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Founders: #1 Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, & 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 The conventional wisdom of the time said to take a deep breath and wait for the next big thing to arrive in due course. Musk rejected that logic by throwing $100 million into SpaceX, $70 million into Tesla, and $10 million into SolarCity. 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 and doubled down on making super-complex physical goods in two of the most expensive places in the world, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. [2:13] What Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview. He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. [9:17] The life that Musk has created to manage all of these endeavors is preposterous. [9:53] He felt as if the public had lost some of its ambition and hope for the future. [14:34] His fears that mankind had lost much of its will to push the boundaries were reinforc

[00:00] A: While Musk has been anything but shy about what he was up to, few people outside of his companies got to see the factories, the R and D centers, the machine shops, and to witness the scope of what he was doing firsthand. Here was a guy who had taken much of the Silicon Valley ethic behind moving quickly and running organizations free of bureaucratic hierarchies, and applied it to improving big, fantastic machines and chasing things that had the potential to be the real breakthroughs we've been missing. By rights, Musk should have been part of the malaise. He jumped into the dot…

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