My Note
My highlights
78 highlights from Kindle. These are the lines I stopped at.
You’re holding in your hands the only book an entrepreneur needs.
the best mentors can’t be hired, and the books are either anecdotal or academic. The only reliable teacher is bitter experience.
This isn’t a tedious biography or recounting of events, it’s the explanation and the manual.
Hard work is common, intelligence uncommon, courage rare—and Elon combusts all three.
The main component of wealth is knowledge, not capital. By creating new knowledge, and then instantiating it in products that are duplicated and distributed, Elon and his fellow entrepreneurs are engines of wealth creation and distribution.
If your motives are pure and greater than yourself, the world will conspire in its subtle ways to help you.
Reject the craving for comfort and social approval. Reorient to the optimism of youth. Leave those talking and dividing, and get on the path to learning and building.
Your energy is best spent with like-minded people who are unstoppable on a mission to make something beautiful.
get paid so that you can do your best work.
make the money so that you can make the thing.
Elon Musk has joined a lineage of legendary entrepreneurs who transformed our culture. Henry Ford’s greatest impact was creating car culture. Steve Jobs’s greatest impact was on computer culture.
Elon Musk’s greatest impact will be advancing the culture of engineering, entrepreneurship, and adventure over the next century.
On a day-to-day basis, I wake up in the morning and ask, “How can I be useful today?”
It’s difficult to be useful at scale.5
I try to take the set of actions most likely to improve the probability that the future will be good.6
Try to be useful. Do useful things for your fellow human beings and the world. It’s hard to be useful, to contribute more than you consume.
I admire anyone making a positive contribution to humanity.
How many people you helped, and how much—that’s the total utility (usefulness).
How many people you helped, multiplied by how much help you provided each person, on average.
Building something that makes a big difference to a small number of people is just as great as something that makes a small difference for a vast number of people. Mathematically, the total positive impact would be roughly similar for those two things. It’s about trying to be useful.
Not every product will change the world, but if it’s making people’s lives better, that’s great.13
Just ask yourself, is what I’m doing as useful as it could be? The goal of an organization should be usefulness to society.
I’m also hopeful they will do things like engineering, writing books, or just in some way, adding more than they take from the world.15
The three areas I thought would have the biggest positive impact on the future of humanity were the internet, the transition to sustainable energy, and space exploration—in particular the extension of life to multiple planets.
I don’t worship anything, but I devote myself to the advancement of humanity using technology.
Don’t start a company because you want to be an entrepreneur or because you want to make money. It is better to approach from this angle: What is a useful thing you could build that you wish existed in the world?
If you like what you’re doing, you think about it even when you’re not working. It’s something your mind is drawn to. If you don’t like it, it’s much harder to make yourself work.
If you’re creating something you love and think other people will love, it’s much easier to sacrifice the time and effort. If it doesn’t work out, you won’t regret it.
Around 1946–1948, when they first started making TVs, they did a famous nationwide survey: “Will you ever buy a TV?” and around 96 percent of respondents said, “No.”41
If you need encouragement, don’t start a company.43
I put a lot of stock in having a grow-the-pie mindset, not a zero-sum mindset.45
When I see people (even some smart people) with a bad attitude or doing things that seem morally questionable, it’s often because they have a zero-sum mindset.
Make sure you’re not operating from a zero-sum mindset, especially without realizing it. It will result in you trying to take things from others, which is not good. It won’t benefit you.
It’s much better to work on adding to the economic pie. Create more than you consume.
We need to expand the scope and scale of consciousness in order to understand what questions to ask of the universe.
This is the path forward. If we do, we will be better able to understand the nature of the universe and understand the meaning of life.
Physics is law. Everything else is a recommendation. I’ve met many people who can break the laws of man, but I have never met anyone who could break the laws of physics.
I would encourage people to use the mental tools of physics and apply them broadly in life. They are the best tools.
Don’t just follow the trends. You can avoid following trends by thinking with the physics approach, first principles. It’s a powerful, powerful method for life in general.
