A good friend recently recommended to me the book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance. As a fan of Tesla, SpaceX, and all the things I had heard about Elon as an entrepreneur, I was always interested in his life and learning more about his methods. This book turned out to be an awesome glimpse into all those things. I really enjoyed the detailed stories and the insider quotes from Elon and many of the people who worked closely with him. It reminded me of my tour of the SpaceX office with my UCLA Anderson Vistage group and the amazing opportunity we had to do a short Q&A with Elon when we were there. I could tell even then that he works extremely hard and thinks everything through "from first principles." His speaking wasn't polished or showy -- he just focused on facts and showed 200% commitment to his wild goals. Below are my notes on the book. I thoroughly enjoyed it and learned a lot from someone so passionate and working on things that actually matter in the long run and are changing the world. 1 elon's world Meaningful world view Saving the human race 2 Africa Wrote his own computer game Photographic visual processing in brain Read 10 hours per day as a child Went through all books in library and 2 encyclopedias 3 Canada Romantic Doesn't take no for answer Wanted to work on biggest impact areas: renewable energy, Internet, space 4 elon's first startup Hardware background Working 24/7 Living at office Zip2 bringing businesses online Quake tournaments Do or die but don't give up 5 PayPal mafia boss Banking internship Reinvested almost all money into X online bank Coups and issues with leadership and being kicked out 6 space x Moved to LA for aerospace and to escape valley Sending mice to Mars Mars Society Tried to buy rockets from Russians but was too expensive Read rocket textbooks and Made spreadsheet that showed could do it a lot cheaper Making as much as practical at spacex Engineers sitting next to factory workers and welders Son died; didn't believe in open grieving and wallowing in sadness When things go wrong must have all the info and a plan Work computers to play quake Lots of failed launches 7 all electric Straubel believed in Power of lithium ion batteries for solar car at Stanford Used Silicon Valley tactics instead of Detroit bureaucracy Sent engineers into field to be able to iterate faster Fired ppl due to typos Required extremely hard work Lots of delivery delays and issues with contractors 8 pain suffering and survival Team of nannies 7 days of work per week Worsening financial situation Divorce Day away from bankruptcy for both companies 9 liftoff Huge successes and contracts Need to understand how mechanical things work In house manufacturing Factory inside office with engineers 10 revenge of electric car Model s success Prototyped batteries for other car companies and beat their deadline expectations Faster more iterative testing Always come to meetings with alternative plan if have difficulties If something could not be done: only response is to take it down to the physics Wrote his own public relations responses Controlling whole product allows creation of lifestyle brand Not a new idea. All about execution. 11 unified field theory Solar energy market Callous interoffice Lack of empathy Cruel stoicism Obsessing over typos in emails Intuition on things u don't know isn't very good Close to Larry page Good ideas always sound crazy until they're not Wonders how to raise kids without adversity Requires more reading time than video game time No stupid video games allowed. Only those that have physics. Smart people need to have more kids Appendices Frivolous lawsuits against him Smartest programmers were in gaming industry and used Microsoft c++ libraries Thoughts on going public vs selling private stock options
4 Comments
Eddie M
6/17/2016 10:46:42 am
Thanks a lot, great recap, saved me 13 hrs!
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isabella
4/15/2019 07:46:38 pm
got me an a too!
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