- To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?
——Elon Musk, Saturday Night Live, May 8, 2021
PROLOGUE: Muse of Fire
Near the end of the first week, the boys were divided into two groups and told to attack each other. “It was so insane, mind-blowing,” Musk recalls. Every few years, one of the kids would die. The counselors would recount such stories as warnings. “Don’t be stupid like that dumb fuck who died last year,” they would say. “Don’t be the weak dumb fuck.”
这种氛围有毒“I realized by then that if someone bullied me, I could punch them very hard in the nose, and then they wouldn’t bully me again. They might beat the shit out of me, but if I had punched them hard in the nose, they wouldn’t come after me again.”
勇于挑战，哈哈哈In the emergency room, when they were preparing to stitch him up, he resisted being treated until he was promised that the dog would not be punished. “You’re not going to kill him, are you?” Elon asked. They swore that they wouldn’t. In recounting the story, Musk pauses and stares vacantly for a very long time. “Then they damn well shot the dog dead.”
“When they got finished, I couldn’t even recognize his face. It was such a swollen ball of flesh that you could barely see his eyes.” He was taken to the hospital and was out of school for a week. Decades later, he was still getting corrective surgery to try to fix the tissues inside his nose.
生存条件恶劣
这人比乔布斯惨多了When Elon finally came home from the hospital, his father berated him. “I had to stand for an hour as he yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless,” Elon recalls. Kimbal, who had to watch the tirade, says it was the worst memory of his life. “My father just lost it, went ballistic, as he often did. He had zero compassion.”
At one point he drove a Rolls-Royce, built a wilderness lodge with his boys, and got raw emeralds from a mine owner in Zambia, until that business collapsed.
我收回之前的话，马斯克老爸之前居然是开劳斯莱斯的！！！He proudly concedes that he exercised “an extremely stern streetwise autocracy” with his boys. Then he makes a point of adding, “Elon would later apply that same stern autocracy to himself and others.”
This emotional shutoff valve could make him callous, but it also made him a risk-seeking innovator. “He learned to shut down fear,” she says. “If you turn off fear, then maybe you have to turn off other things, like joy or empathy.”
关闭了恐惧的同时，其他也会被关闭“I just don’t think he knows how to savor success and smell the flowers,” says Claire Boucher, the artist known as Grimes, who is the mother of three of his other children. “I think he got conditioned in childhood that life is pain.” Musk agrees. “Adversity shaped me,” he says. “My pain threshold became very high.”
跟乔布斯人生是修行，是一样的道理“I think he wasn’t conscious of how that still affected him, because he thought of it as something in his childhood,” Riley says. “But he’s retained a childlike, almost stunted side. Inside the man, he’s still there as a child, a child standing in front of his dad.”
But the more I encountered it, the more I came to believe that his sense of mission was part of what drove him. While other entrepreneurs struggled to develop a worldview, he developed a cosmic view.
别人在世界观，Elon已经开始宇宙观“Elon wants risk for its own sake,” says Peter Thiel, who became his partner in the early days of PayPal. “He seems to enjoy it, indeed at times be addicted to it.”
对风险上瘾When he faced tortuous challenges, the strain would often keep him awake at night and make him vomit. But it also energized him. “He is a drama magnet,” says Kimbal. “That’s his compulsion, the theme of his life.”
“I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode,” he told me, “which it has been in for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life.”
其实他没有什么安全感That April, he snuck away to the Hawaiian house of his mentor Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, accompanied by the actress Natasha Bassett, an occasional girlfriend. He had been offered a board seat at Twitter, but over the weekend he concluded that wasn’t enough. It was in his nature to want total control. So he decided he would make a hostile bid to buy the company outright.
