"Elon Musk: 重要信息精华"

Chapter 1: The family adopted a motto: "Live dangerously—carefully." Chapter 2: Maybe bought her kids second-hand books. Chapter 3: "Its a big theme for him to never have his decisions guided by fear," Peter recalls. Chapter 4: Physics could teach everything about the universe except why. That led to what he calls his adolescent existential crisis. Chapter 5: Sometimes Errol would make sweeping assertions to his kids that were unconnected to facts, such as insisting that in the United States, the president is considered divine and cannot be criticized. Justine, Elons first wife, said, "It made me realize how difficult it is not to be shaped by what we grew up with, even thats not what we want." Chapter 8: He decided to major in physics because, like his father, he was drawn to engineering. He also decided to pursue a joint degree in business. "I was concerned that if I didnt study business, I would be forced to work for someone who did," he says. "My goal was to engineer products by having a feel for the physics and never have to work for a boss with a business degree." His closest friend in this crowd was Robin Ren, who had won a Physics Olympiad in his native China before coming to Penn. "He was the only person better than me at physics," Musk says. At Penn, he developed a third mode of relaxation—a taste for partying. His partner named Adeo Ressi started an environmental newspaper called Green Times and attempted to create his own major called "Revolution" with copies of the newspaper as his senior thesis. Chapter 9: "I thought about the things that will truly affect humanity," he says. "I came up with three: the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel." Just before the enrollment deadline for Stanford, Musk went to Toronto to get advice from Peter Nicholson of Scotiabank. Should he pursue the idea for the Virtual City Navigator, or should he start the PhD program? Nicholson, who had a PhD from Stanford, did not equivocate. "The internet revolution only comes once in a lifetime, so strike while the iron is hot," he told Musk as they walked along the shore of Lake Ontario. "You will have lots of time to go to graduate school later if youre still interested." Chapter 10: Some of the best innovations come from combining two previous innovations. They got their first break when they visited Navteq, which had a database of maps. The company agreed to license it to the Musks for free until they started making a profit. Elon wrote a program that merged the maps with a listing of businesses in the area. "I never wanted to be a CEO," he says, "but I learned that you could not truly be the chief technology or product. "Its not your job to make people on your team love you," he said at a SpaceX executive session years later. "In fact, thats counterproductive." "Great things will never happen with VCs or professional managers," Musk told Inc. Magazine. "They dont have the creativity or the insight." Chapter 11: "Hes not a man who takes no for an answer," Justine Wilson says. "He assumed that he would be either wealthy or broke, but nothing in between. What interested him were the problems he wanted to solve." Chapter 12: His experience at Scotiabank had convinced him that the industry was ripe for disruption. So in March 1999, he founded X.com with a friend from the bank, Harris Fricker. Musks management style had not changed from Zip2, nor would it ever. "What matters to me is winning, and not in a small way. God knows why... its probably rooted in some very disturbing psychoanalytical black hole or neural short circuit." Believing that Musk needed adult supervision, Moritz convinced him to step aside the following month and allow Bill Harris, the former head of Intuit, to become CEO. "Why do we need that?" Musk kept asking. "Delete!" One important little breakthrough was that customers didnt need to have usernames; their email address served that purpose. Musk was drawn to the fight with the intensity of a video gamer. Thiel, on the contrary, liked to coolly calculate and mitigate risk. It soon became clear to both of them that the network effect—whichever company got bigger first would then grow even faster—meant that only one would survive. So it made sense to merge rather than turning the competition into a game of Mortal Kombat. The electronic payment systems of both companies were folded together and marketed under the brand name PayPal. Separating the design of a product from its engineering was a recipe for dysfunction. Designers had to feel the immediate pain if something they devised was hard to engineer. "You know what," said Musk. "I will arm-wrestle you for it." Chapter 13: When Levchin developed the first commercial use of CAPTCHA technology to prevent automated fraud, Musk showed little interest. Although a street fighter, Musk had an unexpected ability to be realistic in defeat. When Jeremy Stoppelman, a Musk acolyte who would later be a founder of Yelp, asked whether he and others should resign in protest, Musk said no. "Entrepreneurs are actually not risk-takers," says Roelof Botha. "Theyre risk mitigators. They dont thrive on risk, they never seek to amplify it, instead they try to figure out the controllable variables and minimize their risk." But not Musk. After symptoms become severe, as they had in Musks case, patients often have only a day or so before the parasite becomes untreatable. His doctor had treated two cases of falciparum malaria prior to treating Elon—both patients died. "He took two lessons from his near-death experience: Vacations will kill you. Chapter 14: In order to get his pilots license, he needed fifty hours of training, which he crammed into two weeks. Later, Hoffman realized, "What I didnt appreciate is that Elon starts with a mission and later finds a way to backfill in order to make it work financially," he says. "Thats what makes him a force of nature." "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."