Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
by Vance, Ashlee
Published: March 3, 2015
Read: April 2, 2019
Review
Wow, I now have tremendous respect for Elon Musk. The boy read two entire encyclopedias series as a child, I've read 0 and I'm 21. The biography follows the life and thoughts of the real Iron Man and his life really is interesting, impressive, and elaborate. The writing seemed to be factual and rarely speculative even including Elon Musk for quotes at various points. Musk often wonders why the biographer cares about the topic of his personal life or events. The result is a wonderous look at the motivations, lifestyle, and leadership style of a ruthless and tireless technocrat running extremely mission-driven companies. The wonder is motivating.
Notes
Biography worry asked if he thinks musk is crazy. Has eccentric parties and events planned by personal assistant like hide and seek in Castle and sumo wrestling a world champion. People working and weekends and he says they are growing fucking soft not enough people are.
Chp2 Childhood and Purpose
14 age existential crisis turns to religion and philiosophy. It seems like one should try to make the world a better place because the inverse makes no sense. Hitchhikers guide says difficult to figures out what important questions to ask. We should strive to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness to better understand what questions to ask. The only thing that makes sense for us to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment.
South Africa childhood. Hyper masculine traits idolized. Mother's parents were super rich in Canada. Then hating the meddling go and detetoriating moral character moved to South Africa often adventurring. Mother model. Father electrical engineer. As a kid, he just stared off to himself not paying attention. Read so many books as a child. Two in a weekend. 2-6pm after school every day at a bookstore. Entire Britannia encyclopedia. Cousins entreprenuers. Early commodore and basic, did 6 month book in 3 days with OCD. Bullied Elon musk and broke his friendship with his best friend by making him stop hanging out with him and agree to stop hanging out with Musk. Went to hospital for week. Always had firm view on things. What's the minimum I can do in school to get where I want to go. Forget useless subjects. Wanted to go to US. Did little in America.
Ch3 Canda
Knew an uncle in Montreal and jumped on a flight. Chose queen because more good looking women. Work ethic extreme, if I could not eat to work more I would. Went to Penn economics and physics. Like the nerds he met there, not many friends. Threw parties for money. Renewable energy, space, and the internet would be the biggest spaces he could have impact. He vowed to do it all.
Chp 4 elons startup
Tireless all nighters. Zip2 Google maps plus Yelp. 1995 convince business to do yellow pages. 3 months brother Kimbell and Musk lived at office. New engineers rewrote ugly code and brought reasonable ideas. For musk, nothing every took more than an hour and he pushed everyone to work nonstop to meet these outrageous deadlines. Board brought in new CEO and musk was CTO. he made a couple of tens millions and moved on to next project. Future companies fought to stay CEo as he thought these people coming in knew what they were doing.
Chp5 PayPal Mafia
Worked at bank and pitched buying South America Debt from Brady Bonds. CEO said no, he realized bsnksa re stupid and just do what everyone else is doing. 22 million. Bought fast cars and had great interviews and high house. Plowed rest into X.com. online bank. 12 million in X. Musk become pretty famee in the valley. He co-founded with several other people, but he was largest stakeholder cus of the investment. One cofounder wanted to make mark and said he wanted to be CEo or he would take the best from the company and start his own. He had a shell of company and Hollywood production of a website for VCs. Under his vision and with nearly insurmountable legal barriers, got a online bank off the ground. And peer to peer payments. Paypal had Levin and Thirl had Confluence too. The companies fought hard head to head. Then merged with Musk as biggest shareholder. Crazy problems with fraud and growth problems. Musk had no confidence from eployees and was ousted as CEO. Took it pretty well actually and kept investing in the company. 2004 sold to PayPal at 1.5 billion. Elon Musk did do something amazing. Make a successful company through do com crash and make online bank. He would tell his wife what was wrong with her and if she was an employee he would fire her. PayPal Mafia was probably best collection of talent ever.
Meanwhile,
He moved to LA and was tired with startup plans. Wanted space. Joined space society made tons of contacts got them together often. Wanted some grand gesture to make people care about space again. Philthorpic gesture to put a plant on Mars. So kids could watch plant grow and be like yeah there life on Mars and we put it there. Met Russians to buy rocket.
