Ashlee Vance Quotes

#1. He does what he wants, and he is relentless about it. It's Elon's world, and the rest of us live in it.

Ashlee Vance

#2. When Musk is present, the chats tend toward the absurd and fantastic

Ashlee Vance

#3. back to 2004. SpaceX needed an actuator that would trigger the gimbal

Ashlee Vance

#4. He's hands-on to a degree that would make Hugh Hefner feel inadequate.

Ashlee Vance

#5. The big car companies are so derivative. They want to see it work somewhere else before they will approve the project and move forward.

Ashlee Vance

#6. When we first talked about the touch-screen, the guys came back and said, 'There's nothing like that in the automotive supply chain,'" Musk said. "I said, 'I know. That's because it's never been put in a fucking car before.

Ashlee Vance

#7. site's lead writer, dug into the histories

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#8. Musk's vision, and, of late, execution seem to combine the best of Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. With

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#9. Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SolarCity - they are all expressions of Musk. SpaceX is Musk.

Ashlee Vance

#10. 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

#11. Elon came to the conclusion early in his career that life is short that if you really embrace this, it leaves you with the obvious conclusion that you should be working as hard as you can.

Ashlee Vance

#12. called The Flying Haldemans: Pity the Poor Private Pilot.

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#13. What Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview.

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#14. He has the ability to work harder and endure more stress than anyone I've ever met," Gracias said.

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#15. At twenty-three, Hollman was young, single, and willing to give up any semblance of having a life in favor of working at SpaceX nonstop, and he became Mueller's second in command.

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#16. He would often say, 'The longer you wait to fire someone the longer it has been since you should have fired them,

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#17. Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy.

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#18. Enough solar energy hits the Earth's surface in about an hour to equal a year's worth of worldwide energy consumption from all sources put together.20

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#19. Throughout these early years, the engineers credited Eberhard with making quick, crisp decisions. Rarely did Tesla get hung up overanalyzing a situation. The company would pick a plan of attack, and when it failed at something, it failed fast and then tried a new approach. It

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#20. A bunch of Tesla employees wrote checks to keep the company going,

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#21. Musk took to the Mars Society right away and joined its board of directors. He donated another $100,000 to fund a research station in the desert as well. Musk's

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#22. He sent the housekeepers away and had Elon do all the chores to let him know what it was like "to play American.

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#23. SpaceX is in this for the long haul and, come hell or high water, we are going to make this work." Musk

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#24. 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.

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#25. 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."*

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#26. You need angel investors to have some belief, and it wasn't a purely financial transaction for him," Tarpenning said. "He wanted to change the energy equation of the country.

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#27. Musk loves costume parties as well, and turned up at one dressed like a knight and using a parasol to duel a midget wearing a Darth Vader costume.

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#28. There really wasn't anything suave about him," Ankenbrandt said. "We all worked twenty hours a day, and he worked twenty-three hours.

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#29. Along with showcasing the Model S, the Tesla stores sold hoodies and hats and had areas in the back where kids would find crayons and Tesla coloring books.

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#30. This question came from Elon Musk near the very end of a long dinner we shared at a high-end seafood restaurant in Silicon Valley. I'd gotten to the restaurant first

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#31. flashed a spreadsheet he'd created. "Hey, guys," he said, "I think we can build this rocket ourselves." Griffin and Cantrell had downed a couple of drinks by this time and were too deflated to entertain a fantasy.

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#32. You almost wish that Bill and Steve had a genetically engineered love child and, who knows, maybe we should genotype Elon to see if that's what happened.

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#33. The two men continue to despise each other today, although they must do so in private, as legally required.

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#34. At one point, the software declared that each Roadster should cost about $68,000, which would leave Tesla making about $30,000 per vehicle. Everyone knew the figure was wrong, but it got reported to the board anyway.

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#35. The couple had lunch the next day and then went to the White Cube, a modern art gallery, and then back to Musk's hotel room. Musk told Riley, a virgin, that he wanted to show her his rockets. "I was skeptical, but he did actually show me rocket videos,

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#36. It took six years - about four and half more than Musk had once planned - and five hundred people to make this miracle of modern science and business happen.

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#37. 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 real breakthroughs we'd been missing.

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#38. There is a fundamental problem with regulators. If a regulator agrees to change a rule and something bad happens, they could easily lose their career. Whereas if they change a rule and something good happens, they don't even get a reward.

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#39. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important.

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#40. Eberhard had come up with the name Tesla Motors, both to pay homage to the inventor and electric motor pioneer Nikola Tesla and because it sounded cool.

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#41. It was not unusual for him to read ten hours a day," said Kimbal.

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#42. The longer you wait to fire someone the longer it has been since you should have fired them,'" Spikes said.

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#43. When you have scarcity, it naturally reinforces greed and leads to more interest,

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#44. When one of them complained of being frightened by the dark, Elon pointed out that "dark is merely the absence of light," which did little to reassure the scared child.

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#45. Musk began thinking back to his time as an intern at the Bank of Nova Scotia. His big takeaway from that job, that bankers are rich and dumb, now had the feel of a massive opportunity.

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#46. I mean, there aren't that many people you can talk to about this sort of thing

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#47. Either we fix [the marriage] today, or I will divorce you tomorrow.

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#48. The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,

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#49. One employee missed an event to witness the birth of his child. Musk fired off an e-mail saying, "That is no excuse. I am extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We're changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don't."*

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#50. 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.

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#51. Later in life, as I competed against the banks, I would think back to this moment, and it gave me confidence. All the bankers did was copy what everyone else did.

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#52. When he returned to the Iron Man production office, Downey asked that Favreau be sure to place a Tesla Roadster in Tony Stark's workshop.

Ashlee Vance