Top highlights from Elon Musk
The family adopted a motto: Live dangerouslycarefully.
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If you were negative or thought something couldnt be done, you were not invited to the next meeting, Mueller recalls. He just wanted people who would make things happen.
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Separating the design of a product from its engineering was a recipe for dysfunction. Designers had to feel the immediate pain if something they devised was hard to engineer.
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Reading remained Musks psychological retreat. Sometimes he would immerse himself in books all afternoon and most of the night, nine hours at a stretch.
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Physics could teach everything about the universe except why. That led to what he calls his adolescent existential crisis. I began trying to figure out what the meaning of life and the universe was, he says. And I got real depressed about it, like maybe life may have no meaning.
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1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from the legal department or the safety department. You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb. 2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didnt delete enough. 3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist. 4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted. 5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.
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If your hand is on a stove and it gets hot, you pull it right off, but if its someone elses hand on the stove, it will take you longer to do something.
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The important thing with Elon, he says, is that if you told him the risks and showed him the engineering data, he would make a quick assessment and let the responsibility shift from your shoulders to his.
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The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. Steve Jobs
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Step one should be to question the requirements, he says. Make them less wrong and dumb, because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb. And then delete, delete, delete.
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Optimism, pessimism, fuck that, Musk answered. Were going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, Im hell-bent on making it work.
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In addition, he came to a realization: he had a fanatic love of video games and the skills to make money creating them, but that was not the best way to spend his life. I wanted to have more impact, he says.
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How is this a business? he asked. Later Hoffman would realize that Musk didnt think that way. What I didnt appreciate is that Elon starts with a mission and later finds a way to backfill in order to make it work financially, he says. Thats what makes him a force of nature.
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Musk has a rule about responsibility: every part, every process, and every specification needs to have a name attached. He can be quick to personalize blame when something goes wrong.
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The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.
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Musk had a resistance to regulations. He did not like to play by other peoples rules.
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Go as close to the source as possible for information, Riley says. The line workers said they thought the tank walls could get as thin as 4.8 millimeters.
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maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle,
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A pattern was set: try new ideas and be willing to blow things up.
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He is more concerned with a phenomenon he calls phoning in rich, meaning people who have worked at the company for a long time and, because they have enough money and vacation homes, no longer hunger to stay all night on the factory floor.
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One night he left the light on and just stared into space silently. Every couple hours I would wake up, and he was just still sitting there, in the thinking man statue pose, just completely silent on the edge of the bed, Grimes says. When she woke up that morning, he said to her, I solved it.
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When I asked him why, he responded, Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary.
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The lens of getting to Mars has motivated every SpaceX decision.
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He went to the Palo Alto public library to read about rocket engineering and started calling experts, asking to borrow their old engine manuals. At a gathering of PayPal alumni in Las Vegas, he sat in a cabana by the pool reading a tattered manual for a Russian rocket engine. When one of the alums, Mark Woolway, asked him what he planned to do next, Musk answered, Im going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization. Woolways reaction was unsurprising. Dude, youre bananas.
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Musk took an iterative approach to design. Rockets and engines would be quickly prototyped, tested, blown up, revised, and tried again, until finally something worked. Move fast, blow things up, repeat. Its not how well you avoid problems, Mueller says. Its how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it.
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Later Hoffman would realize that Musk didnt think that way. What I didnt appreciate is that Elon starts with a mission and later finds a way to backfill in order to make it work financially, he says. Thats what makes him a force of nature.
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Musk became increasingly frustrated with the companys practices, especially the way it relied on an aggressive sales force that was compensated by commissions. Their sales tactics became like those schemes that go door to door selling you boxes of knives or something crappy like that, Musk says. His instincts had always been just the opposite. He never put much effort into sales and marketing, and instead believed that if you made a great product, the sales would follow.
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Musk says. After I got assassinated by the PayPal coup leaders, like Caesar being stabbed in the Senate, I could have said You guys, you suck. But I didnt. If Id done that, Founders Fund wouldnt have come through in 2008 and SpaceX would be dead. Im not into astrology or shit like that. But karma may be real.
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People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves, he would say in a TED Talk a few years later. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better.
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I thought about the things that will truly affect humanity, he says. I came up with three: the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel.
