Book: Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️.

It’s not a life-changing book but it’s cool to understand Elon Musk path.

Here are some few sentences I like and some comments on them:

The best minds of our time are working to make users click on ads

That’s really sad. Elon has a great vision of the future and you can feel like him when reading the book (at least I can). I had to pause the audiobook for some minutes after that.

If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules.

It’s really hard when you’re doing something good but you have many bureaucrats and detractors trying to keep things as easy as possible. Break the rules is sometimes the best thing to do, you just have to be prepared to deal with the consequences. Elon was ready to do whatever he needs to make things work, no matter the consequences.

He also explains why these rules exist and why it’s difficult to change:

If a regulator change a rule and something bad happens, he loses his career. If something good happens he got nothing in return.

In this case, you have to take the responsibility to be able to break the rules.

Elon is passionate about his vision. He is not just making business, he is trying to make the world a better place. Things like “take the man to mars” is not a business, but it’s one of his main goals.

I don’t know if I would feel comfortable working for Musk, there are many bad stories of working for him. But this is the price of his empire.

There are some stories about Elon firing an employee because he said it cannot be done. Musk took his position and delivered the work on time while doing his own job as well. As you may be thinking now, he’s not a 9-5 guy. ;)

That’s it. If you want to understand what is it like to work for an almost unreachable dream, this book may be a good fit for you.

Here are my raw notes about the book:

  • The best minds of our time are working to make users click on ads
  • He found out the employee who told about the finances of Tesla by copying the text to a word document, printing it and comparing with other printed documents
  • If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, than you have to fight the rules.
  • If a regulator changes the rule and something bad happens, he loses his career. But if something good happens he got nothing in return.