This book is all about Elon Musk. Starting with his family life and how he grew up in South Africa, then moving over to the United States, founded Paypal and then went on to become the richest man in the world with the companies SpaceX, Tesla and The Boring Company.
It gives a failry decent overview of Elon Musk’s life. The only problem I had with it is that it was written by a person that had never met him and hadn’t even had contact with him. So that’s fine I guess except it left me feeling a little bit like it was a rehash of things you could find available online. I mean the bibliography contains a lot of resources which I had already seen or would go to view online.
Still a decent read if you want to learn a bit more about the overall life of the richest man in the world which is all available in the public domain anyhow. Just don’t expect any insights into Elon Musks head because he had nothing to do with the writing of this book.
Favorite quotes from the book:
I always had a really intense desire to understand and learn things. – page 3
“Make every minute count. No gap weekends, never mind gap years,” said Errol. Musk has retained this almost inhuman work ethic. – page 49
Bullies are looking for targets that won’t fight back. – page 59
Seek out negative feedback, because it gets harder and harder to get as you progress in the world. – page 76
People are much more willing to change their opinion if you’re not forcing it. – page 76
If something has to be designed and invented and you have to figure out how to ensure that the value of the thing you create is greater than the cost of the inputs, then that’s probably my core skill. – page 88
As Benjamin Franklin put it, ‘Rather go to bed without dinner than to rise in debt.’ – page 91
‘Some actions will fail, some will succeed. You want the net useful output of your set of actions to be the highest. Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it is catastrophic.’ – page 109
‘What does it tell you about our society, where all of us who do not have Asperger’s are at a disadvantage because the social pressures are so extreme and we’re talked out of our original, interesting, creative, heterodox ideas before they’re even fully formed.’ – page 113
‘Artists and entrepreneurs are a lot alike. They are both obsessed with creating something out of nothing. With pulling value from the dark. Before we call people visionaries, before they have that kind of success, we have other words for them. We call them geeks or outsider, socially awkward, weird, a little different, the odd one out.’ – page 125
‘Once you raise the question that other lands than this Earth are possible to live on, that other places are possible places to found colonies, or that there may be other living creatures somewhere, you have changed the whole place of man in the universe. You’ve altered everything. This involves a considerable reduction of human arrogance and a tremendous magnification of human possibilities.’ – page 147
‘Move fast, build things, and break things’… In 2008, the Falcon 1 became the first privately funded liquid-fuelled rocket to reach orbit. – page 155
Whether you agree with him or not, whether you believe his companies to be a success or not, it cannot be argued that when Musk steps into an industry, change occurs. – page 228
Overall: 65%