“He just energizes you. He's got this infectious enthusiasm and gets you hyped up to go do crazy stuff. It's all about urgency and getting it done. He really gets the best out of everybody.”
Tom Mueller
Working with Elon, in their words.
People who worked with Elon, in their words.
Source
“When Elon says something, you have to pause and not immediately blurt out, Well, that is impossible. So you zip it, and you think about it, and you find ways to get that done.”
Gwynne Shotwell
“And he loved it. He immediately got it.”
JB Straubel
“Elon is a visionary, somebody who continues to just push the boundaries, looking for a future that we really want to aspire to be in, worth fighting for.”
Franz von Holzhausen
“He has a real applied mind. He literally sucks the knowledge and experience out of people that he is around.”
Jim Cantrell
“What is really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I have met a lot of super, super smart people, but they are usually super, super smart on one thing.”
Garrett Reisman
“He wants it to be a vibrant place. People are walking around, they are pacing around, they are working on exciting stuff, they are charting something, they are coding.”
Andrej Karpathy
“I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that. It was the most impressive display of leadership that I have ever witnessed.”
Dolly Singh
“One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.”
Kevin Watson
“That’s another reason that people like Elon Musk get stuff done, and people like me write about the Elon Musks.”
Walter Isaacson
“I really enjoyed working with him and learning how he sees things. He sees things from a different perspective.”
Hans Koenigsmann
“Elon has this incredible optimism, where he will pierce through these imagined constraints and show you that really a lot more is possible than you really think is today. You have to be very careful telling him that something's impossible.”
Max Hodak
“He pushes for excellence. And excellence is, it's never light enough. It's never affordable enough, it's never easy enough to install, it's never enough.”
Drew Baglino
“I trust my brother's vision. He is amazing. I'm biased, but I think he's the greatest entrepreneur of our day.”
Kimbal Musk
“Elon is super impressive, because he's done something outside of the IT space… I also think it's harder to do things in the world of atoms.”
Peter Thiel
“Working with Elon is always interesting! He is obviously brilliant, and has an endless supply of very non-linear ideas around solving hard problems. He also believes unshakably in his inability to fail, which can be truly inspirational, and infuriating, in equal measure.”
Max Levchin
“I think we want more entrepreneurs like Elon.”
Reid Hoffman
“The more practical thing is that he is incredibly good at prioritizing the things in his life that matter, like making a colony on Mars or solving global warming. He's relentless in pursuing these goals.”
Ashlee Vance
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