More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“I was born for a storm, and a calm does not suit me,” Andrew Jackson
Notes
“That’s one of women’s weapons is to cry that the man abused her, to cry and to lie. And a man’s weapons are to buy and to sign.”
“I do not recommend reading Nietzsche as a teenager,” he says.
Musk remained in intensive care for ten days, and he did not fully recover for five months. He took two lessons from his near-death experience: “Vacations will kill you. Also, South Africa. That place is still trying to destroy me.”
“Ultimately, what it comes down to,” he said, “is that to solve Full Self-Driving, you actually have to solve real-world artificial intelligence.”
It’s OK to be wrong. Just don’t be confident and wrong.
When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant.
The same general rule applies to a wife.
he spoke to a group of machinists about the high-precision molding of Lego pieces. They are accurate and identical to within ten microns,
Elon declined. “I’ve just got emotions buried under so much layers of concrete, I’m just not ready to open that up,” he said.
When hiring or promoting, Musk made a point of prioritizing attitude over résumé skills. And his definition of a good attitude was a desire to work maniacally hard.
Musk had deployed what he called the “idiot index.” That was the ratio of the total cost of a component to the cost of its raw materials. Something with a high idiot index—say, a component that cost $1,000 when the aluminum that composed it cost only $100—was likely to have a design that was too complex or a manufacturing process that was too inefficient. As Musk put it, “If the ratio is high, you’re an idiot.”
Gates was truly puzzled about why Musk was upset that he shorted the stock. And Musk was just as puzzled that Gates could find it puzzling. “At this point, I am convinced that he is categorically insane (and an asshole to the core),” Musk texted me right after his exchange with Gates. “I did actually want to like him (sigh).”
For his part, Gates was far more gracious. Later that year, he was at a dinner in Washington, DC, where people were criticizing Musk. “You can feel whatever you want about Elon’s behavior,” Gates said, “but there is no one in our time who has done more to push the bounds of science and innovation than he has.”
A few weeks later, Musk was sitting quietly between meetings at Giga Texas, scrolling through the news on his iPhone, when he saw Lucid Motors’ report of its lame quarterly sales numbers. He laughed for a few minutes, then dashed off a tweet. “I had more kids in Q2 than they made cars!” he wrote. Then he kept laughing loudly to himself. “I mean, I love my own humor, even if others don’t,” he said. “I kill me.”
“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,” he told me at the end of that painful second week at Twitter.
“Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter,” Musk tweeted at the end of November. “Do they hate free speech in America?” That evening, Musk had one of his regular long phone conversations with his mentor and investor Larry Ellison, who was then living mainly on Lanai, the island he owned in Hawaii. Ellison, who had been a mentor of Steve Jobs, gave Musk a piece of advice: he should not get into a fight with Apple. It was the one company that Twitter could not afford to alienate. Apple was a major advertiser. More importantly, Twitter could not survive unless it continued to be available
...more
“These things do not look that hard to move,” Elon announced. It was a reality-distorting assertion, since each rack weighed about twenty-five hundred pounds and was eight feet tall. “You’ll have to hire a contractor to lift the floor panels,” Alex said. “They need to be lifted with suction cups.” Another set of contractors, he said, would then have to go underneath the floor panels and disconnect the electric cables and seismic rods. Musk turned to his security guard and asked to borrow his pocket knife. Using it, he was able to lift one of the air vents in the floor, which allowed him to pry
...more
Stan Lee would agree.
For years, Tesla’s Autopilot system relied on a rules-based approach. It took visual data from a car’s cameras and identified such things as lane markings, pedestrians, vehicles, traffic signals, and anything else in range of the eight cameras. Then the software applied a set of rules, such as Stop when the light is red; Go when it’s green; Stay in the middle of the lane markers; Don’t cross double-yellow lines into incoming traffic; Proceed through an intersection only when there are no cars coming fast enough to hit you; and so on. Tesla’s engineers manually wrote and updated hundreds of
...more
For Noah
“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.”
In fact, it was mainly guided by weather predictions and readiness, but it amused Musk, who had been saying for weeks that the 4/20 date was “fated.” The filmmaker Jonah Nolan, who was documenting the mission, had a maxim that the most ironic outcome is the most likely. Musk added his corollary: “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.”
From Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: “They say best men are molded out of faults / And, for the most, become much more the better / For being a little bad.”
