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The family adopted a motto: “Live dangerously—carefully.”
“He knew that real adventures involve risk,” he says. “Risk energized him.”
The science fiction book that most influenced his wonder years was Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
He had conceived by then a life vision that he would repeat like a mantra. “I thought about the things that will truly affect humanity,” he says. “I came up with three: the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel.”
“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.”
When Musk gets stressed, he often retreats into the future.
One of Musk’s favorite words—and concepts—was “hardcore.”
Her main job, she told Junod, was keeping Musk from going king-crazy. “You’ve never heard that term?” she asked. “It means that people become king, and then they go crazy.”
Human consciousness, Musk retorted, was a precious flicker of light in the universe, and we should not let it be extinguished.
“Probably Tesla will have more real-world data than any other company in the world,” he said. Another trove of data, he would later come to realize, was Twitter, which by 2023 was processing 500 million posts per day from humans.
“Risk is a type of fuel.”
“Trump might be one of the world’s best bullshitters ever,”
He went from being a fanboy and fundraiser for Barack Obama to railing against progressive Democrats.
“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.
“This means a future of abundance, a future where there is no poverty. We can afford to have a universal basic income we give people. It really is a fundamental transformation of civilization.”
“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.”
