Top 120 Ashlee Vance Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If you told him that you made a particular choice because ‘it was the standard way things had always been done,’ he’d kick you out of a meeting fast.”

— Ashlee Vance

52. “Tesla had done a decent job of keeping its employee costs down. It hired the kid fresh out of Stanford for $45,000 rather than the proven guy who probably didn’t want to work that hard anyway for $120,000.”

— Ashlee Vance

53. “When you realize that the Volkswagen sign-and-drive “event” is code for “we’re making the experience of buying a car slightly less miserable than usual,” you’ll start to appreciate just how low the automotive industry has sunk.”

— Ashlee Vance

54. “That’s my lesson for taking a vacation: vacations will kill you.”

— Ashlee Vance

55. “In the years that followed, the goal went from taking huge risks to create new industries and grand new ideas, to chasing easier money by entertaining consumers and pumping out simple apps and advertisements. “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.” Silicon Valley began to look an awful lot like Hollywood.”

— Ashlee Vance

56. “I’m not sure why I’d want to talk about extremely sad events. It does no good for the future. If you’ve got other kids and obligations, then wallowing in sadness does no good for anyone around you. I’m not sure what should be done in such situations.”

— Ashlee Vance

57. “Elon’s mind was always way beyond the present moment,” he said. “You could see that he was a step or three ahead of everyone else and one hundred percent committed to what we were doing.”

— Ashlee Vance

58. “The Haldemans had a laissez-faire approach to raising their children, which would extend over the generations to Musk. Their kids were never punished, as Joshua believed they would intuit their way to proper behavior.”

— Ashlee Vance

59. “Tesla had transformed the car into a gadget – a device that actually got better after you bought it.”

— Ashlee Vance

60. “Everything he does is fast,” Brogan said. “He pees fast. It’s like a fire hose – three seconds and out. He’s authentically in a hurry.”

— Ashlee Vance

61. “I came very close to dying,” Musk said. “That’s my lesson for taking a vacation: vacations will kill you.”

— Ashlee Vance

62. “Money is not his motivation, and, quite frankly, I think it just happens for him,” Justine said. “It’s just there. He knows he can generate it.”

— Ashlee Vance

63. “The media reports from the day described the car as the love child of an Aston Martin and a Maserati. In reality, the sedan barely held together. It still had the base structure of a Mercedes CLS, although no one in the press knew that, and some of the body panels and the hood were stuck to the frame with magnets. “They could just slide the hood right off,” said Bruce Leak, a Tesla owner invited to attend the event. “It wasn’t really attached.”

— Ashlee Vance

64. “Musk delved deeply into how solar cells work and the various compounds that can make them more efficient. He concluded the paper with a drawing of the “power station of the future.” It depicted a pair of giant solar arrays in space – each four kilometers in width – sending their juice down to Earth via microwave beams to a receiving antenna with a seven-kilometer diameter. Musk received a 98 on what his professor deemed a “very interesting and well written paper.”

— Ashlee Vance

65. “Lo que Musk no toleraba eran las excusas o la falta de un plan de ataque claro.”

— Ashlee Vance

66. “I may have been optimistic with respect to the timing on some of these things, but I didn’t over-promise on the outcome,” Musk told me during an interview after the Model S launch. “I have done everything I said I was going to do.”

— Ashlee Vance

67. “He’s been known to obsess over typos in e-mails to the point that he could not see past the errors and read the actual content of the messages. Even in social settings, Musk might get up from the dinner table without a word of explanation to head outside and look at the stars, simply because he’s not willing to suffer fools or small talk.”

— Ashlee Vance

68. “SpaceX is the hip, forward-thinking place that’s brought the perks of Silicon Valley – namely frozen yogurt, stock options, speedy decision making, and a flat corporate structure – to a staid industry.”

— Ashlee Vance

69. “He’d started the company to put a dent in the automotive industry and force people to rethink electric cars.”

— Ashlee Vance

70. “Musk, though, approaches everything from a Platonic perspective. As he sees it, all of the design and technology choices should be directed toward the goal of making a car as close to perfect as possible. To the extent that rival automakers haven’t, that’s what Musk is judging. It’s almost a binary experience for him. 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

71. “I think this needs to be done, and I don’t see anyone else doing it.”

— Ashlee Vance

72. “We’re trying to have a really big impact on the space industry. If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules.”

— Ashlee Vance

73. “He seems to feel for the human species as a whole without always wanting to consider the wants and needs of individuals.”

— Ashlee Vance

74. “Anyone who tries to build a car company in the United States is quickly reminded that the last successful start-up in the industry was Chrysler, founded in 1925.”

— Ashlee Vance

75. “SpaceX has been testing reusable rockets that can carry payloads to space and land back on Earth, on their launchpads, with precision.”

— Ashlee Vance

76. “I knew I could stay at Mazda for ten years and get very comfortable or take a huge leap of faith.”

