• YouTube - EveryElonMusk Video

• Wikipedia - Elon Musk

  • Early life
    Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa to a Canadian mother and an English-born South African father. Elon taught himself computer programming and at age 12 sold the computer code for a video game called Blastar for $500. Musk graduated from Pretoria Boys High School and moved to Canada in 1988 at the age of 17, after obtaining Canadian citizenship through his mother. He did so to avoid service in the South African military, and also because he concluded it would be easier to emigrate to the United States from Canada than from South Africa. In 1992, after spending two years at Queen's School of Business, Kingston, Ontario, Musk transferred to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and received a Bachelor of Science degree in business and a second Bachelor of Science degree in physics. He moved to California to pursue a Ph.D. in applied physics at Stanford but left the program after two days to pursue his entrepreneurial aspirations in the areas of the Internet, renewable energy and outer space. In 2002, he was naturalized an American citizen.

    Career
    Musk started Zip2, a web software company, with his brother, Kimbal Musk. The company developed and marketed an Internet "city guide" for the newspaper publishing industry. Musk obtained contracts with The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and persuaded the board of directors to abandon plans for a merger with a company called CitySearch. Compaq acquired Zip2 for US $307 million in cash and US $34 million in stock options in 1999. Musk received 7% or $22 million from the sale.

    X.com and PayPal
    In March 1999 Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company. One year later, the company merged with Confinity, which operated a subsidiary called PayPal. PayPal and X.com each had a person-to-person email-based payment system. The original intent was to merge the two systems, but it never happened. The creators of Yelp, YouTube, and LinkedIn all worked with him at PayPal. Elon Musk strongly favored the X brand over the PayPal brand. After initially co-branding PayPal with the X brand, including making PayPal a subdomain of X.com, he moved to officially remove the PayPal brand for good. Following this, Elon was removed as CEO by the board, who appointed former PayPal founder Peter Thiel interim CEO. PayPal's early growth was due in large part to a successful viral growth campaign created by Musk. In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for US$1.5 billion in stock, of which $165 million was given to Musk. Before its sale, Musk, the company's largest shareholder, owned 11.7% of PayPal's shares.

• Are you aware of anyone who has the drive and knowledge you had when you were starting Zip2, but for whom bad luck has caused them to not be as successful as you?

• His strategy for Tesla Motors reminds me of Henry Ford's strategy for the Ford Motor Company: get people's attention by building cars that win races and drive really fast, and then sell them a more useful version (Model T) by using the cachet you earned from your race cars.

Quora - How can I be as great as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Richard Branson?
http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-be-as-gr ... rd-Branson

Answered by Justine Musk:
Extreme success results from an extreme personality and comes at the cost of many other things. Extreme success is different from what I suppose you could just consider 'success', so know that you don't have to be Richard or Elon to be affluent and accomplished and maintain a great lifestyle. Your odds of happiness are better that way. But if you're extreme, you must be what you are, which means that happiness is more or less beside the point. These people tend to be freaks and misfits who were forced to experience the world in an unusually challenging way. They developed strategies to survive, and as they grow older they find ways to apply these strategies to other things, and create for themselves a distinct and powerful advantage. They don't think the way other people think. They see things from angles that unlock new ideas and insights. Other people consider them to be somewhat insane. 

Be obsessed.

Be obsessed.

Be obsessed. 

If you're not obsessed, then stop what you're doing and find whatever does obsess you. It helps to have an ego, but you must be in service to something bigger if you are to inspire the people you need to help you (and make no mistake, you will need them). That 'something bigger' prevents you from going off into the ether when people flock round you and tell you how fabulous you are when you aren't and how great your stuff is when it isn't. Don't pursue something because you "want to be great". Pursue something because it fascinates you, because the pursuit itself engages and compels you. Extreme people combine brilliance and talent with an *insane* work ethic, so if the work itself doesn't drive you, you will burn out or fall by the wayside or your extreme competitors will crush you and make you cry. 

Follow your obsessions until a problem starts to emerge, a big meaty challenging problem that impacts as many people as possible, that you feel hellbent to solve or die trying. It might take years to find that problem, because you have to explore different bodies of knowledge, collect the dots and then connect and complete them. 

It helps to have superhuman energy and stamina. If you are not blessed with godlike genetics, then make it a point to get into the best shape possible. There will be jet lag, mental fatigue, bouts of hard partying, loneliness, pointless meetings, major setbacks, family drama, issues with the Significant Other you rarely see, dark nights of the soul, people who bore and annoy you, little sleep, less sleep than that. Keep your body sharp to keep your mind sharp. It pays off.

Learn to handle a level of stress that would break most people.

Don't follow a pre-existing path, and don't look to imitate your role models. There is no "next step". Extreme success is not like other kinds of success; what has worked for someone else, probably won't work for you. They are individuals with bold points of view who exploit their very particular set of unique and particular strengths. They are unconventional, and one reason they become the entrepreneurs they become is because they can't or don't or won't fit into the structures and routines of corporate life. They are dyslexic, they are autistic, they have ADD, they are square pegs in round holes, they piss people off, get into arguments, rock the boat, laugh in the face of paperwork. But they transform weaknesses in ways that create added advantage -- the strategies I mentioned earlier -- and seek partnerships with people who excel in the areas where they have no talent whatsoever. 

They do not fear failure -- or they do, but they move ahead anyway. They will experience heroic, spectacular, humiliating, very public failure but find a way to reframe until it isn't failure at all. When they fail in ways that other people won't, they learn things that other people don't and never will. They have incredible grit and resilience. 

They are unlikely to be reading stuff like this. (This is *not* to slam or criticize people who do; I love to read this stuff myself.) They are more likely to go straight to a book: perhaps a biography of Alexander the Great or Catherine the Great* or someone else they consider Great.Surfing the 'Net is a deadly timesuck, and given what they know their time is worth -- even back in the day when technically it was not worth that -- they can't afford it.

I could go on, it's a fascinating subject, but you get the idea. I wish you luck and strength and perhaps a stiff drink should you need it.


* One person in the comments section appears not to know who Catherine the Great is, suggesting that this is "an utter lie" of mine + "feminist stupidity". But Catherine's ability to rise, and strategize around discrimination, holds interesting lessons for anyone.

Quora - What does Elon Musk read?
http://www.quora.com/Elon-Musk/What-does-Elon-Musk-read
- awesome answer given, very well-researched

Elon has mentioned reading biographies in multiple interviews: 

Winston Churchill, Thomas Edison in: Elon Musk and the frontier of Technology.(PBS)
Tesla (of course) and Issacson's biog of Ben Franklin in the Kevin Rose interview: Episode 20 w/ Elon Musk 
SpaceX: On 60 Minutes Elon Musk said that he was mostly self taught and learnt most of what he knows from reading books. What books do you think Elon Musk read?
Ben Franklin in: We're live at Elon Musk's SXSW keynote
He's also mentioned Henry Ford and Carnegie (will update with links if I find them)... But it's easy to see the pattern here

He also talks about the process of decision-making and frameworks-for-thinking on multiple occasions. He's mentioned it in the PBS link above and also in this TED interview ("deductive over inductive reasoning, first-principles reasoning..."): Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity ... | Video on TED.com

He's also mentioned Physics, Engineering & Product Design/Business books on multiple occasions (wish I could list them all!), but I have a feeling that he shies away from mentioning names and details for those. 
[...]
Early technical subjects from his father; Likes Edison more than Tesla: Full Length Interview with Elon Musk
[...]
Kevin Rose interviewed Elon Musk as part of his Foundations series. In that interview (which you can find a video of online) Elon says that he's not big into general business books but instead gets most of his insights from reading biographies like that of Benjamin Franklin.
[...]
Along with the other answers he's most recently shared that he's currently reading up on Howard Hughes
[...]
If you go to space-x's youtube channel, there are a few videos of him shot at his desk. behind, you can see a stack of books. One book he has surely read and appreciates, (I could make out from the blurry background) is 'Einstein' by Walter Issacson.
[...]
He has said that his inspiration for starting SpaceX was the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Source: Elon Musk's mission to Mars

• 1984 - Blastar

  • This is the game Elon coded at age 12 and got paid $500 for.

