Elon Musk
2015-06-30
He seems to be a really hardworking and compulsory guy who does not only push others but also himself to the extreme. As his wife quoted "He is the worse kind of enemy you can have" etc... But people comment him to be nicer than Steve Jobs. He likes to reads a lot ^^^^ seriously a lot^^^ in his childhood. And he seems to be very good at self-learning as he acquire the knowledge of rockets by self-learning. His Xspace inspiration seems to come from the his childhood fantasy about outerspace inspired by the various science fictions he had read. But I'm not sure about where does he got his idea of paypal --- He cultivate the business idea by first join an internet company and then somehow the idea of online banking, then scoop people ( can't recall who are they) to join the ideas. People think he is crazy for coming up with the idea because by the time they don't expect people to trust online banking at all. But he has the gut the push through various regulatory blockades and communicate/preach to people about the value? of online banking.
His model of success seems to be :
{
read a lot--> get your world views settled and firm--> study something that makes you smart and you are interested in --> find a company and works seriously hard-->excavate something seems profitable-->work hard to bring that idea to reality -->cashed the money
Repeat the above process}
And another interesting thing is that the book really demonstrated the struggle he's been through in getting the funds for spaceX and tesla, the two companies was once on brink of death because of running out of funds. He has been trying to be the contractors for NASA( get 1.4billion for promising to send things to space stations for 9 times, while ) and he refused to let other funding agents to fund the company as investment as he is afraid it would deprecate the company to something less than an electric car maker, based on this you can see the importance of having a firm world view/ values( or how it could make your life harder(successful)). The book repetitively mentioned that he is a man capable of enduring tremendous stress that common people would break down, and during stress, he is able to make decisions with great rationality (serious? don't see the examples, maybe how he strive to get funding as one) while others may start to make bad decisions.
Another important matter is how he's managing his team. there are so far some characteristics that I identified from the reading. He commands people with his will once the goal is clear, he's very clear about what his expectation is, if someone could not reach what the initial working load, he would fire them. Second, he's very "micromanaging" about what could drag things behind. For example he would ask all his employees to stop using acronyms that are unauthorized by him. And he also possess a very aggressive aptitute towards pushing forward project. He would set the time frame of finishing a software project by counting #lines* time need/line of code. Based on such example he possess the mind set of measuring goals in a very detailed way and good at breaking things down, in another word, although his goal seems to be lofty at certain time point, he knows things need to be based on something tangible( like time rather than dream/goal) and good at get hands dirty.