Elon Musk Powerful Quotes

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And by recruiting hundreds of bright, self-motivated people, SpaceX has maximized the power of the individual. One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
A bearlike entrepreneur with a jovial personality, Hoffman knew Musk’s wiles. “He has reality-warp powers where people get sucked into his vision,” he says.
Walter Isaacson (Elon Musk)
What he symbolizes,” Milley said, “is the combination of the civil and military cooperation and teamwork that makes the United States the most powerful country in space.
Walter Isaacson (Elon Musk)
There can be no question that Musk has mastered the art of getting the most out of his employees. Interview three dozen SpaceX engineers and each one of them will have picked up on a managerial nuance that Musk has used to get people to meet his deadlines. One example from Brogan: Where a typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership of their own delivery dates. “He doesn’t say, ‘You have to do this by Friday at two P.M.,’” Brogan said. “He says, ‘I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?’ Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You’re working hard for yourself. It’s a distinction you can feel. You have signed up to do your own work.” And by recruiting hundreds of bright, self-motivated people, SpaceX has maximized the power of the individual. One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together. The individual doesn’t have to hold meetings, reach a consensus, or bring other people up to speed on a project. He just keeps working and working and working. The ideal SpaceX employee is someone like Steve Davis, the director of advanced projects at SpaceX. “He’s been working sixteen hours a day every day for years,” Brogan said. “He gets more done than eleven people working together.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
Among his inner circle, Musk is warm, funny, and deeply emotional.* He might not engage in the standard chitchat, asking a friend how his kids are doing, but he would do everything in his considerable power to help that friend if his child were sick or in trouble. He will protect those close to him at all costs and, when deemed necessary, seek to destroy those who have wronged him or his friends. Musk’s
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
In 2015, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk quipped, “We have this handy fusion reactor in the sky called the sun. You don’t have to do anything. It just works. It shows up every day and produces ridiculous amounts of power.
Varun Sivaram (Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet (Mit Press))
Most people do not appreciate that no decision is also a decision. It is better to make many decisions per unit time with a slightly higher error rate, than few with a slightly lower error rate, because obviously one of your future right decisions can be to reverse an earlier wrong one, provided the earlier one was not catastrophic, which they rarely are.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Gene Berdichevsky, one of the members of the solar-powered-car team, lit up the second he heard from Straubel. An undergraduate, Berdichevsky volunteered to quit school, work for free, and sweep the floors at Tesla if that’s what it took to get a job. The founders were impressed with his spirit and hired Berdichevsky after one meeting. This left Berdichevsky in the uncomfortable position of calling his Russian immigrant parents, a pair of nuclear submarine engineers, to tell them that he was giving up on Stanford to join an electric car start-up. As employee No. 7, he spent part of the workday in the Menlo Park office and the rest in Straubel’s living room designing three-dimensional models of the car’s powertrain on a computer and building battery pack prototypes in the garage. “Only now do I realize how insane it was,” Berdichevsky said.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
Musk delved deeply into how solar cells work and the various compounds that can make them more efficient. He concluded the paper with a drawing of the “power station of the future.” It depicted a pair of giant solar arrays in space—each four kilometers in width—sending their juice down to Earth via microwave beams to a receiving antenna with a seven-kilometer diameter. Musk received a 98 on what his professor deemed a “very interesting and well written paper.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
Lucid Motors was started under the name Atieva (which stood for “advanced technologies in electric vehicle applications” and was pronounced “ah-tee-va”) in Mountain View in 2008 (or December 31, 2007, to be precise) by Bernard Tse, who was a vice president at Tesla before it launched the Roadster. Hong Kong–born Tse had studied engineering at the University of Illinois, where he met his wife, Grace. In the early 1980s, the couple had started a computer manufacturing company called Wyse, which at its peak in the early 1990s registered sales of more than $480 million a year. Tse joined Tesla’s board of directors in 2003 at the request of his close friend Martin Eberhard, the company’s original CEO, who sought Tse’s expertise in engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain. Tse would eventually step off the board to lead a division called the Tesla Energy Group. The group planned to make electric power trains for other manufacturers, who needed them for their electric car programs. Tse, who didn’t respond to my requests to be interviewed, left Tesla around the time of Eberhard’s departure and decided to start Atieva, his own electric car company. Atieva’s plan was to start by focusing on the power train, with the aim of eventually producing a car. The company pitched itself to investors as a power train supplier and won deals to power some city buses in China, through which it could further develop and improve its technology. Within a few years, the company had raised about $40 million, much of it from the Silicon Valley–based venture capital firm Venrock, and employed thirty people, mostly power train engineers, in the United States, as well as the same number of factory workers in Asia. By 2014, it was ready to start work on a sedan, which it planned to sell in the United States and China. That year, it raised about $200 million from Chinese investors, according to sources close to the company.
Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
When Musk took delivery of his F1, CNN was there to cover it. “Just three years ago I was showering at the Y and sleeping on the office floor,” he told the camera sheepishly, “and now obviously, I’ve got a million-dollar car… it’s just a moment in my life.” While other McLaren F1 owners around the world—the sultan of Brunei, Wyclef Jean, and Jay Leno, among others—could comfortably afford it, Musk’s purchase had put a sizable dent in his bank account. And unlike other owners, Musk drove the car to work—and declined to insure it. As Musk drove Thiel up Sand Hill Road in the F1, the car was the subject of their chat. “It was like this Hitchcock movie,” Thiel remembered, “where we’re talking about the car for fifteen minutes. We’re supposed to be preparing for the meeting—and we’re talking about the car.” During their ride, Thiel looked at Musk and reportedly asked, “So, what can this thing do?” “Watch this,” Musk replied, flooring the accelerator and simultaneously initiating a lane change on Sand Hill Road. In retrospect, Musk admitted that he was outmatched by the F1. “I didn’t really know how to drive the car,” he recalled. “There’s no stability systems. No traction control. And the car gets so much power that you can break the wheels free at even fifty miles an hour.” Thiel recalls the car in front of them coming fast into view—then Musk swerving to avoid it. The McLaren hit an embankment, was tossed into the air—“like a discus,” Musk remembered——then slammed violently into the ground. “The people that saw it happen thought we were going to die,” he recalled. Thiel had not worn a seat belt, but astonishingly, neither he nor Musk were hurt. Musk’s “work of art” had not fared as well, having now taken a distinctly cubist turn. Post-near-death experience, Thiel dusted himself off on the side of the road and hitchhiked to the Sequoia offices, where he was joined by Musk a short while later. X.com’s CEO, Bill Harris, was also waiting at the Sequoia office, and he recalled that both Thiel and Musk were late but offered no explanation for their delay. “They never told me,” Harris said. “We just had the meeting.” Reflecting on it, Musk found humor in the experience: “I think it’s safe to say Peter wouldn’t be driving with me again.” Thiel wrung some levity out of the moment, too. “I’d achieved lift-off with Elon,” he joked, “but not in a rocket.
Jimmy Soni (The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley)
In a simple description, Hyperloop is conceptualized to be the 5th mode of transportation that has the speed of a bullet train, powered by solar energy, and the overall design that seemed to have been taken from a SyFy film.  This hyper-speedy transportation also targets to transport people in just a matter of minutes.
Wiroon Tanthapanichakoon (Elon Musk: 2nd Edition - A Billionaire Entrepreneur Changing the World Future with SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Solar City, and Hyperloop)
get a sense of how powerful Musk’s work may end up being for the American economy, have a think about the dominant mechatronic machine of the past several years: the smartphone. Pre-iPhone, the United States was the laggard in the telecommunications industry. All of the exciting cell phones and mobile services were in Europe and Asia, while American consumers bumbled along with dated equipment. When the iPhone arrived in 2007, it changed everything. Apple’s device mimicked many of the functions of a computer and then added new abilities with its apps, sensors, and location awareness. Google charged to market with its Android software and related handsets, and the United States suddenly emerged as the driving force in the mobile industry. Smartphones were revolutionary because of the ways they allowed hardware, software, and services to work in unison. This was a mix that favored the skills of Silicon Valley. The rise of the smartphone led to a massive industrial boom in which Apple became the most valuable company in the country, and billions of its clever devices were spread all over the world.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
Because of Musk, Americans could wake up in ten years with the most modern highway in the world: a transit system run by thousands of solar-powered charging stations and traversed by electric cars. By that time, SpaceX may well be sending up rockets every day, taking people and things to dozens of habitats and making preparations for longer treks to Mars. These advances are simultaneously difficult to fathom and
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
If all of this were taking place, Musk, then in his mid-fifties, likely would be the richest man in the world and among its most powerful.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
The Power of Questions: The quality of your life depends on the quality of the questions you ask yourself. All great innovators like Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Elon Musk have the habit of asking powerful and imaginative questions.
Som Bathla (Think Out of The Box: Generate Ideas on Demand, Improve Problem Solving, Make Better Decisions, and Start Thinking Your Way to the Top)
the tough thing is figuring out what questions to ask, but that once you do that, the rest is really easy.
Randy Kirk (The Elon Musk Method: Business Principles from the World's Most Powerful Entrepreneur)
The really great entrepreneurs are good at seeing the big picture without losing site of the details.