• 1999 - CNN - Profile of Elon Musk & X.com
  
  

  • "Back in '95, there weren't very many people on the Internet, and certainly nobody was making any money at all. Most people thought the Internet was going to be a fad. [...] Just three years ago I was showering at the Y and sleeping on the office floor. And now, obviously I've got a million-dollar car and quite a few creature comforts."

    Reporter: "A year ago Musk sold his software company, zip2, which enabled newspapers to publish online, for $400 million--cash." Elon: "Receiving cash is cash. I mean, those are just a large number of Ben Franklins."

    "Raising $50 million is a matter of making a series of phone calls, and the money is there. I've sunk the great majority of my net worth into X.com, which is the new banking and mutual funds company on the Internet that I've started. [...] I think X.com could absolutely be a multi-billion-dollar bonanza, because if you look at the industry that X is pursuing, it's the biggest sector of the world economy."

    "It's sort of like a series of poker games, and now I've gone on to a more high-stakes poker game and just carried those chips with me. I haven't gone and taken my winnings and spent a big chunk of it, I've just really put almost all of it back into the new game."

• 2003.10.08 - Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture
  
  

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afZTrfvB2AQ

  • This is a good early example of him promoting his company and trying to raise its profile.

  • "That's one of the good things about public markets: they're an objective valuer of companies." (NW: Warren Buffett might disagree with the wording of that.)

Zip2
I'll talk a little bit Zip2 and Paypal and then mostly about space and what we're doing in space. So, I originally came up California to do energy physics at Stanford, actually. And this was in '95. And ended up putting that on hold to start Zip2. I'll tell you a little about the thought process of exactly what happened there. In '95, it wasn't at all clear that the internet was going to be a big commercial thing. In fact, most of the venture capitalists that I talked to hadn't even heard of the Internet which sounds bizarre--on Sand Hill Road. But I wanted to do something in there. I thought it would be a pretty huge thing. I thought it was one of those things that came along once in a very long while. So, I got a deferment at Stanford. And thought I'd give it a couple of quarters. If it didn't work out, which I thought it probably wouldn't, then I'd come back to school. Actually, I talked to my professor. I told him this and he said, "Well, I don't think you'd be coming back," And that was the last conversation I had with him. The only way to get involved in the Internet in '95, that I could think of, was to start a company. Because there weren't a lot of companies to go and work for, apart from Netscape, maybe one or two others. And I didn't have any money. So I thought we've got to make something that's going to return money very quickly. So we thought that the media industry would need help converting its content from a print media to electronic. And they clearly had money. So if we could find a way to help them move their media to the Internet that would be an obvious way of generating revenue. There was no advertising revenue on the Internet at the time. That was really the basis of Zip2. We ended up building quite a bit of software for the media industry, primarily the print media industry. So we had as investors and customers Hearst Corporation, Knight Ridder, most of the major US print publishers. We built that up and then we had the opportunity to sell to Compaq in early '99. And basically, took that offer. It was for a little over $300 million dollars in cash. That's a currency I highly recommend. 

Founding of PayPal
So we had that, but I wanted to do something more after Zip2. So immediately post the sale, I didn't really take any time off. I tried to think of where were the opportunities, in...this is in early '99, where the opportunities remained in the Internet. And it seemed to me that there hadn't been a lot of innovation in the financial services sector. And when you think about it, money is low bandwidth. You don't need some sort of big infrastructure improvement to do things with it. It's really just an entry in a database. The paper form of money is really only a small percentage of all the money that's out there. It should lend itself to innovation on the Internet. So, we thought of a couple of different things we could do. One of the things was to combine all of somebody's financial services needs into one website. So, you could have banking, brokerage, insurance and all sorts of things in one place. And that was actually quite a difficult problem to solve. But we solved most of the issues associated with that. And then we had a little feature which took us about a day. That was the ability to email money from one customer to another. You could type in an email address or, actually, any unique identifier and transfer funds or conceivably stocks or mutual funds or whatever from one account holder to another. And if you tried to transfer money to somebody who didn't have an account in the system, it would then forward an email to them saying, "Hey, why don't you sign up and open an account?" And whenever we'd demonstrate these two sets of features we'd say, "This is a feature that took us a lot of effort to do and look how you can see your bank statement and your mutual funds and insurance and all that. It's all in one page and look how convenient that is." And people would go, "Hmm...ho hum." And then we'd say, "And by the way, we have this feature where you can enter somebody's email address and transfer his funds. " And they go, "Wow!" And we were like, 'OK...' So we focused the company's business on emailed payments. In the early game going, our company's called X.com. There was another company called Confinity which also started out from a different area. They started off with Palm Pilot cryptography and then they had as a demo application the ability to beam token payments from one Palm Pilot to another by the infrared port. And then they had a website which was called PayPal where you'd reconcile the beamed payments. And what they found was that the website portion was actually far more interesting to people than Palm Pilot cryptography was. So they started leaning their business in that direction. And then in early 2000, X.com acquired Confinity and then about a year later we ended up changing the company's name to PayPal.

Success Through Viral Marketing: PayPal
And that's an approximate evolution of the company. But Paypal is really a perfect case example of viral marketing, like Hotmail was. Where one customer would essentially act as a salesperson for you for bringing in other customers. So they would send money to a friend and, essentially, recruit that friend into the network. And so you had this exponential growth. The more customers you had the faster it grew. It was like bacteria in a Petri dish, it just goes like this S-curve. I ran Paypal for about the first two years of its existence. We launched after year one and by the end of year two, we had a million customers. It gives you a sense of how fast things grow in that scenario. And we didn't have a salesforce. We, actually, didn't have a VP of Sales. We didn't have a VP of Marketing. And we didn't spend any money on advertising.

Selling the Company: PayPal to eBay
In about February of last year, I'm sure you're probably following it, Paypal went public. I think we were the only internet company to go public in the first part of last year. It went off reasonably well. Although, I think we had more SEC rewrites than any company I can imagine. I think we set a record on SEC rewrites. This was right around the end-on time when there was all sorts of corporate scandals. So, they put as through the ringer. Shortly thereafter, about June, July, we struck a deal with eBay, to sell the company to eBay for over $4 billion. But that was when eBay's stock price was about $55 and they hadn't split. So, I guess, in today's dollars we were about $3 billion. So it worked out pretty well. 

