Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, And The Quest For A Fantastic Future Quotes
"I would like to die thinking that humanity has a bright future." - Elon Musk
"The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment." - Elon Musk
"I think the probability of us discovering another top-one-hundred-type invention gets smaller and smaller." - Jonathan Huebner
"My father seemed sort of sad and lonely, and my mom had three kids, and he didn’t have any. It seemed unfair." - Elon Musk
"He goes into his brain, and then you just see he is in another world." - Maye Musk, on Elon Musk
"He’s set about building something that has the potential to be much grander than anything Hughes or Jobs produced." - Author
"He locks his gaze on to something and says, ‘It shall be mine.’ Bit by bit, he won me over." - Justine Musk, on Elon Musk
"I don’t know how someone becomes like he is." - Elon Musk, on his father
"The man does not take no for an answer." - Justine Musk, on Elon Musk
"A second paper talked about taking research documents and books and electronically scanning them, performing optical character recognition, and putting all of the information in a single database—much like a mix between today’s Google Books and Google Scholar."
"The end result represents the first new means of storing significant amounts of electrical energy since the development of the battery and fuel cell."
"I really like computer games, but then if I made really great computer games, how much effect would that have on the world."
"He wasn’t just sniffing out trends, and he wasn’t consumed by the idea of getting rich."
"Musk received a 97 for this effort and praise for 'a very thorough analysis' with 'excellent financials!'"
"I’d never been a sports captain or a captain of anything or managed a single person."
"I think X.com could absolutely be a multibillion-dollar bonanza."
"Musk thought about interplanetary travel in a very earnest way."
"I mean, I could go and buy one of the islands in the Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build and create a new company."
"With Elon, everyone gave a sigh and said, ‘Oh well. He could have spent ten million dollars to send up the mice, but instead he’ll spend hundreds of millions and probably fail like all the others that proceeded him.’"
"For a science project a couple of years later, Mueller borrowed his dad’s oxyacetylene welding equipment to make a rocket engine prototype."
"I told him that yeah, I’d worked on a 650,000-pound thrust engine at TRW and knew every part of it."
"Elon made it clear that he did not want to talk about Nevada’s death. I didn’t understand this, just as he didn’t understand why I grieved openly, which he regarded as ‘emotionally manipulative.’"
"I buried my feelings instead, coping with Nevada’s death by making my first visit to an IVF clinic less than two months later."
"The CEO is there shooting at us with rockets and plasma guns. Worse, he’s almost alarmingly good at these games and has insanely fast reactions."
"What I’m going to do is figure out the best choice of a high performance base car and electric powertrain and go in that direction."
"‘We’ll buy them out,’ Elon said. So, I e-mailed him my resume at two thirty A.M., and he replied back in thirty minutes."
"We thought up some goofball things. There was one plan for these fancy irrigation systems for farms and the home based on smart water-sensing networks."
"We had done a static fire three days earlier, and everything was fine."
"You can feel it. It’s a real car, and it’s very exciting."
"Cellphones, refrigerators, color TV’s, they didn’t start off by making a low-end product for masses. They were relatively expensive, for people who could afford it."
"If I split the money, maybe both of them would die. If I gave the money to just one company, the probability of it surviving was greater, but then it would mean certain death for the other company."
"The harder it gets, the better he gets. Anyone who saw what he went through firsthand came away with more respect for the guy."
"The product was late and over budget and everything was wrong, but Elon didn’t want anything to do with those plans to either sell the whole company or lose control through a partnership."
"In Silicon Valley, you say you’re backed by a venture capitalist, and that’s the end of the negotiation."
"We tried to emphasize him, and told the reporter about him over and over again, but they weren’t interested in the board of the company."
"It felt at times like Elon was this unreasonably demanding overarching force."
"The idea was to get to Asia, get things done fast and cheap, and make money on the car."
"If being a public company diminishes that likelihood, then we should not do so until Mars is secure."
"The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication."
"It's like he has everyone working on this car that is meant to get from Los Angeles to New York on one tank of gas."
"You might excel at robot-building competitions or be a car-racing hobbyist who has built unusual vehicles."
"His vision is so clear. He almost hypnotizes you. He gives you the crazy eye, and it's like, yes, we can get to Mars."
"This is something that I am open to reconsidering, but, given my experiences with Tesla and SolarCity, I am hesitant."
"The guiding principle at SpaceX is to embrace your work and get stuff done."
"The SpaceX hiring model places some emphasis on getting top marks at top schools."
"The refrigerator-sized computers under the lights have been labeled with big block letters to make it look like they were made by Cyberdyne Systems."
"His patent is completely ridiculous. People have proposed landing on a floating platform in the ocean for a half-century."
"You didn’t go to a dealership and haggle with a pushy salesman. Tesla sold the Model S directly through its own stores and website."
"Customers would walk in and find a complete Model S in the middle of the shop and often an exposed version of the car’s base near the back."
"Whether you ultimately bought the car in the store or online, it was delivered in a concierge fashion."
"In the months that followed the delivery, there were no oil changes or tune-ups to be dealt with because the Model S didn’t need them."
"The Model S also offered a way to fix issues in a manner that people had never before encountered with a mass-produced car."
"The first people to notice what Tesla had accomplished were the technophiles in Silicon Valley."
"From Silicon Valley, the Model S phenomenon spread to Los Angeles, then all along the West Coast and then to Washington, D.C., and New York."
"It’s worth pausing for a moment to meditate on what Tesla had accomplished."
"Tesla needed this early boost of confidence and got it on a scale few expected."
"Tesla had transformed the car into a gadget—a device that actually got better after you bought it."
"Sometimes you have to put something out there for people to attack. In the long run, the stores won't be important. The way things will really grow is by word of mouth."
"Watching people drive the Model S across the country is phenomenal. It’s not about putting a charging station in the desert as a stunt. It’s about realizing where this is going to go."
"We had the Roadster, but there was no good word for a sedan. You can’t call it the Tesla Sedan. That’s boring as hell."
"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."
"If each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that's probably bad, too. Smart people should have kids as well."
"I’m not sure it ever leaves really. So, I do feel joy now, but there’s still that nagging feeling that it might all go away."
"I think the market for submarine cars is quite small."
"We don’t necessarily need all of the money for the Gigafactory right now, but I decided to raise it in advance because you never know when there will be some bloody meltdown."
"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."
"Creating the technology needed to establish life on Mars is and always has been the fundamental goal of SpaceX."
"Public company stocks go through extreme volatility, both for reasons of internal execution and for reasons that have nothing to do with anything except the economy."
"If you believe that SpaceX will execute better than the average public company, then our stock price will continue to appreciate at a rate greater than that of the stock market."
"The easier you make it for people to get money out of PayPal, the less they’ll want to do it."
"The objective should be—what delivers fundamental value."
"If all your financial affairs are seamlessly integrated in one place, it’s very easy to do transactions and the fees associated with transactions are low."
"The reason it worked was because the cost of transactions in PayPal was lower than any other system."
"The critical thing is to achieve internal transactions. They are instant, fraud-free, and fee-free."
"I mean, it’s so ridiculous that PayPal today is worse than PayPal circa end of 2001."