— Ashlee Vance

77. “No one, however, would suggest that his reach extended down as far as Musk’s into overseeing so.”

— Ashlee Vance

78. “I’m not saying like only smart people should have kids. I’m just saying that smart people should have kids as well. They should at least maintain – at least be a replacement rate. And the fact of the matter is that I notice that a lot of really smart women have zero or one kid.”

— Ashlee Vance

79. “All the bankers did was copy what everyone else did. If everyone else ran off a bloody cliff, they’d run right off a cliff with them. If there was a giant pile of gold sitting in the middle of the room and nobody was picking it up, they wouldn’t pick it up, either.”

— Ashlee Vance

80. “He just destroys you and, if you survive, he determines if he can trust you.”

— Ashlee Vance

81. “This was a welcome change from Musk’s approach, which had been to set overly optimistic deadlines and then try to get engineers to work nonstop for days on end to meet the goals. “If you asked Elon how long it would take to do something, there was never anything in his mind that would take more than an hour,” Ambras said. “We came to interpret an hour as really taking a day or two and if Elon ever did say something would take a day, we allowed for a week or two weeks.”

— Ashlee Vance

82. “Turning humans into space colonizers is his stated life’s purpose. “I would like to die thinking that humanity has a bright future,” he said. “If we can solve sustainable energy and be well on our way to becoming a multiplanetary species with a self-sustaining civilization on another planet – to cope with a worst-case scenario happening and extinguishing human consciousness – then,” and here he paused for a moment, “I think that would be really good.”

— Ashlee Vance

83. “I would like to die on Mars,” he said. “Just not on impact. Ideally I’d like to go for a visit, come back for a while, and then go there when I’m like seventy or something and then just stay there. If things turn out well, that would be the case. If my wife and I have a bunch of kids, she would probably stay with them on Earth.”

— Ashlee Vance

84. “To the extent that the world still doubts Elon, I think it’s a reflection on the insanity of the world and not on the supposed insanity of Elon.”

— Ashlee Vance

85. “He will pick the most aggressive time schedule imaginable assuming everything goes right, and then accelerate it by assuming that everyone can work harder.”

— Ashlee Vance

86. “At Tesla, there was no history, no baggage. There was just a vision of products that could change the world. Who wouldn’t want to be involved with that?”

— Ashlee Vance

87. “They were smart, needed to get things done, and didn’t always have time to wait for things like city permits.”

— Ashlee Vance

88. “Musk does not own a home in Northern California and ends up staying at the luxe Rosewood hotel or at friends’ houses. To arrange the stays with friends, Musk’s assistant will send an e-mail asking, “Room for one?” and if the friend says, “Yes,” Musk turns up at the door late at night.”

— Ashlee Vance

89. “He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory.”

— Ashlee Vance

90. “You’re told to park at One Rocket Road in Hawthorne, where SpaceX has its HQ. It.”

— Ashlee Vance

91. “Elon came to the conclusion early in his career that life is short that if you really embrace this, it leaves you with the obvious conclusion that you should be working as hard as you can.”

— Ashlee Vance

92. “Musk came to see man’s fate in the universe as a personal obligation. If that meant pursuing cleaner energy technology or building spaceships to extend the human species’s reach, then so be it.”

— Ashlee Vance

93. “You can forgive the automotive industry veterans.”

— Ashlee Vance

94. “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. So, it’s very asymmetric. It’s then very easy to understand why regulators resist changing the rules. It’s because there’s a big punishment on one side and no reward on the other. How would any rational person behave in such a scenario?”

— Ashlee Vance

95. “We are building this because by the time she is old enough to drive she will know a car as something completely different to how we know it today, just like you don’t think of a phone as a thing on the wall with a cord on it. It’s this future that depends on you.” Eberhard.”

— Ashlee Vance

96. “Surely Musk did not have the gall to try to revamp the very idea of the automobile and build an energy network at the same time with a budget equivalent to what Ford and ExxonMobil spend on their annual holiday parties.”

— Ashlee Vance

97. “On July 1, 2003, Eberhard and Tarpenning incorporated their new company. While at Disneyland a few months earlier on a date with his wife, Eberhard had come up with the name Tesla Motors, both to pay homage to the inventor and electric motor pioneer Nikola Tesla and because it sounded cool.”

— Ashlee Vance

98. “He picks the most visible place on purpose,” said the investor and Tesla board member Steve Jurvetson. “He’s at Tesla just about every Saturday and Sunday and wants people to see him and know they can find him. Then, he can also call suppliers on the weekend, and let them know that he’s personally putting in the hours on the factory floor and expects the same from them.”

— Ashlee Vance

99. “As the first dozen or so employees came to the offices, they were told that SpaceX’s mission would be to emerge as the “Southwest Airlines of Space.”

— Ashlee Vance

100. “Customers received a $20 cash card just for signing up to use the service and a $10 card for every person they referred.”

— Ashlee Vance