At home, his father was a source of unhappiness. At school, Elon was a nerdy kid, bullied and beaten for almost 4 years. Reading this biography, there were a few places I can see this coming from: The first big ingredient of Musk’s personality is a very high tolerance for risk. That’s why he’s often compared to the Marvel character Tony Stark, a.k.a Iron Man. He’s a technology billionaire, often described as a genius, that has a vision of how the world should look in the future, then goes and makes it real. Develop Unstoppable Vision: During a tough childhood, science fiction inspired Musk’s futuristic goalsįrom a distance, Elon Musk looks like a character out of a science fiction novel or a comic book. Vance believes it was because Musk respects resolve and persistence.ġ.

Then Musk then changed his mind and sat down for many conversations. When he began working on this biography, Elon Musk refused to help him, but Vance continued working for 18 months and completed over 200 interviews. So get ready to learn some exciting lessons in this summary of the book “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.” About the AuthorĪshlee Vance (official website) is an important tech writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, and before that The New York Times. The best place to start is probably this biography. To understand how Musk did it, we need to look back at his childhood in South Africa, his early startups in America, and how he thinks about the world. Elon Musk is now the richest man on the planet worth $300 billion, Tesla is selling over 10 times as many cars at 500,000 cars per year, and SpaceX has not only put over a thousand Starlink satellites into orbit, but they’ve also carried over a dozen human astronauts to space. Today it is several years later and a lot has changed. When this book was published in 2015, Elon Musk was worth $10 billion, Tesla was selling 50,000 luxury cars per year, and SpaceX had recently announced Starlink-a global space internet. Instead, he’s trying to establish a human colony on Mars, and launch humanity permanently into space. Unlike most tech billionaires, he’s not just figuring out how to get us more addicted to our phones. Is it because he recently became worth over $300 billion? Kind of.īut really, people are paying attention to Elon because his actual goals are even bigger than all that. Is it because he’s launching rockets that can land themselves? No doubt. Is it because he’s making sexy electric cars? Sure.

Elon musk autobiography review