Common themes between Zip2 and PayPal
Common themes between Zip2 and Paypal? Well, I guess, both of them involved software as the heart of the technology. Even though Zip2 was servicing the media sector. And obviously, Paypal was servicing the financial sector. The heart of it was really software and internet related stuff. So, certainly that's a huge commonality. They're both in Palo Alto, where I live. I think we took a similar approach to building both companies. Which was to have a small group of very talented people and keep it small. I think Paypal had, at it's height, probably 30 engineers for a system that, I would say, is more sophisticated than the Federal Reserve clearing system. I'm pretty sure it is actually because the Federal Reserve clearing system sucks. So, what else is there? Generally, I think the way both Zip2 and Paypal operated was, it was really your canonical "Silicon Valley" start up. You know, pretty flat hierarchy, everybody had it, roughly, some like you. And anyone could talk to anyone. We have to go for the best idea when's as oppose to a person proposing the idea winning because they are who they are. Even though there are times when I thought that should have been the way it could. Obviously, everyone was an equity stake holder. If there were two paths that, let's say, we had to choose through one thing or the other. And one wasn't obviously better than the other. Then rather spend a lot of time trying to figure out which one was slightly better, we would just pick one and do it. Sometimes we'd be wrong. And we'd pick ourselves from our path. But often it's better to pick a path and do it than to just vacillate endlessly on a choice. We didn't worry too much about intellectual property, paperwork or legal stuff. We were really very focused on building the best product that we possibly could. Both Zip2 and Paypal were very product-focused companies. We were incredibly obsessive about how do we evoke something that is really going to be the best possible customer experience. And that was a far more effective selling tool than having a giant sales force or thinking of marketing gimmicks or twelve-step processes or whatever.

Viral Marketing
I'm not super familiar with Friendster. I mean the essence of viral marketing is, 'do you have something where one customer is going to sell to another customer without you having to do anything'. There are lots of instances of that, Friendster might be one. Obviously, Hotmail was one. PayPal was one. eBay was one. In a situation like that, going back to what I said about product, a product matters incredibly because if you're going to recommend something to somebody, you've got to really love the product experience; otherwise, you're not going to recommend it because you don't want to burn your friend. 

Customer Base: PayPal vs. SpaceX
Can you talk a little bit about difference in the customer base you have targeted in SpaceX that enforces experiences with PayPal how much challenge that presents? Yes. The customer base with SpaceX is dramatically different obviously from PayPal. PayPal is a consumer product whereas SpaceX we're selling rockets and the number of people who want to buy rockets is quite small. If anyone here has explained to everyone a rocket, I'd be glad to sell it to him. So it's much more of an individual selling process. There's a great deal more thought that goes to any purchase of a launch, much more so that signing up a PayPal account which doesn't really cost you much, and there's not a lot of viral marketing that's going to happen with a rocket I suspect. I'm hoping but I'm not counting on it.

Qualities of an entrepreneur
I think successful entrepreneurs probably come in all sizes, shapes and flavors. I'm not sure there's any one particular thing. For me, some of the things I've described already I think are very important. I think really an obsessive nature with respect to the quality of the product is very important and so being an obsessive compulsive is a good thing in this context. Really liking what you do, whatever area that you get into, even if you're the best of the best, there's always a chance of failure so I think it's important that you really like whatever you're doing. If you don't like it, life is too short. I'd say also, if you like what you're doing, you think about it even when you're not working. It's something that your mind is drawn to and if you don't like it, you just really can't make it work I think. 

Career Development: To MBA or Not?
How did the Wharton degree help? I think a business degree teaches you a lot of the terminology, it introduces you to concepts that you would otherwise--[laughter from audience] Heh, you know, there's terminology, there's something to be said for that--It introduces you to concepts you would otherwise have to learn empirically. I mean I think you can learn whatever you need to do to start a successful business either in school or out of school. A school in theory should help accelerate that process and I think oftentimes it does. It can be an efficient learning process, perhaps more efficient than empirically learning lessons. I mean there are examples of successful entrepreneurs who never graduated high school and there are those that have PhDs. So I think the important principle is to be dedicated to learning what you need to know, whether that is in school or empirically.

Reducing Company Costs: PayPal and SpaceX
The way we've gotten our prices low, our cost low is we've really focused on every element of the launch vehicle. There's really no one silver bullet that has been responsible for a substantial portion of the cost savings. It's been really hundreds of small innovations and improvements, and so we've done improvements in the propulsion system, the structure, the avionics and the launch operations as well as maintain a very low overhead organization. When you add up all the things we've done in those areas, that allows us to produce the launch vehicle at $6 million. As far as PayPal, there were a lot of back-office relationships that we needed to establish and to attach to various heterogeneous data sources. We needed to attach to the credit card system for processing credit cards. We needed to attach to the Federal Reserve System for doing electronic funds transfers. We needed to attach to various fraud databases to run fraud checks. There was a lot that we had to interface with. That took a while. It all came together I think roughly simultaneously. I mean developing the software and having it ready for the general public reasonably coincided with us being able to conclude those deals and interface with the outside vendors, and all that took about a year. I think one thing that's important is to try not to serialize dependencies, so if you can put as many elements in parallel as possible. A lot of things have a gestation period and there's really nothing you can do to accelerate; I mean it's very hard to accelerate that gestation period. So if you can have all those things gestating in parallel then that is one way to substantially accelerate your timeline. I think people tend to serialize things too much. 

Q: 'How did you decide when to sell?'
We had several offers actually from a number of different entities for Paypal, and in fact the closer we got to IPO, the more offers we got, but we always felt that those undervalued the company and subsequently when we went public, I think the public markets kind of indicated the value of the company. That's one of the good things about public markets. It's that they're an objective valuer of companies. When you're a private company it's very hard to say how much you're worth because you have to basically think of some metric. Are you going to go for multiple of future earnings? Are you going to go off something of revenue? What are your comparables going to be? There are all sorts of questions. It's really up for debate what sort of value your company is. When you're public, it's what the market says you're worth, that's what you're worth. Yes. eBay made a number of offers prior to going public that were substantially below the value once we went post public and that kind of cleared up the disagreement and then we sold them. What else? Actually you had a second part to the question. I'm just wondering if you were concerned on getting any traction to a solution. Yes. eBay had initially Billpoint and then there was eBay Payments and it was a really pretty tough long running battle of Paypal versus eBay's payment system. It was certainly very challenging. I think there were times when it felt like we were trying to win a land war in Asia and they kind of set the ground rules or trying to beat Microsoft in their own operating system. It's really pretty hard. That took a lot of our effort to actually beat eBay on their own system. One of the long-term risks certainly for the company was that eBay would one day prevail and one way to retire that risk obviously was to sell to eBay. 

History of Zip2
Writing software during the summer of '95. Trying to make useful things happen on the internet. I wrote something that allowed you to keep maps and directions on the internet and something that allowed you to do online manipulation of content; kind of a really advanced blogging system. Then we started talking to small newspapers and media companies and so forth. We started getting some interest. I mean, half of the time it'd be like, "What's the Internet?", even in Silicon Valley. But then occasionally, somebody would bite and we get a little bit of money from them. There were, basically, only six of us. There were myself, my brother, who I convinced to come down from Canada; and a friend of my Mom's. And then three sales people we hired on contingency by putting an ad in a newspaper. But things were pretty tough in the early going. I didn't have any money. In fact, I had negative money: I had huge student debts. In fact, I couldn't afford a place to stay and an office. So I rented an office instead. Because, actually, I got a cheaper office than I could get a place to stay. I just slept on the futon and showered at the YMCA on Page Mill. It was the best shape I've ever been. There was shower work out and you're good to go. There was an ISP on the floor below us. Just like a little tiny ISP. And we'd draw a hole through the floor and connect to the main cable. That gave us our internet connectivity like a hundred bucks a month. So we had just an absurdly tiny burn rate. And we also had a really tiny revenue stream. But we actually had more revenue than we had expenses. So when we went and talked to VP's we could actually say we had positive cash flow. That helps, I think.

