Top Highlights

• But this was all part of the confidence game he always knew he’d have to play if he were ever going to create the world’s most valuable automaker. Belief created the vision; the vision would create a market; the market would create cash; and cash would create cars.
• Others had thought about engineering an electric car, but they had failed to make it profitable. Eberhard was thinking of ways to change the business of making cars altogether, bringing to a hundred-year-old industry the lessons learned from a career as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Tesla would be asset-light, focused on brand and customer exp...
• Venture capitalists (VCs), meanwhile, ran funds that raised millions of dollars with the goal of investing in such startups, then cashing out—either through acquisition of the startup by a bigger company or else through an initial public offering at some point during the fund’s lifetime (typically eight to twelve years). In those early days, a soft...
• The knowledgeable staff and Genius Bar became tools to educate customers that needed a nudge into the digital age.
• attention of the Department of Justice.6 It was in many ways classic Tesla: Musk making aspirational statements as part of a broader effort to motivate his teams to do the impossible, and in turn to excite investors.