Dochudson

“Maybe it was part of a larger, cultural shift, maybe it was in conjunction with a wave of excess and decadence sweeping through Silicon Valley itself, or perhaps it was just a symptom of the company’s own success, but in any case Twitter’s mission had become secondary to employees’ lifestyles. Two-hour lunch breaks morphed into two-month leaves of absence. New committees on every possible imagined cause were formed almost daily, eating up hours of productivity and usually collapsing over petty disagreements without ever accomplishing a thing. When people did, eventually, show up to work, there was a noticeable lack of focus.”
― Ben Mezrich, Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History

“Prum believes that animals may come to adopt certain aesthetic characteristics not because those traits are adaptive but simply because they are beautiful. This may be because of a sensory bias in the brain—a neurological feature that just prefers shiny things over nonshiny things—or a preference for novelty. But these attributes don’t necessarily signal that there is something better about the peacock with the extravagant tail. The peahen doesn’t like his tail more than others because it suggests he’s a strong and fit potential mate, but just because she likes how it’s shiny, and blue, and large. Prum bases this theory on a lifetime of studying birds like those in the drawers at his lab, many of which have plumage, skeletons, or songs that make it difficult for them to fly or easy to be spotted by predators.”
― Heather Radke, Butts: A Backstory

“He went to the Palo Alto public library to read about rocket engineering and started calling experts, asking to borrow their old engine manuals. At a gathering of PayPal alumni in Las Vegas, he sat in a cabana by the pool reading a tattered manual for a Russian rocket engine. When one of the alums, Mark Woolway, asked him what he planned to do next, Musk answered, “I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.” Woolway’s reaction was unsurprising. “Dude, you’re bananas.”
― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

“The family adopted a motto: “Live dangerously—carefully.”
― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk