Elon Musk

“Ever since I was a kid, if I start to think about something hard, then all of my sensory systems turn off,” he says. “I can’t see or hear or anything. I’m using my brain to compute, not for incoming information.”

“One of Elon’s rules is ‘Go as close to the source as possible for information,’ ”

All requirements should be treated as recommendations, he repeatedly instructed. The only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics.

Musk calculated that on a good day he made a hundred command decisions as he walked the floor. “At least twenty percent are going to be wrong, and we’re going to alter them later,” he said. “But if I don’t make decisions, we die.”

“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,”

“This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers.” That’s why America could no longer build things like high-speed rail or rockets that go to the moon. “When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.”

“That’s just the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said at a couple of meetings. That was a line that Steve Jobs used often. So did Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Their brutal honesty could be unnerving, even offensive. It could constrict rather than encourage honest dialogue. But it was also effective, at times, in creating what Jobs called a team

Another motivation was that colonizing other planets would help ensure the survival of human civilization and consciousness in case something happened to our fragile planet.

“Live dangerously—carefully.”