What You'll Learn:
Elon Musk is a complicated man. Reactions to the entrepreneur run the gamut of fear, frustration, admiration and loyalty. His intrepid entrepreneurial spirit helped him revolutionize multiple industries, but his successes did not come without a cost. Charting Musk’s path from childhood to his early startups to his now-booming businesses, Ashlee Vance’s portrait of Musk gives us the major factors that have contributed to the making of Musk.
Key Insights:
- Young Elon Musk was a bright know-it-all with very few friends.
- Musk showed his self-reliance, resourcefulness, and ambition as a young man when he moved to Canada and got by on his own.
- Musk’s first startup was profitable, but the experience taught him some hard lessons.
- Musk ignored naysayers and cynics in his audacious pursuit of privately funded space exploration.
- SpaceX and Tesla upgraded Musk’s image, but at significant personal cost.
- Musk’s SpaceX efforts have shaken up the status quo and modernized an antiquated aerospace industry.
- If not for a last-minute surge in sales that boosted the company’s stock, Musk might have sold Tesla to Google.
- Musk has restored faith in innovation by showing that technology can still advance quickly, even this late in the game.