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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ashlee Vance
Started reading
June 8, 2019
version of P. T. Barnum who has gotten extraordinarily rich by preying on people’s fear and self-hatred.
techno-utopian club.
tiresome
substance.
cynics
unprecedented
He’s a confident guy, but does not always do a good job of displaying this.
Like many an engineer or physicist, Musk will pause while fishing around for exact phrasing, and he’ll often go rumbling down an esoteric, scientific rabbit hole without providing any helping hands or simplified explanations along the way.
REVELATION.
(“Come on, honey. It’s better than coffee!”)
“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.”
Tesla’s recharging stations now run alongside many of the major highways in the United States, Europe, and Asia and can add hundreds of miles of oomph back to a car in about twenty minutes. These so-called supercharging stations are solar-powered, and Tesla owners pay nothing to refuel.
works them to the bone,
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. “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 teenage Musk then arrived at his ultralogical mission statement. “The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment,” he said.
spot-on.
he viewed the Internet, renewable energy, and space as the three areas that would undergo significant change in the years to come and as the markets where he could make a big impact.
He vowed to pursue projects in all three. “I told all my ex-girlfriends and my ex-wife about these ideas,” he said. “It probably sounded like super-crazy talk.”
There were no elevators, and the toilets often backed up. “It was literally a shitty place to work,” said an early employee.
“Almost every day, I’d come in at seven thirty or eight A.M., and he’d be asleep right there on that bag,” Heilman said. “Maybe he showered on the weekends. I don’t know.”
That’s Elon. Do or die but don’t give up.”
