Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

by Ashlee Vance

Overview

A New York Times Bestseller

In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley’s most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs—a real-life Tony Stark—and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new “makers.”

Elon Musk spotlights the technology and vision of Elon Musk, the renowned entrepreneur and innovator behind SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, who sold one of his Internet companies, PayPal, for $1.5 billion. Ashlee Vance captures the full spectacle and arc of the genius’s life and work, from his tumultuous upbringing in South Africa and flight to the United States to his dramatic technical innovations and entrepreneurial pursuits.

Vance uses Musk’s story to explore one of the pressing questions of our age: can the nation of inventors and creators who led the modern world for a century still compete in an age of fierce global competition? He argues that Musk—one of the most unusual and striking figures in American business history—is a contemporary, visionary amalgam of legendary inventors and industrialists including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, and Steve Jobs. More than any other entrepreneur today, Musk has dedicated his energies and his own vast fortune to inventing a future that is as rich and far-reaching as the visionaries of the golden age of science-fiction fantasy.

Thorough and insightful, Elon Musk brings to life a technology industry that is rapidly and dramatically changing by examining the life of one of its most powerful and influential titans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062301253
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	01/24/2017
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	44,146
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.30(d)
Lexile:	1200L (what's this?)

About the Author

Ashlee Vance is the New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk and a feature writer at Bloomberg BusinessWeek. He's also the host of Hello World, a travel show that centers on inventors and scientists all over the planet. Previously, he worked as a reporter for The New York Times, The Economist, and The Register. 

Table of Contents

1 Elon's World 1

2 Africa 23

3 Canada 45

4 Elon's First Start-Up 57

5 Paypal Mafia Boss 75

6 Mice In Space 97

7 All Electric 145

8 Pain, Suffering, and Survival 181

9 Liftoff 213

10 The Revenge of the Electric Car 263

11 The Unified Field Theory of Elon Musk 317

Epilogue 361

Appendix 1 375

Appendix 2 381

Appendix 3 387

Acknowledgments 393

Notes 397

Editorial Reviews

The SpaceX and Tesla founder certainly sees setbacks as an unavoidable part of innovation. But a brilliant new biography paints a picture of him as an obsessive, intolerant perfectionist.

Financial Times

[T]his work will likely serve as the definitive account of a man whom so far we’ve seen mostly through caricature. By the final pages, too, any reader will sense the need to put comparisons to Steve Jobs aside. Give Musk credit. There is no one like him.

New York Times Book Review

[A] spirited and riveting biography.

Wall Street Journal

The SpaceX and Tesla founder certainly sees setbacks as an unavoidable part of innovation. But a brilliant new biography paints a picture of him as an obsessive, intolerant perfectionist.

Financial Times

[A] spirited and riveting biography.

Wall Street Journal

Mr. Vance tells the stories of both SpaceX and Tesla with intricacy and insight. . . . What does come through is a sense of legitimate wonder at what humans can accomplish when they aim high, and aim weird.

Dwight Garner

…until we see how things finish up many years from now—Will Tesla crash? Will SpaceX take us to Mars before NASA? Will Musk become the richest person in the world?—this work will likely serve as the definitive account of a man whom so far we've seen mostly through caricature. By the final pages, too, any reader will sense the need to put comparisons to Steve Jobs aside. Give Musk credit. There is no one like him.

The New York Times Book Review - Jon Gertner

[Not] the first biography we've had of Mr. Musk, nor will it be the last. But it is easily the richest to date. It's also the first one Mr. Musk has cooperated with…The result is a book that is smart, light on its feet and possesses a crunchy thoroughness…[Vance] delivers a well-calibrated portrait of Mr. Musk, so that we comprehend both his friends and his enemies. It's a book with many ancillary pleasures. Mr. Vance brings us up to date on the states of green energy and space launches. He also veers away from his subject just often enough, offering profiles of the frequently brilliant people who work alongside Mr. Musk…The best thing Mr. Vance does in this book, though, is tell Mr. Musk's story simply and well. It's the story of an intelligent man, for sure. But more so it is the story of a determined one.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

