Walter Isaacson

From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter. When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist. His father’s impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive. At the beginning of 2022—after a year marked by SpaceX launching thirty-one rockets into orbit, Tesla selling a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on earth—Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. “I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,” he said. It was a wistful comment, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he said it, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground. For two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?

Elon Musk

Vijayasarathy Muthu

 “And we would say, There is a mili- tary specification that says it's a requirement.' And he'd reply, Who Wrote that? Why does it make sense?" All requirements should be treated as recommendations, he repeatedly instructed. The only im- mutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics.

"It's not how well you avoid problems," Mueller says. "It's how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it."

Fabian Beiner

Die Frage ist nicht, wie gut man Probleme vermeidet, sondern wie schnell man versteht, worin das Problem besteht, und es behebt.

Fred Rivett

When Musk gets stressed, he often retreats into the future. He will surprise his engineers, who are focused on some impending major event, by peppering them with questions about the details of things that are years away…

Diese Erfahrung wurde zu einer Lektion, die Eingang in Musks Produktionsalgorithmus finden sollte: Warte vor Einführung einer Automatisierung stets das Ende der Prozessentwicklung ab – bis alle Anforderungen hinterfragt und sämtliche unnötigen Teile gestrichen wurden –, bevor eine Automatisierung vorgenommen wird.

Wenn konventionelles Denken deine Mission verunmöglicht, ist es höchste Zeit, unkonventionell zu denken.

Tem Nugmanov

When Musk gets stressed. he often retreats into the future. He will surprise his engineers, who ane focused on somne impending major event, by peppering them with questions about the details of things that are years away: plans for Mars landings, "Robotaxis" without steering wheels, implanted brain chips that can connect to computers. At Tesla, amid the crises facing production of the Roadster, he would start quizzing his te the status of parts for the next car he envisioned. 

 He learned one very big lesson from these ventures: "It's not the product that leads to success. It's the ability to make the product ef- ficiently. It's about building the machine that builds the machine. In other words, how do you design the factory?" It was a guiding prin- ciple that Musk would make his own.

A jolt of optimism spread through headquarters. "I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that," says Dolly Singh, the human resources director. "Within moments, the energy of the building went from despair and defeat to a massive buzz of determination." Carl Hoffman, a Wired reporter who had watched the failure of the second launch with Musk, reached him to ask how he maintained his optimism. "Optimism, pessimism, fuck that," Musk answered. "We're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work.

Elon Musk quotes

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