Founders - #30 Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Episode Date: July 9, 2018

What I learned from reading Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance. ---I don't want to be the person who ever has to compete with Elon (0:47)Musk expects you to keep up (2:45)Short of building an actual money-crushing machine, Musk could not have picked a faster way to destroy his fortune. He became a one-man, ultra-risk-taking venture capital shop (4:41)Revisit old ideas (5:22)It was not unusual for him to read ten hours a day (7:49)His approach to dating mirrors his approach to work (9:32)Humans are deeply mimetic (10:59)Thinking from first principles (14:37)What it is like to work with Elon Musk (17:40)He would place this urgency that he expected the revenue in ten years to be ten million dollars a day and that every day we were slower to achieve our goals was a day of missing out on that money (19:28)What he went through in 2008 would have broken anyone else. He didn't just survive. He kept working and stayed focused (23:29) A tenet of Elon's companies: make as many things yourself as possible (25:39)The power of the individual in an age of infinite leverage (27:31)The Internet taught me nearly everything I know. It is the modern day equivalent to the library of Alexandria, except it's much harder to burn to the ground. It is indispensable for realizing human rights, combating inequality, accelerating development, and quickening the pace of human progress (29:37)Focusing on the endpoint (30:19)Grand Theft Life (32:00) ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Elon is brilliant. He's involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to give him a gut reaction. He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.

He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It's amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years. I don't want to be the person who ever has to compete with Elon. You might as well leave the business and find something else fun to do. He will outmaneuver you, outthink you, and out-execute you. Welcome to Founders, my podcast about the lives of company builders. In case you're new here, for every podcast, I read a biography or autobiography of someone who has created a company, and then I try to share with you some of the things that I learned.

That excerpt was from the book Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashley Vance. So I want to get into the book, but before we do that, I'd like to tell you that this episode is brought to you by Blinkist. Blinkist puts big ideas from the world's best nonfiction books in powerful little summaries you can read or listen to in just 15 minutes. Over 5 million people are using Blinkist. Blinkist app has been nominated by Apple as one of the best in the App Store. Blinkist also received the World Summit Award granted by the United Nations as well as the Google Material Design Award. So in other words a lot of people like Blinkist. So get key insights from 2,200 plus bestselling nonfiction books. They're also adding more summaries every month

that are transformed into powerful packs you can read or listen to in just 15 minutes by using Blinkist. Blinkist is giving listeners of this podcast 20% off. So if you want to learn more, go to www.blinkist.com forward slash founders. That's Blinkist, B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T.com forward slash founders, and you can get 20% off and start learning faster today. So I just want to get right into the book and just I'm going to share with you some of the highlights that stuck out to me, and hopefully you find this information useful. So we're going to start off with this excerpt that is describing to us Elon's life goal. And so let's go right to the book. Turning humans into space colonizers is his stated life purpose. I would like to die

thinking that humanity has a bright future, he said. If we can solve sustainable energy and be well on our way to becoming a multi-planetary species with a self-sustaining civilization on another planet to cope with a worst-case scenario happening and extinguishing human consciousness, then, and here he paused for a moment, I think that would be really good. All right. a little bit about his personality, which I always find interesting when I'm reading these biographies of these company builders, is trying to get a sense of how they act and what would it be like if you were around them. So let's go to the book. On initial encounter, Musk can come off as shy and borderline awkward. His South African accent remains present but fading, and the charm of it is not enough to offset the halting nature of Musk's speech pattern.

Like many an engineer or physicist, Musk will pause while fishing around for exact phrasing, and he'll often go rumbling down an esoteric, scientific rabbit hole without providing any helping hands or simplified explanations along the way. Musk expects you to keep up. None of this is off-putting. Musk, in fact, will toss out plenty of jokes and can be downright charming. It's just that there's a sense of purpose and pressure hanging over any conversation with the man. And then this is my favorite part of the paragraph. Musk doesn't really shoot the shit. While Musk had been anything but shy about what he was up to, few people outside of his companies got to see the factories, the R&D centers, the machine shops, and to witness the scope of what he was doing firsthand.