Q: 'Would you recommend starting a space company to first-time entrepreneurs?'
No. That's a good question. No, I would not. I think SpaceX, this is advanced entrepreneuring. I can't tell you how many people have said that the fastest way to make a small fortune in the aerospace industry is to start with a large one so hopefully that doesn't work out. I think space is a tough one for first-time entrepreneurs. You're better off starting with something that requires low capital and space is a high-capital effort.

2006 - International Space Development Conference (ISDC)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoNIrv_2UIQ


2006 - Netscape.com @ The unveiling of the Tesla Roadster
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY10ok8wZjY
- Elon has some brief comments halfway through and at the end.


2006 - Wired Science - Interview with Elon Musk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Onajosm9PWo


2006.11.27 - PlentyTV - Interview with Martin Eberhard, CEO of Tesla Motors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLo0Ji9pOMQ
- Watching this reminded me of Hatching Twitter and how Jack Dorsey worked hard to get himself into the public eye, which he was then able to use as leverage. It also reminded me of how a salesman's relationship with his customers is extremely powerful, and companies can end up having to pay salesmen a lot of money to keep their customers. And it also reminded me of how Elon got pushed aside at his first company, which may have been because he wasn't as well-known.



2007.01.19 - Gawker - An alternate history according to Elon Musk (Elon responds to 'The PayPal Wars')
http://gawker.com/230076/an-alternate-h ... -elon-musk

The only negativity in recent years was due to a book called The PayPal Wars, written by a sycophantic jackass called Eric Jackson. This guy was one notch above an intern at PayPal in the first few years of the company, but gives the impression he was a key player and privy to all the high level discussions. Eric couldn't find a real publisher, so Peter funded Eric to self-publish the book. Since Eric worships Peter, the outcome was obvious - Peter sounds like Mel Gibson in Braveheart and my role is somewhere between negligible and a bad seed. However, to his credit, Peter didn't realize the book would be as bad as it was and apologized to me personally at a Room 9 board meeting at David Sacks's home in LA.

2007.08.09 - NPR - Making a Mark with Rockets and Roadsters
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... d=12484430
[Interview clip on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dX-Z9p7sQM]

Justine says Elon is not the sort to give up on things. When they first met in college he asked her out for ice cream. She said she had to study, but he searched the campus for her with two cones, ice cream melting down onto his hands. "You know, that was Elon at 19, with just this single-minded persistence. For a long time, that was kind of what our pseudo-dating life was like. He would ask me out, and I would say no for one reason or another, and it really didn't make any difference!" I asked Justine if she ever thought she was marrying a dreamer; "No", she said, "just someone insanely ambitious, intensely logical, and very determined."

2007.12.01 - Inc. - Entrepreneur of the Year, 2007: Elon Musk
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20071201/en ... gen_4.html
- excellent article, there's a lot of very useful information about how he got started. There's more info in this article about his rise than in the PayPal book ("The PayPal Wars").

it's so rare to see Musk talk to someone on the phone without simultaneously doing something else: pecking out an e-mail, scanning invoices, mulling over a spreadsheet, shopping for computer equipment, fiddling with his BlackBerry. He often does several of these things at once. The only tasks that seem to command the entirety of his attention are technical discussions related to SpaceX's soon-to-be-launched rocket, the Falcon 1, and job interviews. (Musk personally vets all of SpaceX's employees, and he's in the midst of a frantic--but so far fruitless--search for a CEO for Tesla.)

To get through the day, Musk relies on two stimulants: caffeine and a desire to help humanity colonize Mars. Until he recently started cutting back on the former, Musk consumed eight cans of Diet Coke a day, as well as several large cups of coffee. "I got so freaking jacked that I seriously started to feel like I was losing my peripheral vision," he says. If he realizes how crazy this sounds, he doesn't let on. "Now, the office has caffeine-free Diet Coke." Even so, Musk frequently gets so caught up in his multitasking that it sometimes takes two or three tries at his name, uttered at full volume, to get a response.
[...]
If there's something insane about a CEO who thinks his company's mission is more important than any accomplishment in all of human history--indeed, in all of fish history--there's also something irresistible. "One of Elon's greatest skills is the ability to pass off his vision as a mandate from heaven," says Max Levchin, who co-founded PayPal with Musk. "He is very much the person who, when someone says it's impossible, shrugs and says, 'I think I can do it."
[...]
Elon Musk isn't a software geek or a self-styled visionary. He's not particularly young or brash or handsome, and he can come off as kind of a jerk. He isn't hawking new technology, and he's quite shy.
[...]
At SpaceX, Mueller developed a working engine with only 25 engineers. Musk's salespeople have managed to book 14 flights for customers including NASA, the Malaysian government, and MDA, a Canadian data company, charging from $7.1 million to $35 million per trip. SpaceX was cash-flow-positive in the fourth quarter of last year and is on track to reach profitability when the books close on 2007.
[...]
If simultaneously shepherding three disruptive companies sounds tough, it's business as usual for Musk. As a 12-year-old growing up in the South African city of Pretoria with divorced parents, Musk created a video game, Blaster, and sold it to a computer magazine for the ungodly sum of $500. About a year later, Elon and his younger brother Kimbal, who has long been Musk's closest friend and chief co-conspirator, drew up plans to open an arcade near their school. "It was a very compelling proposition when you're 13 and you love video games," Musk says, letting out a rare chuckle. They gave up when a city official informed them that an adult's signature would be required to obtain a permit and instead sold homemade chocolates to their classmates. In his teenage years, Musk parlayed his small entrepreneurial fortune into several thousand dollars of stock market gains.

Just before Elon's 16th birthday, and without telling their parents, the brothers took a bus to the Canadian embassy and applied for passports. (Their mother, a Canadian national, now lives in Manhattan.) A year later, Elon bought a plane ticket to Canada and, over the objections of his father, left South Africa for good. Musk says he was fleeing compulsory service in the South African Defense Force, which was still repressing the country's black majority. But he is quick to add that he'd long dreamed of coming to America. "I would have come here from any country," he says. "The U.S. is where great things are possible." When I ask Musk if his father ever forgave him for leaving, he answers, "I don't really care." The two seldom speak today.

Musk enrolled in Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario; Kimbal joined him a year later. With almost no money, Musk worked a bevy of jobs--as an intern in Microsoft's Canadian marketing department, an intern for the Bank of Nova Scotia, and as a programmer for a video-game developer called, presciently, Rocket Science. He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania on a scholarship and completed a bachelor's degree in finance and one in physics. After graduating, in 1995, he moved to Palo Alto, California, having been accepted into Stanford's physics Ph.D. program, where he planned to study a variety of energy storage device called capacitors.

Something changed that summer, as Musk watched a nascent venture called Netscape Communications--founded by a kid younger than himself--quintuple in value the day it went public. "It just became clear that the Internet was going to change the world in a major way, whereas the capacitor stuff might bear fruit, or it might not," he says. "My overarching interest was to get involved in stuff that really mattered." Musk withdrew from Stanford after two days on campus, with the vague idea that he would start an Internet company. He had $2,000 in the bank, a car, a computer, and no friends in the Bay Area.

