[心得] 馬斯克傳 Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

原文好讀連結：
https://www.zoncheng.com/2023/09/0488-elon-musk-by-walter-isaacson.html

TESLA/ SPACE X創辦人 馬斯克 (Elon Musk) 的相關書籍相當的多，而這本書最大的價值可能是同為Steve Jobs立傳的作者Walter Isaacson流暢的舖陳與用心的考究。馬斯克的故事因為還在持續創造，所以未來可能會像Amazon的創辦人Jeff Bezos一樣，每十年又有新的傳記。(貝佐斯新傳：無極限 書摘心得)

綜觀全書，馬斯克就是一個對世界科技進步推廣有著極大貢獻的偉人，但若與他共事，你又會發現他根本就像是個極度混蛋，甚至比Steve Jobs還難纏的老板或是合伙人 - 因為他有Steve Jobs強大的Reality Distortion Field (現實扭曲力場) 的能力，但又肯適時的事事親為，這點Steve Jobs是不會辦到的；工程師的背景與能力又能讓他更進一步的去直搗問題核心，讓他只要有心，工程師根本無所遁形。

以下是我閱讀英文版時的書摘與心得，共參

###

“He has this fierce determination that blows your mind and was sometimes
frightening, and still is.”

說明：馬斯克弟弟Kimbal Musk對Elon Musk的評價。

###

When Elon went with Nicholson’s daughter, Christie, to a party one evening,
his first question was “Do you ever think about electric cars?” As he later
admitted, it was not the world’s best come-on line.

說明：馬斯克年輕時在Party撩妹的開場語… TESLA在十幾年後才創立…

###

“So, what can this car do?” Thiel asked.

“Watch this,” Musk replied, pulling into the fast lane and flooring the
accelerator.

The rear axle broke and the car spun around, hit an embankment, and flew in
the air like a flying saucer.

說明：馬斯克在與Peter Thiel (PayPal/ Palantir 創辦人) 會議完後，馬斯克開著一台老跑車載著Peter Thiel 在公路上打轉~飛~高~高~ 沒有安全帶，不過兩個人出意外後也怎麼受傷 - 展現了馬斯克「真摰」不要命的一面。

###

X.com, on the contrary, conjured up visions of a seedy site you would not
talk about in polite company.

心得：馬斯克一直很喜歡X這個單字，但投資人對x.com的觀感並不是太好…

###

“He was surrounded by goonish confidantes. He didn’t have any idea
whatsoever about Silicon Valley, but he and his henchmen were eager to line
their pockets.” They asked for 10 percent of the company, and that was the
end of the meeting. “This guy occupies a different planet,” Musk told
Moritz.

說明：馬斯克在找投資人時找過著名的紐約前市長 - 結果發現他們只是一群利慾熏心的商人…。

###

“I’m really the best spokesperson for the company,” he told Thiel during
a tense meeting in Moritz’s office.

說明：馬斯克在生涯早期就很愛當發言人…

###

..., a key-man life insurance policy for $100 million. “If he had died,”
Thiel says, “all of our financial problems were going to be solved.”

說明：馬斯克為自己保了高額的保險，所以他出意外時，當時合伙的Peter Thiel 某種程度上覺得也不一定是件壞事啦…

###

Musk remained in intensive care for ten days, and he did not fully recover
for five months. He took two lessons from his near-death experience: “
Vacations will kill you. Also, South Africa. That place is still trying to
destroy me.”

說明：馬斯克回家鄉南非時出了意外，他的感想就是 放假/ 南非 都會毀了他…。

###

“One of Elon’s greatest skills is the ability to pass off his vision as a
mandate from heaven.”

“My initial thought was not to create a rocket company, but rather to have
a philanthropic mission that would inspire the public and lead to more NASA
funding.”

