MUSKIANS in ELON'S WORLD

Humorously describing about the “Silicon Valley’s techno-utopian club” of which Elon Musk was a card holder, Ashlee Vance  says that, this group tends to be a mix of Ayn Rand devotees and engineer absolutists and if we’d just get out of their way, they’d fix all our problems.

In the book, you will also find constant comparison of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. When thought carefully about the areas affected by the work of both these personas you will find this compassion not “just” enough. 

The part of the time when the writer of his biography acknowledged the “to be acknowledged” works of Elon Musk, it was year 2012. SpaceX just flew a supply capsule to the ISS and had brought it back to earth safely whereas Tesla just delivered its Model S, an all-electric Sedan. And still Musk was not done. Few lines in the book do reveal that what this man has achieved for the stardom or attention that he gets can only be known after going through the front doors of SpaceX. For giving the book’s feel, “Musk had built an honest-to-God rocket factory in the middle of Los Angeles, that didn’t just build one rocket, but many rockets at a time from scratch.”

Many more of the book’s pages describe about the grandeur of SpaceX factory, its work atmosphere where it’s a shared area of people possessing intelligent brains constantly in motion whirring around a variety of bizzare machines. Also to be noted here that the SpaceX‘s one of the building is the research, development and design studio for Tesla. Imagine how the richness and ownership has made it possible for a rocket industry and an automobile company to live together. While describing Elon Musk, many bloggers and fan base compares him with “Tony Stark”, yes he is. A stark-like kid born and raised in South Africa “whose willingness to tackle the impossible things has turned him into a deity in Silicon Valley.”

What we call as an overview but still descriptive writing is what writer has put in under the title “Elon’s World”.

In this part, there is an accurate description of how Internet fantasy had affected San Francisco and Silicon Valley. There was a time where you were no longer needed to make something that other people wanted to buy in order to start a booming company, you just had to have an idea for some sort of Internet thing and you were all set to go. But the downfall of this pattern is described in the book as, “While the good times have been well chronicled, the subsequent bad times have been-surprisingly-ignored”.

Soon after the internet fantasy left Silicon Valley in deep depression, the party time ended. Everyone fearing to be caught into the bubble again, believed how playing safe is new cool. And evidence of this malaise is reflected in the companies that were formed during this period. The best of the minds were thinking about how to make people click ads. “While everybody in the world dreamt of flying cars, they got 140 characters instead to play with”, said Peter Theil, the PayPal cofounder. You will find few more mentions of him in detail in the book when Elon becomes part of PayPal and some hit-backs of this merger take place.

The description of Silicon Valley and its atmosphere is important because this where Mr. Musk took off for his various ideas. Back to the main topic and heads into the book and you will read about dot-com mania of 1995, Zip2-Musk’s first company when he was fresh out of college, X.com, PayPal and Elon’s life in Silicon Valley and what pushed him to wrap everything and move to LA. In this part itself author quickly describes about SpaceX, Tesla and other ventures of Elon when he moved to LA and the dollars he earned and invested. Author also tried to add how Elon tries to manage all of these endeavors and what his typical schedule of the week goes around. And an image you will find in pictures section where someone has actually graphed out how Elon’s travels are when compared to an average American’s travel.

 The early life of Elon and his childhood starts in the next part in the book and it is thorough enough. While all throughout the reading, you will predominantly find repeated instances about Elon’s work style, his bossing-style and how his fellow employees felt and reacted about him; it describes the fun loving shades of Elon’s nature too. And I thought to introduce readers with this area of Elon’s personality as well.

Where Elon is a guy who rarely finds time to decompress, but when he does, the narration is hard to believe. Just an incident stated in the book says that, “On his 30^th birthday, Musk rented out a castle in England for about 20 people and played reverse of hide and seek called sardines in which one person hides and others search for him and in some other party Musk invited a sumo wrestler and faced off against him”.  

And I must say this man loves variation in style of enjoyment as well because another incident of his playful nature is revealed somewhat later in the book and that’s regarding the McLaren F1, world's most expensive car in 1999, he brought for his love towards nice cars and as a reward for himself. And then just one fine day out of the blue he emailed fellow McLaren owners which also included Larry Ellison, the billionaire cofounder of “Oracle”, to invite for car racing, just for fun. Till this time Elon had actually joined the big boys’ club. Later this very beloved McLaren was severely damaged as a result of Musk trying out a stunt in which the car literally started to spin in air like a Frisbee. Sad part it is normally, but “funny part” for Elon that the car wasn’t insured!

In this first part of the book you will find mentions of his second wife Talulah Riley, an actress by profession, and has been described quite close to his journey. However as the next part of the book begin with details of his journey since his, childhood, his life in Africa, his college days and then meeting Justine Wilson, his first wife, there seems a bit of insignificance which will be described more in coming blogs.So with the mix of details about Elon Musk’s life and world, with praises and criticism and roughly his journey throughout different timelines, the first part of the book finishes with Justine, who is also a writer by profession and a blogger, saying,

“He does what he wants, and he is relentless about it. It’s Elon’s world and rest of us live in it.”

… to be continued