Your Kindle Notes For:

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

Ashlee Vance

Last accessed on Tuesday July 5, 2016

43 Highlight(s) | 6 Note(s)

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Yellow highlight | Page: 5 Note | Page: 5

Turning humans into space colonizers is his stated life’s purpose. “I would like to die thinking that humanity has a bright future,”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 24 Note | Page: 24

“The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment,” he said.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 30 Note | Page: 30

“We were left with the impression that we were capable of anything. You just have to make a decision and do it. In that sense, my father would be very proud of Elon.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 36 Note | Page: 36

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

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 49 Note | Page: 49

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.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 89 Note | Page: 89

Throughout this ordeal, however, he showed incredible restraint. He embraced the role of being an advisor to the company and kept investing in it, increasing his stake as PayPal’s largest shareholder. “You would expect someone in Elon’s position to be bitter and vindictive, but he wasn’t,” said Botha. “He supported Peter. He was a prince.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 111 Note | Page: 111

Musk, by contrast, seemed to know what he was doing, weeding out the naysayers meeting by meeting and forming a crew of bright, committed engineers.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 114 Note | Page: 114

The aerospace companies had little competition and tended to make supremely expensive products that achieved maximum performance. They were building a Ferrari for every launch, when it was possible that a Honda Accord might do the trick. Musk, by contrast, would apply some of the start-up techniques he’d learned in Silicon Valley to run SpaceX lean and fast and capitalize on the huge advances in computing power and materials that had taken place over the past couple of decades.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 115 Note | Page: 115

If a conflict broke out, the military wanted the ability to respond with purpose-built satellites for that mission. This would mean moving away from a model where it takes ten years to build and deploy a satellite for a specific job.

Note:recent launch

Yellow highlight | Page: 116 Note | Page: 116

The acquisition also upped Musk’s profile and celebrity, which he could leverage to score meetings with top government officials and to sway suppliers.

Note:pr strategy

Yellow highlight | Page: 117 Note | Page: 117

“I’m not sure why I’d want to talk about extremely sad events. It does no good for the future.

Note:nate... :(

Yellow highlight | Page: 123 Note | Page: 123

Hollman also found that creativity got him a long way. He discovered, for example, that changing the seals on some readily available car wash valves made them good enough to be used with rocket fuel.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 126 Note | Page: 126

He kept hitting me with pointed, direct questions. I thought it was more important to let him know quickly what happened, but I learned it was more important to have all the information.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 129 Note | Page: 129

In Elon’s mind, it would get us a lot of backing from important people in the government.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 132 Note | Page: 132

When Musk discovered that Spincraft was well behind schedule, he turned to a Spincraft employee and informed him, “You’re fucking us up the ass, and it doesn’t feel good.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 133 Note | Page: 133

Musk also hired a documentary crew to follow him around for a while. This audacious gesture really grated on the people toiling away in the SpaceX factory. They felt like Musk’s ego had gotten the best of him and that he was presenting SpaceX as the conqueror of the aerospace industry when the company had yet to launch successfully.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 134 Note | Page: 134

The kiss of death was proving Elon wrong about something.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 137 Note | Page: 137

Back at headquarters, someone would ask to buy a $200,000 machine or a pricey part that they deemed essential to Falcon 1’s success, and Musk would deny the request. And yet he was totally comfortable paying a similar amount to put a shiny surface on the factory floor to make it look nice.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 142 Note | Page: 142

five

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 146 Note | Page: 146

Straubel bought a “piece of shit Porsche” for $1,600 and turned it into an electric car.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 149 Note | Page: 149

He saw its potential as a screaming-fast machine that could shift the perception of electric cars from boring and plodding to something aspirational.

Note:ramos this is why his approach matters

Yellow highlight | Page: 155 Note | Page: 155

the founding team had no intention of turning to Detroit for advice on how to build a car company. No, Tesla would do what every other Silicon Valley start-up had done before it, which was hire a bunch of young, hungry engineers and figure things out as they went along.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 160 Note | Page: 160

“They put it on a boat and shipped it to us, and then we took it to Burning Man,”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 161 Note | Page: 161

Celebrities like then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner showed up at the event, and many of them took test rides in the Roadsters.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 164 Note | Page: 164