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Musk would later talk abouteven joke abouthaving Aspergers, a common name for a form of autism-spectrum disorder that can affect a persons social skills, relationships, emotional connectivity, and self-regulation. He was never actually diagnosed as a kid, his mother says, but he says he has Aspergers, and Im sure hes right. The condition was exacerbated by his childhood traumas. Whenever he would later feel bullied or threatened, his close friend Antonio Gracias says, the PTSD from his childhood would hijack his limbic system, the part of the brain that controls emotional responses. As a result, he was bad at picking up social cues. I took people literally when they said something, he says, and it was only by reading books that I began to learn that people did not always say what they really meant. He had a preference for things that were more precise, such as engineering, physics, and coding.
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In times of emotional darkness, Musk throws himself into his work, maniacally.
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One evening, Eberhard was driving his Roadster around Silicon Valley when a kid in a super-pimped Audi pulled up beside him at a stoplight and revved his engine to challenge him to a drag. When the light changed, Eberhard left him in the dust. The same thing happened at the next two lights. Finally the kid rolled down his window and asked Eberhard what he was driving. Its electric, Eberhard said. Theres no way you can beat it.
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Reaching five thousand cars per week would be a huge challenge. By the end of 2017, Tesla was making cars at only half that rate. Musk decided he had to move himself, literally, to the factory floors and lead an all-in surge. It was a tacticpersonally surging into the breach 24/7 with an all-hands-on-deck cadre of fellow fanaticsthat came to define the maniacal intensity that he demanded at his companies.
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He concluded that Trump as president was no different than he was as a candidate. The buffoonery was not just an act. Trump might be one of the worlds best bullshitters ever, he says. Like my dad. Bullshitting can sometimes baffle the brain. If you just think of Trump as sort of a con-man performance, then his behavior sort of makes sense.
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On one weekend, they marched through the factory painting marks on machinery to be jettisoned. We put a hole in the side of the building just to remove all that equipment, Musk says. The experience became a lesson that would become part of Musks production algorithm. Always wait until the end of designing a processafter you have questioned all the requirements and deleted unnecessary partsbefore you introduce automation.
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As the Model S neared completion, he got in the car one day and pulled down the passenger-side visor. What the fuck is this? he asked, pointing to the government-mandated warning label about air bags and how to disable them when a child is in the passenger seat. Dave Morris explained that the government required them. Get rid of them, Musk ordered. People arent stupid. These stickers are stupid.
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The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.
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wiles
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At first she and Errol were going to name him Nice, after the town in France where he was conceived. History may have been different, or at least amused, if the boy had to go through life with the name Nice Musk.
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He had become fascinated by Fermis Paradox, named after the Italian American physicist Enrico Fermi, who in a discussion of alien life in the universe said, But where is everyone? Mathematically it seemed logical there were other civilizations, but the lack of any evidence raised the uncomfortable possibility that the Earths human species might be the only example of consciousness. Weve got this delicate candle of consciousness flickering here, and it may be the only instance of consciousness, so its essential we preserve it, Musk says. If we are able to go to other planets, the probable lifespan of human consciousness is going to be far greater than if we are stuck on one planet that could get hit by an asteroid or destroy its civilization.
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design is not just about aesthetics; true industrial design must connect the looks of a product to its engineering. In most peoples vocabularies, design means veneer, Jobs once explained. Nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.
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Musks appreciation for the toy industry. They have to produce things very quickly and cheaply without flaws, and manufacture them all by Christmas, or there will be sad faces. He repeatedly pushed his teams to get ideas from toys,
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One reason was that rocket components were subject to hundreds of specifications and requirements mandated by the military and NASA. At big aerospace companies, engineers followed these religiously. Musk did the opposite: he made his engineers question all specifications. This would later become step one in a five-point checklist, dubbed the algorithm, that became his oft-repeated mantra when developing products. Whenever one of his engineers cited a requirement as a reason for doing something, Musk would grill them: Who made that requirement? And answering The military or The legal department was not good enough. Musk would insist that they know the name of the actual person who made the requirement. We would talk about how we were going to qualify an engine or certify a fuel tank, and he would ask, Why do we have to do that? says Tim Buzza, a refugee from Boeing who would become SpaceXs vice president of launch and testing. And we would say, There is a military specification that says its a requirement. And hed reply, Who wrote that? Why does it make sense? All requirements should be treated as recommendations, he repeatedly instructed. The only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics.
