Top 120 Ashlee Vance Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Do or die but don’t give up.”

— Ashlee Vance

2. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook engineer, told me. “That sucks.”

— Ashlee Vance

3. “As Page puts it, “Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not.” It’s a principle he’s tried to apply at Google.”

— Ashlee Vance

4. “Soy un hombre complicado con necesidades muy simples pero muy concretas.”

— Ashlee Vance

5. “You’re standing on the surface of the Earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?”

— Ashlee Vance

6. “Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not.”

— Ashlee Vance

7. “The longer you wait to fire someone the longer it has been since you should have fired them,’” Spikes said.”

— Ashlee Vance

8. “Either you’re trying to make something spectacular with no compromises or you’re not. And if you’re not, Musk considers you a failure.”

— Ashlee Vance

9. “My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail.” Early.”

— Ashlee Vance

10. “And by recruiting hundreds of bright, self-motivated people, SpaceX has maximized the power of the individual. One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together.”

— Ashlee Vance

11. “If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules.”

— Ashlee Vance

12. “He points out that one of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask,” Musk said. “Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy. I came to the conclusion that really we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask.” The.”

— Ashlee Vance

13. “I would like to die thinking that humanity has a bright future,” he said.”

— Ashlee Vance

14. “I think there are probably too many smart people pursuing Internet stuff, finance, and law,” Musk said on the way. “That is part of the reason why we haven’t seen as much innovation.”

— Ashlee Vance

15. “As his ex-wife, Justine, put it, “He does what he wants, and he is relentless about it. It’s Elon’s world, and the rest of us live in it.”

— Ashlee Vance

16. “Maybe I read too many comics as a kid,” Musk said. “In the comics, it always seems like they are trying to save the world. It seemed like one should try to make the world a better place because the inverse makes no sense.”

— Ashlee Vance

17. “In late June, she posted a quotation from Moby without any additional context: “There’s no such thing as a well-adjusted public figure. If they were well adjusted they wouldn’t try to be a public figure.”

— Ashlee Vance

18. “I would like to allocate more time to dating, though. I need to find a girlfriend. That’s why I need to carve out just a little more time. I think maybe even another five to ten – how much time does a woman want a week? Maybe ten hours? That’s kind of the minimum? I don’t know.”

— Ashlee Vance

19. “There needs to be a reason for a grade. I’d rather play video games, write software, and read books than try and get an A if there’s no point in getting an A.”

— Ashlee Vance

20. “I don’t want to be the person who ever has to compete with Elon. You might as well leave the business and find something else fun to do. He will outmaneuver you, outthink you, and out-execute you.”

— Ashlee Vance

21. “I think the probability of us discovering another top-one-hundred-type invention gets smaller and smaller,” Huebner told me in an interview. “Innovation is a finite resource.”

— Ashlee Vance

22. “While the good times have been well chronicled, the subsequent bad times have been – unsurprisingly – ignored. It’s more fun to reminiscence on irrational exuberance than the mess that gets left behind.”

— Ashlee Vance

23. “SpaceX is in this for the long haul and, come hell or high water, we are going to make this work.” Musk.”

— Ashlee Vance

24. “Despite being an engineer, Musk’s father was something of a Luddite and dismissive of the machine. Elon recounted that “he said it was just for games and that you’d never be able to do real engineering on it. I just said, ‘Whatever.”

— Ashlee Vance

25. “Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SolarCity – they are all expressions of Musk. SpaceX is Musk.”

— Ashlee Vance

26. “Jobs. Musk is a sci-fi version of P. T. Barnum who has gotten extraordinarily rich by preying on people’s fear and self-hatred. Buy a Tesla. Forget about the mess you’ve made of the planet for a while.”

— Ashlee Vance

27. “Buy a Tesla. Forget about the mess you’ve made of the planet for a while.”

— Ashlee Vance

28. “People had thrown money at green technology because it seemed like the right thing to do, not because it made business sense.”

— Ashlee Vance

29. “Musk had spent months studying the aerospace industry and the physics behind it. From Cantrell and others, he’d borrowed Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion, along with several more seminal texts.”

— Ashlee Vance

30. “The company would pick a plan of attack, and when it failed at something, it failed fast and then tried a new approach.”