Musk poured his energy into a company he had founded called Zip2, which in some ways was little more than an opportunistic hack. Musk persuaded Navteq, a digital-mapping company, to let him put its maps online. He then purchased a business directory on CD-ROM for a few hundred dollars, wrote a bit of software code that linked the maps to the directory, and created the Web's first yellow pages. That fall, Kimbal and another friend joined him, and the trio rented a small office with a leaky roof for $400 a month. They caulked the ceiling, bought a couple of futons, and replaced the carpet--and they lived and worked in the dank office. Unable to afford a high-speed Internet connection, Musk ran the website on his PC using a dial-up modem. "I'd program it in the night and turn the server on during the day," he says.Eventually Musk persuaded an Internet service provider on the ground floor to let him drill a hole through the ceiling and plug in.

In January 1996 [Nathan - A few months after starting], the three co-founders pitched Mohr Davidow Ventures, a Sand Hill Road venture capital firm, and talked their way into $3 million in funding. (They'd eventually get $38 million more.) In order to get the money, Musk agreed to cede the CEO role to a professional--Richard Sorkin, a Stanford M.B.A. who'd been a vice president at hardware manufacturer Creative Technology. Over the next two years [Nathan - So he was involved with this company for a while], Sorkin navigated Zip2 competently but not spectacularly. While Yahoo, another upstart directory service, marketed itself to Web surfers, Zip2 focused on helping newspaper companies offer maps, directions, and business listings to their online readers. To Musk's chagrin, Sorkin solicited investments from many of the same companies that were licensing its software. "We wound up beholden to the newspapers," Musk says. "They were investors, customers, and they were on the board--and they basically forced Zip2 into a position of subservience." As Yahoo ushered in an era of new media, Zip2, in Musk's view, was stuck kowtowing to the old guard. (Sorkin, for his part, makes no apologies. "It wasn't a philosophical issue," he says. "We went where the money was.")

By 1998, Musk, who remained chairman and executive vice president, was thoroughly frustrated with the direction of his company but found himself unable to do anything about it. Several rounds of funding had diluted his stake to a mere 7 percent. Investors, which now included Knight Ridder, Hearst, and the New York Times Company, occupied four of seven board seats. In April of that year, Sorkin tried to sell Zip2 to City­search, which would have created the country's largest local search company. Musk, who believed Sorkin was squandering the potential to create a viable consumer brand, helped spark a revolt among Zip2 managers, who threatened to quit if Sorkin was not removed. The board fired Sorkin and killed the deal. Unfortunately for Musk, it installed Mohr Davidow's Derek Proudian as CEO and promptly sold the company to Compaq. "What they should have done is put me in charge," he says. "That's OK, but great things will never happen with VCs or professional managers. They have high drive, but they don't have the creativity or the insight. Some do, but most don't."

Compaq's cash payment of $307 million for Zip2--at the time, the largest sum ever paid for an Internet company--made Musk a rich, but surprisingly unhappy, young man. Despite pocketing $22 million, he considered Zip2 something of a failure. He had set out to help build the Internet and instead had built software for The New York Times. Rather than taking time off, he immediately began work on a new idea: an online financial services firm that would make traditional ones obsolete. "The banks are terrible at innovation, and financial services is a huge sector, so I thought, There should be something here," he says. In the summer of 1999, Sequoia Capital, the legendary backer of Oracle, Apple, and Cisco, led an investment of $25 million in Musk's new financial services firm, X.com.

Like a lot of nutty ideas proposed during the bubble, X.com was forced to scale back its ambitions. Musk chose to focus on a single feature: the ability to make payments via e-mail. In 1999, he merged his company with a venture-backed competitor called Confinity, which had a similar product known as PayPal; the merged company kept the X.com name, and Musk became CEO. For 10 months, he presided over a heated clash of egos, personalities, and visions. "Elon is obviously really freaking smart," says Levchin, a co-founder of Confinity. However, Levchin adds that working with Musk--which is to say, working for Musk--can be difficult. "He's one of those guys who can be larger than the room," says Levchin. He and Confinity's other co-founder, Peter Thiel, became increasingly frustrated with Musk's penchant for micromanaging, as disagreements over technology and branding festered. In the fall of 2000, Musk went on a two-week trip to meet prospective investors. When he returned, he learned that Levchin and Thiel had orchestrated a coup. The board fired Musk, replaced him with Thiel, and renamed the company PayPal.

Though Musk admits he was hurt by the coup, he managed to keep his feelings bottled up. "I buried their hatchet," he says, as he pantomimes pulling a blade out of his back. "Life is too short for long-term grudges." Of course, it's also true that Levchin and Thiel went on to take PayPal public and make him even richer. But what Musk hasn't gotten over is the fact that the company never became more than a glorified feature, and he still believes that PayPal has the potential to become the world's largest consumer financial services company. "It has 120 million customers, and there's a high trust factor," says Musk. "There's a lot of unleveraged value there."
[...]
Musk's companies don't look much like the Internet companies Silicon Valley churns out these days. Tesla Motors, like SpaceX, is an ambitious gamble aimed at an established market. Musk spurned early-stage investors and bankrolled the company himself; he has put in $37 million to date. Although Tesla has since accepted more than $68 million from VCs and private equity firms, Musk remains the majority shareholder. 
[...]
When I suggest to Musk that he is being reckless with his fortune, he responds coolly. "It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket," [Nathan - This is what Mark Cuban says as well] he says. "The problem with the Silicon Valley financing model is that you lose control after the first investment round."
[...]
The most controversial of Musk's edicts involved the transmission. Martin Eberhard, Tesla's co-founder and then-CEO, argued that it would be quicker and easier to build the car with a single-speed transmission. Musk ordered a two-speed model so that the Roadster would be able reach a top speed of well over 100 miles per hour. Eberhard found these requests difficult to understand. "I've been successful in my career at constraining problems, at keeping them as manageable as possible," says Eberhard, who sold his previous company, e-book manufacturer NuvoMedia, to Gemstar, in 2000, for $187 million. "Elon has resisted that in a push to make the car better--but at the risk of making it more complex." Musk, who several months ago demoted Eberhard to president of technology and installed an interim CEO, argues that Tesla is a hit precisely because he hasn't sacrificed the car's performance to meet any arbitrary near-term goal. "The noteworthy thing about Tesla," Musk says, "is that it's the first electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car as a product." In other words, Musk's car is faster, cooler, and more fun to drive than a comparably priced gas guzzler. The result is that Tesla has collected deposits from 600 customers, which amounts to a $30 million interest-free loan. Of course, Tesla's customers might have judged the car cool enough with only a single-speed transmission or uncomfortable seats or lame headlights. But there's also a chance they would have balked and bought themselves Ferraris.
[...]
When I ask Musk if he'd ever consider hiring a CEO to run SpaceX, he pauses for a few seconds to reflect on the question. "This may be presumptuous, but I have not met anyone who could do this," he says, before revising. "Well, wait, that's not true. Jeff Bezos could do this. Larry Page could do this. Bill Gates could do this. But there's just a really small list of people with the sufficient technical and business ability to do this job."
[...]
SolarCity's business plan, which Musk first proposed to company co-founders (and his cousins) Lyndon and Peter Rive at the Burning Man festival several years ago, is to leave panel manufacturing--an increasingly competitive and commoditized business--to the likes of BP and focus on building a retail brand. Installing solar capacity in a home or small business costs about $9 per watt, but the panels cost only $4 per watt. The installation business, which includes surveying, planning, sales, and the actual bolting on of panels, is expensive and inefficient. "It's all mom-and-pop contractors, and they basically suck," Musk says. "None of them have put any serious effort into honing the whole process--you know, squeezing out excess parts and labor--and then they have no economies of scale as far as buying panels en masse or establishing best practices."

