The Book of Elon Quotes

“Video games without a score are boring.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Let’s try thinking in the limit, as I explained before. If you are stranded on a tropical island with a trillion dollars, it’s useless. On the island there are no resources to allocate, except yourself, so money doesn’t help. If you’re stranded with no food, all the Bitcoin in the world will not stop you from starving.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Money is just information. Money is a database for resource allocation across time and space.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Money is a database for resource allocation across time and space.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Fortunately, Compaq came along.420 We had the opportunity to sell Zip2 to Compaq in early 1999 and accepted that offer. It was a little over $300 million in cash. Cash is a currency I highly recommend.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“There was a lot more interest in the internet following the Netscape IPO (initial public offering). Our software was more impressive by then, too. Mohr Davidow Ventures (a VC firm) invested $3 million for 60 percent of the company, which we thought was crazy.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Soon, there were six of us. Me, my brother, a friend of my mom’s, and three salespeople we hired on contingency by putting an ad in the newspaper.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Humanity was effectively becoming a superorganism, qualitatively different from what it had been before. I wanted to be part of that. I wanted to help build humanity’s nervous system.401 The internet turned out to be a good idea for my first company because software is a low-capital endeavor. I”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Design is overrated, and manufacturing is underrated. There is 1,000 percent, maybe 10,000 percent more work that goes into the production system than the product itself.376 Especially for a product with new technology. The difficulty of manufacturing is proportionate to the amount of new technology in the product.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“This is underappreciated. People think there is a “eureka” moment where you come up with an idea and that’s it. They believe design is the hard part and production is just making copies. That’s completely false.371 At Tesla, we learned a valuable lesson. The production line will move as fast as the slowest and least lucky part of the entire production line. Let’s say there are ten thousand things that have to go right for production to work. If you have 9,999 things working and one that isn’t, that sets the production rate.372”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Tesla believes strongly in making things. Apple and Google do not. It’s a philosophical difference.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Making anything or providing a valuable service like good entertainment, good information—these are valuable things to do.362”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Now, let me break it to the fools out there. If we don’t make stuff, there’s no stuff. If we don’t grow the food, process the food, and transport the food…there’s no food. Medical treatments, getting your teeth fixed, everything. There’s no stuff if we don’t make stuff.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“They think goods and services magically come from somewhere, and if somebody has more stuff than somebody else, it’s because they took more from this magic source of stuff.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Some people have an absurd view of the economy as a magic thing that just produces stuff.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“For internal timelines, we set the most aggressive timelines we can. I do this because there’s a kind of “law of gaseous expansion” for schedules.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Set Aggressive Timelines”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“When I was interviewing for a vice president of machining, I explained I was paying for everything at SpaceX out of pocket. I asked him, “What’s the cheapest you would work for?” He haggled, and eventually we agreed. Ten minutes later, I gave him a contract. This was a Saturday at 5:00 p.m. He started working that night.348”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Do Things in Parallel Everything is measured in terms of time. What is the time risk associated with something? The one thing you cannot replace is time.340”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“I have a running triage of what I do at each company, constantly thinking, “What is the most useful thing I could do?”336”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“The only true currency is time.331”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave; it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Maniacal Urgency A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle.330”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“Always wait until the end of designing a process—after you have questioned all the requirements and deleted unnecessary parts—before you introduce automation.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“At SpaceX, I would tell the team, “We are on a deletion rampage!! Nothing is sacred. We will delete any remotely questionable tubes, sensors, manifolds, etc. tonight. Please go ultrahardcore on deletion and simplification.” We put immense effort into reducing mass.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“I have everyone at my companies rigorously implement a five-step process for engineering. I call it The Algorithm. I’ll list the steps, then explain. The order is very important. Make your requirements less dumb. Try very hard to delete the part or process. Simplify or optimize. Accelerate. Automate.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“The best part is no part. The best process is no process.316”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“I look at every tiny part of each process and ask, “Is this process necessary?”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“You will lose. It will hurt the first fifty times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success

“One reason SpaceX could move so quickly is I made both the engineering decisions and the spending decisions together in one brain. In most companies, those decisions require at least two different people. There’s some engineering guy who’s trying to convince a finance guy that this money should be spent. But the finance guy doesn’t understand engineering, so he can’t tell if this is a good way to spend money or not. Plus, they may not trust each other. I’m making the engineering and spending decisions together with all the information in one place. My brain trusts itself.”
― Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success