Elon Musk | Ashlee Vance

To be honest, Elon Musk's biography is a big disappointment for me. I even could not finish the book. But still, I have some highlights. Here they are:

As his ex-wife, Justine, put it, “He does what he wants, and he is relentless about it. It’s Elon’s world, and the rest of us live in it.”

Musk sampled a handful of ideologies and then ended up more or less back where he had started, embracing the sci-fi lessons found in one of the most influential books in his life: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. “He points out that one of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask,” Musk said. “Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy."

“The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment,” he said.

I ran out of books to read at the school library and the neighborhood library,” Musk said. “This is maybe the third or fourth grade. I tried to convince the librarian to order books for me. So then, I started to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica. That was so helpful. You don’t know what you don’t know. You realize there are all these things out there.”

“My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail.”

For Elon, the word no does not exist, and he expects that attitude from everyone around him.” Periodically, Musk let loose on the more senior executives as well. “You would see people come out of the meetings with this disgusted look on their face,” Mohr, the salesman, said. “You don’t get to where Elon is now by always being a nice guy, and he was just so driven and sure of himself.”

That’s Elon. Do or die but don’t give up.

When you interview make sure you can talk concretely about what you do rather than use buzzwords.

The longer you wait to fire someone the longer it has been since you should have fired them.