Elon Musk

Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.

The filmmaker Jonah Nolan, who was documenting the mission, had a maxim that the most ironic outcome is the most likely. Musk added his corollary: “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.”

“This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers.” That’s why America could no longer build things like high-speed rail or rockets that go to the moon. “When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.”

Machine-learning systems generally need a goal or metric that guides them as they train themselves. Musk, who liked to manage by decreeing what metrics should be paramount, gave them their lodestar: the number of miles that cars with Tesla Full Self-Driving were able to travel without a human intervening. “I want the latest data on miles per interv

“I’m a big believer that a small number of exceptional people who are highly motivated can do better than a large number of people who are pretty good and moderately motivated,”

best. Even if I don’t do anything but show up, they’ll look at me and say that at least I wasn’t spending all night partying.”

liked. “What Twitter needs is a fire-breathing dragon,” he said after that meeting, “and Parag is not that.”

Gladiator: “Are you not entertained? Is that not why you are here?”

Unplug at times. “I had to stop playing because it was destroying my marriage,” Kimbal says. Shivon Zilis also deleted Polytopia from her phone. So did Grimes. And, for a while, Musk did so as well. “I had to take Polytopia off my phone because it was taking up too many brain cycles,” he says. “I started dreaming about Polytopia.” But the lesson ab