Here was this guy who had taken much of the Silicon Valley ethic behind moving quickly and running organizations free of bureaucratic hierarchies and applied it to improving big, fantastic machines and chasing things that had the potential to be real breakthroughs we'd been missing. By rights, Musk should have been part of the malaise. He jumped right into the 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. Compact bought Zip2 in 1999 for $307 million. Musk made $22 million from the deal and poured almost all of it into his next venture, a startup that would morph into PayPal. As the largest shareholder in PayPal, Musk became fantastically well-to-do

when eBay acquired the company for $1.5 billion in 2002. Instead of hanging around Silicon Valley and falling into the same funk as his peers, Musk decamped to Los Angeles. And this is, I think, the most important part. And while I have an insane amount of respect for this guy, the conventional wisdom of the time said to take a deep breath and wait for the next big thing to arrive in due course. Musk rejected that logic by throwing $100 million into SpaceX, $70 million into Tesla, and $10 million into SolarCity. Short of building an actual money-crushing machine, Musk could not have picked a faster way to destroy his fortune. He became a one-man, ultra-risk-taking venture capital shop and doubled down on making super-complex physical goods

in two of the most expensive places in the world, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. Whenever possible, Musk's companies would make things from scratch and try to rethink much that the aerospace, automotive, and solar industries had accepted as convention so on the podcast i've talked about this idea that um i think it's a it's a great idea and a huge help if you find a book that has given additional meaning to your life or a podcast like i i reread a lot of books that I find valuable and I re-listen to a lot of

podcasts that I find valuable because like in the case of this Elon book, I first read this back in 2016. Actually, the first episode of Founders was based on this book. At the time, Founders wasn't called Founders. I just had the idea that I was going to read biographies of interesting people and then talk about that. And then over time, I narrowed my scope to just focus on, you know, since I'm interested in, very interested in entrepreneurship, just to focus on entrepreneurs, like the lives of entrepreneurs. But I do think there's a huge value because I haven't read this book in almost, you know, almost two years, whatever, about almost two years. And rereading it, there were so many other things that jumped out at me.

And then the interesting part is I picked up other ideas that I've read, uh, in the interim between the, the, these two, this two year period. And they kind of, these ideas kind of go together and they build on one another.

And so that's why I always recommend people to reread books that are interesting to them and reread pot or re listen to podcasts. So, um, there's, I came across this sentence that I highlighted, or this paragraph that I highlighted that I wanted to share with you.

But the note I left myself is actually a quote from another book, and it's actually Peter Thiel's 0 to 1. And the quote I left is, "'General and undifferentiated pitches don't say anything "'about why a recruit should join your company "'instead of many others. So the context of that, he's talking about, hey, if you're going to start a new company,

you should be doing something that's very different. And if you're doing something that's very different, you have actually, people think it's harder, but it might be easier because you have access to better talent. Because if you're the only person in the world doing that thing, and you can then find the people that that's extremely important to, and they're going to want to come work for you because that's the only place they can do it. So we're going to see this with why with how this applies to SpaceX. While the putting man on Mars talk can strike some people as loopy, it gave Musk a unique rallying cry for his companies. It's the sweeping goal that forms a unifying pitch, a unifying principle over everything he does. Employees at all three companies are well aware of this and well aware that they are trying to achieve

the impossible day in and day out. So this next part is about reading and an insatiable desire to learn. So this is a story about the importance of reading in Elon's life. And we're going to hear some stories about what he was like when he was a kid. The most striking part of Elon's character as a young boy was his compulsion to read. From a very young age, he seemed to have a book in his hands at all times. It was not unusual for him to read 10 hours a day, said Kimball. Kimball's his brother. If it was the weekend, he could go through two books in a day. The family went on numerous shopping excursions in which they realized mid-trip that Elon had gone missing. May, that's his mom, or Kimball, would pop into the nearest bookstore and find Elon somewhere near the back sitting on the floor and reading in one of his trance-like states. This next part is what he learned about managing employees at Zip2 and PayPal.

And we're going to hear directly from Elon here. Musk realized that he could have handled some of the situations with employees better. I had never really run a team of any sort before, Musk said. I had never been a sports captain or a captain of anything or managed a single person. I had to think, okay, what are the things that affect how a team functions? The first obvious assumption would be that other people will behave like you, but that's not true. Even if they would like to behave like you, they don't necessarily have all the assumptions or information that

you have in your mind. So if I know a certain set of things and I talk to a replica of myself, but only communicate half the information, you can't expect that replica would come to the same conclusion. You have to put yourself in a position where you say, well, how would this sound to them knowing what they know? So this next part actually made me chuckle. And the note I left myself is his approach to dating mirrors his approach to work. And this is his now ex-wife,wife justine and the mother of his children talking about they met in college and this is how elon was trying to persuade her to date him he would call very incessantly she said you always knew it was elon because the phone would never stop ringing the man does not take no for an answer you can't blow him off i do think of him as a

