140 Quotes by Ashlee Vance

I’m pretty sure that we ended up with the only seventeen-inch touch-screen in the world,” Musk said.

Within the next few years, SpaceX expects to cut its price to at least one-tenth that of its rivals.

Musk came to see man’s fate in the universe as a personal obligation. If that meant pursuing cleaner energy technology or building spaceships to extend the human species’s reach, then so be it.

You can forgive the automotive industry veterans.

No one, however, would suggest that his reach extended down as far as Musk’s into overseeing so.

SpaceX is the hip, forward-thinking place that’s brought the perks of Silicon Valley – namely frozen yogurt, stock options, speedy decision making, and a flat corporate structure – to a staid industry.

SpaceX, by the way, is not alone here. Being late is par for the course in the aerospace industry. It’s not a question of if it’s late, it’s how late will the program be. I don’t think an aerospace program has been completed on time since bloody World War II.

Whereas if they change a rule and something good happens, they don’t even get a reward. So, it’s very asymmetric. It’s then very easy to understand why regulators resist changing the rules. It’s because there’s a big punishment on one side and no reward on the other. How would any rational person behave in such a scenario?

He lost forty-five pounds over the course of the illness and had a closet full of clothes that no longer fit. “I came very close to dying,” Musk said. “That’s my lesson for taking a vacation: vacations will kill you.