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“I wish Elon knew how to be a little happier,”
Il Fornaio, a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant in Palo Alto.
Was very close to working here
that technological progress was not inevitable. It could stop. It could even backslide.
Life cannot be merely about solving problems, he felt. It also had to be about pursuing great dreams. “That’s what can get us up in the morning.”
Thus continued the tradition he had established at PayPal: setting unrealistic timelines that transformed his wild notions from being completely insane to being merely very late.
“I learned never to tell him no,” Mueller says. “Just say you’re going to try, then later explain why if it doesn’t work out.”
“They kept asking me why I was being so hardcore about every little curve of this car. And what I told them was, ‘Because we have to make it beautiful.’ ”
“Creating engineering this good is the beautiful part,”
Musk has a rule about responsibility: every part, every process, and every specification needs to have a name attached.
Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.”
Most importantly, regarding the car as a piece of software rather than just hardware allowed it to be continuously upgraded.
He accused Musk of being a “specist,” someone who was biased in favor of their own species. “Well, yes, I am pro-human,” Musk responded. “I fucking like humanity, dude.”
He never put much effort into sales and marketing, and instead believed that if you made a great product, the sales would follow.
“Did you ever notice that cities are built in 3-D, but the roads are only built in 2-D?”
“Why doesn’t the future look like the future?”
As he walked the floor of the factory, he spoke to a group of machinists about the high-precision molding of Lego pieces. They are accurate and identical to within ten microns, which means any part can easily be replaced by another.
“I think possessions kind of weigh you down and they’re an attack vector,” he said. “In recent years ‘billionaire’ has become pejorative, like that’s a bad thing. They’ll say, ‘Hey, billionaire, you’ve got all this stuff.’ Well, now I don’t have stuff, so what are you going to do?”
gradatim ferociter, or “Step by step, ferociously.”
“I try to criticize the action, not the person. We all make mistakes. What matters is whether a person has a good feedback loop, can seek criticism from others, and can improve. Physics does not care about hurt feelings. It cares about whether you got the rocket right.”
“Elon cares a lot about humanity, but humanity in more of a very macro sense.”
If I loved him any less I’d make him stay But he has to be the best Player of games…. I’m in love with the greatest gamer But he’ll always love the game More than he loves me Sail away To the cold expanse of space Even love Couldn’t keep you in your place.
They don’t want to make space flight seem like a commercial thing as yet. This makes it seem that it isn’t that complex and we are at that point in space travel
“Technology does not automatically progress,” Musk said. “This flight was a great example of how progress requires human agency.”
If we don’t end up adding back some parts later, we haven’t deleted enough.”
One method Musk used when a problem got hairy was to turn his attention to designing a future version of the product.
“Can you get a neuroscientist who can help me understand computer-brain interface?” he asked.
GM sold a grand total of 26 electric vehicles in the U.S. That year Tesla sold about 300,000 electric vehicles in the U.S.
“SpaceX’s out of pocket cost to enable and support Starlink in Ukraine is ~$80M so far,” he wrote in response to Zelenskyy’s question. “Our support for Russia is $0.
“How can someone say they are passionate about fighting climate change and then do something that reduced the overall investment in the company doing the most?” he asked me a few days after Gates’s visit. “It’s pure hypocrisy. Why make money on the failure of a sustainable energy car company?”
“It’s true that if they see the general out on the battlefield, the troops are going to be motivated. Wherever Napoleon was, that’s where his armies would do best.
“Like cavalry generals who don’t know how to ride a horse.”
“I’m not sure how many people would actually like to be me. The amount that I torture myself is next level, frankly.”
The engineers who stayed, he said, had to meet three criteria. They had to be excellent, trustworthy, and driven.
“New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach,”
whether mRNA vaccines caused heart problems, whether mask mandates worked, and whether the virus emerged from a lab leak in China.
devising a self-driving car system that would learn from human behavior.
They put a gong near their desks, and whenever they successfully solved a problem causing an intervention, they got to bang the gong. An
Gonggggggg
“a maximum truth-seeking AI. It would care about understanding the universe, and that would probably lead it to want to preserve humanity, because we are an interesting part of the universe.”
“When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.”
As Shakespeare teaches us, all heroes have flaws, some tragic, some conquered, and those we cast as villains can be complex. Even the best people, he wrote, are “molded out of faults.”
Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training.
They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.
