Book review: The rise and rise of Elon Musk

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

By Ashlee Vance, Ecco, 400 pages, $28.99

Three years ago, I was summoned to a meeting with a powerful stock market investor who wanted to explain why Elon Musk was going to fail. Tesla Motors, Musk’s electric car company, was on the verge of launching its groundbreaking Model S and the smart money on Wall Street scented blood.

The investor, like many others, had shorted Tesla’s stock, betting on it falling hard when the fantasy of making money from selling electric cars evaporated in the California sunshine. But this turned out to be a disastrous ploy. The Model S won unprecedented accolades from the auto press and Tesla’s stock soared. The shorts were forced to eat humble pie along with their losses.

For stock speculators and anyone else in danger of underestimating Elon Reeve Musk, Ashlee Vance’s portrait of the entrepreneur at mid-life is an essential read. You might think you know this story: how a South African with a big vision and rough edges came to the United States and ended up creating and running the first successful private space concern (SpaceX) and the first profitable electric car company, with the biggest US solar installer (SolarCity) as a side project.

But what emerges is a riveting portrait of Silicon Valley’s most driven entrepreneur since Steve Jobs, personal flaws and all. Musk doesn’t give in — ever. Even at the blackest moment, after blowing through the $180-million (Dh661 million) fortune he made as a co-founder of PayPal (and the $22 million from his first internet success, an online maps company called Zip2), he didn’t cede an inch on his grand plans.

The appetite for almost unthinkable levels of risk, along with sheer force of will and an intellectual self-confidence bordering on arrogance, carry the day.

Vance, a technology writer for “Bloomberg Businessweek”, has not produced a hagiography. Few business figures would survive the kind of battering that Musk takes in this book without having their reputations shredded. Among the descriptions of him hurled by detractors (with varying degrees of endorsement from Vance): that he is an egomaniacal, stubborn jerk; bombastic, with touches of insecurity; a confrontational know-it-all with an abundant ego; a hyperbolic huckster, and someone who is unethical in business and vicious in his personal attacks. And that litany comes in the space of just two pages.

Musk sounds almost unbearably difficult to work or live with (which partly explains his three marriages, two to the same woman). Late in the book, he discards his loyal assistant of many years with little ceremony; at another point, his wife realises he has filed for divorce when her credit card is cancelled.

So why has he been such a success, and why do many of the best brains in the software, automotive and aerospace worlds want to work for him? The similarities to Jobs and Apple are striking — a comparison Vance rightly makes. People will put up with a lot when they think they really are changing the world, not just working for another me-too start-up with empty claims of significance.

At a young age, according to Vance, Musk decided that mankind would not survive as an Earth-bound species: the only hope was to colonise Mars as a first step towards an interplanetary future. With governments apparently unwilling to set their sights so high, Musk decided it fell to him to take the lead — at the same time that he was bent on pursuing alternative sources of energy to save the planet we are at present tied to. As Musk likes to joke: he hopes to die on Mars — only, not on impact.

Vance doesn’t let Musk get away with much. He catches the heavy dose of P.T. Barnum in the showmanship, and he identifies Musk’s somewhat overzealous rendition of his own life story. But his detailed reporting on SpaceX and Tesla conveys clearly how Musk has pulled off his unlikely victories.

The key has been to adapt the Silicon Valley start-up culture to industries that had been insulated from disruptive interlopers. Musk set outrageous goals and squeezed unimaginable performance out of his staff. With little money to play with, his companies relied on moving fast and making do. When a SpaceX engineer tells him a supplier has quoted a price of $120,000 for a rocket part, for instance, Musk laughs and says it is no more complicated than a garage-door opener: the engineer eventually finds a way to make the part for $3,900.

It took a particular genius to adapt the fast-moving start-up culture, perfected in the internet and software worlds where products are often released in rudimentary form and perfected later, to highly complex, interdependent systems such as rockets and cars.

As Musk himself describes it, it is as though he has a graphics chip in his head: he has a penchant for hardware that goes beyond his self-taught coding skills and can see how objects in the world will interact, plotting “acceleration, momentum, kinetic energy” in his mind’s eye.

If the book does a good job of capturing its subject’s drive, it is a harder thing to explain what makes Musk run. Vance puts it down to an “existential depression”, caused in part by a dark (but still secret) childhood experience that came from living with a difficult father. “He sees man as self-limiting and in peril and wants to fix the situation,” writes Vance. In this overriding drive to save humankind, Musk treats individual members of the species as expendable.

It’s as plausible an explanation as any, though when paired with the pain and suffering that Musk is prepared to put up with (a near-death experience from malaria barely stands out), this line of reasoning comes perilously close to according him Christ-like status.

So is he the world-changing visionary that many in Silicon Valley would like to believe? Or is he an unrealistic techno-utopian? The answer that emerges from this book is: both. Vance, clearly a fan, does not flinch from verdicts such as this one, issued by an eminent historian of US manufacturing: that Tesla is “nothing but an utterly derivative overhyped toy for show-offs”.

History will deliver the final verdict, depending on whether Musk’s ventures build on their early breakthroughs. Musk is only 43, so there should be plenty more of this life story to come. With any luck the next biographer will do it as much justice as Vance has here.

–Financial Times