Idea Overload 324
in the shower.”^32
Elon has found some ideas when he took a shower,
some ideas late at night when he couldn’t sleep, and some
ideas when he attended Burning Man. “It’s something of a
cliche, but a lot of my ideas nowadays come to me when
I’m in the shower,” Elon said. “It’s because I’ve been think-
ing about them, the mind processing them subconsciously
while I’m sleeping, and what’s the first thing you do when
you get up in the morning? You take a shower.”^128
Almost all the larger ideas originates from when Elon
read articles about a topic he thought was sad. “I thought
it was quite sad that the Apollo program represented the
high water mark of space exploration,” Elon said. “It was
not something I was able to witness in real time, because
I was -2 when they landed.”^339 So he founded SpaceX to
not be sad anymore. “You want to have a future where are
you expecting things to be better, not one where you are
expecting things to be worse,” Elon said. It would have been
sad to have a future where we didn’t have any cars because
we have used up all our oil wells. That’s why Tesla designed
Model S.^124 “What we were really aiming to achieve with
the Model S is to create a car – an electric car – that was
the best car. Not the best car among the electric genre, but
the best car overall,” Elon said.^193
When Elon read an article about the decommissioning
of the Concorde, he felt sad because we traveled slower.
To solve the problem, he came up with an electric aircraft.
It had to be electric because of peak oil. “Boeing just took
$20 billion and ten years to improve the efficiency of their