Book Review: Ashlee Vance's 'Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future'

Book: Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Author: Ashlee Vance

Publisher: Virgin

Rs 474

Pages: 392

On June 28 this year, SpaceX, a space cargo company, sent a Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft to deliver cargo at the International Space Station. Unfortunately, Falcon 9 exploded a few moments after lift-off. Some days later, SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk said a strut in a liquid oxygen tank may have turned rogue, causing the explosion. He added that the strut was outsourced and he would himself take care of individual struts henceforth. A billionaire CEO checking every strut that goes into the making of a rocket might sound a tad much, but that's Musk for you.
Musk, 43, has probably done for tech startups what Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos could not: bring back faith to a tangible and believable product. In one of the early pages of his exhaustive biography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, author Ashlee Vance quotes a Facebook engineer who rues that the best minds of his generation are working hard to get people to 'like' pictures of babies or cats.

In the last few years, Silicon Valley's street cred has plummeted even within the geek circles that make up its populace. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Howard Hughes gave them the last invention to jet forward the idea of 'future'. The internet fantasy, when it crashed, left a fair bit of depression in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
At this point comes Elon Musk, who with his maverick aura, 'don't-give-a-damn' persona and unimaginable feats emerges not only as a perfect fit for the 'Silicon Valley icon' role, but also takes it to dizzying heights. Musk is the billionaire CEO of SpaceX, a company that jets cargo into space. It's the only private company to win a US Air Force contract to ferry stuff into space.

Musk's first foray into tech was at age 12, when he coded a game called Blaster. He then came up with Zip2, an internet city guide in 1995, with his brother Kimbal. Compaq bought the company in 1999, leaving Musk richer by about $22 million. He founded X.com, an email payment gateway in 1999 and merged it with Confinity, which owned Paypal. SpaceX is not the only company Musk helms. He is also the CEO of Tesla, the hybrid electric car brand whose vehicles are charged by free electricity recharge stations powered by SolarCity – one of US' largest solar power companies. And yes, Musk is the chairman of SolarCity.

Vance, who started the biography after working on a story on Musk for Bloomberg Businessweek, writes that the single driving force for the South Africa-bred Musk is his inexhaustible zeal. He once chided an employee who missed an important work day for his son's birth. Musk is apparently cross with Vance for putting that in the book.
Apart from his zeal, Musk is driven by ideas of jetting us into the future; he feels he owes it to mankind. He has declared that by 2050, he will put 80,000 people on Mars. And to put the ideas in motion, Musk works painstakingly. He rarely has time and asked, after divorcing second wife Talulah Riley (they're now together again), if a girlfriend would demand more than 8-10 hours a week. His parties are usually dress-up opportunities, at times playing knife-throwing with balloons being placed around him. Vance says his life is nothing short of a Hollywood movie, and he loves to live it up at the Valley.

As Musk's first wife, Justine, puts it, "It's Elon's world, and we're all living in it."

Q&A with journalist and Elon Musk biographer Ashlee Vance

Silicon Valley champion, Elon Musk, known to go silent when approached by aspiring biographers, refused Ashlee Vance too. But it's possibly his persistence that finally worked, the Businessweek journalist tells Amrita Madhukalya, as he talks about the billionaire CEO with futuristic dreams. Edited excerpts:

Does the fact that Silicon Valley's ambitions are becoming abstract, in comparison to Musk's products, add to his popularity?
Elon is something of a throwback to Silicon Valley's manufacturing roots, when in the 1960s-90s, the region produced semiconductors, computers and all kinds of equipment. These days, the focus is more on web services and apps, so software companies don't employ many people. There's certainly a mystique surrounding Elon as he's bringing some of this old know-how back and running counter to most people in the Valley, taking on harder projects.

Elon Musk is miffed with you. Is that unpleasant?
Heh, I'd be surprised if he's still upset with me. Elon tends to feel things deeply and has big emotional reactions in the short-term, but is quite level-headed over time.

To acquire a US Air Force contract to send satellites to space must be a feat in itself. How big is it?
This is a 'big' deal. The US government is the single largest customer for sending things to space. For the first time, a private company can compete for its business.

How does Musk get his companies to deliver their incredible, otherworldly ideas?
Most employees who join SpaceX and Tesla believe in the companies' missions just as much as Elon. People in SpaceX, for example, desperately want to get to Mars. This borderline, religious zeal helps Elon push his troops to the max, and the fact he's able to deliver on some of his fantastic promises gives them faith.

What future do you forsee for Tesla's cars and SpaceX rockets?
Much remains to be determined with Elon's companies, but they're certainly in much better shape now than they were in 2008. I'm very confident about SpaceX's abilities to dramatically bring down the cost of doing business in space and think it will be the dominant aerospace player in years to come. The bigger question is whether or not Tesla can really produce a mainstream, all-electric car.

Has Elon Musk changed the idea of the traditional Silicon Valley entrepreneur with his crazy parties?
Elon is more of a Hollywood-style tech CEO. Most tech people live reserved lives and stay up north in Silicon Valley. Elon prefers to split his time and have a base in LA. He likes the Hollywood scene.

Musk has warned us of Armageddon in the hands of artificially intelligent technology. What do you have to say to that?
I'm more optimistic than Elon about the direction of AI technology. As a child, he read an awful lot of sci-fi books. This seems to have made him quite cautious about an AI that goes wrong.