Elon Musk

“He personally met with every single person the company hired through the first 3000 employees.”

“He interviewed the first 3000 employees at SpaceX. That's how important it was. One of Musk's most valuable skills was his ability to determine whether someone would fit his mold. His people had to be brilliant. They had to be hardworking, and there could be n…”

“So I heard you don't want to move to LA, and one of the reasons is that your wife works for Google. Well, I just talked to Larry, and they're going to transfer your wife down to LA, so what are you going to do now? To solve this problem, Musk had called his fr…”

“He interviewed the first 3000 employees at SpaceX. That's how important it was.”

“To solve this problem, Musk had called his friend Larry Page, the co-founder of Google. The engineer sat in stunned silence for a moment, but then he replied, given all that, he would come to work at SpaceX.”

“He interviewed the first 3000 employees at SpaceX. That's how important it was.”

“He interviewed the first 3000 employees at SpaceX. That's how important it was.”

“Elon built a huge case around a standard PC and lugged the unit onto a base with wheels. When prospective investors would come by, Elon would put on a show and roll this massive machine out so that it appeared like zip two ran inside of a mini supercomputer.”

“One of his allies is this guy named Mike Griffin. He, a few years later, actually become NASA's administrator, and he helps Elon organize these meetings of these space enthusiasts, these engineers, these rocket scientists.”

“By bringing it in house, Elon cut much of his manufacturing costs in half.”

“So it says after sinking six years and a hundred million dollars into SpaceX, Elon finally had a real rocket.”

“Musk really had put all of his net worth into rocket and electric car ventures. And in August, 2008, He had almost nothing to show for it. His rocket company had produced a litany of failures and Tesla was equally cash strapped and only just beginning to sell …”

“Musk made hiring a priority. He personally met with every single person the company hired through the first 3000 employees.”

“The guy talking right now, he's in his mid twenties. He's four months into working at SpaceX and he already has responsibility for the rocket's entire first stage propulsion system.”

“Without the CRS contract, we would have gone down as the company that made it to orbit and then died.”

“I make the spending decisions and the engineering decisions in one head. Normally those are at least two people. There's some engineering guy who's trying to convince a finance guy that this money should be spent, but the finance guy doesn't understand enginee…”

“SpaceX had invested seven million dollars in launch facilities at Vandenberg. There would be no reimbursement. Elon had to eat the loss.”

“Elon had cleared about a hundred and eighty million dollars from PayPal and figured he could risk half of his money on a rocket company and still have plenty left over.”

“Like he doesn't separate engineering design, which again, Dyson doesn't either. Elon doesn't either.”

“And part of the reason I think he's able to do that is because of his incredible communication skills. He doesn't just express ideas. He makes them memorable. It reminds me a lot of Charlie Munger, reminds me of Elon Musk, reminds me of Steve Jobs.”

“Jim Simons, the founder of Renaissance technologies and Elon Musk, and both of them, what they would do is when they needed time to think, they would find a quiet place, usually in the dark, and they would lay on their back flat. They can't see anything. They …”

“The lesson isn't be like Elon. Hero worship is the wrong takeaway. One person didn't build Starship. The lesson is that structure matters more than the hero. Get the system right and the results follow.”

“Elon putting in a hundred million dollars bought early runway, but Bezos poured much more into Blue Origin, and legacy primes Had multiples of this amount.”

“Andre Carpathie who worked for Elon at Tesla notes that Elon spends about 50% of his time talking directly to engineers, not to VP summarizing engineering work.”

“It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price, which is a crazy ratio for a large mechanical product.”