Elon Musk (Ashlee Vance)

A few quotes from the book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance:

• Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not.
• If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules.
• There needs to be a reason for a grade. I’d rather play video games, write software, and read books than try and get an A if there’s no point in getting an A.
• One thing that Musk holds in the highest regard is resolve, and he respects people who continue on after being told no.
• “One of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask. Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy.”
• I don’t want to be the person who ever has to compete with Elon. You might as well leave the business and find something else fun to do. He will outmaneuver you, outthink you, and out-execute you.
• Whether Musk was a founder of Tesla in the purest sense of the word is irrelevant at this point. There would be no Tesla to talk about today were it not for Musk’s money, marketing savvy, chicanery, engineering smarts, and indomitable spirit. Tesla was, in effect, willed into existence by Musk and reflects his personality as much as Intel, Microsoft, and Apple reflect the personalities of their founders.
• And it may well be the case that this is exactly the type of person it takes to make a freaking space Internet real.
• Like Steve Jobs before him, Musk is able to think up things that consumers did not even know they wanted—the door handles, the giant touch-screen—and to envision a shared point of view for all of Tesla’s products and services.
• When Elon gets into something, he develops just this different level of interest in it than other people. That is what differentiates Elon from the rest of humanity.