Ashlee Vance Quotes

In The Great Stagnation, Cowen bemoaned the lack of big technological advances and argued that the American economy has slowed and wages have been depressed as a result. "In a figurative sense, the American economy has enjoyed lots of low-hanging fruit since at least the seventeenth century, whether it be free land, lots of immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies," he wrote. "Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think. That's it. That is what has gone wrong." In

When Musk is present, the chats tend toward the absurd and fantastic

Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important.

recruiters wooed interesting candidates they had spotted with a cloak-and-dagger shtick. They would hand out blank envelopes that contained invitations to meet at a specific time and place, usually a bar or restaurant near the event, for an initial interview. The candidates that showed up would discover they were among only a handful of people who been anointed out of all the conference attendees. They were immediately made to feel special and inspired. Like many

When we first talked about the touch-screen, the guys came back and said, 'There's nothing like that in the automotive supply chain,'" Musk said. "I said, 'I know. That's because it's never been put in a fucking car before.

You need angel investors to have some belief, and it wasn't a purely financial transaction for him," Tarpenning said. "He wanted to change the energy equation of the country.

A bunch of Tesla employees wrote checks to keep the company going,

The big car companies are so derivative. They want to see it work somewhere else before they will approve the project and move forward.

One employee missed an event to witness the birth of his child. Musk fired off an e-mail saying, "That is no excuse. I am extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We're changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don't."*

What Musk had done that the rival automakers missed or didn't have the means to combat was turn Tesla into a lifestyle. It did not just sell someone a car. It sold them an image, a feeling they were tapping into the future, a relationship. Apple did the same thing decades ago with the Mac and then again with the iPod and iPhone. Even those who were not religious about their affiliation to Apple were sucked into its universe once they bought the hardware and downloaded software like iTunes. This

Throughout these early years, the engineers credited Eberhard with making quick, crisp decisions. Rarely did Tesla get hung up overanalyzing a situation. The company would pick a plan of attack, and when it failed at something, it failed fast and then tried a new approach. It

Musk took to the Mars Society right away and joined its board of directors. He donated another $100,000 to fund a research station in the desert as well. Musk's

I mean, there aren't that many people you can talk to about this sort of thing

Musk had actually started thinking bigger than the Mars Society. Rather than send a few mice into Earth's orbit, Musk wanted to send them to Mars. Some very rough calculations done at the time suggested that the journey would cost $15 million. "He asked if I thought that was crazy," Zachary said. "I asked, 'Do the mice come back? Because, if they don't, yeah, most people will think that's crazy.

I do think Bezos has an insatiable desire to be King Bezos," Musk said. "He has a relentless work ethic and wants to kill everything in e-commerce. But he's not the most fun guy, honestly."*

At one point, the software declared that each Roadster should cost about $68,000, which would leave Tesla making about $30,000 per vehicle. Everyone knew the figure was wrong, but it got reported to the board anyway.

PayPal staff pioneered techniques in fighting online fraud that have formed the basis of software used by the CIA and FBI to track terrorists and of software used by the world's largest banks to combat crime.

Page holds Musk up as a model he wishes others would emulate - a figure that should be replicated during a time in which the businessmen and politicians have fixated on short-term, inconsequential goals. "I don't think we're doing a good job as a society deciding what things are really important to do," Page said. "I think like we're just not educating people in this kind of general way. You should have a pretty broad engineering and scientific background. You should have some leadership training and a bit of MBA training or knowledge of how to run things, organize stuff, and raise money. I don't think most people are doing that, and it's a big problem. Engineers are usually trained in a very fixed area. When you're able to think about all of these disciplines together, you kind of think differently and can dream of much crazier things and how they might work. I think that's really an important thing for the world. That's how we make progress.

I told Elon we could put another engine on there, but I was really, really frustrated and just tired and mad and was kinda short with Elon. I said, 'We can put another fucking thing on there, but I've blown up enough shit today.' He said, 'Okay, all right, that's fine. Just calm down. We'll do it again tomorrow.

