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“He learned to shut down fear,” she says. “If you turn off fear, then maybe you have to turn off other things, like joy or empathy.”
The PTSD from his childhood also instilled in him an aversion to contentment.
He developed a fervor that cloaked his goofiness, and a goofiness that cloaked his fervor.
He thrived on crises, deadlines, and wild surges of work.
The essence of being an engineer, he felt, was to address any problem by drilling down to the most fundamental tenets of physics.
“I was concerned that if I didn’t study business, I would be forced to work for someone who did,” he says. “My goal was to engineer products by having a feel for the physics and never have to work for a boss with a business degree.”
California had just passed a requirement mandating that 10 percent of vehicles by 2003 had to be electric. “I want to go make that happen,” Musk said.
“Most PhDs are irrelevant. The number that actually move the needle is almost none.”
“I thought about the things that will truly affect humanity,” he says. “I came up with three: the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel.”
“The internet revolution only comes once in a lifetime, so strike while the iron is hot,”
“You will have lots of time to go to graduate school later if you’re still interested.”
Some of the best innovations come from combining two previous innovations.
“I never wanted to be a CEO,” he says, “but I learned that you could not truly be the chief technology or product officer unless you were the CEO.”
From the very beginning of his career, Musk was a demanding manager, contemptuous of the concept of work-life balance.
Like Steve Jobs, he genuinely did not care if he offended or intimidated the people he worked with, as long as he drove them to accomplish feats they thought were impossible.
“Unlike other ambitious people, he never talked about making money,” she says. “He assumed that he would be either wealthy or broke, but nothing in between.
One of Musk’s management tactics, then as later, was to set an insane deadline and drive colleagues to meet it.
Musk restructured the company so that there was not a separate engineering department. Instead, engineers would team up with product managers.
