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

Founders

David Senra

History, Entrepreneurship, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2018

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Transcript

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0:00.0	All the way back in 2019 I received a message that changed the direction of this podcast forever.
0:04.6	It was from Tristan who is one of the co-founders of Reed Wise.
0:08.0	He said, hey, I love the podcast and he told me about the Reed Wise product.
0:12.4	I responded, thanks Tristan, love the idea behind Reed Wise. and he told me about the Reed-Wise product.
0:12.5	I responded, thanks Tristan, love the idea behind Reed-Wise,
0:15.2	I will definitely check it out.
0:16.3	I had no idea that I would become a super user of his product.
0:20.8	And so over the years, I've added my highlights and notes for over 300
0:23.7	books I have over 20,000 highlights and notes for the books that I read for the
0:28.3	podcast and because I can search every single thing I've ever done I use ReedWise every day. I never
0:36.1	close the browser tab. The tab on ReedWise is always open because as I'm
0:40.5	reading, as I'm thinking, as I'm researching researching I'm constantly going in
0:44.7	and re-reading all my notes and highlights.
0:47.3	And you might already know this because every other podcast I go on I talk about
0:49.5	Reedwise, I tweet about it, I post about it
0:51.6	constantly, I've been saying for years it is the best
0:53.9	app that I pay for. And because I go around shouting about how great it is from the mountaintops,
0:58.8	I get a bunch of messages. Nearly every day people have asked me, hey is there a possibility that I can actually get access to your readwise?
1:05.6	And this happened so much for so long. And I thought it was like a superpower of mine.
1:09.3	So I was like, no, no, no, no. And then I started thinking, it was like, well, why is everybody
1:12.3	want this? Like like why do they keep
1:13.7	asking for this and I thought about it's like well if you think about this is like has anybody else in the world
	...

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