原来Larry Ellison是Elon的朋友和导师
Chapter 1: Adventurers
The loss of his farm instilled in him a populism, and he became active in a movement known as the Social Credit Party, which advocated giving citizens free credit notes they could use like currency. The movement had a conservative fundamentalist streak tinged with anti-Semitism. Its first leader in Canada decried a “perversion of cultural ideals” because “a disproportionate number of Jews occupy positions of control.” Haldeman rose to become chair of the party’s national council.
原来家庭基因也有民粹With his quirky conservative populist views, Haldeman came to believe that the Canadian government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone soft. So in 1950, he decided to move to South Africa, which was still ruled by a white apartheid regime. They took apart the Bellanca, crated it, and boarded a freighter for Cape Town. Haldeman decided he wanted to live inland, so they took off toward Johannesburg, where most of the white citizens spoke English rather than Afrikaans. But as they flew over nearby Pretoria, the lavender jacaranda flowers were in bloom, and Haldeman announced, “This is where we’ll stay.”
离开加拿大去了南非，任性的选择Joshua Haldeman’s risk-taking eventually caught up with him. He was killed when a person he was teaching to fly hit a power line, causing the plane to flip and crash. His grandson Elon was three at the time. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” he says. “Risk energized him.”
风险让人清醒，跟蝙蝠侠3从底层爬出一样，需要风险Errol, who never had an ownership stake in the mine, expanded his trade by importing raw emeralds and having them cut in Johannesburg. “Many people came to me with stolen parcels,” he says. “On trips overseas I would sell emeralds to jewelers. It was a cloak-and-dagger thing, because none of it was legal.” After producing profits of roughly $210,000, his emerald business collapsed in the 1980s when the Russians created an artificial emerald in the lab. He lost all of his emerald earnings.
原来是走失祖母绿The night of the wedding, Errol and Maye took an inexpensive flight to Europe for their honeymoon. In France, he bought copies of Playboy, which was banned in South Africa, and lay on the small hotel bed looking at them, much to Maye’s annoyance. Their fights turned bitter. When they got back to Pretoria, she thought of trying to get out of the marriage. But she soon became nauseated from morning sickness. She had become pregnant on the second night of their honeymoon, in the town of Nice. “It was clear that marrying him had been a mistake,” she recalls, “but now it was impossible to undo.”
好唏嘘的故事
Chapter 2：A Mind of His Own，Pretoria, the 1970s
“Ever since I was a kid, if I start to think about something hard, then all of my sensory systems turn off,” he says. “I can’t see or hear or anything. I’m using my brain to compute, not for incoming information.” The other kids would jump up and down and wave their arms in his face to see if they could summon back his attention. But it didn’t work. “It’s best not to try to break through when he has that vacant stare,” his mother says.
也是一种另类的专注方式“When I was a child, there’s one thing I said,” he recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone during a tumultuous period in his love life in 2017. “ ‘I never want to be alone.’ That’s what I would say. ‘I don’t want to be alone.’ ”
“He has this fierce determination that blows your mind and was sometimes frightening, and still is.”
When he was eight, he focused his determination on getting a motorcycle. Yes, at age eight. He would stand next to his father’s chair and make his case, over and over. When his father picked up a newspaper and ordered him to be quiet, Elon would continue to stand there. “It just was extraordinary to watch,” Kimbal says. “He would stand there silently, then resume his argument, then stand silent.” This happened every evening for weeks. His father finally caved and got Elon a blue-and-gold 50cc Yamaha.
原来也是富家子弟！！！“I took people literally when they said something,” he says, “and it was only by reading books that I began to learn that people did not always say what they really meant.” He had a preference for things that were more precise, such as engineering, physics, and coding.
Often she would have to travel on a modeling job or to give a nutrition lecture, leaving the kids at home. “I never felt guilty about working full-time, because I didn’t have a choice,” she says. “My children had to be responsible for themselves.” The freedom taught them to be self-reliant. When they faced a problem, she had a stock response: “You’ll figure it out.” As Kimbal recalls, “Mom wasn’t soft and cuddly, and she was always working, but that was a gift for us.”
