MUSKIANS

Keeping my regular style of writing on socialism a bit far from here, this time I tried honestly to make fans of this ‘SpaceX-Tesla’ guy come closer to his roller-coaster journey which is mostly what has been depicted by Mr. Ashlee Vance in his writing. This blog series can be a treat for those who were silently wishing to read all about Elon Musk and not just those fancy 10 things about Elon Musk or blah things Elon Musk wants to achieve. Yes this will be a blog series because it’s really not just to read an article to know all about this man and judge him for everything that he is. It’s more like, the man you know and the journey you don’t. So here we go..

When Ashlee Vance might have finished what he wrote about Elon and his life , he would have at some corner of his brain realized that what he has presented will make a new race of thoughts, new clan, new people who breathe together the air of novelty and will be known as Muskians. The people who won’t be simply admirers but keen observers and critics of what has been revolutionized by Mr Musk in the area of space and technology.

While the writer of the biography is an experienced business columnist and has been in constant touch with Musk for writing his book, he says, “Any study of Elon Musk must begin at the headquarters of SpaceX in Hawthorne, California.”, and here I am merely a reader but still I want to sincerely try at giving out my words and wishes to add in this blog, an attempt to shortly review the book as well.

While I firstly cared to read appreciations from various forums and authors about the book, I was scooped by the thought that this book might just turn out to be a pile of image cleansing pages and regular big words at what this industrialist is doing and all. And I thought, “Oh well, sweet and short let’s read Wikipedia, everything almost worth knowing is there”.

 But again out of curiosity I started with the book and I must say it was really a great ride down through the lane when actual Muskian activities were taking place one by one, making an impression on the world with, not golden words to charm, but real marks of efforts to do good things.

“Do you think I am insane”?

A question from Elon at the starting of the book and slowly one after the other the writer narrates the incident on how he started with writing Elon’s biography. Describing their first communication about writing the book, Ashlee reveals the badass character of Elon when he simply tells the writer that he won’t cooperate on this plan of writing a book about him. The reader in me got curious about all this stuff because I had it in mind previously that Elon hired some writer to write about his journey and clean the mess that might be in press and media for some reasons. And this was a slight shock. But later putting the writer’s word exactly he tells that his constant efforts and won’t give up spirit convinced Musk and he agreed to help. And as Ashlee wrote in book about Elon, “He respects people who continue on after being told no”. So as more about Elon’s character started unfolding through the book, it made obvious and expected paragraphs about his interests in talks about technology, and how it took the writer to take him out of Artificial Intelligence doom and gloom talks on to the topic of their main discussion. Elon Musk has been specifically frightful that Google’s co-founder might accidentally produce something evil by producing the fleet of AI enhanced robots that might destroy mankind. What we need to know here is that Elon and Larry page, Google’s co-founder, holds very good relations and you will even find out in further reading that they were even about to do a deal about Tesla which for some reason didn’t happen. The book is full of many incidents, their reasons and how everything unfolded in Elon’s life. And writer has left no stone unturned in the praises of Mr. Musk, but it still doesn’t make you feel as buttering.

 To my surprise, the writer has taken a straight shoot at the founder of Facebook out of no where saying, “What Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to…well..save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.”  Well I don’t want to trust this all so quickly, we will go slowly.

 But a crisp statement that people often have known as the identity of Elon is present in the book as well, “Turning humans into space colonizers is his stated life’s purpose”.  But that’s not all.  

                                                                                                                                                                … to be continued