Book Review: Elon Musk Biography

I've done a few book reviews in the past here, but I admit I've been slacking a bit. Not on the reading, though. I've actually been reading even more. I've been slacking a lot in writing about my thoughts and notes on each of the books. It's time to change that.

For those who are a bit out of the loop and doesn't know who Elon Musk is, he's the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla as well as a chairman of SolarCity. From those credentials alone you can definitely tell that this guy knows what he's doing! One thing I like to tell people when describing Elon Musk is that I do believe he's the biggest innovator of our generation. This book, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, will definitely describe how that statement is true.

From the start you get a sense of Elon as he was as a young kid. The biggest thing to hit me was just how much he read at a young age. This is actually not very surprising as I've always heard that the best leaders and innovators are voracious readers. Of course, that's not the reason I like to read, but it is nice to know that you share this habit with people like Elon.

What is interesting is the story of Elon's earlier companies, Zip2 and X.Com. X.Com eventually did merge with PayPal and Elon was the largest shareholder in the company. These two companies gave Elon his first millions.

SpaceX

With the money from the previous companies, Elon started SpaceX. This was brought on by a life-long dream to go to Mars. The book details the innovations and early failures of the company that builds their own rockets right in the US.

The innovations being that all parts of the rocket were built in-house at the SpaceX factory which turns out to be much cheaper than buying them from other countries. They continue to innovate by building rockets that can be reused by coming back to earth and land by themselves.

They did have early failures when they tried to launch the first version of their Falcon rocket which almost brought the company into bankruptcy. Thankfully, they were able to get a successful launch and able to win a lot of bids from NASA to keep the company going.

Tesla

Tesla is definitely a company I've been following for a while. Ever since I got to test drive a Model S in Houston a year ago, I've been interested in them.

A bit of a detail of Elon and Tesla is that he's a co-founder because he was the first investor into the company. If he didn't do this, then the company would have gone bankrupt long ago and due to that, I would consider him a co-founder. With that said, Elon probably did do a lot for the company as its CEO. He helped get the initial Roadster out and had a lot of input into the Model S.

I'm definitely looking forward to what this company will bring, especially with them making their gigafactory that should help bring down the cost of the batteries and, overall, the cost of the car.

Conclusion

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this biography. I already thought Elon Musk is an interesting person and definitely someone I'd want to meet one day. This book gave a bit more insight into him as a CEO and innovator as well as the histories of SpaceX and Tesla.

I'm pretty sure there will be more to come from Elon and I'll be waiting anxiously for another book on the rest of Elon's innovative career.

Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

I'm sure I'm a bit late reading this and I'll admit I didn't know hardly a thing about Steve Jobs before coming into this book. The only reason I decided to give it a shot was that it was so well recommended by the tech community online, especially after the Ashton Kutcher movie went out in theaters. "Why not?", I figured. "I like biographies and it'll give me some more background of the man himself as well as to how he ran Apple." So I went straight to my library to get a copy.

It was definitely a great read. It felt more like a novel than just a biography which makes it an easy read and helps it get read that much faster. It still took a couple of weeks to get through it, though I believe I'm a bit of a slower reader than many as I think it helps understand more of what I'm reading.

The main things that became instantly interesting was how much of a visionary Steve Jobs apparently was at Apple as well as how much business sense he instantly had. True Steve Wozniak basically did the engineering for the Apple I and II. However, if it wasn't for Jobs then I doubt the company exist at all. Truly, his drive to create a company definitely came to fruition.

There were many things the biography helped to learn about why certain events occurred, such as how and why he was ousted from Apple in the mid 80s, how Microsoft helped the company when he was brought back to Apple, how he was involved with Pixar, and the beginnings of what became the the iPod and iPhone. Interestingly, the way they came about is just the other products out there, as Jobs would say, sucked.

Steve Jobs' love of technology and design is a rare combination even in these days. How many developers do you know are actually good designers? I'm definitely not one of them (though, I am trying to learn) . I used to think that the closed ecosystem of Apple creating their own hardware, software, and services was a bad idea, but like Wozniak I'm beginning to understand how it helps the end user experience as a whole.

The biography even helped with a bit of understanding of the business culture as a whole since it repeatedly went to how meetings went with Jobs and the Apple board. Even as a CEO Jobs tended to be different than others by taking hours or days to make a decision on something instead of months to do research how the decision could affect the company. That tells you how passionate he was about his products and what his company could do for people.

If you haven't read it yet, I definitely recommend it. Of course, you can always just wait for the movie. I have high hopes it'll be better than the aforementioned one.

As for myself, I think I'll be test driving more Apple products in the future.