When that fell through, he decided to make SpaceX with friends. Had all star cast of engineers. PayPal money went in when it was sold. Elon Musk strives to hire and recuit relentless with smart people. Young ambitious kids doing multidispcli ary work and getting things done. To meet space x deadline, they pushed contractors or made it in house. After much effort,rocket blows up and blames Holmes. Holmes is so mad and was so key to SpaceX early days.
Chp7 electric
Some guy really wanted to make a lithium ion car as people didn't realize how strong git was. No one wanted to invest, then he met musk. Last successful car company is Chrysler. Tesla guys wanted direct to consumer and sports car. Founding team never had any car experience, they did it startup style. Hire young intelligent people. 18 people actually made a car and we're on the forefront of lithium ion research. Roadster was over budget and over deadline and the founder was ousted because of manfucaturing problems and he was an engineering guy. New CEO wanted to package the company for sale for it's technology to save investment. MUSK HATED THAT. AND doubled down and hired a new CEO. Musk would like to fire people and not sugar coat. Told people to work weekends and someone said he wanted to see his family. "You can see your family when we go bankrupt". 2008 and Tesla needs more money....
Ch8
Justine blogged about her life. 10 Playboy hit the nightlife scene. Robert Downey kinda based stark on musk meeting him. Divorced his wife who didn't like feeling second tier. She had a blog where she write a lot. Musk meet and married a 22 year old acted he met at a club in a few weeks. She was smart and Statesville and like the billionaire conquering world s. It was mid 2008 and musk had enough money for his two companies to last until the end of the year. Positioned SpaceX to tackle big NASA contracts. He was crazy ambitious. He would berate and hound any one on the critical path, but would also do everything in his power to help them. SpaceX had one last launch. And they did. 6 years and they successfully launched a private space craft into orbit. 2008 he ran out of money. He had to choose between Tesla and SpaceX or split money. Man on the brink. SpaceX was a front runner for NASA contact band he pushed to make It win and seem reliable. He put everything he could personally, borrowed money from friends, and had employees put what they could and got 20 million. He then asked existing investors to match it which they did. A VC firm, vantage point, held up the deal and probably wanted to oust musk and not make cars. He bluffed and said he would fund it himself and people ponied up. He pushed and pased it Christ mas Eve when he couldn't make payroll the next day. SpaceX got a 1.5 billion dollar NASA contract 2008 December as well. It was CRAZY, this guy was amazing and made strategic longterm decisions.
Chp9 Lyft off
SpaceX undercuts with a massive cutoff and makes all it's machines in the US. Makes America a very competitive internationally. Launching is a 20 billion valuation and has 50 launched planned and 20 launches done now. Has pick of litter and looks for type a hobbyists and passion with real world experience. Bring perks of valley to aerodapce. Average spaceX lines of code is 500. Musk interviewed first 1000 candidates. SpaceX manufactures 80-90% while Boeing and Martin laud how they depend on hundreds of suppliers. Exactly valuable technology cutting 10-100%. Blue origin doubles people's salary's. Instead of encyopedia would quiz people to learn 90% of what you know. Such aggressive deadlines and would be shocked at what he said. Good to aim for aggressive schedules. One person working 16 hours is way more efficient then 2 people working 8 hours. Really good at getting most from employees. Instead of asking for deadline, asks employee if they can do the impossible and if they say yes they are signing up. Calls schools and asks for bright kids with no children. 125k and he said no do it for 5k. Makes huge monumental decisions very fast. He is so genius about costs. Solve all these physics and equations in real time. Musk banned unnecessary acronyms. Worst thing someone can do is say it's impossible, be will fire them and do their job and be CEO of two projects and actually does it. This sucks when it hits the FCC rules. Once sent email to boss of gov agency citing why his employee said a ton of dumb thing. Boss replied how dare he the guy is right and super experienced. He replied no he's wrong let me rearticulate why and your wrong here's the reasons why. Easy to understand why regulators resist changing the rules. If the rule change is bad, they could lose their kob. If it's good, no benefit. CEO is bright pretty girl and handles day to day in background. Become great space engineer. She negotiate contracts with governments when SpaceX needed it before falcon one even in orbit. "If you hate space and want humans to go extinct fuck it" SpaceX vs China in her eyes. Makes sense about bloat of space projects with 1 billion satellites that simply can't blow up and exceed requirements. ULA and Boeing and Martin Monopoly go against SPACEX for 1/5 price. ULA has since signed deal with blue origin. Politics issues on bidding for contracts. Low cost flight with flacon 1 worked but didn't have demand. Keep safety factor and low costs fast, changing aerospace. Falcon Heavy largest rocket. NASA doing it with 18 billion, clueless. Falcon 2 for humans in rockets. Doesn't want to go public becuase employees get distracted by manic depressive stock price.