Here was a guy who had taken much of the Silicon Valley ethic behind moving quickly and running organizations free of bureaucratic hierarchies and applied it to improving big, fantastic machines and chasing things that had the potential to be real breakthroughs we'd been missing.

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.

Eberhard had come up with the name Tesla Motors, both to pay homage to the inventor and electric motor pioneer Nikola Tesla and because it sounded cool.

Where a typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership of their own delivery dates. "He doesn't say, 'You have to do this by Friday at two P.M.,'" Brogan said. "He says, 'I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?' Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You're working hard for yourself. It's a distinction you can feel. You have signed up to do your own work." And by recruiting hundreds of bright, self-motivated people, SpaceX has maximized the power of the individual. One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together. The individual doesn't have to hold meetings, reach a consensus, or bring other people up to speed on a project. He just keeps working and working and working. The

The longer you wait to fire someone the longer it has been since you should have fired them,'" Spikes said.

Musk's vision, and, of late, execution seem to combine the best of Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. With

He sent the housekeepers away and had Elon do all the chores to let him know what it was like "to play American.

When you have scarcity, it naturally reinforces greed and leads to more interest,

One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together. The individual doesn't have to hold meetings, reach a consensus, or bring other people up to speed on a project. He just keeps working and working and working.

Watson continued: Elon is brilliant. He's involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction. He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy. He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It's amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years. I don't want to be the person who ever has to compete with Elon. You might as well leave the business and find something else fun to do. He will outmaneuver you, outthink you, and out-execute you.

You can see Musk's embrace of the car as lifestyle in Tesla's abandonment of model years. Tesla does not designate cars as being 2014s or 2015s, and it also doesn't have "all the 2014s in stock must go, go, go and make room for the new cars" sales. It produces the best Model S it can at the time, and that's what the customer receives. This means that Tesla does not develop and hold on to a bunch of new features over the course of the year and then unleash them in a new model all at once. It adds features one by one to the manufacturing line when they're ready. Some customers may be frustrated to miss out on a feature here and there. Tesla, however, manages to deliver most of the upgrades as software updates that everyone gets, providing current Model S owners with pleasant surprises.

The couple had lunch the next day and then went to the White Cube, a modern art gallery, and then back to Musk's hotel room. Musk told Riley, a virgin, that he wanted to show her his rockets. "I was skeptical, but he did actually show me rocket videos,

Elon is one of the few people that I feel is more accomplished than I am," said Craig Venter, the man who decoded the human genome and went on to create synthetic lifeforms. At some point he hopes to work with Musk on a type of DNA printer that could be sent to Mars. It would, in theory, allow humans to create medicines, food, and helpful microbes for early settlers of the planet. "I think biological teleportation is what is going to truly enable the colonization of space," he said. "Elon and I have been talking about how this might play out.

Musk began thinking back to his time as an intern at the Bank of Nova Scotia. His big takeaway from that job, that bankers are rich and dumb, now had the feel of a massive opportunity.

I've learned that your intuition about things you don't know that much about isn't very good," Page said. "The way Elon talks about this is that you always need to start with the first principles of a problem. What are the physics of it? How much time will it take? How much will it cost? How much cheaper can I make it? There's this level of engineering and physics that you need to make judgments about what's possible and interesting. Elon is unusual in that he knows that, and he also knows business and organization and leadership and governmental issues.

He's hands-on to a degree that would make Hugh Hefner feel inadequate.

It took six years - about four and half more than Musk had once planned - and five hundred people to make this miracle of modern science and business happen.

Under Musk's direction, X.com tried out some radical banking concepts. Customers received a $20 cash card just for signing up to use the service and a $10 card for every person they referred. Musk did away with niggling fees and overdraft penalties. In a very modern twist, X.com also built a person-to-person payment system in which you could send someone money just by plugging their e-mail address into the site. The whole idea was to shift away from slow-moving banks with their mainframes taking days to process payments and to create a kind of agile bank account where you could move money around with a couple of clicks on a mouse or an e-mail. This was revolutionary stuff, and more than 200,000 people bought into it and signed up for X.com within the first couple of months of operation.

