Tim Higgins > Quotes

“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.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“His next vehicle, a pickup dubbed the Cybertruck, had many of the signatures of a car developed by Musk—features that appealed to him directly (including a dystopian appearance, supposedly bulletproof steel and shatter-proof windows) and that are likely hard to industrialize.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“All of his fortune was now on the line. From the depths of the Great Recession, he’d done something that other U.S. automakers were unable to do: avoid bankruptcy.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“They claimed that a mountain bike, surfboard, and fifty-inch TV could lie flat inside—at the same time. Instead of storing the batteries in a giant box in the trunk, as they’d done with the Roadster, Straubel’s team imagined them in a shallow rectangular box beneath the floor. A motor, much smaller than the typical gas-powered engine, would be fitted between the back wheels. With the bulk of the drivetrain beneath the car instead of under the hood, it opened up a ton of interior room.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Large corporations now owned dozens, if not hundreds, of franchises. AutoNation Inc., a publicly traded car seller based in Florida, was the largest with 265 franchises in the U.S., selling everything from Chevrolet to BMW. In 2012, AutoNation employed 21,000 people (compared to the 2,964 full-time workers at Tesla). Its largest shareholder was Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who invested $177 million in the business that year. The company generated $8.9 billion in revenue off the sale of more than a quarter of a million new vehicles.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Don’t ever use the word budget with me again because it means you’ve turned off your brain. Generally,”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“it’s perhaps little surprise that the biggest carmakers can’t get by without hoards of cash: in 2017 GM had $20 billion in cash on hand; Ford had $26.5 billion; Toyota and VW both finished fiscal 2017 with $43 billion in their bank accounts.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Musk’s lawyers spent that night trying to change Musk’s mind about his refusal of the settlement, even asking celebrity investor Mark Cuban to prod him into a deal. Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, had had his own public battle with the SEC that dragged on for five years, after he was charged with insider trading. It was like a scene out of Showtimes’ Billions, as Cuban counseled the beleaguered CEO, warning”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Yeah, I know no one is selling anything right now,” Musk said into the phone. “But Tesla has got to make payroll. Find something that you can turn into cash.” He was writing personal checks to cover employee salaries and putting their work expenses on his personal credit cards.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Belief created the vision; the vision would create a market; the market would create cash; and cash would create cars.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“They ultimately agreed to the SEC’s new terms: Musk could keep his role as CEO but he was to give up his title of chairman for three years rather than two, as originally proposed. Musk personally would have to pay a $20 million fine, $10 million more than in the first deal. Tesla would have to pay a $20 million fine and agree to placing two new directors on its board. The company would also have to put in place a plan to monitor Musk’s public comments. He wouldn’t be allowed to tweet material information without prior approval. No more “funding secured” messages without a lawyer looking at it first.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“He decided to oust Ze’ev Drori—and appoint himself (making Musk the fourth CEO to hold the position in about a year’s time). Musk told the senior leaders they needed to prepare for massive layoffs to preserve cash. The Model S would be the key to their survival,”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Now, as it came time to negotiate a new compensation package, Musk demanded the board give him a plan that would make him the highest paid CEO ever and, in theory, if fully paid out, one of the richest people in the world. The ten-year plan he wanted would be worth more than $50 billion if Tesla achieved a variety of financial targets, including reaching a market value of $650 billion—an almost $600 billion increase from its present value. The”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“extreme effort. Please prepare yourself for a level of intensity that is greater than anything most of you have experienced before. Revolutionizing industries is not for the faint of heart, but nothing is more rewarding or exciting.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“If Tesla was positioning itself to build battery packs and sell them as part of solar panel systems, they should control the entire customer experience. To board members such as Gracias, it crystallized the understanding that they were moving into a new era for the company: the electricity storage business.