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Founders: #30 Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

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What I learned from reading Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance. --- I don't want to be the person who ever has to compete with Elon (0:47) Musk expects you to keep up (2:45) Short of building an actual money-crushing machine, Musk could not have picked a faster way to destroy his fortune. He became a one-man, ultra-risk-taking venture capital shop (4:41) Revisit old ideas (5:22) It was not unusual for him to read ten hours a day (7:49) His approach to dating mirrors his approach to work (9:32) Humans are deeply mimetic (10:59) Thinking from first principles (14:37) What it is like to work with Elon Musk (17:40) He would place this urgency that he expected the revenue in ten years to be ten million dollars a day and that every day we were slower to achieve our goals was a day of missing out on that money (19:28) What he went through in 2008 would have broken anyone else. He didn't just survive. He kept working and stayed focused (23:29) A tenet of Elon's companies: make as many things yourself as possible (25:39) The power of the individual in an age of infinite leverage (27:31) The Internet taught me nearly everything I know. It is the mo

[00:00:00] Elon is brilliant. He's involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to give him a gut reaction. He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy. [00:00:24] He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It's amazing to…

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