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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ashlee Vance
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January 19 - March 12, 2019
Musk has his version of the truth, and it’s not always the version of the truth that the rest of the world shares.
namely that Google’s cofounder and CEO Larry Page might well have been building a fleet of artificial-intelligence-enhanced robots capable of destroying mankind.
“If we can solve sustainable energy and be well on our way to becoming a multiplanetary species with a self-sustaining civilization on another planet—to cope with a worst-case scenario happening and extinguishing human consciousness—then,” and here he paused for a moment, “I think that would be really good.”
More disconcerting is their underlying message that humans are flawed and our humanity is an annoying burden that needs to be dealt with in due course.
In the years that followed, the goal went from taking huge risks to create new industries and grand new ideas, to chasing easier money by entertaining consumers and pumping out simple apps and advertisements. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook engineer, told me.
Huebner showed that the frequency of life-changing inventions had started to slow. He also used data to prove that the number of patents filed per person had declined over time. “I think the probability of us discovering another top-one-hundred-type invention gets smaller and smaller,” Huebner told me in an interview. “Innovation is a finite resource.”
Jonathan Huebner, a physicist who works at the Pentagon’s Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California.
He argued that science fiction, which once celebrated the future, has turned dystopian because people no longer have an optimistic view of technology’s ability to change the world.
The space business requires dealing with a mess of politics, back-scratching, and protectionism that undermines the fundamentals of capitalism. Steve Jobs faced similar forces when he went up against the recording industry to bring the iPod and iTunes to market.
While much of America’s infrastructure decays, Musk is building a futuristic end-to-end transportation system that would allow the United States to leapfrog the rest of the world.
He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory.
Musk came to see man’s fate in the universe as a personal obligation. If that meant pursuing cleaner energy technology or building spaceships to extend the human species’s reach, then so be it. Musk would find a way to make these things happen.
“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.”
“The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment,” he said.
Musk turned four years old just days after the Soweto Uprising, in which hundreds of black students died while protesting decrees of the white government.
This is how it came to pass that a lonesome, gawky South African boy who talked with the utmost sincerity about pursuing “collective enlightenment” ended up as America’s most adventurous industrialist.
Elon buys into the idea that his unusual tolerance for risk may well have been inherited directly from his grandfather.
The perplexing thing was that Elon seemed to drift off into a trance at times. People spoke to him, but nothing got through when he had a certain, distant look in his eyes.
endear
pensive
He could see images in his mind’s eye with a clarity and detail that we might associate today with an engineering drawing produced by computer software. “It seems as though the part of the brain that’s usually reserved for visual processing—the part that is used to process images coming in from my eyes—gets taken over by internal thought processes,” Musk said.
From a very young age, he seemed to have a book in his hands at all times. “It was not unusual for him to read ten hours a day,” said Kimbal. “If it was the weekend, he could go through two books in a day.” The family went on numerous shopping excursions in which they realized mid-trip that Elon had gone missing. Maye or Kimbal would pop into the nearest bookstore and find Elon somewhere near the back sitting on the floor and reading in one of his trancelike states.
I ran out of books to read at the school library and the neighborhood library,” Musk said. “This is maybe the third or fourth grade. I tried to convince the librarian to order books for me. So then, I started to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica. That was so helpful. You don’t know what you don’t know.
When one of them complained of being frightened by the dark, Elon pointed out that “dark is merely the absence of light,” which did little to reassure the scared child.
Elon genuinely thought that people would be happy to hear about the flaws in their thinking. “Kids don’t like answers like that,” said Maye. “They would say, ‘Elon, we are not playing with you anymore.’ I felt very sad as a mother because I think he wanted friends.
“It would certainly be accurate to say that I did not have a good childhood,” he said. “It may sound good. It was not absent of good, but it was not a happy childhood. It was like misery.
For three or four years, Musk endured relentless hounding at the hands of these bullies.
During a science-class debate, Elon gained attention for railing against fossil fuels in favor of solar power—an almost sacrilegious stance in a country devoted to mining the earth’s natural resources. “He always had firm views on things,” said Wood.
‘We are talking about whether there is a need for branch banking in the financial industry and whether we will move to paperless banking.’
‘What grades do I need to get where I want to go?’
There needs to be a reason for a grade.
“You could tell that this person was very different. He captivated me in that way.”
“One night he told me, ‘If there was a way that I could not eat, so I could work more, I would not eat. I wish there was a way to get nutrients without sitting down for a meal.’ The enormity of his work ethic at that age and his intensity jumped out. It seemed like one of the more unusual things I had ever heard.”
“You always knew it was Elon because the phone would never stop ringing. The man does not take no for an answer. You can’t blow him off. I do think of him as the Terminator. He locks his gaze on to something and says, ‘It shall be mine.’ Bit by bit, he won me over.”
I went to the least number of classes possible.”
“Or if their computer didn’t boot properly or had a virus, I’d fix it. I could pretty much solve any problem.”
He studied business, competed in public speaking contests, and began to display the brand of intensity and competitiveness that marks his behavior today.
and ended up writing a paper titled “The Importance of Being Solar.”
The paper went on to predict a rise in solar power technology based on materials improvements and the construction of large-scale solar plants.
A second paper talked about taking research documents and books and electronically scanning them, performing optical character recognition, and putting all of the information in a single database—much
The remarks from the professor were spot-on. Musk’s clear, concise writing is the work of a logician, moving from one point to the next with precision.
he showed an unusual knack for being able to perceive a path from a scientific advance to a for-profit enterprise.
I like to make technologies real that I think are important for the future and useful in some sort of way.”
“Even then, as essentially a college kid with zits, Elon had this drive that this thing—whatever it was—had to get done and that if he didn’t do it, he’d miss his shot,”
“Really smart people sometimes don’t understand that not everyone can keep up with them or go as fast,”
“Because he doesn’t have that ‘I feel you’ dimension there were things that seemed obvious to other people that weren’t that obvious to him. He had to learn that a twenty-something-year-old shouldn’t really shoot down the plans of older, senior people and point out everything wrong with them. He learned to modify his behavior in certain ways. I just think he comes at the world through strategy and intellect.”
“You don’t get to where Elon is now by always being a nice guy, and he was just so driven and sure of himself.”
atrocious
“I’d never been a sports captain or a captain of anything or managed a single person. I had to think, Okay, what are the things that affect how a team functions. The first obvious assumption would be that other people will behave like you. But that’s not true. Even if they would like to behave like you, they don’t necessarily have all the assumptions or information that you have in your mind. So, if I know a certain set of things, and I talk to a replica of myself but only communicate half the information, you can’t expect that the replica would come to the same conclusion. You have to put
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Okay, I might have fixed that thing but now I’ve made the person unproductive. It just wasn’t a good way to go about things.”
All the bankers did was copy what everyone else did. If everyone else ran off a bloody cliff, they’d run right off a cliff with them. If there was a giant pile of gold sitting in the middle of the room and nobody was picking it up, they wouldn’t pick it up, either.”
