Title: Elon Musk – How the billionaire CEO os SpaceX and Tesla is shaping our Future

Author: Ashlee Vance

Pages: 374

Hi all,

This marks the second book that I have read of Elon Musk. The first being Insane Mode (023-2020). The first one was somewhat of an insiders’ perspective, or someone aspiring to work for one of his companies. This one was from an external perspective. Pure journalist doing some research and holding interviews with people that work/ed one of the various companies that he helped raise up from the ground.

The chapters of the book are listed in chronological order of the events that happened in his and his family’s life and are as follows:

• Chapter 1 – Elon’s world (pg 1)
  • We learn that Musk is not the only one in the family that stands out, but even his ancestry was always out and about and not standing still for a quiet moment.
  • Though none have gone as far to become big scale industrialists, the drive and ethos and search for adventure always lingered in their DNA.
• Chapter 2 – Africa (pg 23)
  • This chapter briefly outlines that his grandparents (mothers side) made the decision to travel to South Africa so they can do some more exploration, which would be a change of scenery from Canada. One of their children (Musk’s mother) was acquainted with a local boy, who was fascinated by her for long and only much later did they decide to become an item. They would marry and have their children (Elon being the oldest).
  • His father was an engineer and would have his sons accompany him to construction sites to assist him with building some of their projects.
  • The parents split up and the mother moved to Durban, South Africa with the children. Though Elon decided to move with his father. When Elon reached his final years of school he would apply to get his Canadian citizenship so he could pursue a career in a country that offered opportunities, since South Africa at the time didn’t seem a place where he could realize his dreams.
• Chapter 3 – Canada (pg 45)
  • Upon receiving his citizenship he flew over to Canada, and eventually moved in with relatives. For a year he did odd-jobs, until he eventually signed up with a university. This is where he met his first wife and they would become an item later on.
  • He later decided to apply for a scholarship to another university in the US to get dual-degrees for Economics and Physics.
  • In university his entrepreneurial spirits remained alight since they rented a frat-home which they used to live and study from during the weekdays and host parties over the weekends.
• Chapter 4 – Elon’s first Start-Up (pg 57)
  • Internet was just coming out of it’s infancy and Elon saw the potential it held for various business opportunities. He and his brother would brainstorm about many different kinds of business they should consider bringing onto the market.
  • Eventually they decided to start a company called “Zip2” which was something the equivalent of an electronic yellow pages phone book.
  • They started the company from their flat and grew it to attract venture capital financing. The company didn’t go without troubles. Eventually Elon decided that he wanted to go into another line of business once they had grown the company as much as they wanted and found a buyer for a price they were happy to let the company go for.
• Chapter 5 – PayPal Mafia Boss (pg 75)
  • Elon then wanted to tackle the finance sector since he believed it to be inevitable that banking would move online. Thus, he wanted to create the first online bank with his start-up called “X.com”.
  • Another competitor with another company also saw the potential in the online banking sector, Peter Thiel, with his company “PayPal”. The two companies tried to offer products and fees that were an effort to move away from inefficient banking fees and services, as well as to be a competitive advantage towards PayPal.
  • However, the two companies decided that both were spending too much funds in order to beat the other, that if they combined instead, they could benefit much more significantly. Thus, the two merged and the two would run henceforth under the name PayPal.
  • There were lots of problems still in the company, together with lots of management issues that would eventually lead to Elon being ousted by the firm from his CEO role.
  • He held on to his shares, even bought more since he believed in what the company was doing and eventually sold his shares when Ebay made an offer for the company.
• Chapter 6 – Mice in Space (pg 97)
  • After selling off his shares with PayPal Elon wanted to venture into an industry that was close to his heart. Rather, close to his mission for humanity. The aeronautics industry. He believed that humanity should be an inter-planetary species for its survival and thus this industry needed a drastic revival since its inception many decades in the past (mid 20th century).
  • The challenge would be to find the right kind of people since those people already working for an established company in this industry would hardly take his start-up seriously.
  • Thus he started attending events where space travel and colonization were discussed in order to become intertwined in the circles of people from the industry. Gradually he met different people with whom he could share his dream and who were willing to take a chance with him.
  • Initially they wanted to buy some rockets themselves, but these were too expensive from the Russian companies. Then the plan shifted towards building the engine in-house and smaller components would be sourced by external suppliers. However, since he believed these contractors were charging too much and working too little he decided that their business model should shift towards building as much as possible in-house.
  • The goal now was to become as independent from any suppliers and other countries and revive the space launch capabilities from US soil, since this had been dominated by the Russian space companies for a few years.
  • Throughout all the years the company had many difficulties in building all the necessary components and eventually launch a fully functioning rocket before it could come out as a decent competitor for future NASA tenders.
• Chapter 7 – All Electric (pg 145)
  • Another project that Elon was passionate for was moving away from fossil fuels since the country was highly dependent on its importation. To become independent, as well as to move towards sustainable renewable energy, the goal was clear to move to electric cars. He found the right man for the job who shared in his passion and they set out to build their first electric car model, the Roadster, which would be built under the start-up “Tesla”. Since other industry car makers were only out to make new models with the fossil fuel technology, they had to set out to develop this new technology from scratch.
  • They had to develop a working prototype so that they could showcase it to different investors and secure more funding to become a commercial supplier of electric vehicles.
  • The goal was not to become another car supplier amongst the others, but to change everyone’s mind to shift towards cleaner alternative and offer a vehicle that could compete with all others at the highest level.
  • They had many financial struggles to get the project going, and keep it afloat since a lot of cash was spent on the development and correction of flaws that kept coming up.
• Chapter 8 – Pain, Suffering and Survival (pg 181)
  • The companies were ongoing and some success could be seen arising from each of them. However, both companies were consuming more money that planned, which required Elon and his teams to do everything they could to secure more and more funding to keep them afloat.
  • What made this difficult was that the economy was going through one of the worst financial recessions since the Great Depression of 1930. Thus, financial institutions were less willing to offer funding for a start up that seemed less likely to survive.
    • As move through the pages you may feel some stress yourself for the company because the problems were simply accumulating more and more like a rolling snowball down a hill.
• Chapter 9 – Liftoff (pg 213)
• Chapter 10 – The Revenge of the Electric Car (pg 263)
• Chapter 11 – The unified Field Theory of Elon Musk (pg 317)
• Epilogue (pg 361)

If I had to choose between the two books, I would pick this one, because the author has done terrific research into discovering who he is, where he has come from and what was happening with all his companies since their inception until about 2016.

You will learn so much of the character that you may even agree with him on some decisions that you otherwise would not have, simply because you learn to see things from his perspectives.

Summary:

The book flows well chronologically that you pretty much hear his life story as it happened. It goes into great detail of how he had to deal with daily struggles in his businesses (during their early stages, as well as later stages when it had already started succeeding) and shows that his work ethic and drive and drive are truly outstanding, without which the problems and stresses the companies underwent might, under other leadership, have led to bankruptcy. Even though the book shows that he demands incredulous things from his staff, and comes across as ruthless, his aims are for something greater than we are currently living. The book deserves a rating of 4.3/5.

I hope you enjoy it as well.

Keep well!