Randy Kirk (The Elon Musk Method: Business Principles from the World's Most Powerful Entrepreneur)
In The Great Stagnation, Cowen bemoaned the lack of big technological advances and argued that the American economy has slowed and wages have been depressed as a result. “In a figurative sense, the American economy has enjoyed lots of low-hanging fruit since at least the seventeenth century, whether it be free land, lots of immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies,” he wrote. “Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think. That’s it. That is what has gone wrong.” In
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
Where a typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership of their own delivery dates. “He doesn’t say, ‘You have to do this by Friday at two P.M.,’” Brogan said. “He says, ‘I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?’ Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You’re working hard for yourself. It’s a distinction you can feel. You have signed up to do your own work.” And by recruiting hundreds of bright, self-motivated people, SpaceX has maximized the power of the individual. One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together. The individual doesn’t have to hold meetings, reach a consensus, or bring other people up to speed on a project. He just keeps working and working and working. The
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
Do not be afraid of embarrassment when pursuing your goal. You will be glad you hung around when everyone else faltered.
Daniel D'apollonio (Entrepreneur: Entrepreneur Mind sets and Habits to Live Your Dreams (Business, Money, Power, Mindset, Elon musk, Self help, Financial Freedom Book Book 1))
As more zero-emissions power surges through energy grids around the world, an even greater challenge looms. The 27,000 terawatt-hours of electricity generated by the world today will soon fall well short of our needs. By 2050, according to the International Energy Agency, we’ll need at least 50,000 terawatt-hours of capacity for tens of millions of additional electric cars, among other things. Once solar panels are powering homes, as Elon Musk and Lynn Jurich understood from the start, people’s garages will become their gas stations.
John Doerr (Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now)
Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible. At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales. Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day. We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.[431]
Charles Morris (Tesla: How Elon Musk and Company Made Electric Cars Cool, and Remade the Automotive and Energy Industries)
This group includes Elon Musk, plus the founders of YouTube, Yelp, and LinkedIn. They would provide the capital to Airbnb, Lyft, Spotify, Stripe, DeepMind—now better known as Google’s world-leading artificial intelligence project—and, of course, to Facebook.
Max Chafkin (The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power)
GM, Ford, Toyota, and BMW have grown into global icons that design, build, and sell tens of millions of vehicles each year. Those car purchases have come to represent more than just an appliance; they convey independence and status, a symbol of the American Dream and, more and more so, the Global Dream.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
it’s perhaps little surprise that the biggest carmakers can’t get by without hoards of cash: in 2017 GM had $20 billion in cash on hand; Ford had $26.5 billion; Toyota and VW both finished fiscal 2017 with $43 billion in their bank accounts.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Their lawyer advised them that Tesla could sell directly in California on a technicality: the carmaker had never had any franchise dealerships, and therefore it wouldn’t be cutting into its franchisee sales. That, at least, was the argument they’d be building off of. Now they just needed to figure out the rules for forty-nine other states.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
As he hired new managers and engineers, Musk was building a culture around how he wanted Tesla to operate. He subscribed to “first principles thinking,” a way of problem solving that he attributed to physics but that was rooted in Aristotle’s writings. The notion was to drill down to the most basic ideas, ones that can’t be deduced from any other assumptions. Put in terms related to Tesla: Just because another company did it one way, that doesn’t mean it’s the right way. (Or the way Musk wanted it done.)
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
In another message, he assured workers they could talk to him directly. “You can talk to your manager’s manager without permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else’s permission,” he wrote in another note. “Moreover, you should consider yourself obligated to do so until the right things happen.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Large corporations now owned dozens, if not hundreds, of franchises. AutoNation Inc., a publicly traded car seller based in Florida, was the largest with 265 franchises in the U.S., selling everything from Chevrolet to BMW. In 2012, AutoNation employed 21,000 people (compared to the 2,964 full-time workers at Tesla). Its largest shareholder was Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who invested $177 million in the business that year. The company generated $8.9 billion in revenue off the sale of more than a quarter of a million new vehicles.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Please prepare yourself for a level of intensity that is greater than anything most of you have experienced before. Revolutionizing industries is not for the faint of heart, but nothing is more rewarding or exciting.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
The mere fact the Tesla Model S exists at all is a testament to innovation and entrepreneurship, the very qualities that once made the American automobile industry the largest, richest, and most powerful in the world.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Belief created the vision; the vision would create a market; the market would create cash; and cash would create cars.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
he couldn’t work around laws, he was going to change them. Texas would be his first fight.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
When Tesla first revealed the Roadster, they hoped to get 100 buyers willing to put down $100,000. It took a few weeks to do that. The Model S collected 3,000 pre-orders in the months after it was revealed. But this was unlike anything they had expected. Tens of thousands of people were signing up for the car, sight unseen. Then hundreds of thousands. The team was floored, searching for words. It was all so jarring: If you computed Tesla’s anticipated build rate for the Model 3, the reservations alone that night ate up the first few years of planned production.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