Chp10 revenge of electric car
Model S Sudan is great electric car. Two trucks. Highest safety rating ever and charged for free around electric things. Batteries about 3x efficient and you buy in store. Tesla has no oil changed and will take back car if problem. Car gets better, computer on wheels. Ultimate status symbol especially in CA, roadster. Considered best car ever built by many in industry. Not only best electric car, best car. Model S 4 door sedan built from scratch. Design lead was genius. We knew we could do aluminum wuestion is how hard and how long. Hired guy to lobby for incentives in gov and sell batteries to car companies.they basically got a factory really cheap from abandoned factory on northern California giving toyata a stake in Tesla. He always said take it down to the physics for why it couldn't be done. Physicist at heart and engineer. But he's a designer too with good eye. Think of things consumer don't even think they want..model x sedan got wing cars to make it easier to get to back seats and such. Musl paints his offices all white and puts engineers and technicians together. Puts his desk very visibly. Would make new sedan and reinvent chargering station with coast to coast super charging stations with budget of what Ford sepnds on holiday parties.he realized problem of word of mouth sucked for model S and people lacked confidence. Realized factory wasn't going to go to Max production and if it stopped the stock would crash and everyone would fail. So he pulled people from random places to call people and close deals. He fired subpar executives and hired above average juniors. Backed resale market. Tesla was almost sold to Google for $8 billion with musk staying in control as they ran out of money. But then Tesla got a sudden huge selling from employees calling and they posted a profit for that quarter sending benefit soaring. Musk wanted a guarantee of a Google loan after talks of acquisition went public and the hesitiation allowed Tesla to survive long enough. Whoa, they could change the battery swap and get instant power. Musk faces the most important problems like pr disaster of searing review car and he personally write response.tesla got autopilot, summoning,and speed acceleration. Dealers make money off services, Tesla got it.
Ch13 Elon musk field
Cousins did SolarCity after looking at market for 2 years. Major players just said they would wait for dollar process to go down to meet consumer needs. So they made way for customers to lease dollar panels and so software to check if house good idea. His companies interconnected and against incumbents. Musk enterprises are linked in the stock market as well. Unmatched ability to raise funds and people don't want to be on the he wrong side of history. 1.4 billion dollar incentive for battery factory in Nevada. Model 3 to make Tesla mainstream. 10 billion dollars now, started even after PayPal woth wwayyy less. Wanted to be first man on Mars (if SpaceX would be ok of he died). Musk amazing to attract talent for aerospace and mechanical. Hyper loop cuz he hates the bullet train from LA to SF as so expensive and mediocre. Published paper. Musk needs more loyalty and human connection as people think every interaction is way too get fired. Brown had spent 10 years work overtime for him as executive assistant and asked to be compensated at executive level. He told her he would do her job to see how hard it was after vacation. He did it, and said (after 12 years) he didn't need her anymore. Perhaps he is autistic. Good friends with Larry Page. Always start with physics. How hard how cheap is it possible? Repeatable by him. If life is short, you should work as hard as you can. Wealth and education and being secular are correlated with lower birthrate. Some really smart women have zero or one kid. Could help Us, best attack on climate changne, and backup plan to Mars.
Appendix
PayPal became popular because it's price per transaction was cheaper because of internal transactions. They need to get people to keep money in the PayPal system. Money market investment and debit card and offer checks too PayPal seemed to do that.