2008.05.16 - Unknown Indian-American program - Elon Musk talks entrepreneurship
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m-Mjhfbg5c


2008.06 - Awesome interview with OnInnovation
http://www.oninnovation.com/topics/deta ... =Elon_Musk
- lots of very useful information; I need to go back through this and write it all out

I taught myself how to program computers when I was a kid. Bought my first computer when I was 10, sold my first commercial program when I was 12. [Interviewer: "Not bad."] Yeah. Made a lot of money for a little kid. [Interviewer: "Take me through the process that led to PayPal."] Well, I had a company before that, which was called Zip2, which people generally wouldn't have heard of, but it did things like maps and directions, and yellow pages, and it also did email, calendaring, personalization. But really, that software was provided to the major media companies, like the New York Times Company, Hearst, Knight Ridder, to power their websites, and really have a much more functional experience for the user. So my first company was not a consumer company; it was primarily providing internet software to media companies to enable them to go online.

[regarding the idea behind X.com:]
...the idea was to aggregate all of your financial services seamlessly in one place, make it really easy to use, so you don't have to go to multiple financial institutions to take care of your mortgage, your credit cards, your banking relationship, insurance, mutual funds, you just go to one location. And we had a feature, which was the ability to email money to anyone in the system.
[...]
4 of 22
Just towards the end of my undergrad I was thinking that the internet would be something that would really fundamentally change the world and change humanity forever in a very significant way. It seemed to me like humanity was acquiring a nervous system. Previously you would have people who were isolated cells, if you will, but the communication mechanisms were weak, and there was really no way that any one cell had access to all the information of the collective consciousness. You'd have to go to libraries here and there, and talk to people, and that sort of thing. But the way it is today, you could be in the jungles of Congo and have a satellite link to the internet, and have access to essentially the entire knowledge of humanity. I mean, that's pretty intense. That's a huge, huge difference. [Interviewer: "When was this?"] Uhhh, like in '94. [...] I'd been on the internet for a few years before that [Nathan - This is how you get the jump-start!] since I'd been in the physics arena. You know, in the sciences people were using the internet for many years, as early as the '70s they were using the internet. But it was very difficult to use, it was text-based, it was very difficult to get access to it. [Nathan - So look for tech like this! The Oculus Rift definitely seems analogous.] You had to be either in the government or at some academic institution. But once it became clear that the internet was going to be widespread, that everyone would have access to it, that's when it occurred to me that this is really going to fundamentally change humanity. And that became clear right around the '94 time-frame.
[...]
6 of 22
I think it's worth nothing that when someone has a breakthrough innovation it is rarely one little thing. Very rarely is it one little thing. It's usually a whole bunch of things that collectively amount to a huge innovation. But the problem is, because it's hard to convey a complicated thing to people, the innovator (or the innovator's PR department) will say "Oh, such-and-such is the reason why it's better", this little catch-phrase.
[...]
Innovation is a collection of complex things that are usually difficult to convey, so there's some soundbite that's given.

7 of 22
I think generally people's thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It's rare that people try to think of something on a first-principles basis. They'll say, "We'll do that because it's always been done that way." Or they'll not do it because, "Well, nobody's ever done that, so it must not be good". But that's just a ridiculous way to think. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up; from first principles, as the phrase that's used in physics. You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that and then see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn't work, and it may or may not be different from what people have done in the past. It's harder to think that way, though. [Interviewer: "Why's it so hard to think that way? And how have you broken that pattern?" Um...I don't know, I've just always thought that way I suppose. I mean, I would always think about something and whether that thing was really true or not, and could something else be true, or is there a better conclusion that one could draw that's more probable. I don't know, I was doing that when I was in elementary school, and I would just question things. Maybe it's just built in, to question things.

8 of 22
So I built up Zip2, the first company, sold that to Compaq for about $300 million, and then wanted to still do another company on the internet, and that's where I thought, "Well, where is there still room for a lot of innovation on the internet?" And that's how I chose the financial services sector, because money is just an entry in a database, and it's low bandwidth, you don't need any big infrastructure upgrade on the internet to make it work [Nathan - unlike YouTube?] and so it seemed like there must be room for innovation. And that's how I decided to do something in the financial services arena, even though I really had essentially almost no background in financial services, except for an internship at a bank.

17 of 22 - Inspirations
[Good stuff I need to transcribe]
I think Edison was a good role model, probably one of the biggest role models.

20 of 22 - Risk of Failure
Well, it's like the Nike slogan: "Just Do It". You know, "Just showing up is half the battle". You've got to try hard to do it, and don't be afraid of failure. But you also need to be rooted in reality. It's easy to "get high on your own supply", as Scarface said. You've gotta not be afraid to innovate, but also don't delude yourself into thinking something's working when it's not, or you're going to get fixated on a bad solution. [pauses to think] And also, don't be afraid of new arenas: you can get a book, you can learn something, and experiment with your hands, and just make it happen, find a way or make a way to make something happen.

21 of 22 - Henry Ford (Need to transcribe)

2008.11.05 - Web 2.0 Conference
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdCXcu3juhE

2008.12 - Penn Gazette - The Next, Next Thing
http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/1108/feature4_1.html

Elon: "I still believe this: If we continue upon the Apollo program and get to Mars and beyond, that will seem far more important in historical context than anything else we do today. The day multiplanetary species come about, things like the Soviet Union will be forgotten or merely remembered by arcane historical scholars. Things like the invasion of Iraq won’t even be a footnote.”
[...]
Elon's friend Ressi: “We were both transfer students and they stuck us in these giant dorms and we just wanted to get out,” recalls Ressi, who transferred to Penn from Carnegie Mellon University. So they found each other and rented a house off-campus. “But then we weren’t connected to the fraternity scene, and we weren’t new students either. We had to meet people, so we decided to have parties, but since we also didn’t have money, we decided to make it a business
[...]
“[u]I didn’t and still do not have an expertise in rockets, but I am determined to acquire it,” Musk says. “It is not like I ever worked for Boeing or Lockheed. But I do have an understanding of how things work in physics and engineering, and the people at SpaceX are arguably the best in the world at what they do. [Nathan - Again the same idea: get the best people in the world working with you.]”
[...]
Ressi was with his old roommate on many of Musk’s initial trips to build the company and drum up business. “We went everywhere: France, small private contractors in Russia, the Pasadena Jet Propulsion Lab, the people who have the X Prize,” says Ressi.[/u].”

They hired bouncers and even cleaning crews, charged enough to always have a little left over to spend, and realized they had gotten the entrepreneurial bug.

“They do that sort of thing all the time now, but back when we did it, everyone thought it was clever and business-like,” says Ressi, himself the veteran of several startups—most recently as the founding member of TheFunded.com, a website where entrepreneurs can bite the hands that feed them (or decline to) by rating and otherwise commenting on venture-capital firms. “I think Elon was careful to do everything right then, and has not wavered from that same sort of attention to detail now.”
[...]
For that initial round of discussions, Musk held firm to his idea of getting to Mars. He named the venture “Life to Mars” and started holding seminars, some even including filmmaker James Cameron, of Terminator and Titanic fame.

“People would come up with crazy ideas, like sending mice to Mars or not actually bringing any crops because they might pollute the Mars atmosphere,” recalls Ressi. Then it all dissipated. The Russians they had talked to jacked up the price of launch vehicles and few other people seemed serious about it as a business.