母亲是支柱Every few years, he would initiate another court action and then drop it. When Tosca recounts these tales, she begins to cry. “I remember Mom just sitting there, sobbing on the couch. I didn’t know what to do. All I could do was to hold her.”
他老爸真是个混蛋
Chapter 3: Life with Father, Pretoria, the 1980s
Why did he decide to move in with his father? Elon sighs and stays silent for almost a minute when I ask this. “My dad was lonely, so lonely, and I felt I should keep him company,” he finally says. “He used psychological wiles on me.”
He owned a gold-colored convertible Rolls-Royce Corniche and, more importantly, two sets of encyclopedias, lots of books, and a variety of engineering tools.
“Why did he choose to go live with someone who inflicted pain?” Maye Musk asked forty years later. “Why didn’t he prefer a happy home?” Then she paused for a moment. “Maybe that’s just who he is.”
Elon developed a reputation for being the most fearless. When the cousins went to a movie and people were making noise, he would be the one to go over and tell them to be quiet, even if they were much bigger. “It’s a big theme for him to never have his decisions guided by fear,” Peter recalls. “That was definitely present even when he was a child.”
He was also the most competitive of the cousins. One time when they were riding their bicycles from Pretoria to Johannesburg, Elon was way out in front, pedaling fast. So the others pulled over and hitched a ride in a pickup truck. When Elon rejoined them, he was so angry that he started hitting them. It was a race, he said, and they had cheated.
支撑我买Tesla股票，哈哈哈“He is quick to grasp new mathematical concepts,” his teacher noted. But there was a constant refrain in the report card comments: “He works extremely slowly, either because he dreams or is doing what he should not.” “He seldom finishes anything. Next year he must concentrate on his work and not daydream during class.” “His compositions show a lively imagination, but he doesn’t always finish in time.” His average grade before he got to high school was 83 out of 100.
There he got excellent grades in all but two subjects: Afrikaans (he got a 61 out of 100 his final year) and religious instruction (“not extending himself,” the teacher noted). “I wasn’t really going to put a lot of effort into things I thought were meaningless,” he says. “I would rather be reading or playing video games.”
Reading remained Musk’s psychological retreat. Sometimes he would immerse himself in books all afternoon and most of the night, nine hours at a stretch. When the family went to someone’s house, he would disappear into their host’s library. When they went into town, he would wander off and later be found at a bookstore, sitting on the floor, in his own world. He was also deeply into comics. The single-minded passion of the superheroes impressed him. “They’re always trying to save the world, with their underpants on the outside or these skin-tight iron suits, which is really pretty strange when you think about it,” he says. “But they are trying to save the world.”
Chapter 4: The Seeker, Pretoria, the 1980s
She would tell her class stories from the Bible, and he would question them. “What do you mean, the waters parted?” he asked. “That’s not possible.” When she told the story of Jesus feeding the crowd with loaves and fishes, he countered that things cannot materialize out of nothing. Having been baptized, he was expected to take communion, but he began questioning that as well. “I took the blood and body of Christ, which is weird when you’re a kid,” he says. “I said, ‘What the hell is this? Is this a weird metaphor for cannibalism?’ ” Maye decided to let Elon stay home and read on Sunday mornings.
Fortunately, he was saved by science fiction, that wellspring of wisdom for game-playing kids with intellects on hyperdrive. He plowed through the entire sci-fi section in his school and local libraries, then pushed the librarians to order more.
科幻使人进步，哈哈哈“Foundation Series & Zeroth Law are fundamental to creation of SpaceX.”
The science fiction book that most influenced his wonder years was Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The jaunty and wry tale helped shape Musk’s philosophy and added a dollop of droll humor to his serious mien. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide,” he says, “helped me out of my existential depression, and I soon realized it was amazingly funny in all sorts of subtle ways.”
银河系漫游指南！！！“I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe,” he says.
