Elon Musk
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.
Stats for nerds
34recommend
80mentions
70people
2015–2026years
46% recommend54% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I read this Musk biography a few years ago: https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/...
I don't think he's short of technical skill. I think he is a genius, and I think he's sincere in his desire to make humanity multiplanetary.
I recommend reading the biography to get the facts that aren't penetrating your bubble.
I think Musk is going kind of insane due to ketamine abuse, bipolar disorder, and/or whatever caused his father to go insane around his current age.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PaL38q9a4e8Bzsh3S/elon-musk-...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/03/ketamine-...
- People go bankrupt all the time in the US. That doesn't mean they starve to death.
> Would personal bankruptcy result in both he and his offspring living in poverty?
Musk did spend time in the US with no money. He got a job. It was a dirty job cleaning industrial machinery. A job anyone with a willingness to work could get.
Instead of doing all this guessing and assuming and making up things about Musk, why not read an actual biography of him? The one I read is by Vance:
https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/...
It costs $1.32. No excuses!
- The biography "Elon Musk" by Vance.
https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-Billionaire-SpaceX-Shaping/...
- You might want to check out "Elon Musk" by Vance on what his innovations were with the battery and drive system. Yes, people knew about regenerative braking. When was the last time someone built an electric car with regenerative braking? The Tesla was not built with off-the-shelf batteries and drive systems. Musk originally tried to, but they were unworkable.
- > Musk's only meaningful contribution to SpaceX was money.
It was a heck of a lot more than that. See "Elon Musk" by Vance.
> We could just have raised NASA's budget instead
He did it for a tiny fraction of NASA's budget.
> So he spent it on rockets, as a vanity project
He's reached cash flow positive.
> Was this where the money was best spent? I have no reason to believe so.
Becoming the richest man in the world through his investing is a whopper of a reason that it was well spent.
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