To many, the differences between the Model 3 and the Model S were hard to spot. And that, in itself, was the stunning thing: A car with a promised starting price of $35,000 might easily be mistaken for its $100,000 predecessor. The night was a spectacular coup.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
In 2015, JB Straubel, Tesla’s CTO, developed yet another new line of business for the automaker, selling large battery packs for home and commercial spaces, which appealed to solar customers eager to capture the energy they were creating by day to use at night.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
If Tesla was positioning itself to build battery packs and sell them as part of solar panel systems, they should control the entire customer experience. To board members such as Gracias, it crystallized the understanding that they were moving into a new era for the company: the electricity storage business.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
He wanted to, he wrote, “create a smoothly integrated and beautiful solar-roof-with-battery product that just works, empowering the individual as their own utility, and then scale that throughout the world. One ordering experience, one installation, one service contact, one phone app.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Concurrent with all this, a massive new venture capital fund was being created by SoftBank, the Japanese tech conglomerate with stakes in Alibaba, Sprint, and others. CEO Masayoshi Son was on the verge of controlling a nearly $100 billion fund that was intended to rewrite the rules of investing in Silicon Valley and pick world-changing winners, infusing them with the kinds of cash that a generation ago would’ve seemed impossible in the private market. Goldman thought a meeting between Musk and Son might be fruitful. A matchmaker was found for the two: Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle. He lived near Son’s Silicon
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Musk, Ellison, Son, and Al-Rumayyan: Collectively they controlled hundreds of billions of dollars (though unlike those of his fellow diners, Musk’s fortune was largely illiquid). They all shared ambitions to make larger-than-life bets that, if successful, would change the course of humanity.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Now, as it came time to negotiate a new compensation package, Musk demanded the board give him a plan that would make him the highest paid CEO ever and, in theory, if fully paid out, one of the richest people in the world. The ten-year plan he wanted would be worth more than $50 billion if Tesla achieved a variety of financial targets, including reaching a market value of $650 billion—an almost $600 billion increase from its present value. The
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
The proposal caused rancor among some of Musk’s senior leadership team, who felt they too should be seeing a bigger reward for the company’s success. According to one former executive, among those hurt by Musk’s actions was JB Straubel, who had been there from the beginning and was considered a co-founder. “That was one of the breaking points,” the executive said. “It broke their relationship.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
One of Musk’s chief assumptions had been that large shareholders would stick with Tesla, even as a private company. It was a naive belief. He learned that mutual funds, due to regulatory requirements, would be forced to trim their stake. His plan had assumed two-thirds of shareholders would follow him; if the likes of Fidelity and T. Rowe, which owned a combined 20 million shares, couldn’t go along, they’d have to be bought out at $420 a share. Or
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund had taken a $2 billion stake in the company, instantly making it one of the carmaker’s largest shareholders. Minutes later, as Musk headed to the airport to fly to the Gigafactory in Nevada, he typed out a fateful message on Twitter: “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Normally, a company alerts the NASDAQ ahead of the maneuver Musk was now casually proposing, and trading is halted. It isn’t a courtesy, it’s the trading exchange’s rule; companies are supposed to notify the exchange at least ten minutes before any news that might create significant volatility in the stock price, such as an intention to go private, so trading can be stopped to allow investors to digest the new information. The announcement caught them off guard—Tesla hadn’t said a thing. NASDAQ officials frantically tried to reach their contacts at the company. Little
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Musk called Egon Durban at the private equity firm Silver Lake about the deal. The firm, which included Larry Ellison as an investor, had carved out a high profile in Silicon Valley. In 2013, they helped Michael Dell take the company he founded, Dell, private in a $25 billion leveraged buyout. Durban cautioned that Musk’s hope of allowing all current investors to stay with the company would be unprecedented.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
He decided to oust Ze’ev Drori—and appoint himself (making Musk the fourth CEO to hold the position in about a year’s time). Musk told the senior leaders they needed to prepare for massive layoffs to preserve cash. The Model S would be the key to their survival,
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
They claimed that a mountain bike, surfboard, and fifty-inch TV could lie flat inside—at the same time. Instead of storing the batteries in a giant box in the trunk, as they’d done with the Roadster, Straubel’s team imagined them in a shallow rectangular box beneath the floor. A motor, much smaller than the typical gas-powered engine, would be fitted between the back wheels. With the bulk of the drivetrain beneath the car instead of under the hood, it opened up a ton of interior room.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
One thing Tesla elected not to do when preparing for public ownership, which would have ramifications years later, was introduce a dual-class stock system. This was what allowed Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google (or Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook two years later) to keep control of their company, even as they held a small fraction of its total stock. It’s unclear why Tesla’s IPO paperwork, which it filed in January 2010, contained no such provision
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
We are revolutionizing the auto purchase and ownership experience,” Blankenship told the San Jose Mercury News. “At a typical car dealership, the goal of the dealer is to sell you a car that’s on the lot. At Tesla, we’re selling you a car that you design. The shift is people say: ‘I want this car.’ 
