Book Summay: Elon Musk

My wife and I ordered a few biographies for us as part of the New Years resolution in 2016 of reading good books. We ordered "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future" by Ashlee Wance as one of the biographies but none of us got to reading it anytime during the entire year. It was only during the December holidays of 2016 that I picked up the book in an attempt to do something useful in my company's shutdown period. And the book didn't disappoint either.

We all know that Elon Musk is this amazing next generation of CEOs whose name is taken in the same breadth as Steve Jobs. But Steve Jobs emergence as the Silicon Valley's inspiration of delivering world class personal computers and magnificent gadgets like iPhone, iPad and iPod, happened in early 1980s which is an era that younger people, especially the millennials find hard to relate to. Moreover, most successful CEOs in Silicon Valley like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg, Larry Page and Sergery Brin happen to be Americans who made it big with their amazing product ideas, entrepreneurship and leadership. That's where story of Elon Musk is different. Elon Musk who born and brought up in South Africa, made his way into America by getting himself a Canadian citizenship, enrolled in Standford University's Phd program only to leave to found companies like Zip2 and PayPal and the person who invested all his money into saving Tesla Motors and SpaceX when the economic downturn of 2008 threatened to take his dreams away. His story is truly amazing and worth the read for people working in Silicon Valley.

The author upfront mentioned that Elon Musk had a huge part in the delivery of his book not only from the perspective of allowing access to people that Musk works with but also scrutinizing the controversial parts of the book. But that didn't stop the author from writing negative opinions of people who worked with Musk but ended up either getting fired or burning the bridges with him. This only conforms his single minded belief towards excellence and his intolerance to mediocrity.

The author starts by tracing Musk's difficult childhood in wake of divorce of parents, an abrasive and abusive father and apartheid. However, this didn't stop him from following his heart to achieve his childhood dream of exploring space and using technology to achieve this ambition. He secured Canadian citizenship and moved with his mother, brother and sister to Canada. From Canada, he enrolled into University of Pennsylvania and majored in Physics. Computers and the business around computers always caught Musk's imagination. Even though, he enrolled in a graduate program in Stanford University, he immediately left it to found Zip2 with his younger brother Kimbal Musk. Zip2 allowed businesses to list their business online and provided turn-by-turn navigation directions to these businesses to users. A Google maps application of sorts. After Zip2, got bought over by Compaq computers, Musk ventured into making banking and payments over the Internet. He found X.com which later bought over PayPal, which was also doing online payments. Even though Musk's tenture in merged company (also called PayPal) was tumultuous, it prepared him well for the more challenging projects ahead. PayPal got bought over by EBay and Musk made hundreds of million dollars out of the sale.

Musk never found pleasure of making money of people who viewed ads on an online website. Musk always wanted to come up with technology which could shape the lives of people in a more fundamental and radical way. His philosophy led to the establishment of SpaceX and Tesla Motors. While, SpaceX attempts to commercialize space travels, Tesla Motors took lithium ion cells to power an electric vehicle that could potentially save the planet from perils of global warming. With SpaceX, Musk is attempting to significantly lower down the cost of a space launch to International Space Station (ISS), sending payloads to Mars and in general putting commercial satellites to orbit around earth. With Tesla Motors, Musk has revolutionized the way people think about transportation with integration from Solar City's solar panels to recharge the metric vehicles to enable them to run without shortage of battery charge across the US. The author provides first hand view of the technical and logistical difficulties that Musk and the engineers faced of getting to their first successful rocket launch and how Musk overcame the lossy production model of Tesla Motors to make it one of the most valued companies in the world.

The author also touches the tough phase in Musk's life in 2008 when he underwent a divorce with his first wife and had to bear the painful brunt of the economic downturn of 2008. Musk had started SpaceX and Tesla Motors mostly with the money he made out of sale of PayPal but he had to pool in additional money in 2008 to save the companies from going bankrupt. It was heart wrentchening to read to what extent he went in order to keep the payroll of his employees going and still pooled in money in the two startups which in 2008 showed little promise to be profitable ever. Musk simply believed in his childhood dream to be able to conquer the space and be compassionate towards the planet which led to the survival of SpaceX and Tesla.

The book is not only about Musk but it gives a bird's eye view of the startup culture in Silicon Valley. The author shows the bright and dark sides of the startup culture. The bright side being how people from unknown and orthogonal backgrounds, through sheer hard work and enterprise achieve the realization of a technology or a product. The dark side being the painful tussle for ownership of a profitable business and the blame games when a project in a startup fails for some reason. The book should be a must read for people interested in knowing about Silicon Valley or curious to know what goes into establishing businesses.