— Ashlee Vance

31. “If there was a way that I could not eat, so I could work more, I would not eat. I wish there was a way to get nutrients without sitting down for a meal.”

— Ashlee Vance

32. “I calculated the backstop value, and it was something like fifty cents on the dollar, while the actual debt was trading at twenty-five cents,” Musk said.”

— Ashlee Vance

33. “One thing that Musk holds in the highest regard is resolve, and he respects people who continue on after being told no.”

— Ashlee Vance

34. “He would place this urgency that he expected the revenue in ten years to be ten million dollars a day and that every day we were slower to achieve our goals was a day of missing out on that money.” Musk.”

— Ashlee Vance

35. “What’s fascinating is that Musk remains willing to lose it all.”

— Ashlee Vance

36. “From that point on, the trek from California to the test site became known as the Texas Cattle Haul. The SpaceX engineers would work for ten days straight, come back to California for a weekend, and then head back. To ease the burden of travel, Musk sometimes let them use his private jet. “It carried six people,” Mueller said. “Well, seven if someone sat in the toilet, which happened all the time.”

— Ashlee Vance

37. “There is a fundamental problem with regulators. If a regulator agrees to change a rule and something bad happens, they could easily lose their career. Whereas if they change a rule and something good happens, they don’t even get a reward.”

— Ashlee Vance

38. “Like many an engineer or physicist, Musk will pause while fishing around for exact phrasing, and he’ll often go rumbling down an esoteric, scientific rabbit hole without providing any helping hands or simplified explanations along the way.”

— Ashlee Vance

39. “It bothers Musk a bit that his kids won’t suffer like he did. He feels that the suffering helped to make him who he is and gave him extra reserves of strength and will.”

— Ashlee Vance

40. “He goes into his brain, and then you just see he is in another world,” Maye said. “He still does that. Now I just leave him be because I know he is designing a new rocket or something.”

— Ashlee Vance

41. “Every time he’s fired someone and taken their job, he’s delivered on whatever the project was.”

— Ashlee Vance

42. “To me, Elon is the shining example of how Silicon Valley might be able to reinvent itself and be more relevant than chasing these quick IPOs and focusing on getting incremental products out,” said Edward Jung, a famed software engineer and inventor. “Those things are important, but they are not enough. We need to look at different models of how to do things that are longer term in nature and where the technology is more integrated.”

— Ashlee Vance

43. “PayPal staff pioneered techniques in fighting online fraud that have formed the basis of software used by the CIA and FBI to track terrorists and of software used by the world’s largest banks to combat crime. This collection of super-bright employees has become known as the PayPal Mafia – more or less the current ruling class of Silicon Valley – and Musk is its most famous and successful member.”

— Ashlee Vance

44. “The way Elon talks about this is that you always need to start with the first principles of a problem. What are the physics of it? How much time will it take? How much will it cost? How much cheaper can I make it?”

— Ashlee Vance

45. “I’m not an investor. I like to make technologies real that I think are important for the future and useful in some sort of way.”

— Ashlee Vance

46. “Enough solar energy hits the Earth’s surface in about an hour to equal a year’s worth of worldwide energy consumption from all sources put together.20.”

— Ashlee Vance

47. “This left Musk searching for an industry that had tons of money and inefficiencies that he and the Internet could exploit. Musk began thinking back to his time as an intern at the Bank of Nova Scotia. His big takeaway from that job, that bankers are rich and dumb, now had the feel of a massive opportunity.”

— Ashlee Vance

48. “Both the Roadster and the Model S also take advantage of what’s known as regenerative braking, which extends the life of the brakes. During stop-and-go situations, the Tesla will brake by kicking the motor into reverse via software and slowing down the wheels instead of using brake pads and friction to clamp them down. The Tesla motor generates electricity during this process and funnels it back to the batteries, which is why electric cars get better mileage in city traffic.”

— Ashlee Vance

49. “One day, soon enough, we’ll be able to download our brains to a computer, relax, and let their algorithms take care of everything.”

— Ashlee Vance

50. “Musk sampled a handful of ideologies and then ended up more or less back where he had started, embracing the sci-fi lessons found in one of the most influential books in his life: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.”

— Ashlee Vance