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Some short sellers, feeling the pressure, will begin to gang up together to attack a company—through the media, online investor forums, and, increasingly, on Twitter—all as part of an effort to change the narrative of a company, to highlight the negatives around its business or reveal a failing that normal investors may not recognize. Essentially, they’re trying to scare investors and drive a targeted stock price down.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
The stock passed the $700 billion market value milestone that Musk had thrown down years earlier like Babe Ruth calling his shot. It soared from a value of $100 billion to more than $800 billion in 244 days, accomplishing something it took Apple almost a decade to do. With the stock he already owned, his wealth was surging from an estimated $30 billion at the start of 2020 to around $200 billion at the start of 2021, overtaking Amazon founder Jeff
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
His next vehicle, a pickup dubbed the Cybertruck, had many of the signatures of a car developed by Musk—features that appealed to him directly (including a dystopian appearance, supposedly bulletproof steel and shatter-proof windows) and that are likely hard to industrialize.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Musk’s lawyers spent that night trying to change Musk’s mind about his refusal of the settlement, even asking celebrity investor Mark Cuban to prod him into a deal. Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, had had his own public battle with the SEC that dragged on for five years, after he was charged with insider trading. It was like a scene out of Showtimes’ Billions, as Cuban counseled the beleaguered CEO, warning
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
They ultimately agreed to the SEC’s new terms: Musk could keep his role as CEO but he was to give up his title of chairman for three years rather than two, as originally proposed. Musk personally would have to pay a $20 million fine, $10 million more than in the first deal. Tesla would have to pay a $20 million fine and agree to placing two new directors on its board. The company would also have to put in place a plan to monitor Musk’s public comments. He wouldn’t be allowed to tweet material information without prior approval. No more “funding secured” messages without a lawyer looking at it first.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Largely thanks to Tesla’s success, the U.S. federal tax credit for buying a fully electric car would begin to phase out on January 1, dropping to $3,750 from $7,500. Midyear it would go to $1,875. By year’s end it would be gone.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
In a CBS News 60 Minutes interview, he showed total contempt for the SEC, saying he didn’t have anyone routinely reviewing his social-media messages. “To be clear,” he said, “I do not respect the SEC”—which on Twitter he mocked as the “Shortseller Enrichment Commission.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Finding the right mentor is not always easy. But we can locate role models in a more accessible place: the stories of great originals throughout history. Human rights advocate Malala Yousafzai was moved by reading biographies of Meena, an activist for equality in Afghanistan, and of Martin Luther King, Jr. King was inspired by Gandhi as was Nelson Mandela. In some cases, fictional characters can be even better role models. Growing up, many originals find their first heroes in their most beloved novels where protagonists exercise their creativity in pursuit of unique accomplishments. When asked to name their favorite books, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel each chose “Lord of the Rings“, the epic tale of a hobbit’s adventures to destroy a dangerous ring of power. Sheryl Sandberg and Jeff Bezos both pointed to “A Wrinkle in Time“ in which a young girl learns to bend the laws of physics and travels through time. Mark Zuckerberg was partial to “Enders Game“ where it’s up to a group of kids to save the planet from an alien attack. Jack Ma named his favorite childhood book as “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves“, about a woodcutter who takes the initiative to change his own fate. … There are studies showing that when children’s stories emphasize original achievements, the next generation innovates more.… Unlike biographies, in fictional stories characters can perform actions that have never been accomplished before, making the impossible seem possible. The inventors of the modern submarine and helicopters were transfixed by Jules Vern’s visions in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “The Clippership of the Clouds”. One of the earliest rockets was built by a scientist who drew his motivation from an H.G. Wells novel. Some of the earliest mobile phones, tablets, GPS navigators, portable digital storage desks, and multimedia players were designed by people who watched “Star Trek” characters using similar devices. As we encounter these images of originality in history and fiction, the logic of consequence fades away we no longer worry as much about what will happen if we fail… Instead of causing us to rebel because traditional avenues are closed, the protagonist in our favorite stories may inspire originality by opening our minds to unconventional paths.
