Elon Musk Book Review (Part 1 of 2): What Surprised Me

I really liked the book. I came into the book admiring his accomplishments with Tesla and self-driving capability. I left with a deeper understanding of him as a person and his other accomplishments.

It helps that Isaacson is a great writer. And, if you are looking for fun or gossipy material, Musk’s life provides plenty of that: getting ousted from PayPal, the “founding” of Tesla, Starlink in Ukraine, why he bought Twitter, what his inner circle thought of his tweets, what he thinks of Trump, bickering with Gates and Bezos, the SEC, and his complicated personal life.

But, what made me really like the book were all the great ideas and stories about operational and supply chain excellence. I will use a lot of this material in the classes I teach. I’ll write about this in the next post.

For now, here are some big themes that surprised me.

SpaceX is the main thing. I’m not interested in rockets, so I assumed that SpaceX was just one of many things Musk was up to. Nope. SpaceX and getting people on Mars are the main things he’s interested in. Much of the book was about SpaceX, which still kept my interest.

The guy is addicted to risk.

Musk’s life is about taking big risks and making big bets. I liked this quote:

“Look at the two companies that he went on to build, SpaceX and Tesla,” says [Peter] Thiel. “Silicon Valley wisdom would be that these were both incredibly crazy bets. But if two crazy companies work that everyone thought couldn’t possibly work, then you say to yourself, ‘I think Elon understands something about risk that everybody doesn’t.’” (pg 86)

The bets don’t always pay off, but that doesn’t bother him. What does bother him is when things are going well, and he isn’t taking huge risks.

Stamina is usually underrated, but not in this book.

Robin Hanson wrote about the importance of stamina several years ago. I agree with him. I think stamina is an underrated (or overlooked) trait of many successful people. That is, many successful people can put in hour after hour of work to solve problems or get things done.

One thing this book makes clear is that Musk can put in hour after hour of work. He doesn’t seem to sleep. He can go for weeks or months, sleeping at the factory or office and working twenty-four hours a day. It is hard to fathom that he can switch from one industry to another.

The book is long, yet maybe less than halfway done.

The book is long because he gets stuff done: SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, The Boring Company (started on a whim), SolarCity, Twitter, OpenAI, Optimus Prime, and X.ai. The time I put into preparing a lecture, Musk would have started a billion-dollar company!

However, as I got to the end of the book, I realized that this was (hopefully) just the first chapter. He will keep pushing to get a colony on Mars, working on helping transition to solar power, creating self-driving cars and humanoid robots, and probably twenty other things that would make for another good book.

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(Edit: Here is a link to the second part of the review)