terminator he locks his gaze onto something and says, it shall be mine. I just chuckled at the idea of picturing Elon as Terminator. And this is another example of more skin in the game and respect. And this is a direct quote from Elon. He goes, I'm not an investor. I like to make technologies real that I think are important for the future and useful in some sort of way. So, again, the reason I put respect there is just because there's a ton of examples of successful founders going on and selling their company or becoming fabulously wealthy. And then instead of starting another company and staying like remaining an entrepreneur, they turn to an investor, an angel investor, venture capitalist. And there's nothing wrong with that. People should do whatever

they want to do. I just think that the outliers like Elon are more interesting to me. The idea that I'm not comfortable just sitting on the sideline and hearing about somebody else's idea, like I want to go have an impact on that. i've talked about this idea on the podcast many times that humans are deeply memetic that it's very you have to be very careful um like the ideas you expose yourself to or the people you hang around because we we just we just copy each other incessantly all of us do it um and so part of the re what i like what i'm doing here is i'm having these constant by reading all these biographies and spending so much time every week thinking about this, I'm having these like deep one-sided conversations about some hearing ideas and experiences from somebody that has already done what I want to do. And I think that

overall will make me hopefully more successful in whatever endeavor I choose to do, but also makes me happier, like being able to like spend so much time and thought like this. So Elon picks up on the deeply memetic nature of humans. At the time, he's an intern, I think at a bank in Canada. And so he comes up with this really, he's really young. I think he's like 20 years old at the time. And he realized there's a bit of a massive arbitrage opportunity coming with buying and then reselling debt. And so let me just read this and it'll make more sense. This is Elon talking. I calculated the backstop value and it was something like 50 cents on the dollar while the actual debt was trading at 25 cents. This was like the biggest opportunity ever

and nobody seemed to realize it. He inquired as to how much Brazilian debt might be available at the 25 cent price. So he's making a call to Goldman Sachs, who's the main trader in this. And the guy said, how much do you want? And I came up with some ridiculous number, like $10 billion. When the trader confirmed that was doable, Musk hung up the phone. I was thinking that they had to be fucking crazy because you could double your money. Everything was backed by Uncle Sam. It was a no-brainer. And so he takes the idea to his boss and here's the result. But they still didn't do it and I was

stunned. And this next sentence is actually the lesson I take away from all this. Later in life, as I competed against the banks, I would think back to this moment and it gave me confidence all the bankers did was copy what everyone else did if everyone else ran off a bloody cliff they'd run off a cliff right with them if there was a giant pile of gold sitting in the middle of the room and nobody was picking it up they wouldn't pick it up either. So moving along, here's an example of his insane amount of risk tolerance. Musk invested about $12 million into X.com. So X.com is the company he started

that later merged with Confinity, which was Peter Thiel and Max Levchin's company, which later became PayPal. So, and just to give you a background, this is, he made 20 something million dollars off of the sale of Zip2. So this is happening after Zip2. So Musk invested about $12 million into x.com, leaving him after taxes with $4 million or so for personal use. That's part of what separates Elon from mere mortals. He's willing to take an insane amount

of personal risk. When you do a deal deal like this it either pays off or you end up in a bus shelter somewhere so again goes back to why i i spend so much time reading books about them or just trying to learn from them because if you give me 20 let's say 22 million dollars or in this case uh after taxes and after he bought like a fancy car and a condo and did some other things he had 16 million dollars left he said okay maybe if i'm starting another company maybe i'll invest you know part of that maybe 2 million 4 million 25 of that something like that he does the exact opposite he basically says i'm going to take uh 75 of everything i've left and put it into a venture and again at x.com he was trying to make the world's first online bank, which again, in 1999, was a hugely risky endeavor. So I thought that part was fascinating.

Moving on to the next part. So this is thinking from first principles. And this is one of the main ideas I've learned from Elon. And I actually, the first time I heard him talk about this was on the Foundation podcast. I will leave a link to the, I'll leave a link to the YouTube video where he talks about this and I'll get it to the start, the actual time he starts talking about this because he explains what first principle thinking is in a matter of minutes and it's really easy to understand. So I definitely think it's worth checking out and I'll leave that in the show notes. All right. So this is him thinking from first principles. Let me give you some background before I go into that. At the time, he's flown back and forth to Russia.