Adam Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
Don’t ever use the word budget with me again because it means you’ve turned off your brain. Generally,
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
extreme effort. Please prepare yourself for a level of intensity that is greater than anything most of you have experienced before. Revolutionizing industries is not for the faint of heart, but nothing is more rewarding or exciting.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
The insatiable need for more processing power -- ideally, located as close as possible to the user but, at the very least, in nearby indus­trial server farms -- invariably leads to a third option: decentralized computing. With so many powerful and often inactive devices in the homes and hands of consumers, near other homes and hands, it feels inevitable that we'd develop systems to share in their mostly idle pro­cessing power. "Culturally, at least, the idea of collectively shared but privately owned infrastructure is already well understood. Anyone who installs solar panels at their home can sell excess power to their local grid (and, indirectly, to their neighbor). Elon Musk touts a future in which your Tesla earns you rent as a self-driving car when you're not using it yourself -- better than just being parked in your garage for 99% of its life. "As early as the 1990s programs emerged for distributed computing using everyday consumer hardware. One of the most famous exam­ples is the University of California, Berkeley's SETl@HOME, wherein consumers would volunteer use of their home computers to power the search for alien life. Sweeney has highlighted that one of the items on his 'to-do list' for the first-person shooter Unreal Tournament 1, which shipped in 1998, was 'to enable game servers to talk to each other so we can just have an unbounded number of players in a single game session.' Nearly 20 years later, however, Sweeney admitted that goal 'seems to still be on our wish list.' "Although the technology to split GPUs and share non-data cen­ter CPUs is nascent, some believe that blockchains provide both the technological mechanism for decentralized computing as well as its economic model. The idea is that owners of underutilized CPUs and GPUs would be 'paid' in some cryptocurrency for the use of their processing capabilities. There might even be a live auction for access to these resources, either those with 'jobs' bidding for access or those with capacity bidding on jobs. "Could such a marketplace provide some of the massive amounts of processing capacity that will be required by the Metaverse? Imagine, as you navigate immersive spaces, your account continuously bidding out the necessary computing tasks to mobile devices held but unused by people near you, perhaps people walking down the street next to you, to render or animate the experiences you encounter. Later, when you’re not using your own devices, you would be earning tokens as they return the favor. Proponents of this crypto-exchange concept see it as an inevitable feature of all future microchips. Every computer, no matter how small, would be designed to be auctioning off any spare cycles at all times. Billions of dynamically arrayed processors will power the deep compute cycles of event the largest industrial customers and provide the ultimate and infinite computing mesh that enables the Metaverse.
Mattew Ball
Frame control creates power and power attracts. BY JOSH (JETSET) KING MADRID WHAT DO KANYE WEST AND ELON MUSK HAVE IN COMMON? When you put the two together, there may be few similarities, but I believe one trait they share is the ability to control their frame, also known as frame control. Frame control is a little-known underlying phenomenon that may be one of the reasons they are so influential and successful despite the controversy. Nonetheless, they maintain their status as some of our culture's most powerful figures. The power of how we frame our personal realities is referred to as frame control. A frame is a tool that you can use to package your power, authority, strength, information, and status. Standing firm in your beliefs can persuade and influence. I first discovered frame control in 2016 after coming across the book Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff. I was hooked instantly. I was a freshman in college at UC Irvine at the time and was earning a few thousand dollars a month in my online business. In just a few short months after applying the concept of frame control in my life and business, everything changed — I started dating the girl of my dreams, cleared my first $27,000 in one month and dropped out of college to go all in on my business. Since then, I've read every book, watched every video, and studied every expert-written blog I can find on the subject. This eventually led me to obtain NLP and neuro-marketing certifications, both of which explain the underlying psychology of how our brains frame social interactions and provide techniques for controlling these frames in oneself and others in order to become more likable, influential, and lead a better life overall. Frame control is about establishing your own authority, but it isn't just some self-help nonsense. It is about true and verified beliefs. The glass half-empty or half-full frame is a popular analogy. If you believe the glass is half-empty, that is exactly what it will be. But someone with a half-full frame can come in and convince you to change your belief, simply by backing it up with the logic of “an empty glass of water would always be empty, but having water in an empty glass makes it half-full.” Positioning your view as the one that counts does take some practice because you first have to believe in yourself. You won’t be able to convince anyone of your authority if you are not authentic or if you don’t actually believe in what you’re trying to sell. Whether they realize it or not, public figures are likely to engage in frame control. When you're in the spotlight, you have to stay focused on the type of person you want the rest of the world to see you as. Tom Cruise, for example, is an example of frame control because of his ability to maintain dominance in media situations. In a well-known BBC interview, Tom Cruise assertively puts the interviewer in his place when he steps out of line and begins probing into his personal life. Cruise doesn't do it disrespectfully, which is how he maintains his own dominance, but he does it in such a way that the interviewer is held accountable. How Frame Control Positions the User as Influential or Powerful Turning toward someone who is dominant or who seems to know what they are doing is a natural occurrence. Generally speaking, we are hard-wired to trust people who believe in themselves and when they are put on a world stage, the effects of it can be almost bewildering. We often view comedians as mere entertainers, but in fact, many of them are experts in frame control. They challenge your views by making you laugh. Whether you want to accept their frame or not, the moment you laugh, your own frame has been shaken and theirs have taken over.
