ELON  MUSK

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance ; Published by  Virgin Books ; Pages 332 ; Price Rs.699 /-

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In the earlier part of this year  Satellite “Space X Falcon” was launched. It is the heaviest satellite ever launched  with ability to lift 1,41,000 Lb—a mass greater than a 737 Jetliner loaded with passengers, crew, luggage and fuel. This was the work of a private company owned by Elon Musk—all of 46 years. He is also owner of Tesla Car. Elon Musk placed his own car, a Tesla Roadster, with mannequin inside wearing the official SpaceX space suit as the payload. The man is known as "Starman" and it is projected that the car and Starman will be in the solar system for One Billion years. 

Who is Elon Musk and what makes him tick?.For an answer read the book under review. It is one of the more comprehensive works on this  entrepreneur and cult-figure.  Musk’s  three major goals in life were to make humans space colonisers, to build ecologically sound and beautiful cars, and to power the world with safe, free solar energy.The author Ashley  Vance--a Business Columnist-- explores Musk’s beginnings, ventures his vision for the future of humankind. The book  captures a snapshot in time of a man who already has had a tremendous impact on humanity and the way that we think. By 2012, Musk’s companies were all racking up success after success in each of his goal areas.

 Vance is to be credited for writing a book that gives us far more understanding of not just Elon Musk the visionary, but also Elon Musk the person via interviews with former staffers, current staffers, family members and friends. 

Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1971. His  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 . He ploughed most of it into his next venture, an internet-banking startup that would become PayPal. When PayPal in turn was eventually bought by eBay in 2002, Musk found himself with more than $100m at his disposal.

 The most intriguing figure among the Valley’s billionaire entrepreneurs right now makes incredibly elaborate machines: electric cars and space rockets. The man who glories in the sci-fi name of Elon Musk wants to change the world by solving transport and global warming, and establishing a colony on Mars .

  Musk pumped a huge chunk of his money into the two ventures for which he is known today: the electric-car company Tesla Motors and the rocket company Space X. 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.

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  and satellite companies.

  Musk’s former eBay comrade Peter Thiel tells the author: “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.”

 Musk like many modern geek entrepreneurs – most notoriously the late Steve Jobs –  has an abrasive management style, sometimes insulting brilliant colleagues and firing people sans  warning.

 Musk is interested in more than just tech: he follows the New York Review of Books on Twitter. He shares custody of his five sons with his former wife, Justine Musk. Though evidently immensely driven, Musk can be self-mocking and surprisingly funny. “No man is an island,” he likes to say, “unless he is large and buoyant.”

Meanwhile he is engagingly rude about some of his peers, particularly the founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.

Musk didn’t invent the rocket, nor the electric car. But he did reinvent them. Most crucially, he made them good enough, cheap enough. The most crucial innovation SpaceX made in rocket design, meanwhile, was the audacious decision to build nearly everything itself. Insourcing became the new outsourcing. By designing and constructing almost all the parts from engines to electronics, SpaceX could shave chunks off the prices demanded by external suppliers, while being able to change things in the designs very quickly when needed.

 This  entrepreneur, inventor and engineer is the animating force behind companies (Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity) that have made startling advances in non-indoor-cat arenas: electric cars, space exploration and solar energy. Musk  is all of 46. His  grand vision is to colonize Mars and  Vance writes:“He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. …Musk wants to  save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.”

  Vance’s fascinating and superbly researched biography delivers a well-ordered portrait of  Musk. We comprehend both his friends and his enemies. He has been married three times — twice to the same woman — 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. The best thing Vance does in this book is to narrate  Musk’s story simply and well. It’s the story of an intelligent  and determined man.  Musk’s work ethic has always been intense. One observer says about him early on, “We all worked 20 hour days, and he worked 23 hours.”

 Musk got started in space exploration by first learning all he could about it, sometimes reading Soviet-era rocket manuals. There were many failures, and several near-bankruptcies, along the way to making SpaceX what it is today, notably one of only two private companies to have docked with the International Space Station.

The author tells the stories of both SpaceX and Tesla with intricacy and insight. He 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 is a contemporary, visionary amalgam of legendary inventors and industrialists including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, and Steve Jobs. 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.

Here is an outstanding biography of an outstanding man.

PPR

5/8/2018