Notes on Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance

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

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