GENERAL OVERVIEW

It's easy to get overawed by a man of many avatars like Elon Musk.
However, US business technology writer Ashlee Vance has done an
exceptional job of keeping his journalistic instincts alive and kicking right
through the book by not projecting him as a corporate deity that many such
biographies would do inevitably.
Musk can come off as shy and borderline awkward. His South African accent
remains present but fading and the charm of it is not enough to offset the
halting nature of Musk's speech pattern. Like many an engineer or physicist,
Musk will pause while fishing around for exact phrasing, and he'll often go
rumbling down an esoteric, scientific rabbit hole without providing any
helping hands or simplified explanations along the way."
There are many such examples right through the book. In fact, the project
began with Musk shooting down Vance's offer to write the book. But Vance's
dogged pursuit of his subject through people around him forced Musk to
agree to the book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vance wrote for The Register from March 2003 to August 2008. He moved
to The New York Times in September 2008 and then to Bloomberg Business
week in January 2011. Vance covered companies such as IBM, HP, Intel,
and Dell, and also writes about a wide range of technology topics, including
robots, Segway scooters, and the R programming language.

In 2007, Vance wrote a book, called Geek Silicon Valley, on the history of

Vance hosted an audio podcast called Semi-Coherent Computing from 2007–

In 2015, Vance started writing and hosting the "Hello World" video series for
Bloomberg, focusing on the tech scene in various countries. In the same year,
he published his biography about Elon Musk, the founder
of Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal and other tech companies.
ABOUT ELON MUSK
Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1971. His troubled father made
his childhood “a kind of misery”, but he was also free to experiment with
building home-made rockets in the company of his cousins. At the age of 12
he published in a magazine the code for a video game he had written. He
moved to Canada at 17 and worked odd manual jobs before winding up at the
University of Pennsylvania, where he took degrees in both physics and
economics. Soon afterwards Musk co-founded an early internet-mapping
company called Zip2, and when Compaq bought it in 1999 he made $22m
(£15m). He ploughed most of it into his next venture, an internet-banking
startup that would become PayPal. In Ashlee Vance’s fascinating and
superbly researched biography, one Musk admirer describes this decision as
representing “an insane amount of personal risk. When you do a deal like
that, it either pays off or you end up in a bus shelter somewhere.” In a bus
shelter, that is, with the $4m Musk had reserved for his personal use. Some
Valley people do rather lack perspective. When PayPal in turn was eventually
bought by eBay in 2002, Musk found himself with more than $100m at his
disposal.

Musk pumped nearly all of this money into the two ventures for which he is
known today: the electric-car company Tesla Motors (Musk was an early
investor and board chairman before becoming CEO), and the rocket
company SpaceX. (He also has a solar-panel company, SolarCity.) These
business decisions were thrillingly contrary to the prevailing wisdom of bits
over atoms. Tesla was based in Silicon Valley, and SpaceX opened its factory
in the middle of Los Angeles, where tattooed engineers worked on rocket
engines to a deafening soundtrack of Van Halen. As Vance describes it,
Musk “doubled down on making super-complex physical goods in two of the
most expensive places in the world”.

For years, however, both companies were near-jokes, and people were
waiting to see Musk fail. Tesla was late delivering its first electric supercars
to celebrity customers, while SpaceX’s test rockets kept blowing up. But
Musk persevered. Tesla now sells nearly 50,000 cars a year. And SpaceX
became the first private company in history to launch a rocket into orbit; in
2013 it successfully delivered its first commercial satellite. It now has a long
and profitable roster of launch missions planned for government agencies,
for Nasa (to resupply the International Space Station), and satellite
companies. No one is laughing any more. As Musk’s former eBay comrade
Peter Thiel tells Vance: “To the extent that the world still doubts Elon, I think
it’s a reflection on the insanity of the world and not on the supposed insanity
of Elon.”
CRITICAL COMMENTS ON STYLE, THEME AND
READABILITY
“Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” isn’t 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,
though he had no control, the author says, over its contents. Mr. Vance is
a technology writer for Bloomberg Businessweek. He won over Mr. Musk,
who initially declined to be interviewed, impressing him with his diligence
after he had interviewed some 200 people. Mostly, though, Mr. Vance curbs
his enthusiasm and 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. Other eye-popping details, not all of them previously reported, are
flecked atop this book like sea salt. His five children don’t merely have
nannies but have had a nanny manager. He worries that Google is building a
fleet of robots that may accidentally destroy mankind. He rents castles and
sumo wrestlers for his parties. At one of them, a knife thrower aimed at a
balloon between the blindfolded Mr. Musk’s legs.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. Mr. Musk’s work ethic has always been intense.
LESSONS TO BE LEARNT
This book is an inspiration not only for techies but also for the one who have
no idea about technology. Its mainly because of the way the author conveyed
most promising and positive life insights of Elon Musk . One observer says
about him early on, “We all worked 20 hour days, and he worked 23 hours.”
Ashlee Vance, throughout the biography has conveyed this man and his
personality incredibly. You will pursue him within the arch of being ruthless,
egomaniac to compassionate, dedicated, selfless personality.
As he says “if something is important enough you do it even if odds are not
in your favor”, certainly, he has done things with lots of risks involves but
they were most essential for a future of mankind e.g. his investment in space
to make a life multi-planetary. He aims to be on mars.Mars is just a story,
space exploration is his foremost intention...he might go to the moon. His bet
of the investment in renewable technologies and the ability of solar, battery,
and aerospace technology to shape the future of mankind is certainly getting
paid off. He has done things with the same enthusiasm and commitment
whether it is space, electric vehicle, renewable technologies, artificial
intelligence, etc. Musk has gone far as to give people hope, optimism for a
better future, and confidence in technology as a tool to make a positive
impact for the greater good and renewed their faith in pioneering aspects of
technology. He showed to the world how electric cars can become the most
desirable and most good looking cars in the world. With his extraordinary
talent and relentless hard work he became a multimillionaire at the age of
Twenty seven. His journey from a Canadian backpacker to a multimillionaire
is of a decade. Despite this accomplishment so early in his life, his
enthusiasm to keep going behind his ideas to fulfill his dreams is speechless.
His principles, strategies, decisions, skill, passion is shaping our future as
well as guarding our present.
“Hats off to this legendary entrepreneur of today for inspiring so many
lives.”
I strongly recommend for all the young readers it will definitely change the
way of thinking about future.

THANK YOU