JetSet (Josh King Madrid, JetSetFly) (The Art of Frame Control: The Art of Frame Control: How To Effortlessly Get People To Readily Agree With You & See The World Your Way)
Tesla > NYT. Elon Musk used the instrumental record of a Tesla drive to knock down an NYT story. The New York Times Company claimed the car had run out of charge, but his dataset showed they had purposefully driven it around to make this happen, lying about their driving history. His numbers overturned their letters. Timestamp > Macron, NYT. Twitter posters used a photo’s timestamp to disprove a purported photo of the Brazilian fires that was tweeted by Emmanuel Macron and printed uncritically by NYT. The photo was shown via reverse image search to be taken by a photographer who had died in 2003, so it was more than a decade old. This was a big deal because The Atlantic was literally calling for war with Brazil over these (fake) photos. Provable patent priority. A Chinese court used an on-chain timestamp to establish priority in a patent suit. One company proved that it could not have infringed the patent of the other, because it had filed “on chain” before the other company had filed. In the first and second examples, the employees of the New York Times Company simply misrepresented the facts as they are wont to do, circulating assertions that were politically useful against two of their perennial opponents: the tech founder and the foreign conservative. Whether these misrepresentations were made intentionally or out of “too good to check” carelessness, they were both attempts to exercise political power that ran into the brick wall of technological truth. In the third example, the Chinese political system delegated the job of finding out what was true to the blockchain. In all three cases, technology provided a more robust means of determining what was true than the previous gold standards — whether that be the “paper of record” or the party-state. It decentralized the determination of truth away from the centralized establishment.
Balaji S. Srinivasan (The Network State: How To Start a New Country)
There’s no better case study showing how connectivity and computing power will turn old products into digitized machines than Tesla, Elon Musk’s auto company. Tesla’s cult following and soaring stock price have attracted plenty of attention, but what’s less noticed is that Tesla is also a leading chip designer. The company hired star semiconductor designers like Jim Keller to build a chip specialized for its automated driving needs, which is fabricated using leading-edge technology. As early as 2014, some analysts were noting that Tesla cars “resemble a smartphone.” The company has been often compared to Apple, which also designs its own semiconductors. Like Apple’s products, Tesla’s finely tuned user experience and its seemingly effortless integration of advanced computing into a twentieth-century product—a car—are only possible because of custom-designed chips. Cars have incorporated simple chips since the 1970s. However, the spread of electric vehicles, which require specialized semiconductors to manage the power supply, coupled with increased demand for autonomous driving features foretells that the number and cost of chips in a typical car will increase substantially.
Chris Miller (Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology)
SpaceX was about creating a way for humans to live on other planets in case Earth became unviable. Tesla was about developing technology to save the planet from climate collapse.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Tesla wasn’t going to stop until every car on the road was an electric, he continued. “This is the beginning of the beginning.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Yeah, I know no one is selling anything right now,” Musk said into the phone. “But Tesla has got to make payroll. Find something that you can turn into cash.” He was writing personal checks to cover employee salaries and putting their work expenses on his personal credit cards.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
All of his fortune was now on the line. From the depths of the Great Recession, he’d done something that other U.S. automakers were unable to do: avoid bankruptcy.
Tim Higgins (Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century)
Every kind of company can become a software company—all you have to do is internalize the value of rapid iteration. You don’t need to be Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey; you just need to believe in the power of iteration, and Darwin will be on your side. But of course, to iterate, you first need to build. You can’t iterate on something you’ve bought off the shelf. That’s why it’s Build vs. Die.
Jeff Lawson (Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century)
Using the Sun’s free energy via solar energy generation is a natural hedge to Electric Vehicles and households or business’s electricity needs both financially and environmentally. As such, Electric Vehicles that are paired with and recharged by Solar Energy engage in a complementary symbiotic financial and environmental hedging strategy that allows for consumers to independently power both their transportation needs and their homes or business electrical needs. In doing so, they eliminate their fossil-fuel and electricity expense dependencies while simultaneously eliminating their carbon emission output.
Neo Trinity (Decoding Elon Musk's Secret Master Plans: Why Electric Vehicles and Solar Are a Winning Financial Strategy)
I think things like ‘cancel culture’, call-out culture and pile-ons are sometimes necessary to draw attention to things. But I don’t believe this is going to be enough for change. Social media companies aren’t built to overthrow systemic oppression; they uphold it within the very functioning of their platforms. In addition to this, billionaires are not the people who are about to hand us the tools to overthrow power structures that they benefit from. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and ByteDance are not about to liberate us. The algorithmic functioning of social media companies simply isn’t built for marginalised people because at large they are not coded by people with marginalised experiences.
