Elon Musk biography | Book summary

Elon Musk is the man behind companies like Zip2, PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, solar city. Musk initially rejected the idea of this book but the author constantly approached him and he finally decided to give his support for the biography. Elon revealed his fear regarding the use of A I and how enhanced robots are capable of destruction. Many employees described musk as a control freak but as you read about his past life you come to understand him and see life from his point of view. Elon invested the majority of his internet fortune and his companies battled not only other top companies but nations. He is not chasing money but building the future. Elon musk was a voracious book reader in his childhood. It was a normal thing for him to read 10 hours per day and complete two books in a single day on weekends. He did not have many friends during his childhood and was beaten badly in his high school. Once he was beaten so badly that he was not in the condition to join the school for a week. His parents also divorced when he was young and later, he moved to his father’s house where he got access to a computer and books. He created a game at a very young age. The name of this game was the blaster. He was not the brightest student in his school days and showed no signs of a billionaire. He passed necessary subjects with just mandatory grades. At the age of 17, he moved to Canada and always wanted to go to America. He lived in Canada with her mother’s relatives and took admission in Queen’s University. Once he impressed Peter Nicholson during cold calling and peter invited him for a summer internship at the bank. Elon invited peters daughter to his birthday. They never dated but he shared the idea of an electric car with her. He told her that if there would be a way in which he doesn’t have to eat then he will not eat so that he can work more. During his college, Elon dated Justine Wilson who later became his wife. College suited more to musk because he was not mocked here for his ideas. He showed his entrepreneurship skills at college by renting an apartment and converting it to such a thing that will be desirable for the party.

Musk’s first start-up was zip2. Musk rented an awful place and musk with Kimbal who is his cousin took the work. Zip2 aimed at creating a searchable directory of business tied with maps. It was like customers can search your business on the internet and can find your location. This is a normal thing in the present time but at that time this sounded the dumbest thing to business owners because of their inability to see the future. They went for old fashioned door-to-door sale and didn’t found much success. Despite initial failures, zip2 became a hit. High work demand and blunt criticism was the main feature of his personality. The new transition made Elon the chief technology officer but he wanted to be CEO. Musk also lost the position of chairman of the company as investors were not impressed by his leadership skills. Compaq bought zip2 for 307 million. Musk got 22million and Kimbal got 15million. Musk’s next company was X dot Com. According to musk bankers were rich and dumb as they were not able to capitalize on various opportunities. This company was set to bring a major revolution to the banking industry. He was joined by various experts and their group later became famous with the name of PayPal mafia. At that time there were millions of laws that were blocking X dot com. Still, they secured banking licenses and mutual funds. Their service enabled people to send payment through their email. After some time, X dot com also became a hit company with 2 lac people signed up for its service. Confinity also created a PayPal which provided services similar to X dot com and they started competing with each other. They invested millions for the promotion of their service and lost millions to online fraud. To avoid their losses, they joined forces but their employees were not able to work with each other properly. Problems and frauds also increased with the increase in customers and then came one of the nastiest coups of Silicon Valley. Many blamed Elon for the inability of X dot com to carry its functions smoothly. A small group of persons wanted to push out musk. At that time musk and Justin were on their honeymoon in Sydney. A no-confidence letter was issued and he was no longer the CEO of X dot com. X Dotcom was rebranded as PayPal and the image of Elon suffered due to this coup. After some time, PayPal was sold to eBay for 1.5 billion. After the coup musk was still investing in the company which made his position stronger.

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After the PayPal deal musk moved to Los Angeles so that he can get access to the space industry. Boeing and NASA used to perform their manufacturing near Los Angeles. Elon joined the mars society and donated some money related to experiments in space. He even thought of producing oxygen on Mars. Some people criticized musk’s move and some were excited about his project. For his project musk went to Russia so he can purchase ICBM but he was unsuccessful because of the price and the Russians never took him seriously. During his way back to Russia instead of wasting time he calculated the cost of making space flights and SpaceX became reality. He invested more than 100 million in SpaceX. They worked hard on their first rocket and faced many difficulties as they were competing with big companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Their first flight failed due to the salty atmosphere but before this reason was revealed Hollman who was an employee of space x was blamed for the failure. He was the key figure of the company and left the company after this incident. Then the company carried out the second flight and it also failed but the workers were able to identify the reason behind the failure and they were optimistic about the next flight. At the same time musk was facing problems with Tesla. Tesla’s story involves various important peoples. J.B.Straubel once brought a Porsche and turned it into an electric car. He was passionate about them and was optimistic about the potential of lithium-ion batteries. He was thinking more about the batteries than the electric car. He started raising funds for his project and met Elon who was also interested in electric cars for years. Here comes the entry of Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning who were concerned about global warming. Martin was looking for an alternative to gas cars and formed his own car company. At a date at Disney land, he came up with the name tesla for the company. Musk invested a huge amount of money and became the chairman of the company. Soon Straubel joined Tesla and they developed a workable battery pack. Musk invested another 9 million in the company. The first car of the company was Roadster. Soon they faced a major flaw. Twenty batteries were tied together and heating strip wire was put into the bundle and the explosion horrified the engineers. Blast after blast and they finally solved the problem. The company aimed at producing expensive cars at first and then gradually producing cheaper cars with time. Demand went high for the roadster due to the features promised by the company. Some even went to the office of tesla so that they can pre-order their car. Eberhard was making quick and crisp decisions but musk wanted a more comfortable car which delayed the manufacturing of the car. At that time, Tesla was bleeding money. Many admired Eberhard for his work but according to some engineers, it was the time for a change and a new CEO. Engineering was at the top during the Eberhard period but other areas were neglected. Due to ridiculous cost and inefficient supplied Eberhard was removed as the CEO and became the president of the technology. They failed to track the cost due to some software issues. Eberhard left the company and with time problems at Tesla increased. Elon started dealing directly with Tesla just like SpaceX. At that time recession came and no one was buying cars to make the matter worst. It became more difficult to ask for more investment

