Elon Musk

PayPal went public in early 2002 and was acquired by eBay that July for $1.5 billion. Musk’s payout was around $250 million.

At 7:30 on the morning of June 28, 1971, Maye Musk gave birth to an eight-pound, eight-ounce boy with a very large head.

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 $

In the early days of Henry Ford and other pioneers, carmakers did most of the work in-house. But beginning in the 1970s, the companies spun off their parts-makers and upped their reliance on suppliers. From 1970 to 2010, they went from producing 90 percent of the intellectual property in their vehicles to about 50 percent. That made them dependent

As his team grew, Musk infused it with his tolerance for risk and reality-bending willfulness. “If you were negative or thought something couldn’t be done, you were not invited to the next meeting,” Mueller recalls. “He just wanted people who would make things happen.”

Personal networks are more complex than digital ones.

When I was reporting on Steve Jobs, his partner Steve Wozniak said that the big question to ask was Did he have to be so mean? So rough and cruel? So drama-addicted? When I turned the question back to Woz at the end of my reporting, he said that if he had run Apple, he would have been kinder. He would have treated everyone there like family and not

“Live dangerously—carefully.”

Will artificial intelligence develop in ways that benefit and protect humanity, or will machines develop intentions of their own and become a threat to humans?