• “His most searing experiences came at school. For a long time, he was the youngest and smallest student in his class. He had trouble picking up social cues. Empathy did not come naturally, and he had neither the desire nor the instinct to be ingratiating. As a result, he was regularly picked on by bullies, who would come up and punch him in the face. "If you have never been punched in the nose, you have no idea how it affects you the rest of your life,"… But those scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, Errol Musk… He has a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature, they say. One minute he would be friendly, the next he would launch into an hour or more of unrelenting abuse. He would end every tirade by telling Elon how pathetic he was. Elon would just have to stand there, not allowed to leave. "It was mental torture," Elon says, pausing for a long time and choking up slightly. "He sure knew how to make anything terrible." - intro

Addicted to Risk & Shutting Down Fear

• He’d go into demon mode to avoid being his father: "If your father is always calling you a moron and idiot, maybe the only response is to turn off anything inside that would've opened up an emotional dimension that he didn't have tools to deal with." This emotional shutoff valve could make him callous, but it also made him a risk-seeking innovator. "He learned to shut down fear," she says. "If you turn off fear, then maybe you have to turn off other things, like joy or empathy." The PTSD from his childhood also instilled in him an aversion to contentment. "I just don't think he knows how to savor success and smell the flowers," says Claire Boucher, the artist known as Grimes, who is the mother of three of his other children. "I think he got conditioned in childhood that life is pain." Musk agrees. "Adversity shaped me," he says. "My pain threshold became very high."
• His childhood experiences made him addicted to risk and drama: "Elon wants risk for its own sake… He seems to enjoy it, indeed at times be addicted to it." - Peter Thiel (would experiment with rockets and explosives as a kid)
• Growing up he’d have trouble paying attention and would “retreat into his own world”, which made it hard for him to make any friends: "Kimbal and Tosca would make friends on the first day and bring them home, but Elon never brought friends home. He wanted to have friends, but he just didn't know how." As a result, he was lonely, very lonely, and that pain remained seared into his soul. "When I was a child, there's one thing I said… I never want to be alone.' That's what I would say. 'I don't want to be alone." (This helps explain his multiple life partners and like 10 kids…)

Seeking an Escape in Books and Programming

• His parents had a tumultuous relationship, with his dad Errol hitting his mom and cheating on her with younger girls until eventually they divorced when Musk was 8, yet Musk moved in with him at 10 and had to endure this pathological liar personality: "Everything could be super, then within a second he would be vicious and spewing abuse." It was almost as if he had a split personality. "One minute he would be super friendly, Kimbal says, "and the next he would be screaming at you, lecturing you for hours - literally two or three hours while he forced you to just stand there - calling you worthless, pathetic, making scarring and evil comments, not allowing you to leave.” (Jekyll and Hyde) - MJ’s dad: get in the house with the women…
• “Reading remained Musk's psychological retreat. Sometimes he would immerse himself in books all afternoon and most of the night, nine hours at a stretch. When the family went to someone's house, he would disappear into their host's library. When they went into town, he would wander off and later be found at a bookstore, sitting on the floor, in his own world.” - books expand your imagination, as this was first how he read about rocket space technology…
• At age 11 Elon saw his first computer and worked multiple jobs to buy a basic Commodore VIC-20, starting his journey of coding: “The computer came with a course in how to program in BASIC that involved sixty hours of lessons. "I did it in three days, barely sleeping," he remembers. A few months later, he tore out an ad for a conference on personal computers at a university and told his father he wanted to attend… When Errol came to pick him up at the end, he found Elon engaging with three of the professors. "This boy must get a new computer," one of them declared.” (Made his first video game Blastar at 13)
• Just before turning 18, Elon set out to leave his father's grasp and move to Canada: "You'll be back in a few months," Elon says his father told him contemptuously. "You'll never be successful." → Soon the rest of his family moved to Toronto (except his dad), where they were crammed in a small apartment yet Musk was happy with his books: “He had no friends or social life in Toronto, and he spent most of his time reading or working on the computer. Tosca, on the contrary, was a saucy teenager, eager to go out. "I'm coming with you," Elon would declare, not wanting to be lonely. "No you're not," she would reply. But when he insisted, she ordered, "You have to stay ten feet away from me at all times." He did. He would walk behind her and her friends, carrying a book to read whenever they went into a club or party.”

A Roof is a Man-Made Thing

• While in college Musk interned for Scotiabank, where he discovered a Latin America bond trade that he felt was an easy win, but was quickly shot down by the bank’s management - they had too much allocated to Latin American bonds already: “Musk also drew another lesson from his time at Scotiabank: he did not like, nor was he good at, working for other people. It was not in his nature to be deferential or to assume that others might know more than he did.”
• After this internship, he transferred to Penn and started studying physics, with a long-term vision of space travel and electric cars… “Whether he was calibrating the force of gravity or analyzing the properties of materials, he would discuss with Ren how the laws of physics applied to building rockets. "He kept talking about making a rocket that could go to Mars," Ren recalls. "Of course, I didn't pay much attention, because I thought he was fantasizing." Musk also focused on electric cars. He and Ren would grab lunch from one of the food trucks and sit on the campus lawn, where Musk would read academic papers on batteries. California had just passed a requirement mandating that 10 percent of vehicles by 2003 had to be electric. "I want to go make that happen," - no limiting beliefs whatsoever
• "I thought about the things that will truly affect humanity," he says. "I came up with three: the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel." In the summer of 1995, it became clear to him that the first of these, the internet, was not going to wait for him to finish graduate school.” → Musk decided to defer his Stanford Ph.D. program to pursue his idea of a virtual Yellow Pages, which became his first company Zip2, as in Zip to where you want to go

Zip2: Google Maps Before Google Maps

• Basically Google Maps before Google Maps: “Some of the best innovations come from combining two previous innovations. The idea that Elon and Kimbal had in early 1995, just as the web was starting to grow exponentially, was simple: put a searchable directory of businesses online and combine it with map software that would give users directions to them. Not everyone saw the potential.” → They sold to newspapers instead of direct retail businesses, as the newspapers already have a bunch of advertising relationships in place to fill the Zip2 demand quickly