Musk saw his first computer around the time he turned eleven. He was in a shopping mall in Johannesburg, and he stood there for minutes just staring at it. “I had read computer magazines,” he says, “but I had never actually seen a computer before.” As with the motorcycle, he hounded his father to get him one. Errol was bizarrely averse to computers, claiming they were good only for time-wasting games, not engineering. So Elon saved his money from odd jobs and bought a Commodore VIC-20, one of the earliest personal computers. It could play games such as Galaxian and Alpha Blaster, in which a player attempts to protect Earth from alien invaders.
1982年就看到电脑，那还是非常早的！！！The computer came with a course in how to program in BASIC that involved sixty hours of lessons. “I did it in three days, barely sleeping,” he remembers. A few months later, he tore out an ad for a conference on personal computers at a university and told his father he wanted to attend. Again, his father balked. It was an expensive seminar, about $400, and not meant for children. Elon replied that it was “essential” and just stood next to his father staring. Over the next few days, Elon would pull the ad out of his pocket and renew his demand. Finally his father was able to talk the university into giving a discounted price for Elon to stand in the back. When Errol came to pick him up at the end, he found Elon engaging with three of the professors. “This boy must get a new computer,” one of them declared.
当时Elon才11岁诶！！！He then came up with a grander idea: the cousins could create a video-game arcade of their own. “We knew exactly which games were the most popular, so it seemed like a sure thing,” Elon says. He figured out how the cash flow could finance the machines. But when the boys tried to get the city permits, they were told they needed someone over eighteen to sign the application. Kimbal, who had filled out the thirty pages of forms, decided that they couldn’t ask Errol. “He was just too hard of a human,” Kimbal says. “So we went to Russ and Pete’s dad, and he flipped out. That basically shut the whole thing down.”
Chapter 5: Escape Velocity, Leaving South Africa, 1989
“When Elon’s in a good mood, it’s like the coolest, funnest thing in the world. And when he’s in a bad mood, he goes really dark, and you’re just walking on eggshells.”
Elon: “I don’t know how he went from being great at engineering to believing in witchcraft. But he somehow made that evolution.” Errol can be very forceful and occasionally convincing. “He changes reality around him,” Kimbal says. “He will literally make up things, but he actually believes his own false reality.”
“I would see shades of these horrible stories Elon told me surface in his own behavior,” says Justine, Elon’s first wife. “It made me realize how difficult it is not to be shaped by what we grew up with, even when that’s not what we want.” Every now and then, she dared to say something like “You’re turning into your father.” She explains, “It was our code phrase to warn him that he was going into the realm of darkness.”
精神不稳定，投资有风险He first tried to get U.S. citizenship on the grounds that his mother’s father had been born in Minnesota, but that failed because his mother had been born in Canada and had never claimed U.S. citizenship. So he concluded that getting to Canada might be an easier first step. He went to the Canadian consulate on his own, got application forms for a passport, and filled them out not only for himself but for his mother, brother, and sister (but not father). The approvals came through in late May 1989.
“You’ll be back in a few months,” Elon says his father told him contemptuously. “You’ll never be successful.”
Chapter 6: Canada, 1989
She sent back scouting reports to Tosca. Vancouver was too cold and rainy, she wrote. Montreal was exciting, but people there spoke French. Toronto, she concluded, was where they should go.
家族里探险的基因Tosca got a job at a hamburger joint, Elon as an intern in Microsoft’s Toronto office, and Maye at the university, a modeling agency, and as a diet consultant. “I worked every day and also four nights a week,” she says. “I took off one afternoon, Sunday, to do the laundry and get groceries. I didn’t even know what my kids were doing, because I was hardly at home.”
He had no friends or social life in Toronto, and he spent most of his time reading or working on the computer. Tosca, on the contrary, was a saucy teenager, eager to go out. “I’m coming with you,” Elon would declare, not wanting to be lonely. “No you’re not,” she would reply. But when he insisted, she ordered, “You have to stay ten feet away from me at all times.” He did. He would walk behind her and her friends, carrying a book to read whenever they went into a club or party.