說明：與Steve Jobs著名的Reality Distortion Field相較，Elon Musk也有諸多技藝…

###

His first plan was to build a small rocket to send mice to Mars. “But I
became worried that we would end up with a tragicomic video of mice slowly
dying on a tiny spaceship.” That would not be good. “So then it came down
to, ‘Let’s send a little greenhouse to Mars.’ꠠThe greenhouse would
land on Mars and send back photographs of green plants growing on the red
planet.

心得：與Elon Musk學行銷！

###

“If you set an aggressive schedule that people think they might be able to
make, they will try to put out extra effort,” he says. “But if you give
them a schedule that’s physically impossible, engineers aren’t stupid. You’
ve demoralized them. It’s Elon’s biggest weakness.”

說明：Elon Musk最大缺點… 但有時候也是他最大的優點…

###

the “idiot index.” That was the ratio of the total cost of a component to
the cost of its raw materials. Something with a high idiot index—say, a
component that cost $1,000 when the aluminum that composed it cost only $100—was likely to have a design that was too complex or a manufacturing process
that was too inefficient. As Musk put it, “If the ratio is high, you’re an
idiot.”

說明：Idiot Index 完美解析！

###

Do not fear losing. “You will lose,” Musk says. “It will hurt the first
fifty times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less
emotion.” You will be more fearless, take more risks.

###

Optimize every turn. In Polytopia, you get only thirty turns, so you need to
optimize each one. “Like in Polytopia, you only get a set number of turns in
life,” Musk says. “If we let a few of them slide, we will never get to Mars.
”

###

I nodded but still had the same question: Why had he shorted the stock?
Gates looked at me as if I had not understood what he just explained and thenreplied as if the answer was obvious: he thought that by shorting Tesla he
could make money.

說明：Bill Gates說明為什麼他要作空TESLA股票，原因就是如此的單純…。

###

“If we’re not blowing up engines, we’re not trying hard enough,”

###

“No mirrors, no pedals, no steering wheel. This is me taking responsibility
for this decision.”

說明：Elon Musk和Steve Jobs一樣對產品設計都有諸多要求，而且更甚。

###

If he wanted the survivors at Twitter to be hardcore, he was going to have toshow them how hardcore he could be. He had slept on the floor of his first
office at Zip2 in 1995. He had slept on the roof of Tesla’s Nevada battery
factory in 2017. He had slept under his desk at the Fremont assembly plant in2018. It wasn’t because it was truly necessary. He did it because it was in
his nature to love the drama, the urgency, and the sense that he was a
wartime general who could rally his troops into battle mode. Now it was time
for him to sleep at Twitter headquarters.

說明：Elon Musk睡公司精選

###

Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an
increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This
will mean working long hours at high intensity….

If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yeson the link below. Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday)
will receive three months of severance.

James and Ross stayed up all night watching the results come in. They put
down bets. How many would say yes? James thought it would be 2,000 out of theapproximately 3,600 remaining employees. Ross wagered it would be 2,150. Muskchimed in with a low prediction: 1,800 would choose to stay. In the end,
2,492 said yes, a surprisingly high 69 percent of the workforce. Musk’s
assistant Jehn Balajadia handed out vodka-spiked Red Bulls to celebrate.

說明：Twitter重生挑人法…。

###

The CEO then told him that some of the floors could not handle more than fivehundred pounds of pressure, so rolling a two-thousand-pound server would
cause damage. Musk replied that the servers had four wheels, so the pressure
at any one point was only five hundred pounds. “The dude is not very good at
math,” Musk told the musketeers.

說明：工程背景的優勢 - 連搬家都比較會！

###

以上，有興趣的話，中文版幾天前剛上市，800多頁有點厚，建議先試閱，不然心動帶回家後很容易變書磚~

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我覺得這兩件事，首先，他是不是個爛老板，是的，100%. 但他是不是個能壓出工程人員極限的老板，是的，因為他看的懂code~ 而且他會管控到產線這一塊… 很多文組創業老板 (像Jobs)，應該這一塊個人是沒辦法的。 你叫Jobs去搬家，他是不可能的，他頂多找一個他任可的專家去辦而已。