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“One thing Tesla elected not to do when preparing for public ownership, which would have ramifications years later, was introduce a dual-class stock system. This was what allowed Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google (or Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook two years later) to keep control of their company, even as they held a small fraction of its total stock. It’s unclear why Tesla’s IPO paperwork, which it filed in January 2010, contained no such provision”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“In 2015, JB Straubel, Tesla’s CTO, developed yet another new line of business for the automaker, selling large battery packs for home and commercial spaces, which appealed to solar customers eager to capture the energy they were creating by day to use at night.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“To many, the differences between the Model 3 and the Model S were hard to spot. And that, in itself, was the stunning thing: A car with a promised starting price of $35,000 might easily be mistaken for its $100,000 predecessor. The night was a spectacular coup.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“The mere fact the Tesla Model S exists at all is a testament to innovation and entrepreneurship, the very qualities that once made the American automobile industry the largest, richest, and most powerful in the world.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“One of Musk’s chief assumptions had been that large shareholders would stick with Tesla, even as a private company. It was a naive belief. He learned that mutual funds, due to regulatory requirements, would be forced to trim their stake. His plan had assumed two-thirds of shareholders would follow him; if the likes of Fidelity and T. Rowe, which owned a combined 20 million shares, couldn’t go along, they’d have to be bought out at $420 a share. Or”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“SpaceX was about creating a way for humans to live on other planets in case Earth became unviable. Tesla was about developing technology to save the planet from climate collapse.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Their lawyer advised them that Tesla could sell directly in California on a technicality: the carmaker had never had any franchise dealerships, and therefore it wouldn’t be cutting into its franchisee sales. That, at least, was the argument they’d be building off of. Now they just needed to figure out the rules for forty-nine other states.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“The stock passed the $700 billion market value milestone that Musk had thrown down years earlier like Babe Ruth calling his shot. It soared from a value of $100 billion to more than $800 billion in 244 days, accomplishing something it took Apple almost a decade to do. With the stock he already owned, his wealth was surging from an estimated $30 billion at the start of 2020 to around $200 billion at the start of 2021, overtaking Amazon founder Jeff”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“In another message, he assured workers they could talk to him directly. “You can talk to your manager’s manager without permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else’s permission,” he wrote in another note. “Moreover, you should consider yourself obligated to do so until the right things happen.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Concurrent with all this, a massive new venture capital fund was being created by SoftBank, the Japanese tech conglomerate with stakes in Alibaba, Sprint, and others. CEO Masayoshi Son was on the verge of controlling a nearly $100 billion fund that was intended to rewrite the rules of investing in Silicon Valley and pick world-changing winners, infusing them with the kinds of cash that a generation ago would’ve seemed impossible in the private market. Goldman thought a meeting between Musk and Son might be fruitful. A matchmaker was found for the two: Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle. He lived near Son’s Silicon”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“We are revolutionizing the auto purchase and ownership experience,” Blankenship told the San Jose Mercury News. “At a typical car dealership, the goal of the dealer is to sell you a car that’s on the lot. At Tesla, we’re selling you a car that you design. The shift is people say: ‘I want this car.’ ”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“GM, Ford, Toyota, and BMW have grown into global icons that design, build, and sell tens of millions of vehicles each year. Those car purchases have come to represent more than just an appliance; they convey independence and status, a symbol of the American Dream and, more and more so, the Global Dream.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Largely thanks to Tesla’s success, the U.S. federal tax credit for buying a fully electric car would begin to phase out on January 1, dropping to $3,750 from $7,500. Midyear it would go to $1,875. By year’s end it would be gone.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“Musk, Ellison, Son, and Al-Rumayyan: Collectively they controlled hundreds of billions of dollars (though unlike those of his fellow diners, Musk’s fortune was largely illiquid). They all shared ambitions to make larger-than-life bets that, if successful, would change the course of humanity.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

“In a CBS News 60 Minutes interview, he showed total contempt for the SEC, saying he didn’t have anyone routinely reviewing his social-media messages. “To be clear,” he said, “I do not respect the SEC”—which on Twitter he mocked as the “Shortseller Enrichment Commission.”
― Tim Higgins, Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century