And this is one of the first things one learns from Musk's example — he is relentless in his pursuit of the bold and, the bigger point, totally unfazed by scale. When he couldn't get a job, he started a company. When Internet commerce stalled, he reinvented banking. When he couldn't find decent launch services for his Martian greenhouse, he went into the rocket business. And as a kicker, because he never lost interest in the problem of energy, he started both an electric car and a solar energy company. It is also worth pointing out that Tesla is the first successful car company started in America in five decades and that SolarCity has become one of the nation's largest residential solar providers.9 All told, in slightly less than a dozen years, Musk's appetite for bold has created an empire worth about $30 billion.10 So what's his secret? Musk has a few, but none are more important to him than passion and purpose. "I didn't go into the rocket business, the car business, or the solar business thinking this is a great opportunity. I just thought, in order to make a difference, something needed to be done. I wanted to have an impact. I wanted to create something substantially better than what came before.

Reading remained Musk’s psychological retreat. Sometimes he would immerse himself in books all afternoon and most of the night, nine hours at a stretch.

As important as Steve Jobs was, no doubt about it — [and] you have to add him to Bill Gates, because they birthed the personal computing revolution kind of together — here's the difference: Elon Musk is trying to invent a future, not by providing the next app.

Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values, or traditions.

You’ve got one life on this planet. Why not try to build something big? This is the beauty of Elon Musk, and why I think he inspires so many people, it's just because he takes on really, really big audacious tasks. And he provides an example for people to think big. And it takes a lot of work to build even small things. I don’t think the corner grocery store owner is working any less hard than Elon Musk, or pouring any less sweat and toil into it. Maybe even more.

To adapt to the reality of scale, meanwhile, Musk employs a number of other strategies. We'll start with first principles, which is a lesson he borrowed from physics. "Physics training is a good framework for reasoning," explains Musk. "It forces you to boil things down to their most fundamental truths and then connect those truths in a way that lets you understand reality. This gives you a way to attack the counterintuitive, a way of figuring out things that aren't obvious. When you're trying to create a new product or service, I think it's critical to use this framework for reasoning. It takes a lot of mental energy, but it's still the right way to do it."

You’re the greatest cutter,...I need an Elon Musk — I need somebody that has a lot of strength and courage and smarts. I want to close up the Department of Education, move education back to the states.

How Musk chooses which streams to explore depends on the relationship between those probabilities and the importance of his objective. "Even if the probability for success is fairly low, if the objective is really important, it's still worth doing. Conversely, if the objective is less important, then the probability needs to be much greater. How I decide which projects to take on depends on probability multiplied by the importance of the objective.

That [Elon] Musk would get duped by lies circulating on the site is mildly ironic; he has revealed his gullibility many times. That he would frequently and almost exclusively endorse fringe far-right activists is a cause for genuine concern. Musk claims to be a champion of free speech. With nearly 195mn followers, he is America's most influential purveyor of disinformation.

They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially ‘colonised’ it. So technically, I colonised Mars.
In your face, Neil Armstrong!

Both Musk and Sam Altman have a rare relationship with risk: they’re always taking gambles’

I plan to travel to Mars and make it my home.
..
People should be traveling to Mars and doing it in our lifetime.

If I had money, I would enjoy flying to Mars... This was the dream of the first cosmonauts. I wish I could realize it! I am ready to fly without coming back.

Eight months later, on July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, Musk tweeted again: "Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins." In the spring of 2018, with $113 million of Musk's own money, the Boring Company began boring.