The book 'Elon Musk' is an authorized biography of one of the most interesting and innovative entrepreneurs of our generation.
This book gives the interesting and inspiring story of Musk's life, from his childhood to the part where he spent significant time in Zip2 and Paypal and then onto Tesla, SpaceX, and Solar City. The author, Ashlee Vance, an American business columnist and author had to put up quite an effort and time to gather all the content that is presented in this book. He interviewed mostly employees of SpaceX and Tesla, also Elon's mother, and at the end Elon himself. The first edition of the book was published in May 2015.
The book takes us back to his days in South Africa. Born in 1971, he grew up in Pretoria. From childhood itself, young Elon had a keen interest in technology and used to fantasize about Space and battles between Evil and Good. He was into it so much that at the age of 12 he developed a game called Blaster on his own. The game's objective was to fight and destroy an alien space freighter with bombs and beam machines. In 1984, the public first met Elon Musk, courtesy of this video game, when a South African Trade publication published the source code of the game. The book tells us in detail about Maye Musk, his mother and his father Errol Musk, and gives a brief family history of both of them. It takes us through Elon's childhood in Africa about his High School experiences and growing up with his brother Kimbal Musk. After this at the age of seventeen, Elon left South Africa for Canada.
While reading you will get to know why this escape to Canada was not a well-thought plan for Elon. He had a long Canadian ancestry from his mother's side. His mother had family all across Canada. As the book progresses we get to know how Elon ended up with one of his cousins and how he took up different kinds of jobs for survival. Elon then ended up rolling at Queen's University in Kingston. During this time his brother Kimbal also went to Canada. Elon after two years Queen's University went to the University of Pennsylvania. He went in the pursuit of a dual degree, an economics degree from Wharton School, and then a bachelor's degree in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania. As the book progress, you will see how always had a desire to do something that would have an effect on the world. At each and every step and action mentioned in the book, you will get to know the vision that Elon Musk always had. At a point in time, Elon considered getting into video game business but later backed off because he thought by getting into video games would not help him to create a big effect on the world.
The book then guides us to Elon's first startup, Zip2, which was founded by him and Kimbal. Zip2 was basically a searchable directory of businesses plotted on a digital map. The story behind Zip2 coming into existence is a pretty interesting one that the books present to us in a pleasant format. For the initial phase, they borrowed $28k from their father. They worked day and night to make Zip2 a success. Musk did the original coding behind the service and Kimbal managed the sales operation. Over the years Zip2 achieved remarkable success. In 1999, the PC maker company acquired Zip2 for an amount of $307 million. Musk made $22m from the sale of Zip2. With that Musk founded X.com in March 1999, which was an online financial services and e-mail payment company. After a year X.com merged with Confinity and the merger was renamed to PayPal in 2001. Elon had an interesting journey while being the CEO of PayPal. But due to disagreements with other company executives Musk was removed from the CEO position, but he remained on board. Later PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5b and Musk made $165m from the deal.
After this, the book presents to us Elon's journey in building SpaceX. In 2001 Elon took up a project called Mars Oasis, whose purpose was growing food crops on Martian regolith. For that, he contacted Russian Companies to buy rockets. After many dealings, a Russian Company offered one rocket for $8m. Elon thought it was too much and called off the deal. Then an idea stuck, he could start a company that could build the affordable rockets he needed. With $100m from his early ventures, Elon founded SpaceX in May 2002. Elon believed the key to making space travel affordable was to make rockets reusable. As you read you will get to know the dedication and hard work he put in order to make his vision a reality. After many failed attempts to launch their first rocket, Falcon 1, SpaceX made its successful launch at its fifth try. After that SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon, its first spacecraft
After this, the book leads us to Elon's next big venture Tesla. Unlike SpaceX, Elon was not the founder of Tesla. Originally Tesla Motors was started in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Elon lead Series A round of investment in Tesla and joined Tesla's board of directors. After a few issues and a financial crisis, Eberhard, the then CEO had to leave the company after that Elon assumed the role of CEO in 2008. Elon's plan was to make money by first building and selling an electric sports car and then use that money to build affordable cars. The book takes you through the whole development journey of Tesla's first sports car, the Tesla Roadster in 2008. After that Tesla bought its four-door Model S sedan into the Market in 2012. In a few years, the sale of Tesla increased so much that they decided to open up a network of supercharger stations all across the US. While reading through this part of the book, you get to see how Elon managed his time being CEO of two giant companies. Tesla's innovation was on a different level. They kept on adding/upgrading features to its cars be it a functional feature or a more advanced technical feature, and one of the main things that kept Tesla going was Elon's vision and determination.
We have seen many global entrepreneurs and industrialists, but none like Elon Musk have touched upon multiple domains and have achieved success in all. Personally, what I like most about Elon Musk is his never give up attitude, if he figures out something is possible he doesn't let go until that is achieved. The author did a great job in bringing out this inspirational story of Elon Musk and also has touched upon his personal life too. This book is a must-read for those who are into the early stages of entrepreneurship. Also, if anyone wants to know the man behind Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity this book is the best resource for you. My main take away from the book can be expressed by the following quote by Elon himself.
Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, then you are not innovating enough.
- Elon Musk
Do give this book a read and mention how was your experience. Anyone who has already read this, comment out your views as well. Till then, Happy Reading!!
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