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Reality could trump fantasy.
“This flight was a great example of how progress requires human agency.”
“If you make this thing fast, you can find out fast. And then you can fix it fast.”
that the road to hell to some degree is paved with good intentions—but the road to hell is mostly paved with bad intentions.”
When you’re playing a video game, there is no empathy, right?”
similarities. Both have analytic minds, an ability to laser-focus, and an intellectual surety that edges into arrogance. Neither suffers fools.
“How can someone say they are passionate about fighting climate change and then do something that reduced the overall investment in the company doing the most?”
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.”
When he felt dinged up, cornered, bullied, either online or in person, it took him back to a place that was super painful, where he was dissed by his father and bullied by his classmates.
Vacations, flower-smelling, work-life balance, and days of “mental rest” were not his thing. Let that sink in.
Yes. “I’m not Trump’s fan. He’s disruptive. He’s the world’s champion of bullshit.”
He preferred a scrappy, hard-driven environment where rabid warriors felt psychological danger rather than comfort.
Twitter had become a de facto collaborator with the FBI and other government agencies, giving them the power to flag large amounts of content for suggested removal.
Instead of blowing the whistle when they felt too much government pressure, Twitter’s managers seemed eager to be accommodating. Taibbi’s revelations illustrated the problematic but unsurprising fact that the moderators at Twitter were biased in favor of suppressing stories that would help Trump.
One of his maxims was that you should never use a cruise missile to kill a fly; just use a flyswatter.
“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.”
“When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.”
The explosion of Starship was emblematic of Musk, a fitting metaphor for his compulsion to aim high, act impulsively, take wild risks, and accomplish amazing things—but also to blow things up and leave smoldering debris in his wake while cackling maniacally.
Driven since childhood by demons and heroic compulsions, he stoked the controversies by making inflammatory political pronouncements and picking unnecessary fights. Completely possessed at times, he regularly propelled himself to the Kármán line of craziness, the blurry border that separates vision from hallucination.
Do the audaciousness and hubris that drive him to attempt epic feats excuse his bad behavior, his callousness, his recklessness? The times he’s an asshole? The answer is no, of course
One can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones.
But it’s also important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly. It can be hard to remove the dark ones without unraveling the whole cloth.
Dont throw the baby in the bath water
Even the best people, he wrote, are “molded out of faults.”
ought to buy some Kevlar boots,” he joked. Perhaps, he ruminated, Twitter should have an impulse-control delay button.
Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training.
