Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Musk and Stark were the type of men, according to Downey, who “had seized an idea to live by and something to dedicate themselves to” and were not going to waste a moment.

“We had a blanket rule against investing in clean-tech companies for about a decade,” said Peter Thiel, the PayPal cofounder and venture capitalist at Founders Fund. “On the macro level, we were right because clean tech as a sector was quite bad. But on the micro level, it looks like Elon has the two most successful clean-tech companies in the U.S.

You have to put yourself in a position where you say, ‘Well, how would this sound to them, knowing what they know?’”

Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.

By rights, Musk should have been part of the malaise. He jumped right into dot-com mania in 1995, when, fresh out of college, he founded a company called Zip2—a primitive Google Maps meets Yelp. That first venture ended up a big, quick hit. Compaq bought Zip2 in 1999 for $307 million. Musk made $22 million from the deal and poured almost all of it

This left Musk searching for an industry that had tons of money and inefficiencies that he and the Internet could exploit.

his ultralogical mission statement. “The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment,”

Both companies were designed with this vision of motivating a critical mass of talented people to work on inspiring things.”

Only a cynical dullard could come away from witnessing this feeling anything other than wonder at what man can accomplish.