03/30/2015
Vance (Geek Silicon Valley) paints a complicated picture of a complicated man in this biography of Silicon Valley tycoon Elon Musk. Vance follows Musk from a difficult childhood in South Africa to his education at Queen’s University in Ontario and later at the University of Pennsylvania. Musk’s early successes with Internet start-ups were only the beginning. He became the prime mover behind SpaceX, “the only private company to dock with the ISS”; Tesla, maker of the Model S electric car; and SolarCity, a solar power company with a unique business model. Throughout, Vance elucidates Musk’s unusual combination of vision, determination, intelligence, whimsy, and ruthlessness that enabled these successes. He describes Musk not as someone “chasing momentary opportunities in the business world” but as someone “trying to solve problems that have been consuming him for decades.” Vance ably conveys the reality of this man who is both a dreamer and a doer. Agent: David Patterson, Foundry Literary + Media. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Mr. Vance tells the stories of both SpaceX and Tesla with intricacy and insight. . . . What does come through is a sense of legitimate wonder at what humans can accomplish when they aim high, and aim weird. — Dwight Garner, New York Times

“[T]his work will likely serve as the definitive account of a man whom so far we’ve seen mostly through caricature. By the final pages, too, any reader will sense the need to put comparisons to Steve Jobs aside. Give Musk credit. There is no one like him.” — New York Times Book Review

“[A] spirited and riveting biography.” — Wall Street Journal

“The SpaceX and Tesla founder certainly sees setbacks as an unavoidable part of innovation. But a brilliant new biography paints a picture of him as an obsessive, intolerant perfectionist.” — Financial Times

“Fascinating and superbly researched…” — The Guardian UK

From the Publisher

Fascinating and superbly researched…

The Guardian UK

★ 04/15/2015
Known for the companies he has founded or developed including PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX, Elon Musk has had a huge impact on multiple industries and is poised to have a major impact on how the world consumes energy. This timely biography, built on interviews with colleagues, past and present employees, and Musk himself, begins with the story of the businessman's adventurous ancestors, his unconventional childhood, and how an aptitude for programming fueled early successes. The story combines celebrity, science, business, and ambition in a new take on the American dream in which start-ups change the world and the rugged individualist succeeds by building teams. Vance, a tech writer for the New York Times and Bloomberg Business, does an admirable job of balancing the highs and lows of Musk's outsized personality. He writes a thought-provoking chronicle that doesn't suffer for being only a first act, as Musk is still leading the field in innovation. VERDICT Vance's study cuts across genres and will inform even those who follow the tech world closely.—Catherine Lantz, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago Lib.

Library Journal

Fred Sanders narrates this smartly written biography with the right balance of gravitas and entertainment value, providing accents for some of the major characters including a convincing South African accent for the story's star. Elon Musk, in case you're not familiar, is a 21st- century Howard Hughes, a captivating entrepreneur who has disrupted entrenched industries that include banking (PayPal), aeronautics (SpaceX), automobiles (Tesla), and energy (Solar City). His life story makes for a riveting tale—he was a bullied teenager who grew up to build electric cars and launch rockets into space (as well as to become the model for Tony Stark, Robert Downey's character in the Iron Man movies). The combination of great narration, well-written and well-researched content, and a bigger-than-life subject propels this nuanced work into the upper atmosphere of audiobook biographies. R.W.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

MAY 2015 - AudioFile

2015-03-17
A look at aerospace/automotive mogul Elon Musk. It could be said that Bloomberg Businessweek writer Vance (Geek Silicon Valley: The Inside Guide to Palo Alto, Stanford, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Santa Clara, 2007) has provided a much-needed portrait of an Internet-age hero, but that would depend on whether one's idea of a hero is, say, a Doctors Without Borders physician or the self-made founder of Tesla and SpaceX. Musk's ultimate ambition is to someday "die on Mars," a hypothetical event that some of his more outspoken critics may not root against. After enduring a South African childhood marked by divorce and beatings at school, Musk moved to Canada and, from there, the United States, where he earned a degree at the University of Pennsylvania. He left his Stanford doctorate program after two years to participate in the wave of Silicon Valley startups, helming a couple of half-realized but promising business ventures, both of which he sold for millions (one was an early incarnation of PayPal). Soon, Musk's ambitions became too big for the narrow Silicon Valley framework. He took his money and invested not only in a rocket-building company (SpaceX), but also a boutique electric car manufacturer (Tesla), among other side ventures. After years of frustration, Tesla and SpaceX became profitable companies almost simultaneously, and Musk was worth billions of dollars and beset with new aspirations to make human beings an "interplanetary" species. Though Vance doesn't spend the entire book praising his subject—he does provide peeks at a man who sometimes rules his techie fiefdom by fear and treats his significant others like employees—the author undermines journalistic objectivity by excusing Musk's tyrannical behavior as the prerogative of a Nietzschean superman working to save humanity. Despite Vance's best efforts, Musk comes off as another megalomaniacal hypercapitalist whose stock in trade is luxury goods and services for luxury clients.

Kirkus Reviews