Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

by Ashlee Vance

“I think there are probably too many smart people pursuing Internet stuff, finance, and law,” Musk said on the way. “That is part of the reason why we haven’t seen as much innovation.”

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook engineer, told me. “That sucks.”

“He points out that one of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask,” Musk said. “Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy. I came to the conclusion that really we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask.”

I thought it was more important to let him know quickly what happened, but I learned it was more important to have all the information.”

The company would pick a plan of attack, and when it failed at something, it failed fast and then tried a new approach.