Elon Musk
How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Is Shaping Our Future
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4.3 • 24 Ratings
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- €8.99
Publisher Description
South African born Elon Musk is the renowned entrepreneur and innovator behind PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity. Musk wants to save our planet; he wants to send citizens into space, to form a colony on Mars; he wants to make money while doing these things; and he wants us all to know about it. He is the real-life inspiration for the Iron Man series of films starring Robert Downey Junior.
The personal tale of Musk’s life comes with all the trappings one associates with a great, drama-filled story. He was a freakishly bright kid who was bullied brutally at school, and abused by his father. In the midst of these rough conditions, and the violence of apartheid South Africa, Musk still thrived academically and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he paid his own way through school by turning his house into a club and throwing massive parties.
He started a pair of huge dot-com successes, including PayPal, which eBay acquired for $1.5 billion in 2002. Musk was forced out as CEO and so began his lost years in which he decided to go it alone and baffled friends by investing his fortune in rockets and electric cars. Meanwhile Musk’s marriage disintegrated as his technological obsessions took over his life ...
Elon Musk is the Steve Jobs of the present and the future, and for the past twelve months, he has been shadowed by tech reporter, Ashlee Vance. Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of Spacex and Tesla is Shaping our Future is an important, exciting and intelligent account of the real-life Iron Man.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Good but a little too uncritical in parts
Good book. Covers the facts/history well. However at times it's a little fawning in its praise of Musk. Also after criticising pop-psychologists for lumping certain into the Autistic spectrum, he then proceeds to his own amateur psychology.
He loves him
I feel like the writer is a little girl with a massive crush on this entrepreneur. He is clearly great in his academics, no need to go on about his big round cheeks or alpha male shoulders etc. stick to the business accomplishments.
Great.
Gives us an insider look of the ‘Iron man’s life and work, and the ethic behind them.