He had the idea that, hey, I'm going to start SpaceX, but instead of building rockets myself, I'm going to buy these older rockets from Russia. So there's these great stories in the book where, you know, it talks about how the Russians are doing business with them. They don't respect him. In one case, they spit on him and somebody else. And so they finally give up. They're on the plane ride back from Moscow,

back to California. And this is where he actually comes up with the idea from SpaceX. And he does it from first principle thinking. And so let's go right into the story. At which point Musk wheeled around and flashed a spreadsheet he had created. Hey guys, he said, I think we can build this rocket ourselves. The document detailed the cost of the materials needed to build, assemble, and launch a rocket. According to Musk's calculations, he could undercut existing launch companies by building

a modest-sized rocket that would cater to the part of the market that specialized in carrying smaller satellites and research payloads to space. The spreadsheet also laid out the hypothetical performance characteristics of the rocket in fairly impressive detail. Musk had spent months studying the aerospace industry and the physics behind it. He had read books like Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and Aerothermodynamics of Gas, Turbine, and Rocket Propulsion, along with several more seminal texts. Musk had reverted to his childhood state as a devourer of information and had emerged from this meditative process with the realization that rockets could and should be made much cheaper than what the Russians were offering. Musk would inspire people to think about exploring space again by making it cheaper to explore space.

So one of the main things I learned from Elon is to really, you know, if you're thinking from first principles, it allows you to reject dogma and to reject conventional wisdom. Now, some of conventional wisdom is accurate, but if you break conventional wisdom down to first principles, you'll find that a lot of it is probably wisdom for a world that no longer exists. So the note I left myself here is opportunities hiding in plain sight. Musk felt that the space industry had not really evolved in about 50 years.

The aerospace companies had little competition and tended to make supremely expensive products that achieved maximum performance. They were building a Ferrari for every launch when it was possible that a Honda Accord might do the trick. And this next part is what it's like to work with Elon Musk. And just give you a background of what's taking place at this point in the book. SpaceX has already been going for a while. Elon has this idea to make a prototype rocket, then to ship it to Washington, D.C., assemble a giant rocket in the middle of Washington, D.C., and then hold a press conference.

And again, he's really, really, really good at marketing and really good at raising awareness for what he's doing. So this is what's happening while they're trying to make the prototype. So it says, while making the prototype for this event, Hallman, Hallman is an employee at SpaceX, experienced the full spectrum of highs and lows that came with working for Musk. The engineer had lost his regular glasses weeks earlier when they slipped off his face and fell down a flame duct at the Texas launch site. Hallman had since made to do wearing an old pair of prescription safety glasses, but they too were ruined when he scratched the lenses while trying to duck under an engine at the SpaceX factory. Without a spare moment to

visit an optometrist, Hallman started to feel his sanity fray. The long hours, the scratch, the publicity stunt, they were all too much. He vented about this in the factory one night, unaware that Musk stood nearby and could hear everything. Two hours later, Mary Beth Brown, that was Elon's assistant at the time, appeared with an appointment card to see a LASIK eye surgery specialist. When Hallman visited the doctor, he discovered that Musk had already agreed to pay for the surgery. Elon can be very demanding, but he'll make sure the obstacles in your way are removed. And this idea, I've never heard anybody think about time's relationship to money. And so this idea I think is going to stick with me for a very

long time. We had some chats where he laid out his philosophy, said Kevin Brogan, the early SpaceX employee. He would say that everything we did was a function of our burn rate and that we were burning through $100,000 per day. It was this very entrepreneurial Silicon Valley way of thinking that none of the aerospace engineers in Los Angeles were dialed into. Sometimes he wouldn't let you buy a part for $2,000 because he expected you to find it cheaper or invent something cheaper. Other times he wouldn't flinch at renting a plane for $90,000 to get something to the test site because it saved an entire workday, so it was worth it. And this is the part that I found so fascinating fascinating he would place this urgency that he expected the revenue in 10 years to be 10 million dollars a day and that every day we were slower to achieve

