By Ashlee Vance
Biography of a technology entrepreneur
Subject
Themes
Elon Musk grows up in Pretoria, South Africa, the son of an emotionally brutal father and a mother whose own father had relocated the entire family from Canada to a country he had never visited, motivated by sheer dissatisfaction with the life available to him. Musk inherits from that grandfather a tolerance for risk and a refusal to accept that existing conditions are fixed. He reads obsessively, codes games, and argues in science class that solar power is the future. At seventeen he leaves for Canada and never returns to live in South Africa again.
Elon Musk grows up in Pretoria, South Africa, the son of an emotionally brutal father and a mother whose own father had relocated the entire family from Canada to a country he had never visited, motivated by sheer dissatisfaction with the life available to him. Musk inherits from that grandfather a…
Ashlee Vance's biography of Musk, published in 2015, arrives at a moment when the entrepreneur had become a genuine cultural phenomenon but before the most polarising chapter of his public life had begun. The book's reception was largely positive, and the portrait it offers, critical of Musk's…
In most technology businesses, the product is software and the barrier to competition is intellectual property. The manufacturing process, if there is one, is outsourced. Musk takes the opposite approach at every company he builds: he treats the factory itself as the primary competitive advantage,…
One of the most consistent patterns across Musk's career is the relationship between his stated timelines and reality. He consistently announces deadlines that are impossible. The Falcon 1 was supposed to launch within fifteen months of SpaceX's founding. The Roadster was supposed to cost $25…
Most companies exist to solve a problem their founders believe is underserved in the market. Musk's companies exist, by his own account, to prevent specific catastrophic futures. The difference in scale changes everything: how decisions are made, how failure is absorbed, and what kind of people are…
Musk's capacity for risk is one of the most unusual things about him, and the origins of that capacity are not mysterious. They are traceable to a specific family history and a specific childhood experience, neither of which most people would choose. His maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman,…
One of the most consequential decisions in Musk's career at Tesla is one that the automotive establishment considered a mistake: building an electric sports car first. The conventional wisdom about how to introduce disruptive technology to a mass market runs in the opposite direction. Start with…
At twelve years old, Elon Musk writes a space combat game called Blastar and sells its code to a South African trade magazine for five hundred dollars. The game is not particularly sophisticated, but it reveals something about its creator: a child who takes ideas about rockets and space warfare…
Musk arrives in Montreal in June 1988 carrying the name of a great-uncle and almost nothing else. The uncle has already moved to Minnesota. Musk calls his mother collect, gets the news, and walks to a youth hostel. With a hundred-dollar bus pass and a vague memory that his grandfather once lived in…
After selling Zip2, Musk invests $12 million of his own money into X.com, an online banking venture he believes could reshape the financial system. He also buys a McLaren F1 supercar, one of a handful in the United States, which becomes a symbol of what Silicon Valley excess looks like when it works…
J. B. Straubel grows up in Wisconsin rebuilding motors and building chemistry experiments in his family's basement. At Stanford he designs his own degree around energy systems and software, and after graduating he spends years trying to convince investors that lithium-ion batteries are ready to…
After surviving the crisis of 2008 and achieving orbit with the Falcon 1, SpaceX builds the Falcon 9, a nine-engine rocket standing 224 feet tall and designed from the outset to be reliable, economical, and manufacturable at scale. The company launches roughly once a month, carrying commercial…
In 2004, Musk is driving to Burning Man with his cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive when he suggests they look into solar energy. He has studied the market and thinks the opportunity is large but the execution model is wrong: solar is too expensive and too complicated for most homeowners to access. The…
By Ashlee Vance
Subject
Themes
Elon Musk grows up in Pretoria, South Africa, the son of an emotionally brutal father and a mother whose own father had relocated the entire family from Canada to a country he had never visited, motivated by sheer dissatisfaction with the life available to him. Musk inherits from that grandfather a tolerance for risk and a refusal to accept that existing conditions are fixed. He reads obsessively, codes games, and argues in science class that solar power is the future. At seventeen he leaves for Canada and never returns to live in South Africa again.