Break something down to the most fundamental principles. Start by asking: What am I most confident is true at a foundational level? That sets your axiomatic base. Then you reason up from there. Then you check your conclusions against the axiomatic truths.
The first-principles approach to battery costs is this: What are the batteries made of? What are the materials that make up the batteries? What is the market value of those material constituents?
First-principles thinking built SpaceX. Most people think, “Historically, all rockets have been expensive. Therefore, in the future, all rockets will be expensive.” But that’s not true.105 This is where it’s helpful to use the analytical approach again.
Another good physics tool is thinking about things “in the limit.” Take a particular idea and imagine scaling it to a very large or very small number. How do things change?118
Read books, because the data rate of reading is much greater than when somebody is speaking.
I encourage you to read a lot of books. Just read. Try to ingest as much information as you can.
I’d recommend everyone read or skim through the condensed version of the Encyclopedia Britannica. You can always skip subjects. If you read a few paragraphs and know you’re not interested, just jump to the next one.
How can you know what you’re really interested in if you’re not at least doing a broad, light exploration of the knowledge landscape?
It is important to view knowledge as a semantic tree. Make sure you understand the fundamental principles (the trunk and big branches) before you get into the leaves (the details), then there is something for them to hang on to.144
Most people self-limit their ability to learn. It’s pretty straightforward—just read books and talk to people.
Arthur C. Clarke: “A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” That’s really true.
That was the reason for the US Manhattan Project. People think it was a government project. I’d like to emphasize that it was a creation of the physics community more than it was the government. The government supported it, but it was a decision and creation from the physics community. Without them, it would not have happened.
The only true currency is time.331
The power of speed is underappreciated as a competitive factor.
The real way you actually achieve intellectual property (IP) protection is by innovating fast.
It’s rare that something will ever get done faster than the schedule.
I do have a small foundation. I am giving some money away. But generally, if there’s a way to fix something within the market system, building a company is the better way to do it.
Sometimes people equate wealth with consumption, but they’re obviously not the same thing. Consumption is fun, but capital allocation is a job.
It is insanely hard to build and ship useful products to a large number of people.
Work on things that you find interesting, fulfilling, and that contribute some good to the rest of society.712
The final thing I would encourage you to do is to take risks. Especially before you have kids and other obligations. As you get older, your obligations start to increase.
It is easiest to start before you have those obligations. Take risks now, and do something bold. You won’t regret it.726
The actual economy is stuff. Goods and services. What limits the output of goods and services? The limiter is labor.
Money is just a database.
Even capital is distilled labor, so the limiting factor for the economy is labor.
We can massively increase labor by building humanoid robots. If you remove labor as the limiting factor for the economy, it’s not clear that an economy in the traditional sense has any meaning anymore because you have no constraint on goods and services. There will be no shortage of goods and services.736
In the future, the only forms of scarcity will be artificial scarcity (where we decide to make it scarce, like a particular piece of art) or unique items like a particular home in an exact location.
There will be humanoid robots throughout factories. Cars will also be entirely automatic. Anywhere intelligence can be applied will be automated. That’s maybe 2033–2043.742
I recommend reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. The premise is protecting society through a dark age. My guess is there will be another dark age at some point.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams This is in fact a book of philosophy, disguised as a silly humor book.
The answer is easy once you can properly formulate the question.1016
I know it’s cliché, but The Lord of the Rings is my favorite series ever.
Foundation series by Isaac Asimov
I’m not predicting that we’re about to enter a dark age, but that there’s some probability we will, particularly if there’s a third world war. We want to make sure that there’s enough of us as a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring civilization back and perhaps shorten the length of a dark age.
What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill This is a close match for my philosophy.1032
On War by Carl von Clausewitz There should be a chapter saying, “If you have a decisive technology advantage, you can actually win with minimal casualties.”
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia Read through the condensed version of the Encyclopedia Britannica; I’d recommend that.1050
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark A compelling guide to the challenges and choices in our quest for a great future of life, intelligence, and consciousness—on Earth and beyond.1052
There are many ways to dive more deeply into Elon’s ideas. Go to ElonMuskBook.org for bonus chapters, audiobooks, interviews, and more.