Elon Musk

“I thought about the things that will truly affect humanity,” he says. “I came up with three: the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel.”

“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.”

“Elon will say crazy stuff, but every once in a while, he’ll surprise you by knowing way more than you do about your own specialty. I think a huge part of the way he motivates people are these displays of sharpness, which people just don’t expect from him, because they mistake him for a bullshitter or goofball.”

Be proactive. “I’m a little bit Canadian pacifist and reactive,” Zilis says. “My gameplay was a hundred percent reactive to what everyone else was doing, as opposed to thinking through my best strategy.” She realized that, like many women, this mirrored the way she behaved at work. Both Musk and Mark Juncosa told her that she could never win unless

Ever since he flew back from Russia and calculated the costs of building his own rockets, Musk had deployed what he called the “idiot index.” That was the ratio of the total cost of a component to the cost of its raw materials. Something with a high idiot index—say, a component that cost $1,000 when the aluminum that composed it cost only $100—was

“I know that I can take a risk as long as I’m prepared,” she says.

Pick your battles. In Polytopia, you might find yourself surrounded by six or more tribes, all taking swipes at you. If you swipe back at all of them, you’re going to lose. Musk never fully mastered that lesson, and Zilis found herself coaching him on it. “Dude, like, everyone’s swiping at you right now, but if you swipe back at too many, you’ll ru

“It was an interesting exercise in karma,” Musk says. “After I got assassinated by the PayPal coup leaders, like Caesar being stabbed in the Senate, I could have said ‘You guys, you suck.’ But I didn’t. If I’d done that, Founders Fund wouldn’t have come through in 2008 and SpaceX would be dead. I’m not into astrology or shit like that. But karma ma

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer,” Jobs once explained. “Nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.”