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corporate boards, Apple and Tesla, and he became close friends with Jobs and Musk. He said they both had beneficial cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD is one of the reasons for their success, because they obsessed on solving a problem until they did,
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Will artificial intelligence develop in ways that benefit and protect humanity, or will machines develop intentions of their own and become a threat to humans?
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When redesigning the factory, Musk put the cubicles for the engineers right on the edge of the assembly lines, so they would see the flashing lights and hear the complaints whenever one of their design elements caused a slowdown. Musk often corralled the engineers to walk up and down the lines with him. His own open desk was in the middle of it all, with no walls around him, and it had a pillow underneath so he could spend the night when he wanted.
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A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle, he repeatedly declared. The sense of urgency was good for its own sake. It made his engineers engage in first-principles thinking. But as Mueller points out, it was also corrosive. If you set an aggressive schedule that people think they might be able to make, they will try to put out extra effort, he says. But if you give them a schedule thats physically impossible, engineers arent stupid. Youve demoralized them. Its Elons biggest weakness.
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He admitted there was a reasonable chance that it would not work, but it was better to try and fail rather than analyze the issue for months. If you make this thing fast, you can find out fast. And then you can fix it fast.
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pack under the floor of the car. They engineered it so that the pack became an element of the cars structure. It was an example of Musks policy that the designers sketching the shape of the car should work hand in glove with the engineers who were determining how the car would be built. At other places I worked, von Holzhausen says, there was this throw-it-over-the-fence mentality, where a designer would have an idea and then send it to an engineer, who sat in a different building or in a different country. Musk put the engineers and designers in the same room. The vision was that we would create designers who thought like engineers and engineers who thought like designers, von Holzhausen says.
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pack under the floor of the car. They engineered it so that the pack became an element of the cars structure. It was an example of Musks policy that the designers sketching the shape of the car should work hand in glove with the engineers who were determining how the car would be built. At other places I worked, von Holzhausen says, there was this throw-it-over-the-fence mentality, where a designer would have an idea and then send it to an engineer, who sat in a different building or in a different country. Musk put the engineers and designers in the same room. The vision was that we would create designers who thought like engineers and engineers who thought like designers, von Holzhausen says. This followed the principle that Steve Jobs and Jony Ive had instilled at Apple: design is not just about aesthetics; true industrial design must connect the looks of a product to its engineering. In most peoples vocabularies, design means veneer, Jobs once explained. Nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.
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the Krmn line of craziness, the blurry border that separates vision from hallucination.
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engineers rather than the product managers should lead the team.
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Cuando tiene esa mirada perdida, es preferible no interrumpir, seala su madre.
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Most PhDs are irrelevant. The number that actually move the needle is almost none.
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Its a big theme for him to never have his decisions guided by fear, Peter recalls. That was definitely present even when he was a child.
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The courtship continued through January 2000, causing Musk to postpone his honeymoon with Justine. Michael Moritz, X.coms primary investor, arranged a meeting of the two camps in his Sand Hill Road office. Thiel got a ride with Musk in his McLaren. So, what can this car do? Thiel asked. Watch this, Musk replied, pulling into the fast lane and flooring the accelerator. The rear axle broke and the car spun around, hit an embankment, and flew in the air like a flying saucer. Parts of the body shredded. Thiel, a practicing libertarian, was not wearing a seatbelt, but he emerged unscathed. He was able to hitch a ride up to the Sequoia offices. Musk, also unhurt, stayed behind for a half-hour to have his car towed away, then joined the meeting without telling Harris what had happened. Later, Musk was able to laugh and say, At least it showed Peter I was unafraid of risks. Says Thiel, Yeah, I realized he was a bit crazy. Musk remained resistant to a merger. Even though both companies had about 200,000 customers signed up to make electronic payments on eBay, he believed that X.com was a more valuable company because it offered a broader array of banking services.
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the most agonizing year of his life. In times of challenge, one of his refuges is to focus on a future project.
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When some designers pushed him to at least do some market testing, Musk replied, I dont do focus groups.
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Musk. He was into amplifying risk and burning the boats so we could never retreat from it.
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