Iron man was a super-hit movie. Downey was impressed by Elon musk and musk became an inspiration for him. After the success of the movie, Elon became more famous and he had fun with various celebrities but his companies were still not going well. He sold his prized possessions so that his companies can survive. The condition of the company also impacted his marriage and he filed for divorce on 10 June 2008. He was willing to spend his last dollars on his companies. To pay the employees they needed cash. In SpaceX they were ready for the third flight and musk insisted on pushing the technology at the same time making a successful flight. Third-time also they failed. There was a malfunction during the flight. All the hopes of the employees shattered but musk was still optimistic. He turned the misery of his employees into focus and they started working again. Musk never let any employee being affected by the financial condition of the company. The fourth flight was the last hope for the company to gain some government contracts. They were too excited about this launch and made a mistake while transporting the rocket. They finished 3 months of repair in 2 weeks. Musk went to Disney land with Kimbal to distract himself from the stress and the fourth flight became successful. Everyone gave a Rockstar welcome to Elon and he burst into tears. After a long time, they got the contract from the Malaysian government but still, the condition of the company was not good as they were not getting the major contracts from the government and the worst situation came when the calculation was made either to save one company and let other die or equally split the money and maybe both companies die. Some employees wrote cheques to save their company. Kimbal was also close to bankruptcy due to the recession but still invested in tesla. At that time SpaceX was hoping for contracts from NASA. Then 15 million came to musk from his investment in his cousin’s company. SpaceX also lost favours in NASA contracts due to jealousy. But to a shock, SpaceX received 1.6 billion from NASA for 12 flights to the space station. Some people backed SpaceX in NASA. Musk drove out in tears and tesla transactions proceeded.

Space x was launching cheap flights and was giving competition to Russia and China who were using old equipment. SpaceX hired toppers from top colleges with passion for the mission. SpaceX created the majority of their products, unlike Lockheed Martin and Boeing who were dependent on Russian supplies. SpaceX did a dramatic cost-cutting in their business. They designed their motherboards, circuits, etc. At that time Blue Origin fought with SpaceX. Blue Origin lead by Jeff Bezos hired a large chunk of employees from SpaceX by giving better incentives. Elon’s growth occurred with the growth of SpaceX. He relied on textbooks for the majority of his knowledge. After hiring experts, he used to absorb knowledge from them. At first, it might look that he is testing you but he would not stop asking questions until he gets 90 percent of your knowledge. Musk also fought with Lockheed Martin and Boeing for the right to compete for the government contracts and proved that SpaceX flights are more capable and cheaper than Boeing or Lockheed Martin. In 2012 tesla began shipping S sedan. It had tremendous power and had large storage. It had a 17-inch touch screen from which you can control almost every feature of the car. There was no oil change and no salesman will push you to buy the car. Almost any flaw could be solved by downloading a software update and you can get access to new features. Still, losses from the roadster were not easy to recover but they got a 465 million loan from the department of energy. Toyota and general motors abandoned their manufacturing unit due to recession and Tesla acquired the unit at very a cheap price. Toyota also invested 50m in tesla for a 2.5 percent stake. Just after the model S release customers discovered many flaws in the car but still Elon shocked everyone by unveiling charging stations where you can charge your tesla for free. In 2013 tesla faced another crisis as it was not able to convert reservations into purchases and was not having enough cash. Elon pulled people from different departments and ordered them to call the customers and close the deal. During this time, he promoted those who were working above average and fired those who were not putting in the expected efforts for the company. Consumers also deferred their orders due to the new features. Elon went to his friend Larry Page of Google to sell Tesla for 6 billion and Elon will have control of the company until they make their third car. The lawyers continued their work but after 14 days Tesla had all the money they needed as the employee successfully converted reservation into sales and Tesla became too expensive for Google. Tesla also paid off their loan and talks with google ended.

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Here comes the final story of the book which revolves around musk’s cousin and Solar City. Rive brothers who are musk’s cousins created solar city to expand the use of solar energy. Musk invested his money in the solar city. Before Solar City consumers have to install solar panels, which were not easy. Solar city took all the work from installation to analyzing the position of a house to gain maximum use of solar energy. Instead of manufacturing the panels, they brought them and then leased them to the customers. Musk helped the company and became the largest shareholder of solar city. Later they acquired a company that manufactured solar cells and created more efficient cells than their competition. Later Tesla bought SolarCity and now SolarCity supplies panels for Tesla to provide free recharging and Tesla makes battery packs for the solar city. Musk’s companies have dominated their market and many people compare him to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. He can hire good people but he had difficult times with his employees. He knows what customer wants like Bill Gates but he is not that good at presentation because of lack of time. His companies have faced criticism from experts who see SpaceX as a nothing more than space tourism, on the other hand, some see him as an inspiration and believes that human can become multi-planetary species.

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Originally published at https://www.bookshustler.com on April 21, 2021.