our goals was a day of missing out on that money i guess i was going to save this thought for the end of the podcast but i think what reading this book and now reading it for the second time has done has done uh for me is it made me realize like i'm just not doing enough like he it seems like elon makes the most of time and it's because of his fundamental belief that life is short and i don't i i don't know how many people actually approach time the way he does and so my my hope is that by reading this, I recalibrate what I can actually think I can do in one day. And that whole idea that if you're a day late, like it's really hard for us to understand the range of probabilities, you know, 10 years in the future or whatever the case is. But if you do have the belief that you're going to be,

your company's going to be making a million dollars a day or $2 million or whatever the number is, in his case he's saying $10 million a day. Well, if you take three extra days to get there, that's $30 million less of revenue that you'll never get back. So it's a really interesting thought. Here's an example of Elon's determination. And he's running Tesla, SpaceX, and he's about to run out of money. This is during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. And this is a direct quote from him. I will spend my last dollar on these companies. If we have to move into Justine's parents' basement, we'll do it.

So right around that time, Musk actually runs out of money. When Musk ran through the calculations concerning SpaceX and Tesla, it occurred to him that only one company would likely even have a chance at survival. I could either pick SpaceX or Tesla or split the money I had left between them, Musk said. That was a tough decision. If I split the money, maybe both of them would die. If I gave the money to just one company, the probability of it surviving was greater, but then it would mean certain death for the other company. I debated this over and over. While Musk meditated on this, the economy worsened quickly, and so too did Musk's financial condition. As 2008 came to an end, Musk had run out of money. I'm recording this about 10 years after this period in Musk's life.

We know how it all turned out. The book goes into greater detail, so if you're interested, definitely check out, read the book. But it goes into the fact that Tesla winds up getting another round of financing that it didn't need at the very last second. I think it was like a few days before they'd become insolvent. And they had their first successful SpaceX launch, and then they were awarded a contract by NASA. So within a few months, in the end of 2008, he was able to save both companies. And so now,

this is his friend and investor, this guy named Garcia, talking about focus and suffering, that I think is useful for all of us. For Garcia, the Tesla and SpaceX investor, and Musk's friend, the 2008 period told him everything he would ever need to know about Musk's character. He saw a man who had arrived in the United States with nothing, who had lost a child, who had been pillared in the press by reporters and his ex-wife, and who was on the verge of having his life's work destroyed. He has the ability to work harder and endure more stress than anyone I've ever met, Garcia said. What he went through in 2008 would have broken anyone else. He didn't just survive, he kept working and stayed focused. That ability to stay focused in the midst of a crisis stands as one of Musk's main advantages over other executives and competitors.

Most people who are under that sort of pressure fray, Garcia says. Their decisions go bad. Elon gets hyper-rational. He's still able to make very clear long-term decisions. The harder it gets, the better he gets. Anyone who saw what he went through firsthand came away with much more respect for the guy. I've just never seen anything like his ability to take pain." And this one sentence

I thought was really interesting. Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SolarCity, they are all expressions of Musk. SpaceX is Musk. And this is another example of that quote I said a little earlier from Zero to One, that general and undifferentiated pitches don't say anything about why a recruit should join your company instead of many others. And it says, Musk wants to conquer the solar system. And as it stands, there's just one company where you can work if that sort of quest gets you out of bed in the morning. And here's another example of what it's like to working with Elon. SpaceX and Musk also seem to inspire an unusual level of loyalty. Musk has managed to conjure up that Steve Jobs-like zeal among his troops. His vision is so clear, he almost hypnotizes you. He gives you the crazy eye,

and it's like, yes, we can get to Mars. Take that a bit further, and you arrive at a pleasure-pain sadomasochistic vibe that comes with working for Musk. Numerous people interviewed for this book decried the work hours, Musk's blunt style, and his sometimes ludicrous expectations. Yet almost every person, even those who had been fired, still worshipped Musk and talked about him in terms usually reserved for superheroes or deities. So this next note I left myself was one of the tenets I've noticed on how Elon approaches work and the organization of his companies is make as many things for yourself as possible. And it's talking about the difference between SpaceX and their main competitor. SpaceX manufactures between 80% and 90% of its rockets, engines, electronics, and other parts.