Every time Tesla interacted with Detroit it received a reminder of how the once-great city had been separated from its own can-do culture. Tesla tried to lease a small office in Detroit. The costs were incredibly low compared with space in Silicon Valley, but the city’s bureaucracy made getting just a basic office an ordeal. The building’s owner wanted to see seven years of audited financials from Tesla, which was still a private company. Then the building owner wanted two years’ worth of advanced rent. Tesla had about $50 million in the bank and could have bought the building outright. “In Silicon Valley, you say you’re backed by a venture capitalist, and that’s the end of the negotiation,” Tarpenning said. “But everything was like that in Detroit. We’d get FedEx boxes, and they couldn’t even decide who should sign for the package.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 176 Note | Page: 176

Elon said, ‘I would tell those people they will get to see their families a lot when we go bankrupt.’ I was like, ‘Wow,’ but I got it. I had come out of a military culture, and you just have to make your objective happen.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 177 Note | Page: 177

Popple found Musk’s style aggressive, but he liked that Musk would listen to a well-argued, analytical point and often change his mind if given a good enough reason.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 177 Note | Page: 177

If you told him that you made a particular choice because ‘it was the standard way things had always been done,’ he’d kick you out of a meeting fast. He’d say, ‘I never want to hear that phrase again. What we have to do is fucking hard and half-assing things won’t be tolerated.’

Note:process is not the thing

Yellow highlight | Page: 178 Note | Page: 178

He just destroys you and, if you survive, he determines if he can trust you. He has to understand that you’re as crazy as he is.” This ethos filtered through the entire company, and everyone quickly understood that Musk meant business.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 179 Note | Page: 179

tirades—directed either at him or suppliers that had let Tesla down—that included talk of people’s balls being chopped off and other violent or sexual acts.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 179 Note | Page: 179

Musk spit coffee across a conference room table because it was cold and then, without a pause, demand that the employees work harder, do more, and mess up less.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 200 Note | Page: 200

“He’s giving us the pillow talk voice, so we all have to huddle around the speakerphone, while he tells us, ‘You guys need to get your shit together,’” Brogan said.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 223 Note | Page: 223

“His vision is so clear,” Singh said. “He almost hypnotizes you. He gives you the crazy eye, and it’s like, yes, we can get to Mars.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 229 Note | Page: 229

“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.”*

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 230 Note | Page: 230

People who have spent significant time with Musk will attest to his abilities to absorb incredible quantities of information with near-flawless recall.

Note:neo

Yellow highlight | Page: 233 Note | Page: 233

There can be no question that Musk has mastered the art of getting the most out of his employees. Interview three dozen SpaceX engineers and each one of them will have picked up on a managerial nuance that Musk has used to get people to meet his deadlines. One example from Brogan: 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.”

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 234 Note | Page: 234

Davis did his tour of duty on Kwaj and considered it the greatest time of his life. “Every night, you could either sleep by the rocket in this tent shelter where the geckos crawled all over you or take this one-hour boat ride that made you seasick back to the main island,” he said. “Every night, you had to pick the pain that you remembered least. You got so hot and exhausted. It was just amazing.” After working on the Falcon 1, Davis moved to the Falcon 9 and then Dragon.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 269 Note | Page: 269

Elon Musk had built the automotive equivalent of the iPhone. And car executives in Detroit, Japan, and Germany had only their crappy ads to watch as they pondered how such a thing had occurred.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 291 Note | Page: 291

Competitors continued to treat Tesla like an annoying, ankle-biting dachshund.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 305 Note | Page: 305

He also made an announcement personally guaranteeing the resale price of the Model S. Customers would be able to resell their cars for the average going rate of similar luxury sedans with Musk putting his billions behind this pledge. And then Musk tried to orchestrate the ultimate fail-safe for Tesla just in case his maneuvers did not work.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 307 Note | Page: 307

What transpired next was the Summer of Musk. Musk put his public relations staff on high alert, telling them that he wanted to try to have one Tesla announcement per week.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 343 Note | Page: 343

There’s a tendency, especially in Silicon Valley, to label people who are a bit different or quirky as autistic or afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome. It’s armchair psychology for conditions that can be inherently funky to diagnose or even codify. To slap this label on Musk feels ill-informed and too easy.

Note:

Yellow highlight | Page: 364 Note | Page: 364

He seems to feel for the human species as a whole without always wanting to consider the wants and needs of individuals. And it may well be the case that this is exactly the type of person it takes to make a freaking space Internet real.

Note:

Would you like to take some notes?

You haven’t created any notes for this book yet. You can add or remove bookmarks, highlights, and notes at any location in a Kindle book.

Learn more about notes and highlights

Sorry, we''ve experienced a problem. Please try again.