Boredom Leads to Great Things 45
and returning him safely to the Earth by the end of the
1960s. Neil Armstrong and his crew achieved this goal
in 1969 when he became the first person to walk on the
Moon. The other human spaceflight programs were called
Mercury and Gemini.
You could suspect Elon found his technical spirit from
his father who was an engineer, but that’s not true. He
was exposed to technical subjects while growing up, but
his father wasn’t a technologist. His grandfather, who
could rebuild engines and fly around the world, was a
smaller source of inspiration. But the largest role model was
Thomas Edison. Many years later, the list of Elon’s personal
heroes would include Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Henry Ford,
and Walt Disney.^354 They were all creative people who had
taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing
things in a different way.
“Picasso had a saying - ‘good artists copy, great artists
steal’ - and we have always been shameless about stealing
great ideas,” Steve Jobs said. Also Edison stole some ideas
from Nikola Tesla, who worked as an inventor at the same
time as Edison.^323 Despite the accusations against Edison,
Elon explained he’s a larger fan of Edison than Tesla. While
Edison brought “his” inventions to the market and made
them accessible to the world, Tesla kept them in his head.
Edison always hired assistants to realize his inventions,
and he liked to say he could tell the importance of one of
his inventions by the number of dollars it brought in and
nothing else concerned him.^354
At age ten, Elon bought his own computer with money