It is a strategy that flat out dumbfounds SpaceX competitors like United Launch Alliance. So United Launch Alliance, it's also referred to as ULA, it's a partnership between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. So in this case, the author is now talking about ULA is a partnership between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. So in this case, the author is now talking about ULA. ULA, which openly brags about depending on more than 1,200 suppliers to make its end products. And so the author says, ULA sees itself as an engine of job creation rather than a model of inefficiency. I think on past podcasts I talked about,

so I find the work of Elon Musk very inspiring, but as far as like if I had to pick only one other entrepreneur or founder that I've learned most practical knowledge from, I would say that's Jeff Bezos. So I was a little distraught at this one section. This is Elon on Jeff Bezos. They used to have a good relationship and it's not so good anymore The relationship between Musk and Bezos had soured, and they no longer chat about their shared ambition of getting to Mars. I do think Bezos has an insatiable desire to be King Bezos, Musk said.

He has a relentless work ethic and wants to kill everything in e-commerce. But he's not the most fun guy, honestly. This is the power of the individual in an age of infinite leverage. And so I went back in my notes and I've seen since 2013, I've been kind of obsessed with this idea about, so there's a trend, at least in the United States, where there's a explosion of one person businesses that make over a million dollars a year in revenue. And some, there's even an explosion

in some that make five to $10 million a year. And so, you know, it may go from like 10,000 people were doing this in 2013 to now it's like maybe 40 or 50,000 people or whatever the number is. And I do think since we're in an age of infinite leverage that there is the individual becomes much more powerful. Right. So if there's already people now being able to make companies that make over a million dollars a year. Right. If you have one one person, that means revenue per employee is astronomical, right? There is eventually going to be a single person billion dollar company. So this is just a personal quote that I have saved in my phone that I look at from time to time. And let me just read it to you. And by recruiting hundreds of bright,

self-motivated people, SpaceX has maximized the power of the individual. One person putting in a 16-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together. The individual doesn't have to hold meetings, reach a consensus, or bring other people up to speed on a project. He just keeps working and working and working. My next note and something if you've listened to a bunch of my podcasts you know that I say this all the time that we were extremely lucky to be alive when the internet was created and this this real quick paragraph is just talking about how SpaceX has kind of built on knowledge that NASA and other and other countries had about rocket design and getting to space.

So it says, they cribbed from past capsule work and read over every paper published by NASA and other aeronautic bodies around projects like Gemini and Apollo. This is a quote from a SpaceX employee. If you go search for something like Apollo's reentry guidance algorithm, there are these great databases that will just spit out the answer. So that part reminded me of one of my all-time favorite quotes about the internet. And it's actually from a former SpaceX employee. And this guy says, the internet taught me nearly everything I know. It is the modern day equivalent to the library

of Alexandria, except it's much harder to burn to the ground. It is indispensable for realizing human rights, combating inequality, accelerating development, and quickening the pace of human progress. Another thing I learned from this book was you need to focus on where the endpoint is. So to give you some context at the time, they started out doing an electric car and there was some kind of debate was oh maybe we should do a hybrid because that way you get over the the problem that most people have with range and everything else and so this is the the conclusion and how they wind up making their decision to go all electric it would be expensive and the performance would not be as good as an all-electric car and we would have needed to build a team to compete with the core competency of every car company in the world we would have been to build a team to compete with the core competency of every car company in the world.

We would have been betting against all the things we believe in, like the power electronics and batteries improving. We decided to put all that effort into going where we think the endpoint is, and we never looked back. And here's another example of opportunities that hide in plain sight. They're talking about Tesla. If you listen to one of the podcasts I did on Henry Ford, most cars were, I guess, driving machines. They weren't called cars at the time, but electric cars are actually predated the internal combustion engine. And so it's really interesting. Let me just get into this, why the opportunity for electric cars was hiding in plain sight.

Quick to remind people that the chance to build an awesome electric car had been there all along. It's not really like there was a rush to get into this idea and we got there first. It is frequently forgotten in hindsight that people thought this was the shittiest business opportunity on the planet. The venture capitalists were running for the hills what separated tesla from the competition was the willingness to char

to charge after its vision without compromise a complete commitment to execute to musk's standards and uh this next note i left myself is time is the currency of life. Elon came to the conclusion early in his career that life is short. If you really embrace this, it leaves you with the obvious conclusion that you should be working as hard as you can. And finally, this idea of Grand Theft Life, which comes from Tim Urban, who's the founder of the Wait But Why blog. And he's also the one that wrote that great four-part series on Elon Musk that I would recommend. So if you just Google Grand Theft Life, Wait But Why, it'll come up and you can read that section as well. It's available for free online. And the idea is basically if you're playing a game, treat life like you would Grand Theft Auto, the video game, right? So if you were playing a

game called Grand Theft Life, you would be true to yourself, you'd be bold, you'd actually do what you wanted to do without fear of the consequences. Like if you'd want to develop your skills for yourself, like you would your character. And this is something I actually applied in my life when I read Tim's blog post last year. And let's say you want your character to be stronger. So then you take your character to the gym. You want your character to have more money to have access to resources. So then you make your character do all these you want your character to have more money to have access to resources So then you you make your character do all these other jobs and the thought that I got from Tim and Elon was like well Why don't you just step outside of yourself and do the same thing? But for yourself like treat yourself as your video game character and treat life as this game that you're trying to play

So if I want to get in better shape, then I'll take my character to the gym in that case That's my real person like the real me if I want to have a low body fat percentage and be healthier, I'll eat better food. So I'll take my character to, you know, to eat somewhere healthier instead of fast food or whatever the case is. Same thing. If you want to have access to more time and to more resources, then make your character work harder. So this is the author's realization. So remember, at the beginning of the podcast, we talked about how he was a cynic. Now this, the sentence I'm about to read to you, comes at the very end of the book. And it's, to me, reading all this and spending this much time studying Elon Musk, it's like he really does approach life as a game and without fear.

And I think we'd all be better off if we were able to do a little bit more of that in our lives. So this is the author speaking. I'm more convinced than ever that Musk is and always has been a man on a quest and that his brand of quest is far more fantastic and consuming than anything most of us will ever experience. And that's where I'm going to leave this podcast for now. If you want the full story,

make sure you read the book, Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, and the quest for a fantastic future. If you've listened all the way this far, I have a secret link I want to share with you that actually helps you if you want to get the entire story. If you look in the show notes, you're going to see something called the Founder's Secret Link. It's actually a way to get two free audio books just by trying audible if you're interested in in uh in listening to the audio version of this book um then go ahead and use that link you sign in with your amazon account it takes like 30 seconds and then you can listen to this book and any other book that you want i mean there's and if you want suggestions for books just go look at past podcasts and literally every single podcast that i've done i'd recommend that book um so here's uh what i what i need to ask for your

help on something if you like my podcasts if you get if they're useful which is that's my entire goal i just want to be useful i want to like i don't want to waste your time i want to i want you to find uh the information you're getting here valuable and hopefully it applies to whatever it is you're doing in life the biggest thing you can do to help me, if I've helped you at all, is please go to Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star rating. Even if you listen to it on another platform, Apple Podcasts is just the largest platform. Apple's spending a lot more time trying to fix the problem that hasn't been solved yet, which is podcast discovery. And the more ratings and the higher ratings we have, the more people are exposed to these ideas.

And that would benefit the podcast, and it just benefits people in general if they're actually listening to stuff that's good for them. So please, if you like these podcasts, leave a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. I would really appreciate it. Subscribe if you haven't already. New podcasts are coming out every Monday.

I've told you in the past I listen I read all the the the reviews you guys leave on Apple on Apple podcasts or on iTunes I guess it's the same thing and one of the reviews was talking about how much you like the podcast and they were a little ups they were a little like worried that the podcast ended because there was like a five-week gap in between me releasing a new podcast. And I realized like, you know, I have an obligation. Not only am I doing this myself, but I have an obligation to you. If you're going to spend your time, then I need to be more disciplined and more dedicated and make sure I'm getting a lot of time.

So I'm giving myself a hard deadline every Monday. There has to be a new podcast release. So subscribe if you want to see those. If you want to support the podcast and read some great books, which is the entire reason the podcast exists, I put links to every single book I've covered on all Founders Podcasts. They're available at founderspodcast.com

and they're available in the show notes. So you don't even have to go to the website if you don't want to. Buy one of the books, buy 10 of them, buy all of them. And Amazon will spend me a small percentage of the sale at no additional cost to you. You get some great reads and you get to support this podcast at the same time

if you're interested in doing that. And the last thing, I just wanted to let you know something new. There's a lot of quotes that I come across since I'm reading all these books every week that they just don't make the cut into the podcast, but they're still interesting. And I've been pulling some interesting quotes

from the books and posting them on Twitter. So if you want to learn more about them or just, you know, they're little aphorisms, little bits of knowledge that you might find helpful. You can read them at Founders Podcast. It's at Founders Podcast on Twitter. Again, it's at Founders Podcast. And hopefully you enjoy that as well. Thanks for listening. And I will talk to you next week.