My top 10 highlights from the book:

1.  He personally met with every single person the company hired through the first three thousand employees.

2.  I’ve never met a man so laser focused on his vision for what he wanted. He’s very intense, and he’s intimidating as hell.

3.  He didn’t want to fail, but he wasn’t afraid of it.

4.  No committees. No reports. Just done.

5.  The iterative approach begins with a goal and almost immediately leaps into concept designs, bench tests, and prototypes. The mantra with this approach is build and test early, find failures, and adapt. This is what SpaceX engineers and technicians did.

6.  The speed SpaceX worked at relative to its peers could be jarring.

7.  Shotwell wrote a plan of action for sales. Musk took one look at it and told her that he did not care about plans. Just get on with the job. “I was like, oh, OK, this is refreshing. I don’t have to write up a damn plan,” Shotwell recalled. Here was her first real taste of Musk’s management style. Don’t talk about doing things, just do things.

8.  Numerous other entrepreneurs had tried playing at rocket science before, Musk well knew. He wanted to learn from their mistakes so as not to repeat them.

9.  SpaceX likes to operate on its own terms and its own timeline.

10.  Most of all he channeled an intense force to move things forward. Elon wants to get shit done.

Listen to #369 Elon Musk and The Early Days of SpaceX on Apple, Spotify, or the web.