We need to figure out how to launch multiple times a day," Musk said. "The thing that's important in the long run is establishing a self-sustaining base on Mars. In order for that to work - in order to have a self-sustaining city on Mars - there would need to be millions of tons of equipment and probably millions of people. So how many launches is that? Well, if you send up 100 people at a time, which is a lot to go on such a long journey, you'd need to do 10,000 flights to get to a million people. So 10,000 flights over what period of time? Given that you can only really depart for Mars once every two years, that means you would need like forty or fifty years.

Either we fix [the marriage] today, or I will divorce you tomorrow.

He would often say, 'The longer you wait to fire someone the longer it has been since you should have fired them,

You almost wish that Bill and Steve had a genetically engineered love child and, who knows, maybe we should genotype Elon to see if that's what happened.

Musk has talked about having more kids, and it's on this subject that he delivers some controversial philosophizing vis-à-vis the creator of Beavis and Butt-head. "There's this point that Mike Judge makes in Idiocracy, which is like smart people, you know, should at least sustain their numbers," Musk said. "Like, if it's a negative Darwinian vector, then obviously that's not a good thing. It should be at least neutral. But if each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that's probably bad, too. I mean, Europe, Japan, Russia, China are all headed for demographic implosion. And the fact of the matter is that basically the wealthier - basically wealth, education, and being secular are all indicative of low birth rate. They all correlate with low birth rate. I'm not saying like only smart people should have kids. I'm just saying that smart people should have kids as well. They should at least maintain - at least be a replacement rate. And the fact of the matter is that I notice that a lot of really smart women have zero or one kid. You're like, 'Wow, that's probably not good.

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.

After arriving at Burning Man, Musk, a regular at the event, and his family went through their standard routines. They set up camp and prepped their art car for a drive. This year, they had cut the roof off a small car, elevated the steering wheel, shifted it to the right so that it was placed near the middle of the vehicle, and replaced the seats with a couch. Musk took a lot of pleasure in driving the funky creation." Elon likes to see the rawness of people there," said Bill Lee, his longtime friend. "It's his version of camping. He wants to go and drive the art cars and see installations and the great light shows. He dances a lot." Musk put on a display of strength and determination at the event as well. There was a wooden pole perhaps thirty feet high with a dancing platform at the top. Dozens of people tried and failed to climb it, and then Musk gave it a go. "His technique was very awkward, and he should not have succeeded," said Lyndon. "But he hugged it and just inched up and inched up until he reached the top.

But there is now a degree to which you have to ask whether his success is an indictment on the rest of us who have been working on much more incremental things. To the extent that the world still doubts Elon, I think it's a reflection on the insanity of the world and not on the supposed insanity of Elon. - Peter Thiel on Elon Musk

Elon came to the conclusion early in his career that life is short that if you really embrace this, it leaves you with the obvious conclusion that you should be working as hard as you can.

He does what he wants, and he is relentless about it. It's Elon's world, and the rest of us live in it.

site's lead writer, dug into the histories

Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SolarCity - they are all expressions of Musk. SpaceX is Musk.

Elon will say, 'Fine. You're off the project, and I am now the CEO of the project. I will do your job and be CEO of two companies at the same time. I will deliver it,'" Brogan said. "What's crazy is that Elon actually does it. Every time he's fired someone and taken their job, he's delivered on whatever the project was.

As a bonding exercise one weekend, Musk, Ambras, a few other employees and friends took off for a bike ride through the Saratoga Gap trail in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Most of the riders had been training and were accustomed to strenuous sessions and the summer's heat. They set up the mountains at a furious pace. After an hour, Russ Rive, Musk's cousin, reached the top and proceeded to vomit. Right behind him were the rest of the cyclists. Then, fifteen minutes later, Musk became visible to the group. His face had turned purple, and sweat poured out of him, and he made it to the top. "I always think back to that ride. He wasn't close to being in the condition needed for it," Ambras said. "Anyone else would have quit or walked up their bike. As I watched him climb that final hundred feet with suffering all over his face, I thought, That's Elon. Do or die but don't give up.

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,

Musk loves costume parties as well, and turned up at one dressed like a knight and using a parasol to duel a midget wearing a Darth Vader costume.