Ashlee Vance QUOTES

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

102 " The technology has proven so valuable that SpaceX’s competitors have started to copy it and have tried to poach some of the company’s experts in the field. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s secretive rocket company, has been particularly aggressive, hiring away Ray Miryekta, one of the world’s foremost friction stir welding experts and igniting a major rift with Musk. “Blue Origin does these surgical strikes on specialized talent* offering like double their salaries. I think it’s unnecessary and a bit rude,” Musk said. Within SpaceX, Blue Origin is mockingly referred to as BO and at one point the company created an e-mail filter to detect messages with “blue” and “origin” to block the poaching. The relationship between Musk and Bezos has soured, and they no longer chat about their shared ambition of getting to Mars. “I do think Bezos has an insatiable desire to be King Bezos,” Musk said. “He has a relentless work ethic and wants to kill everything in e-commerce. But he’s not the most fun guy, honestly. "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

103 " A six-month offset would be like, like Gallipoli. You have to make sure you charge right after the bombardment. Don’t fucking sit around for two hours so that the Turks can go back in the trenches. Timing is important. We have to do everything we can to minimize the timing risk. "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

104 " Jobs. Musk is a sci-fi version of P. T. Barnum who has gotten extraordinarily rich by preying on people’s fear and self-hatred. Buy a Tesla. Forget about the mess you’ve made of the planet for a while. "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

105 " Musk comes off much more like Thomas Edison than Howard Hughes. He’s an inventor, celebrity businessman, and industrialist able to take big ideas and turn them into big products. "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

106 " The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment, "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

107 " He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

108 " Musk came to see man’s fate in the universe as a personal obligation. If that meant pursuing cleaner energy technology or building spaceships to extend the human species’s reach, then so be it. "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

109 " 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. "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

110 " If there was a way that I could not eat, so I could work more, I would not eat. I wish there was a way to get nutrients without sitting down for a meal. "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

111 " The founders of start-ups as varied as YouTube, Palantir Technologies, and Yelp all worked at PayPal. Another set of people—including Reid Hoffman, Thiel, and Botha—emerged as some of the technology industry’s top investors. PayPal staff pioneered techniques in fighting online fraud that have formed the basis of software used by the CIA and FBI to track terrorists and of software used by the world’s largest banks to combat crime. This collection of super-bright employees has become known as the PayPal Mafia—more or less the current ruling class of Silicon Valley—and Musk is its most famous and successful member. "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

112 " To me, Elon is the shining example of how Silicon Valley might be able to reinvent itself and be more relevant than chasing these quick IPOs and focusing on getting incremental products out,” said Edward Jung, a famed software engineer and inventor. “Those things are important, but they are not enough. We need to look at different models of how to do things that are longer term in nature and where the technology is more integrated. "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

113 " Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation. "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

114 " Marketing people who made grammatical mistakes in e-mails were let go, as were other people who hadn’t done anything “awesome” in recent memory. “He can be incredibly intimidating at times but doesn’t have a real sense for just how imposing he can be,” said one former Tesla executive. "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

115 " The longer you wait to fire someone the longer it has been since you should have fired them,’” Spikes said. "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

116 " Musk’s insistence on explaining the early origins of his passion for electric cars, solar energy, and rockets can come off as insecure. It feels as if Musk is trying to shape his life story in a forced way. But for Musk, the distinction between stumbling into something and having intent is important. Musk has long wanted the world to know that he’s different from the run-of-the-mill entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He wasn’t just sniffing out trends, and he wasn’t consumed by the idea of getting rich. He’s been in pursuit of a master plan all along. “I really was thinking about this stuff in college,” he said. “It is not some invented story after the fact. I don’t want to seem like a Johnny-come-lately or that I’m chasing a fad or just being opportunistic. I’m not an investor. I like to make technologies real that I think are important for the future and useful in some sort of way. "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

117 " Ich würde gern auf dem Mars sterben, nur nicht bei der Landung", sagt er. "Im Idealfall möchte ich für einen Besuch dorthin eine Weile zur Erde zurückkommen und wieder hochfliegen, wenn ich 70 bin oder so, und dann einfach da bleiben. wenn alles gut läuft, wird es so sein. "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

118 " PayPal to a confident CEO who commands the respect of thousands. “I think there are ways he has dramatically improved over time,” said Thiel. Most impressive to Thiel has been Musk’s ability to find bright, ambitious people and lure them to his companies. “He has the most talented people in the aerospace industry working for him, and the same case can be made for Tesla, where, if you’re a talented mechanical engineer who likes building cars, then you’re going to Tesla because it’s probably the only company in the U.S. where you can do interesting new things. Both companies were designed with this vision of motivating a critical mass of talented people to work on inspiring things. "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

119 " miracle of modern science and business happen. Earlier "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

120 " 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. "

― Ashlee Vance , Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future