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

by Ashlee Vance

“Do you think I’m insane?”

“I think there are probably too many smart people pursuing Internet stuff, finance, and law,”

Asked how he survives this schedule, Musk said, “I had a tough childhood, so maybe that was helpful.”

“But Elon believes in the science of things.”

Tosca would wonder aloud about the distance from Earth to the Moon. Elon would spit out the exact measurement at perigee and apogee.

Elon had never met Christie before, but he went right up to her and led her to a couch. “Then, I believe the second sentence out of his mouth was ‘I think a lot about electric cars,’”

‘If there was a way that I could not eat, so I could work more, I would not eat.

I would rather commit seppuku than fail.”

His big takeaway from that job, that bankers are rich and dumb,

All the bankers did was copy what everyone else did.

“We’re all hanging out in this cabana at the Hard Rock Cafe, and Elon is there reading some obscure Soviet rocket manual that was all moldy and looked like it had been bought on eBay,”

At the age of twelve, he crafted a mock-up space shuttle that could be attached to a rocket, sent up into the air, and then glide back to the ground.

“You’re fucking us up the ass, and it doesn’t feel good.”

Elon replied, ‘Okay. Nice to meet you,’ which basically meant, ‘Get the fuck out of my office.’

‘I would tell those people they will get to see their families a lot when we go bankrupt.’

‘I will spend my last dollar on these companies. If we have to move into Justine’s parents’ basement, we’ll do it.’”

Musk told Riley, a virgin, that he wanted to show her his rockets.

“What a fuckhead.”

“The behemoths are going to have to figure out how to get it together and compete. And it is our job to have them die.”

“The mantra was that one great engineer will replace three medium ones,”

Musk penned the feisty rebuttal himself, while on vacation in Aspen with Kimbal, and friend and Tesla board member Antonio Gracias. “At some other company, it would be a public relations group putting something like this together,”

Tesla, for example, wanted to call its third-generation car the Model E, so that its lineup of vehicles would be the Model S, E, and X—another playful Musk gag.

I feel a bit like my grandmother. She lived through the Great Depression and some real hard times. Once you’ve been through that, it stays with you for a long time. I’m not sure it ever leaves really.

there’s still that nagging feeling that it might all go away.

Musk remains willing to lose it all.

“I mean, there aren’t that many people you can talk to about this sort of thing,” Musk said. These chats included Musk daydreaming aloud about becoming the first man to set foot on the Red Planet.

“By 2010 the electronic controls for a typical sedan required more lines of software code than the instructions needed to operate the latest Boeing jetliner,”