Chapter 7: Queen’s Kingston, Ontario, 1990–1991
He narrowed his choices to two universities that were an easy drive from Toronto: Waterloo and Queen’s. “Waterloo was definitely better for engineering, but it didn’t seem great from a social standpoint,” he says. “There were few girls there.” He felt he knew computer science and engineering as well as any of the professors at both places, but he desperately desired a social life. “I didn’t want to spend my undergraduate time with a bunch of dudes.” So in the fall of 1990 he enrolled at Queen’s.
他不希望孤独，同时也认为自己有很好的编程技巧One they picked was Peter Nicholson, the executive in charge of strategic planning at Scotiabank. Nicholson was an engineer with a master’s degree in physics and a PhD in math. When Kimbal got through to him, he agreed to have lunch with the boys. Their mother took them shopping at Eaton’s department store, where the purchase of a $99 suit got you a free shirt and tie. At lunch they discussed philosophy and physics and the nature of the universe. Nicholson offered them summer jobs, inviting Elon to work directly with him on his three-person strategic planning team.
认识大佬Nicholson, then forty-nine, and Elon had fun together solving math puzzles and weird equations. “I was interested in the philosophical side of physics and how it related to reality,” Nicholson says. “I didn’t have a lot of other people to talk to about these things.” They also discussed what had become Musk’s passion: space travel.
Nicholson says that Scotiabank was navigating the Latin American debt situation using its own methods, which worked better. “He came away with an impression that the bank was a lot dumber than in fact it was,” Nicholson says. “But that was a good thing, because it gave him a healthy disrespect for the financial industry and the audacity to eventually start what became PayPal.”
蔑视权威
Chapter 8: Penn，Philadelphia, 1992–1994
He decided to major in physics because, like his father, he was drawn to engineering. The essence of being an engineer, he felt, was to address any problem by drilling down to the most fundamental tenets of physics. He also decided to pursue a joint degree in business. “I was concerned that if I didn’t study business, I would be forced to work for someone who did,” he says. “My goal was to engineer products by having a feel for the physics and never have to work for a boss with a business degree.”
这里很关键
理想是：“My goal was to engineer products by having a feel for the physics and never have to work for a boss with a business degree.”
改成我的理想就是：“My goal was to build products by having a feel for the design and never have to work for a boss with a business degree.”Ren recalls that Musk focused on the three areas that would shape his career. Whether he was calibrating the force of gravity or analyzing the properties of materials, he would discuss with Ren how the laws of physics applied to building rockets. “He kept talking about making a rocket that could go to Mars,” Ren recalls. “Of course, I didn’t pay much attention, because I thought he was fantasizing.”
Musk also focused on electric cars. He and Ren would grab lunch from one of the food trucks and sit on the campus lawn, where Musk would read academic papers on batteries. California had just passed a requirement mandating that 10 percent of vehicles by 2003 had to be electric. “I want to go make that happen,” Musk said.
Musk also became convinced that solar power, which in 1994 was just taking off, was the best path toward sustainable energy. His senior paper was titled “The Importance of Being Solar.” He was motivated not just by the dangers of climate change but also by the fact that fossil fuel reserves would start to dwindle. “Society will soon have no option but to focus on renewable power sources,” he wrote. His final page showed a “power station of the future,” involving a satellite with mirrors that would concentrate sunlight onto solar panels and send the resulting electricity back to Earth via a microwave beam. The professor gave him a grade of 98, saying it was a “very interesting and well written paper, except the last figure that comes out of the blue.”
Although Elon loved the vibe of the parties, he never got fully immersed in them. “I was stone cold sober at the time,” he says. “Adeo would get wasted. I’d be banging on his door and say, like, ‘Dude, you’ve got to come up and manage the party.’ I ended up being the one who had to keep an eye on things.”
