I am sure you’ve heard the name Elon Musk somewhere during the past couple of years. It’s not a name you would easily forget. He’s been attributed to many things such as PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX and some even call him the Tony Stark of our world. You might have seen the launches and landings of SpaceX’s rockets recently in the news, such as Falcon 9 and Dragon, and Tesla’s car Model S and its autopilot feature and the soon to be released the Model 3 car, that has also been making news recently. Well, Elon Musk owns all of this and how he got here is what this book is all about.
This book was written by the author Ashlee Vance. I listened to it in audio read by Fred Sanders. To gather the information presented in this book, the author conducted interviews with Elon and many of his acquaintances. I thought the information provided was thorough and insightful. I am usually fascinated by smart successful people and this book presented Elon in this way. He is one of those people who started out small and used his unique ideas and drive to build the empire he has now.
The book starts out with his early years in South Africa and his interest in writing computer code. He moved to Canada and then the United States where he and his brother started their first company Zip2; a web software company. After selling it, he started a series of acquisitions and co-founding other companies which led him to making more money. His success enabled him to build his vision towards developing electric cars and rockets. He is an entrepreneur who is very ambitious, dedicated to his work and very involved in the businesses he owns. One of his current ambitions and plans is to go to Mars within the next couple of years.
The writing style was good and easy to follow. It gives a lot of technical details about how the Tesla electric cars and rockets are built which I thought dragged a bit and wasn’t that interesting to me. The book also touched on his personal life which didn’t interest me much either. His personality or how likable he is as a person or a boss is also described in the book, and from what I see, he is not always very likable and can be tough at times. But that didn’t stop him or stop anyone from wanting to work with him, if it was as a business partner or employee.
This book is motivational and a good listen and I can’t wait to see when he actually makes it to Mars.
A Book and Two Cups of Tea 