musk’s vision for his new financial services firm was—unsurprisingly—ambitious. What if, he wondered, a single entity unified a person’s entire financial life? In some of his earliest investor pitches, he called this idea “the Amazon of financial services”: finance’s one-stop shop, offering not just standard-issue savings and checking accounts, but everything from mortgages to lines of credit, stock trading, loans, and even insurance. Wherever money went, Musk believed his new company should go, too."

"For Musk, the Scotiabank internship proved “how lame banks are.” Fear of the unknown had cost them billions, and in his later efforts at X.com and PayPal, he’d return to this experience as evidence that the banks could be beaten. “If they’re this bad at innovation, then any company that enters the financial space should not fear that the banks will crush them—because the banks do not innovate,” Musk concluded."

"Musk had learned that start-up success wasn’t just about dreaming up the right ideas as much as discovering and then rapidly discarding the wrong ones. “You start off with an idea, and that idea is mostly wrong. And then you adapt that idea and keep refining it and you listen to criticism,” he’d tell an audience years later. “And then engage in sort of a recursive self-improvement… keep iterating on a loop that says, ‘Am I doing something useful for other people?’ Because that’s what a company is supposed to do.” Too much precision in early plans, he believed, cut that iterative loop prematurely."

"Fricker also became flummoxed by Musk’s promise that X.com would handle everything under the financial sun. “The description of what we were doing was… 10x what we were actually doing. And if there was frustration… it was that I wanted to get something built, regulated, and productized,” Fricker said. “The more we described what we were going to build, the more difficult the project became to do that.”"

"Musk listened to the senior leader for about twenty minutes before cutting him off. “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, before walking out. “Don’t ever show it to me again.” Musk didn’t want to prioritize one thing over another, he wanted to prioritize everything."

"Musk gathered the departed leader’s remaining colleagues together. “Look they’re good engineers, but just not good enough for the team,” he said."

"Musk complained to his staff about having to cater to the whims of the market; that every move was taken out of context and overreacted to; that their focus was on the next quarter when he was thinking about the next decades."

"Musk spelled out his thinking. “Public company stocks, particularly if big step changes in technology are involved, go through extreme volatility, both for reasons of internal executions and for reasons that have nothing to do with anything except the economy. This causes people to be distracted by the manic-depressive nature of the stock instead of creating great products.”"

"It was in many ways classic Tesla: Musk making aspirational statements as part of a broader effort to motivate his teams to do the impossible, and in turn to excite investors. Except this time, Musk had said the factory would churn out as many as 200,000 cars in the second half of that year, and after three months it had done less than 1 percent of that figure."

"On one occasion, Jon McNeill, the sales chief and one of his top deputies, could be heard trying to calm Musk. “I think we can fix this,” he said, before repeating a proverb: No man comes up with a good idea when being chased by a tiger."

"“Rapid decision-making may appear as erratic, but it is not,” according to Musk. “Most people do not appreciate that no decision is also a decision. It is better to make many decisions per unit time with a slightly higher error rate, than few with a slightly lower error rate, because obviously one of your future right decisions can be to reverse an earlier wrong one, provided the earlier one was not catastrophic, which they rarely are.”"

"Musk turned to George Blankenship, now the head of global sales, with clear instructions: “We make a dollar, we have a company. We lose a dollar, it’s another losing quarter—we do not have a company.”"

"One mistake some made early on was justifying an expense by saying that it was within budget. An engineer would long remember the response from Musk: Don’t ever use the word budget with me again because it means you’ve turned off your brain. Generally, Musk would agree to an expense if it was needed, but he wanted assurances that there was a real reason."

"Initially, Musk interviewed most candidates, often asking a simple question: What have you done that’s extraordinary? Engineers would marvel at his ability to dive into the finer points of their work. A wrong answer would end the interview quickly—and often draw Musk’s wrath to the recruiter who had sent the person."

"Musk was building a culture around how he wanted Tesla to operate. He subscribed to “first principles thinking,” a way of problem solving that he attributed to physics but that was rooted in Aristotle’s writings. The notion was to drill down to the most basic ideas, ones that can’t be deduced from any other assumptions. Put in terms related to Tesla: Just because another company did it one way, that doesn’t mean it’s the right way. (Or the way Musk wanted it done.)"

"The presentation attracted those curious to see Musk in person. He wasn’t yet as famous as he would become but was already developing a reputation as a rebel in the tech world."