Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

hucksterism,”

The brothers rented a tiny office in Palo Alto that had room for two desks and futons. For the first six months, they slept in the office and showered at the YMCA. Kimbal, who would later become a chef and restaurateur, got an electric coil and cooked meals occasionally. But mainly they ate at Jack in the Box, because it was cheap, open twenty-four hours, and just a block away. “I can still tell you every single menu item,” Kimbal

“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.”

intransigent

“What I didn’t appreciate is that Elon starts with a mission and later finds a way to backfill in order to make it work financially,” he says. “That’s what makes him a force of nature.”

“I was pretty mad, and when I get mad I try to reframe the problem.”

“We’re going to be doing dumb things, but let’s just not do dumb things on a large scale,”

All requirements should be treated as recommendations, he repeatedly instructed. The only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics.

“It’s not how well you avoid problems,” Mueller says. “It’s how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it.”

What struck Tarpenning was that Musk focused on the importance of the mission rather than the potential of the business:

Outsourcing may save money, but it can hurt cash flow.

seminal

sclerotic

His instincts had always been just the opposite. He never put much effort into sales and marketing, and instead believed that if you made a great product, the sales would follow.

détente

Musk calculated that on a good day he made a hundred command decisions as he walked the floor. “At least twenty percent are going to be wrong, and we’re going to alter them later,” he said. “But if I don’t make decisions, we die.”

All technical managers must have hands-on experience. For example, managers of software teams must spend at least 20% of their time coding. Solar roof

managers must spend time on the roofs doing installations. Otherwise, they are like a cavalry leader who can’t ride a horse or a general who can’t use a sword. Comradery is dangerous. It makes it hard for people to challenge each other’s work. There is a tendency to not want to throw a colleague under the bus. That needs to be avoided. It’s OK to be wrong. Just don’t be confident and wrong.

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he liked the number 420 because it was slang for smoking marijuana. “It seemed like better karma at four-twenty than at four-nineteen,” he says. “But I was not on weed, to be clear. Weed is not helpful for productivity. There’s a reason for the word ‘stoned.’ ”

mercurial

“Yeah, I’m sometimes a little too optimistic about time frames,” he said. “It’s time you knew that, yeah. But would I be doing this if I wasn’t optimistic? Geez.”

eclectic

“We’re not doing a traditional boring truck. We can always do that later. I want to build something that’s cool. Like, don’t resist me.”

Musk combined, as he often did, an aspirational mission with a practical business plan.

burn-the-boats strategy.

NIMBYism, clogged with regulations, plagued by meddlesome commissions, and too skittish about COVID.

What does this mean?

He believed that there was nothing wrong with becoming wealthy by building successful companies and keeping the money invested in them.

“I think possessions kind of weigh you down and they’re an attack vector,”

pejorative,

cathartic,

Boeing was not looking for disrupters. “Maybe we want the people who aren’t the best, but who will stick around longer.”

At least he was honest about this mentality

Musk got backed up, and Dontchev was told he would have to come back another day. Instead, Dontchev sat outside Musk’s cubicle for five hours.

This is the opposite of what Corey Wayne teaches. Persistence. Also mentioned in TAGR

they both focused on envisioning the future rather than pursuing short-term profits.

dilettante

“I give people hardcore feedback, mostly accurate, and I try not to do it in a way that’s ad hominem,” he says. “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.”

One method Musk used when a problem got hairy was to turn his attention to designing a future version of the product.

fighting to survive keeps you going for quite a while. When you are no longer in a survive-or-die mode, it’s not that easy to get motivated every day.

Do not fear losing. “You will lose,” Musk says. “It will hurt the first fifty times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion.” You will be more fearless, take more risks.

The future would not get here fast enough unless they forced it.

reticence,

“What he symbolizes,” Milley said, “is the combination of the civil and military cooperation and teamwork that makes the United States the most powerful country in space.”

“I’m a big believer that a small number of exceptional people who are highly motivated can do better than a large number of people who are pretty good and moderately motivated,”

“This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers.” That’s why America could no longer build things like high-speed rail or rockets that go to the moon. “When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.”