“Elon just got fed up and started SpaceX instead,” says Ressi. “He is not a guy you want to alienate by sounding too silly. He wants results. He was that way when we had the parties at Penn, and he is that way with his businesses now. Money has definitely not changed him.”

Ah, yes, money. Musk and Ressi say they did not have a dime at Penn before they started doing their parties. Now Musk could be worth $300 million or so. He admits that his first taste of wealth with his initial Silicon Valley-boom companies was addictive. He got himself a $1 million McLaren F1 sports car, the fastest production car available, and a couple of small aircraft, which he pilots himself. He bought a house in the posh LA neighborhood of Bel Air.
[...]
Previous launches had died on the pad or in early flight. The third one lost two NASA satellites with it, along with the ashes of 208 people, including Star Trek actor James “Scotty” Doohan and astronaut Gordon Cooper, who wanted part of their final legacy in space.

But even after that failed third launch, Musk kept up his vaunted optimism. He sent an email to SpaceX employees to prove it. “The most important message I’d like to send right now is thatSpaceX will not skip a beat in execution going forward … There should be absolutely zero question that SpaceX will prevail in reaching orbit and demonstrating reliable space transport. For my part, I will never give up and I mean never. Thanks for your hard work.”
[...]
“Elon is really shrewd,” says Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s vice president of business development. “I have been in the aerospace business for 20 years, and I have never seen someone who started from nowhere become so versed in the subject. He interviews everyone and asks the right questions.

“I know it sounds clichéd to say good things about the top guy, but Elon is like that,” she adds. “He doesn’t know everything, but he is technically savvy and loves doing business. I guess that is what it is, a person who is driven doesn’t look back and say, ‘I already did this,’ but looks forward and says, ‘I’ve got to do that.’”
[...]
“I think you have to enjoy what you are doing. Otherwise, it is hard to do it,” says Musk. “There are three things you look for: You have to look forward in the morning to doing your work. You do want to have a significant financial reward. And you want to have a possible effect on the world. If you can find all three, you have something you can tell your children.”
[...]
“Look, Elon is a very creative guy, very intelligent,” says Drori. “He knows about cars. He definitely knows about technology. And he clearly knows about business, so why would I not take his advice? He is the face of this company. After all, he put a lot of money in it, so why can’t he be the face?” Musk’s celebrity could be a key to the company’s success, Drori adds. “He is well-known, which certainly puts Tesla ahead of other electric cars, as far as marketing them.” [Nathan - This is the biggest suggestion I've seen that Elon isn't making the crucial decisions.]
[...]
[Regarding SolarCity:]
“We went to Elon and he knew immediately how to modify our idea,” says Lyndon Rive. “The barrier to getting individuals to use solar power was the up-front cost of installing the panels.” SolarCity now arranges financing for leases on the equipment for the homeowners or businesses, so the panels are rented rather than owned by the customer. Customers usually use less energy, so those savings help offset the monthly rental on the panels, resulting in overall reductions on energy bills.

“We’re in the vanguard here in California, and we will soon be in Arizona and Oregon,” says Rive. “But what has made us go is our association with Elon. He is one of the few people in the world to have extreme talent in technicality—that engineering and technical background—and, at the same time, in business. It is rare you have an individual like that. Then you add his passion to make the world a better place.”

That passion for whatever he sets his mind to can sometimes look more like obsession, to colleagues and rivals alike. “Yes, there is something about Elon that he has to work 18 hours a day, it seems,” Rive says. “You tell him to slow down and he speeds up. You would think he wouldn’t need the money or the aggravation any more, but that is the way he is.”

2009 - Interview (bad-quality footage via TechCrunch)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cim8W5vLBKY


2009.05 - Wharton - Interview(s) with Elon Musk
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/arti ... -products/
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/arti ... to-riches/
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/arti ... gh-vision/


2009 - International Space Development Conference (ISDC)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUYY3QT82B8


2009 - The Valley Girl - Interview with Elon Musk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD0uyVjY9Lg
- 0:45 - Q: What is an entrepreneur to you? A: I think somebody who is somewhat of a generalist, even though they may have specific strengths in certain areas, technical, business, 
- the rest of the interview is fairly common stuff ("What is Tesla?" "What is SpaceX?")


2009.04.07 - Churchill Club - Uber Entrepreneur: An Evening with Elon Musk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1j0yHOxcL0
http://transition.churchillclub.org/eve ... EVT_ID=810



2010 - Iron Man 2 - Elon Musk cameo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcOVHoi1p40
- I think this is worth including here because it shows yet another example of how to get publicity.
- Watching this reminded me of what I had read about plays in Shakespeare's age, where the rich would pay to have a seat in the middle of the stage, with everything happening around them (or something like that).


2010.01.19 - Kiddie Hawk Foundation - Elon Musk honoured as Entrepreneur of the year
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXH-puBE10Q


2010.08.11 - Vator - A candid interview with Tesla CEO Elon Musk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1h1aG0usIY

• 2010.09.10 - Marie Claire - "I Was a Starter Wife": Inside America's Messiest Divorce

  • A fellow student a year ahead of me, he was a clean-cut, upper-class boy with a South African accent who appeared in front of me one afternoon as I was leaping up the steps to my dorm. He said we'd met at a party I knew I hadn't been to. (Years later, he would confess that he had noticed me from across the common room and decided he wanted to meet me.) He invited me out for ice cream. I said yes, but then blew him off with a note on my dorm-room door. Several hours later, my head bent over my Spanish text in an overheated room in the student center, I heard a polite cough behind me. Elon was smiling awkwardly, two chocolate-chip ice cream cones dripping down his hands. He's not a man who takes no for an answer.

  • He was a scientific type, at home with numbers, commerce, and logic. I was not the only woman he pursued, but even after he transferred to Wharton he kept sending roses. When he'd return to Queen's to visit friends, I found myself agreeing to have dinner with him. Once, in the bookstore together, I pointed to a shelf and said, "One day I want my own books to go right there." I had said this before to a girlfriend, who laughed and spun on her heel. But Elon not only took me seriously, he seemed impressed. It was the first time that a boy found my sense of ambition — instead of my long hair or narrow waist — attractive. Previous boyfriends complained that I was "competitive," but Elon said I had "a fire in my soul." When he told me, "I see myself in you," I knew what he meant.

  • One night, over dinner, he asked me how many kids I wanted to have. "One or two," I said immediately, "although if I could afford nannies, I'd like to have four. He laughed. "That's the difference between you and me," he said. "I just assume that there will be nannies."

  • Two years later — two months before our January 2000 wedding — Elon told me we had an appointment with a lawyer who was going to help us with a "financial agreement" that the board of his new company wanted us to sign. When I looked at him, he said quickly, "It's not a prenup."

  • Our day-to-day routine remained the same (except for the addition of flying lessons) [So he wasn't spending all of his time working.]

  • he proposed, getting down on bended knee on a street corner.
    
    

  • What I didn't understand at the time was that Elon was actually ushering me into a period of "mediation," which, I now know, means anything done or spoken is confidential and cannot be used in a court of law. But I had no time to research mediation, or learn that it rarely serves the interest of the less powerful person in the relationship.
    
    

  • As we danced at our wedding reception, Elon told me, "I am the alpha in this relationship."
    
    

  • He had grown up in the male-dominated culture of South Africa, and the will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home. (...) Elon's judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking.
    
