Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

“Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes,”

“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.”

“If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible,” Musk told him, “then unconventional thinking is necessary.”

“I’m not a religious person,” Musk later told podcaster Lex Fridman, “but I nonetheless got on my knees and prayed for that mission.”

“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.”