Ressi later marveled that Musk usually seemed a bit detached. “He enjoyed being around a party but not fully in it. The only thing he binged on was video games.” Despite all of their partying, he understood that Musk was fundamentally alienated and withdrawn, like an observer from a different planet trying to learn the motions of sociability. “I wish Elon knew how to be a little happier,” he says.
Chapter 9: Go West, Silicon Valley, 1994–1995
At Ivy League schools in the 1990s, ambitious students were tugged either east toward the gilded realms of Wall Street banking or west toward the tech utopianism and entrepreneurial zeal of Silicon Valley. At Penn, Musk received some internship offers from Wall Street, all lucrative, but finance did not interest him. He felt that bankers and lawyers did not contribute much to society. Besides, he disliked the students he met in business classes. Instead, he was drawn to Silicon Valley. It was the decade of rational exuberance, when one could just slap a .com onto any fantasy and wait for the thunder of Porsches to descend from Sand Hill Road with venture capitalists waving checks.
去硅谷是正确的选择By day he worked at Pinnacle Research Institute, a twenty-person group that had modest Defense Department contracts to study a “supercapacitor” developed by its founder. A capacitor is a device that can briefly hold an electric charge and discharge it quickly, and Pinnacle thought that it could make one that was powerful enough to provide energy for electric cars and space-based weapons. In a paper he wrote at the end of the summer, Musk declared, “It is important to note that the Ultracapacitor is not simply an incremental improvement, but a radically new technology.”
In the evening he worked at a small Palo Alto company called Rocket Science, which made video games. When he showed up at their building one night and asked for a summer job, they gave him a problem they hadn’t been able to solve: how to coax a computer to multitask by reading graphics that were stored on a CD-ROM while simultaneously moving an avatar on the screen. He went on internet message boards to ask other hackers how to bypass the BIOS and joystick reader using DOS. “None of the senior engineers had been able to solve this problem, and I solved it in two weeks,” he says.
牛人白天和晚上是两份实习They were impressed and wanted him to work full-time, but he needed to graduate in order to get a U.S. work visa. In addition, he came to a realization: he had a fanatic love of video games and the skills to make money creating them, but that was not the best way to spend his life. “I wanted to have more impact,” he says.
清晰知道自己想要什么One unfortunate trend in the 1980s was that cars and computers became tightly sealed appliances. It was possible to open up and fiddle with the innards of the Apple II that Steve Wozniak designed in the late 1970s, but you couldn’t do that with the Macintosh, which Steve Jobs in 1984 made almost impossible to open. Similarly, kids in the 1970s and earlier grew up rummaging under the hoods of cars, tinkering with the carburetors, changing spark plugs, and souping up the engines. They had a fingertip-feel for valves and Valvoline. This hands-on imperative and Heathkit mindset even applied to radios and television sets; if you wanted, you could change the tubes and later the transistors and have a feel for how a circuit board worked.
这个趋势令人感受到不安This trend toward closed and sealed devices meant that most techies who came of age in the 1990s gravitated to software more than hardware. They never knew the sweet smell of a soldering iron, but they could code in ways that made circuits sing. Musk was different. He liked hardware as well as software. He could code, but he also had a feel for physical components, such as battery cells and capacitors, valves and combustion chambers, fuel pumps and fan belts.
In particular, Musk loved fiddling with cars. At the time, he owned a twenty-year-old BMW 300i, and he spent Saturdays rummaging around junkyards in Philadelphia to score the parts he needed to soup it up. It had a four-speed transmission, but he decided to upgrade it when BMW started making a five-speed. Borrowing the lift at a local repair shop, he was able, with a couple of shims and a little bit of grinding, to jam a five-speed transmission into what had been a four-speed car. “It was really able to haul ass,” he recalls.