    

  • Elon made it clear that he did not want to talk about Nevada's death. I didn't understand this, just as he didn't understand why I grieved openly, which he regarded as "emotionally manipulative."
    
    

  • we had a domestic staff of five
    
    

  • Elon was obsessed with his work: When he was home, his mind was elsewhere.
    
    

  • Elon started to say that I "read too much," shrugging off my book deadlines.
    
    

  • Elon pushed me to be blonder. "Go platinum," he kept saying, and I kept refusing.
    
    

  • Elon agreed to enter counseling, but he was running two companies and carrying a planet of stress. One month and three sessions later, he gave me an ultimatum: Either we fix this marriage today or I will divorce you tomorrow, by which I understood he meant, Our status quo works for me, so it should work for you. He filed for divorce the next morning. I felt numb, but strangely relieved.
    
    

  • I've worked through some anger, both at Elon for rendering me so disposable, and at myself for buying into a fairy tale when I should have known better.

2010.10.27 - Riskmaster Award Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTHSwlVeMyo

• 2011 - Revenge of the Electric Car

  • 10:25 - Start of the first Elon Musk segment.

  • ~11 - They show actual footage of the launch party for the roadster.

  • ~13 - Elon says how much money he's invested into Tesla. I think the number he gives is ~$50 million.

  • ~23:50 - quote from Elon about their mission

  • 28:00 - The CEO of Nissan talks in a meeting about not wanting to wake up the competition.

  • 29:30 - You see the CEO of Nissan talking with his advisors.

    • It's interesting to see them talk with each other.

  • 37:00 - Bob Lutz talks about how GM's

  • 39:18 - Segment on Elon

  • 40:00 - You see the offices of Tesla.

  • 40:50 - "I

  • 41:00 - At that point Tesla had created ~100 cars.

  • 41 - You see Musk's house.

  • 44 - You see the VP of GM actually giving feedback to the designers.

  • ~46 - You see Elon driving to the Menlo Park store.

  • - You see Elon actually giving feedback to people at the store.

  • ~55 - switching back to Tesla.

  • - The reporter says that Elon was saying things that aren't true.

  • - They interview Martin Eberhard.

  • - Elon says they were projecting it would take $35mill to get to production, and Elon said it ended up taking $190 mill.

  • ~58 - You see Elon giving a meeting with prospective owners.

  • ~1:01:00 - Elon asked the DOE for a $400mill loan.

  • 1:03 - You actually see Bob Lutz during the crisis.

  • 1:04 - Lutz explains that electric vehicles are a bet on the price of oil.

  • 1:10 - Tesla gets a $90mill lifeline from Daimler, but the government loan hasn't come through, so Tesla does a hail-mary and starts taking deposits for the model S.

  • ~1:12 - You actually see Elon selling a Tesla to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  • ~1:13 - "I don't pay much attention to what others are doing because I have so much to do myself."

  • ~1:14 - You actually see Elon hanging out with Bob Lutz at the car show.

  • 1:17 - They show Tesla's IPO on Nasdaq.

• 2011 - UCLA Phi Beta Kappa

• 2011.09.15 - Churchill Club - Legendary Leader Award Ceremony

• 2011.09.16 - Business Insider - Elon Musk Worries That His Kids Are Too Soft To Be Entrepreneurs

Last night at an awards ceremony hosted by the Churchill Club, VC Steve Jurvetson (who has invested in Musk's companies) asked Musk what his family did to create so many entrepreneurs.

"My extended family is quite big, I have a lot of cousins. Only a few of them should be running companies."

Then he paused for a long time, seemingly deciding how much more he should say.

Finally he let spill: "I had a terrible upbringing. I had a lot of adversity growing up. One thing I worry about with my kids is they don't face enough adversity."
[...]
Musk also gave two other useful pieces of advice for would-be entrepreneurs:

Have a world-changing vision. To keep employees motivated as a company grows beyond its startup roots, you "need to have a goal that's world-changing," like commercial space travel or changing the automotive industry. He noted that the three companies he's most involved in -- SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity -- now have about 1,500 employees each. Without a big vision, he wouldn't have been able to recruit as much good talent. [Nathan - This is something Sun Tzu talks about as well, he calls it "the moral way". And Larry Page said the same thing in his talk at the Academy of Achievement: it can be easier to go after a really big problem because smart people will be more excited to go after it.]

Don't work yourself to death to cover your mistakes. When he first arrived in Silicon Valley, he says, "I was vary naive and much stupider than I am now. I wish I could go back and give myself a slap on my face....I was working crazy hours. I would literally sleep under my desk to avoid going home because that'd just take time....I was trying to make up for my mistakes by working really, really hard." Instead, he says, acknowledge your mistakes, fix them if you can, and move on if you can't.

• 2012.05.24 - Twitter - He mentions being beat up as a kid

Was beat up pretty badly as a kid & left me w jagged septum. Harder to breathe as I got older, so time to fix.

• 2012.09.07 - Kevin Rose Interview with Elon Musk

2:15 - He had played videogames since he was ~6 years old
2:00 - At around 9 he saw a Commodore Vic 20 in a store, and he was really excited about the idea of being able to MAKE games [this is exactly how I got into programming]
2:45 - He didn't know what career he wanted to pursue when he was growing up.
3:20 - He originally moved to the Bay Area to get a PhD in physics, but he got caught up in the excitement about the Internet. He tried to get a job at Netscape but they turned him down because his resume didn't look useful [this looks like a company/investment opportunity: figure out how to find effective employees, even if their resume doesn't look useful]
4:05 - He actually went to Netscape and stood around in their lobby with his resume, but was too scared to try to talk to anyone, so he left [this makes me feel a lot better because I've been in the same situation]
4:40 - After getting rejected by Netscape he worked on software over the summer and then decided to take a break from his grad studies to try to start a company; he started it with his brother and a friend of theirs.
5:20 - The original idea for Zip2 was to create software that could help media companies (like the NYTimes) get online.
5:45 - He started off as the CEO, but after a year they got VC funding and the funders wanted to bring in a professional CEO. At the time Elon thought it would be a good idea.
6:25 - In retrospect Elon thinks the guy they brought in wasn't that good, and the company succeeded in spite of the guy instead of because of him.
7:00 - He says he dealt with the challenges of being a first-time CEO by reading a lot of books.
7:40 - Elon says he didn't read a lot of general business books, but did find biographies and autobiographies to be really helpful. He says one of the people he mosts admires is Benjamin Franklin, and he mentions Isaacson's biography as being really good.
9:10 - Kevin asks Elon how he got into such wild ideas as Tesla and SpaceX. Elon says that in college he was trying to figure out what technology would most affect the future of humanity and came to the conclusion that it was 1) the Internet, 2) sustainable energy (both production and consumption), and 3) making life multi-planetary
17:18 - The way he has the team design the car is to meet every Friday to go over every tiny detail. He notes that there are a lot of constraints. He stresses that the key is a lot of iteration.
19:40 - He says he has more ideas than time to implement them.
19:50 - He says he gets a lot of ideas in the shower in the morning after having thought about them the night before. He says he also got some good ideas at Burning Man.
21:10 - It's very important to actively seek out and listen to negative feedback. He thinks this is a very common mistake. He looks for this feedback from everyone he talks to. When he has his friends look at what he's doing, he says "Don't tell me what you like; tell me what you don't like."
22:40 - It's very important to reason from first principles instead of by analogy. You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and then reason up from there. It takes a lot more mental energy.