Physics could teach everything about the universe except why. That led to what he calls his adolescent existential crisis. “I began trying to figure out what the meaning of life and the universe was,” he says. “And I got real depressed about it, like maybe life may have no meaning.
The important thing with Elon,” he says, “is that if you told him the risks and showed him the engineering data, he would make a quick assessment and let the responsibility shift from your shoulders to his.
In addition, he came to a realization: he had a fanatic love of video games and the skills to make money creating them, but that was not the best way to spend his life. “I wanted to have more impact,” he says.
How is this a business?” he asked. Later Hoffman would realize that Musk didn’t think that way. “What I didn’t appreciate is that Elon starts with a mission and later finds a way to backfill in order to make it work financially,” he says. “That’s what makes him a force of nature.
Musk had a resistance to regulations. He did not like to play by other people’s rules.
Step one should be to question the requirements,” he says. “Make them less wrong and dumb, because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb. And then delete, delete, delete.
A pattern was set: try new ideas and be willing to blow things up.
He is more concerned with a phenomenon he calls “phoning in rich,” meaning people who have worked at the company for a long time and, because they have enough money and vacation homes, no longer hunger to stay all night on the factory floor.
Musk has a rule about responsibility: every part, every process, and every specification needs to have a name attached. He can be quick to personalize blame when something goes wrong.
Musk became increasingly frustrated with the company’s practices, especially the way it relied on an aggressive sales force that was compensated by commissions. “Their sales tactics became like those schemes that go door to door selling you boxes of knives or something crappy like that,” Musk says. His instincts had always been just the opposite. He never put much effort into sales and marketing, and instead believed that if you made a great product, the sales would follow.
People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves,” he would say in a TED Talk a few years later. “It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better.
In times of emotional darkness, Musk throws himself into his work, maniacally.
One evening, Eberhard was driving his Roadster around Silicon Valley when a kid in a super-pimped Audi pulled up beside him at a stoplight and revved his engine to challenge him to a drag. When the light changed, Eberhard left him in the dust. The same thing happened at the next two lights. Finally the kid rolled down his window and asked Eberhard what he was driving. “It’s electric,” Eberhard said. “There’s no way you can beat it.
Daughter of Jobs and Chrisann Brennan, born in 1978; became a writer.
Apple’s innovations were more than skin-deep. Since 1994 it had been using a microprocessor, called the PowerPC, that was.
On one weekend, they marched through the factory painting marks on machinery to be jettisoned. “We put a hole in the side of the building just to remove all that equipment,” Musk says. The experience became a lesson that would become part of Musk’s production algorithm. Always wait until the end of designing a process – after you have questioned all the requirements and deleted unnecessary parts – before you introduce automation.
Wiener believed that the most promising path for computer science was to devise machines that would work well with human minds rather than try to replace them. “Many people suppose that computing machines are replacements for intelligence and have cut down the need for original thought,” Wiener wrote. “This is not the case.”14 The more powerful the computer, the greater the premium that will be placed on connecting it with imaginative, creative, high-level human thinking.
The creativity of the Xerox PARC team combined with the design and marketing genius of Jobs would make the GUI the next great leap in facilitating the human-machine interaction that Bush, Licklider, and Engelbart had envisioned.
Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s?
Ethernet, the technologies developed by Bob Metcalfe.