They stopped at the just-opened Denver airport because Musk wanted to see the baggage-handling system. “He was fascinated by how they designed the robotic machines to handle the luggage without human intervention,” Ren says. But the system was a mess. Musk took away a lesson he would have to relearn when he built highly robotic Tesla factories. “It was over-automated, and they underestimated the complexity of what they were building,” he says.
他是真的喜欢制造哇Musk planned to enroll at Stanford at the end of the summer to study material science as a graduate student. Still fascinated by capacitors, he wanted to research how they might power electric cars. “The idea was to leverage advanced chip-making equipment to make a solid state ultracapacitor with enough energy density to give a car long range,” he says. But as he got closer to enrolling, he began to worry. “I figured I could spend several years at Stanford, get a PhD, and my conclusion on capacitors would be that they aren’t feasible,” he says. “Most PhDs are irrelevant. The number that actually move the needle is almost none.”
确实，大部分PHD是无关紧要的He had conceived by then a life vision that he would repeat like a mantra. “I thought about the things that will truly affect humanity,” he says. “I came up with three: the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel.” In the summer of 1995, it became clear to him that the first of these, the internet, was not going to wait for him to finish graduate school. The web had just been opened up for commercial use, and that August the browser startup Netscape went public, soaring within a day to a market value of $2.9 billion.
说明，脑机接口是后来Elon想出来的，他也在终身学习Just before the enrollment deadline for Stanford, Musk went to Toronto to get advice from Peter Nicholson of Scotiabank. Should he pursue the idea for the Virtual City Navigator, or should he start the PhD program? Nicholson, who had a PhD from Stanford, did not equivocate. “The internet revolution only comes once in a lifetime, so strike while the iron is hot,” he told Musk as they walked along the shore of Lake Ontario. “You will have lots of time to go to graduate school later if you’re still interested.” When Musk got back to Palo Alto, he told Ren he had made up his mind. “I need to put everything else on hold,” he said. “I need to catch the internet wave.”
一生只有一次的机会来临的时候，需要抓住它
毕竟学校继续会在，不用着急He actually hedged his bets. He officially enrolled at Stanford and then immediately requested a deferral. “I’ve written some software with the first internet maps and Yellow Pages directory,” he told Bill Nix, the material science professor. “I will probably fail, and if so I would like to come back.” Nix said it would not be a problem for Musk to defer his studies, but he predicted that he would never come back.
做了对冲！！！厉害的
Chapter 2: Zip2, Palo Alto, 1995–1999
After a few months, they rented an unfurnished apartment that stayed that way. “All it had was two mattresses and lots of Cocoa Puffs boxes,” says Tosca. Even after they moved in, Elon spent many nights in the office, crashing under his desk when he was exhausted from coding. “He had no pillow, he had no sleeping bag. I don’t know how he did it,” says Jim Ambras, an early employee. “Once in a while, if we had a customer meeting in the morning, I’d have to tell him to go home and shower.”
Elon工作，非常投入，值得学习“You could use your cursor and zoom in and move around the map,” says Kimbal. “That stuff is totally normal today, but it was mind-blowing to see that at the time. I think Elon and I were the first humans to see it work on the internet.” They named the company Zip2, as in “Zip to where you want to go.”
For their first meeting with potential investors, they had to take a bus up Sand Hill Road because the car their dad had given them broke down. But after word spread about the company, the VCs were asking to come to them. They bought a big frame for a computer rack and put one of their small computers inside, so that visitors would think they had a giant server. They named it “The Machine That Goes Ping,” after a Monty Python sketch. “Every time investors would come in, we showed them the tower,” Kimbal says, “and we would laugh because it made them think we were doing hardcore stuff.”
虚张声势，哈哈哈，乔布斯也用过Maye flew from Toronto to help prepare for the meetings with venture capitalists, often staying up all night at Kinko’s to print the presentations. “It was a dollar a page for color, which we could barely afford,” she says. “We would all be exhausted except Elon. He was always up late doing the coding.” When they got their first proposals from potential investors in early 1996, Maye took her boys to a nice restaurant to celebrate. “That’s the last time we’ll have to use my credit card,” she said when she paid the bill.