Munroe Bergdorf (Transitional: In One Way or Another, We All Transition)
A Model S can recharge 150 miles of range in 20 minutes at one of Tesla’s charging stations with DC power pumping straight into the batteries. By comparison, a Nissan Leaf that maxes out at 80 miles of range can take 8 hours to recharge.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
Recently Elon Musk, the founder of Paypal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors, imagined using spaceships to make traveling faster on Earth. We all know rockets were invented to carry spacecrafts into space, but Musk’s imagination was altogether on a different spectrum. He presented the idea about using a spaceship, which will start from destination A on Earth, travel into space, (where it will travel much faster since there is no gravity), and then land at destination B on Earth. If this idea works, it could cover the travel between any two locations in the world in less than one hour. You could travel from Shanghai to New York in under 40 minutes.How does that sound for a change? You can see Musk’s amazing video here at Travel Everywhere In Earth Within 30 Minutes.[12
Som Bathla (Mind Hacking Secrets: Overcome Self-Sabotaging Thinking, Improve Decision Making, Master Your Focus and Unlock Your Mind’s Limitless Potential (Power-Up Your Brain Book 6))
By late January 2014, Tesla had completed the construction of a cross-country Supercharger corridor that would allow Model S drivers to get from Los Angeles to New York without having to spend a penny on energy. The electric highway took a northern route through Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Illinois, before approaching New York from Delaware. The path it cut was similar to a trip taken by Musk and his brother, Kimbal, in a beat-up 1970s BMW 320i in 1994. Within days of the route’s completion, Tesla staged a cross-country rally to show that the Model S could easily handle long-distance driving, even in the dead of winter. Two hot-pepper-red Model S’s, driven by members of the Supercharging team, left Tesla’s Los Angeles–based design studio just after midnight on Thursday, January 30. Tesla planned to finish the trip at New York’s City Hall on the night of February 1, the day before Super Bowl XLVIII, which would take place at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, just across the state line. Along the way, the cars would drive through some of the snowiest and most frigid places in the country, in one of the coldest weeks of the year. The trip took a little longer than expected. The rally encountered a wild snowstorm in the Rocky Mountains that temporarily closed the road over Vail Pass and then provided an icy entrance to Wyoming. Somewhere in South Dakota, one of the rally’s diesel support vans broke down, forcing its occupants to catch a flight from Sioux Falls to rejoin the rest of the crew in Chicago. And in Ohio, the cars powered through torrential rains as the fatigued crew pressed on for the final stretch. It was 7:30 A.M. on Sunday, February 2, when the Teslas rolled up to New York’s City Hall on a bright, mild morning. The 3,427-mile journey had taken 76 hours and 5 minutes—just over three days. The cars had spent a total of 15 hours and 57 seconds charging along the way,
Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
Norway is working on a combination of taxes, subsidies, infrastructure, and other incentives in an effort to end sales of gasoline cars in the country by 2025. In October 2016, Germany’s federal council voted for a nonbinding resolution to end all sales of gasoline cars with internal combustion engines by 2030. In May 2017, India’s power minister announced a plan to have only electric cars—and “not a single petrol or diesel car”—sold in the country from 2030 on. Both the UK and France have said they will end sales of diesel and gasoline cars by 2040. And even China has said it will set a date that will signal the end of all gasoline car sales in the country (although it hasn’t said what that date will be). All these scenarios could have a drastic effect on the uptake of electric vehicles, which would in turn have a dramatic impact on the consumption of oil.
Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
It was 1908 when Henry Ford unveiled the first Model T, a product that would reorient the infrastructure of civilization, and around which civilization would reorient itself. Just over a century later, Elon Musk unveiled the Model S at a time when civilization is more than ready for a cultural rebirth—one that could be catalyzed by something as innocuous as a beautiful car that drives itself. Autonomy, after all, is a term not limited to the automatic control of a motor vehicle. Its meaning also speaks of self-determination. It is through the power of this autonomy that we can turn a revolution into a renaissance.
Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
Tesla is a vehicle for an idea: that we humans have better ways to power our lives than to burn a dinosaur-era compaction that dirties the air and skanks up the chemistry of the atmosphere. That notion applies to more than just cars. Tesla also sells its batteries as energy storage units. Since it acquired SolarCity in 2016 and added solar panels to its offerings, Musk has made his intentions clear: Tesla is an energy company. This is the story of how the electric car became a Trojan horse for a new energy economy. I believe it is the most important technology story of the twenty-first century.
Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
These so-called supercharging stations are solar-powered, and Tesla owners pay nothing to refuel. While much of America’s infrastructure decays,
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
When I was a kid, I was wondering – what’s the meaning of life, why are we here, what’s it all about? I came to the conclusion that what really matters is trying to understand the right questions to ask. And the more that we can increase the scope and scale of human consciousness, the better we are able to ask these questions.
Olivia Longray (Elon Musk: 199 Best Quotes from the Great Entrepreneur: Tesla, SpaceX, Exciting Future, Money, Failure and Success (Powerful Lessons from the Extraordinary People Book 1))
Elon
Olivia Longray (Elon Musk: 199 Best Quotes from the Great Entrepreneur: Tesla, SpaceX, Exciting Future, Money, Failure and Success (Powerful Lessons from the Extraordinary People Book 1))