Official Review - Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance

[RandyReadingRoundUp]

(10/10) This is the new biography about Elon Musk, current CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and chairman of Solar City. If there is one man’s resume that will make you discouraged about your own accomplishments, it’s that of Elon Musk. The author does a fantastic job with this biography as it seems to be very fair and balanced while also being very interesting and readable.

Here’s a brief timeline of Musk’s key accomplishments:

At age 18 he’s moves to Canada from South Africa not knowing a single person and enrolls at a university.
At 24 he founds a tech startup working on ideas similar to those that would eventually become Google Maps/Yelp. He sells the company 4 years later to Compaq for a cool $307 million and personally takes home $22 million.
As a 28-year-old millionaire he founds a company that eventually becomes PayPal. PayPal is purchased by eBay in 2002 and Musk makes $165 million.
At this point he wants to partake in projects that he’s even more passionate about. So he decides to found SpaceX and pursue his goal of space travel, particularly to Mars someday.
In his spare time running SpaceX, he manages to become the main shareholder of a startup called Tesla Motors. The company struggles early on so he takes the reigns and becomes Tesla’s CEO as well.
Today he runs Tesla ($30 billion company) and SpaceX ($10+ billion private company) and is chairman of Solar City ($6 billion company).
His estimated net worth is $12 billion.
It’s not enough that Musk quickly became a millionaire in his late 20s. He didn’t stop there. Today he runs some of the coolest companies on the planet trying to accomplish the seemingly impossible, going to Mars and making high performance electric cars mainstream. Some people say he’s a jerk, some say a genius, some say an incredible risk taker. If nothing else, Musk’s life is incredible, almost a work of fiction. It truly seems like he lives on a different planet than the risk of us. And if he has his way, someday he just might…