最后一次使用母亲的信用卡！！！真不错Mohr Davidow loved the presentation and finalized the investment. The firm also found an immigration lawyer to help the two Musks get work visas and gave them each $30,000 to purchase cars. Elon bought a 1967 Jaguar E-type. As a kid in South Africa, he had seen a picture of the car in a book on the best convertibles ever made, and he had vowed to buy one if he ever struck it rich. “It was the most beautiful car you could imagine,” he says, “but it broke down at least once a week.”
1967 Jaguar E-type这辆车确实挺好看的But he learned a lesson. “I never wanted to be a CEO,” he says, “but I learned that you could not truly be the chief technology or product officer unless you were the CEO.”
With the changes came a new strategy. Instead of marketing its product directly to businesses and their customers, Zip2 focused on selling its software to big newspapers so they could make their own local directories. This made sense; newspapers already had sales forces that were knocking on the doors of businesses to sell them advertising and classifieds. Knight-Ridder, the New York Times, Pulitzer, and Hearst newspapers signed up. Executives from the first two joined the Zip2 board. Editor & Publisher magazine ran a cover story titled “Newspaperdom’s New Superhero: Zip2,” reporting that the company had created “a new suite of software structures that would enable individual newspapers to quickly mount large-scale city guide-type directories.”
这个销售策略非常关键，如何赚钱From the very beginning of his career, Musk was a demanding manager, contemptuous of the concept of work-life balance. At Zip2 and every subsequent company, he drove himself relentlessly all day and through much of the night, without vacations, and he expected others to do the same. His only indulgence was allowing breaks for intense video-game binges. The Zip2 team won second place in a national Quake competition. They would have come in first, he says, but one of them crashed his computer by pushing it too hard.
不顾工作生活平衡“It’s not your job to make people on your team love you,” he said at a SpaceX executive session years later. “In fact, that’s counterproductive.”
不同的理念He was toughest on Kimbal. “I love, love, love my brother very much, but working with him was hard,” Kimbal says.
“When we had intense stress, we just didn’t notice anyone else around us,” says Kimbal. He later admitted that Elon was right about Zip2. “It was a shitty name.”
True product people have a compulsion to sell directly to consumers, without middlemen muddying things up. Musk was that way. He became frustrated by Zip2’s strategy of relegating itself to being an unbranded vendor to the newspaper industry. “We wound up beholden to the papers,” Musk says. He wanted to buy the domain name “city.com” and become a consumer destination again, competing with Yahoo and AOL.
“Great things will never happen with VCs or professional managers,” Musk told Inc. Magazine. “They don’t have the creativity or the insight.” One of the Mohr Davidow partners, Derek Proudian, was installed as interim CEO and tasked with selling the company. “This is your first company,” he told Musk. “Let’s find an acquirer and make some money, so you can do your second, third, and fourth company.”
这位临时CEO的说法，在世俗眼里是正确的，但在真正想打造公司的眼里，不对In January 1999, less than four years after Elon and Kimbal launched Zip2, Proudian called them into his office and told them that Compaq Computer, which was seeking to juice up its AltaVista search engine, had offered $307 million in cash. The brothers had split their 12 percent ownership stake 60–40, so Elon at age twenty-seven walked away with $22 million and Kimbal with $15 million. Elon was astonished when the check arrived at his apartment. “My bank account went from, like, $5,000 to $22,005,000,” he says.
27岁，就已经是千万美金身家了！！！Celebrity was enticing for a kid who had grown up with no friends. “I’d like to be on the cover of Rolling Stone,” he told CNN. But he would end up having a conflicted relationship with wealth. “I could go and buy one of the islands of the Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build and create a new company,” he said. “I haven’t spent all my winnings. I’m going to put almost all of it back to a new game.”
新的游戏，新的公司