Elon Musk

⚡️ 15 Quotes from the book

“To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”

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“South Africa in the 1980s was a violent place, with machine-gun attacks and knife killings common. Once, when Elon and Kimbal got off a train on their way to an anti-apartheid music concert, they had to wade through a pool of blood next to a dead person with a knife still sticking out of his brain.”

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“But those scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, Errol Musk, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist who to this day bedevils Elon.”

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“Reading remained Musk’s psychological retreat. Sometimes he would immerse himself in books all afternoon and most of the night, nine hours at a stretch.”

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“Musk read both sets of his father’s encyclopedias and became, to his doting mother and sister, a 'genius boy.' To other kids, however, he was an annoying nerd.”

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“I realized by then that if someone bullied me, I could punch them very hard in the nose, and then they wouldn’t bully me again.”

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“His heritage and breeding, along with the hardwiring of his brain, made him at times callous and impulsive. It also led to an exceedingly high tolerance for risk. He could calculate it coldly and also embrace it feverishly.”

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“If you turn off fear, then maybe you have to turn off other things, like joy or empathy.”

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“He thrived on crises, deadlines, and wild surges of work. When he faced tortuous challenges, the strain would often keep him awake at night and make him vomit. But it also energized him.”

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“At the beginning of 2022—after a year marked by SpaceX making thirty-one successful rocket launches, Tesla selling close to 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,' he told me, 'which it has been in for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life.'”

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“Getting someone in a wheelchair to walk again, people will get it right away. It’s a gut-punch idea, a fucking bold thing. And a good thing.”

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“I’d like to be super clear that if you feel the slightest bit ill or even uncomfortable, please do not feel obligated to come to work. I will personally be at work. My frank opinion remains that the harm from the coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself.”

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“There are only a handful of really big milestones: single-celled life, multicellular life, differentiation of plants and animals, life extending from the oceans to land, mammals, consciousness. On that scale, the next important step is obvious: making life multiplanetary.”

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“Adversity shaped me. My pain threshold became very high.”

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“The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.”

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