Reading Challenge: During Locked Down Elon Musk : biography - Ashlee Vance

Reading Challenge: During Locked Down
Elon Musk : biography - Ashlee Vance
I took out this book from the book shelf yesterday. You may not know much about billionaire Elon Musk but most of the car owners around the globe aspire to buy Tesla, fancy electric car created by Musk. He is a Canadian-American entrepreneur and the founder of many pathbreaking SpaceX, Tesla, and Zip2, among others. He was also one of the person  responsible for the success of PayPal. Currently he serves as (CEO) and Chief Designer (CDO) of SpaceX, CEO and product architect of Tesla, and chair of SolarCity.
He is an out of box thinker, innovator with futuristic vision and creator , who despite adversity and the mold of society think about the optimal solutions to problems, work hard and realize them.
His biography is written by Ashlee Vance an US based business columnist. Ashlee spent almost three years to record and compile Musk’s biography.
His work is very engaging and traces  struggle of Musk starting from his family’s origin story all the way to his successes by May, 2015.
Vance’s writing style is colorful and vivid as he describes various details along with the biographic facts. Sometimes he would insert an extra paragraph detailing the clothing of Musk or a scene from their dinner at a restaurant. Other times, he would describe the design of Tesla automobiles or the features of SpaceX’s rockets. This could be considered as tangential to the biographical purpose of the book by some readers, but nevertheless a welcome detour for others.
In the final chapter, the author attempts to present a holistic view of the subject of her book. It is definitely enriching to understand what motivates great people, what makes them exert themselves in pursuit of their mission and the book definitely delivers in that aspect.
His Journey
Elon Musk grew up in South Africa, dreamed of electric cars and spaceships. Even while being bullied at his high school, he chose to focus on programming, creativity and science instead of on anger and bitterness over the imperfections of his social environment. Strongly motivated, he ventured to the USA to pursue studies and his dreams. Precisely like Nicola Tesla, Elon Musk arrived in America with almost nothing but his talent and a thirst for science. Distinguished student at school, Elon impressed his professors and got an internship at a prestigious financial institution. However, that institution’s prestige quickly diminished in Elon’s eyes when some of his potentially very profitable ideas fell on deaf ears.
His disappointment was the very reason for success as it prompted Musk to start his first company — Zip2 in 1995. Before the era of Google Maps or navigation assistants, Zip2 was a convenient catalog of businesses and their physical locations with detailed directions on how to reach them. Musk attempted to become a CEO of the company but was blocked by the board of directors. Ultimately, the company was acquired by Compaq and Elon Musk monetized his 7% share in it.
In 1999, Elon Musk saw the potential of online banking and started one of the first companies engaged in it — X.com. His work days were long, his progress was incremental, his office was filthy and the food he ate was horrible. But even then, Musk demonstrated resilience and resolve shared by very few of his colleagues. Elon’s effort was enormous and positive results quickly followed. It is debatable whether an ordinary person would manage to lead the same company through crossing the startup chasm given the adversities he faced.
Often, however, every feature doubles as a defect and such was the case of Elon Musk’s character. Strong character means that one can endure hardship and quickly recover from shocks, but it also means stubbornness. In the extreme case when a person is used to hardship, they may think that everyone should endure in the same way. Such a person could lack in compassion for the suffering of others. A person like that could see others as weak or capricious. The results of such lines of thinking could lead to unpleasant social interactions. When such interactions are highly visible or even a subject of scrutiny, the public backlash may be significant, and it has been so on several occasions for Musk.
The concrete result for Elon Musk in 2000 was that a coup occurred during his honeymoon that ousted him from his role as CEO of X.com. This left a deep scar in Musk’s mind and gave him the determination to never place himself in a position of vulnerability. From now on, in every one of his following companies, he would be firmly in charge. No one would ever be able to wrestle the CEO position away from him.
His next two companies would be the embodiment of Elon’s childhood dreams of electric cars and spaceships. At first, SpaceX wasn’t even envisioned as a company. Rather, it was a statement that Elon wanted to make — a statement to humanity itself. Musk wanted to send a rocket to Mars, carrying a container. Inside the container would be terrestrial soil and seeds. Upon arrival, the seeds would be planted and the container exposed to Martian sunlight. The sunlight on Mars and the soil from Earth would nurture the plant into growth — a process that would be broadcast to Earth.
However, frustration after frustration made Musk do what he does best — he founded a company for space travel, the ultimate mission of which is to reach Mars. SpaceX is still not there. It has, however, crossed the chasm of trial and error. In fact, SpaceX has already achieved more than most other space launch businesses. It produces its own rockets with its own avionics and software. The rockets have vertical landing capability and are therefore reusable. SpaceX has recovered more than 20 rockets so far.
His Tesla car started as the fusion between the passion of Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning for electric cars, and Elon Musk’s concept of clean and comfortable transport. Although at first the cars resembled golf carts, Musk’s drive and ambition, coupled with countless overtime hours spent by his engineering team resulted in the best-selling electric car in the world for 2016 and 2018.
Elon Musk seems to be driven by a mission that stands above board rooms and quarterly results. He genuinely seems to risk his wellbeing and fortune in order to build a better tomorrow. In his drive, however, he implicitly requests that from everyone else around him. That includes his most loyal employees, friends and family members. It could be especially tough when people need a certain degree of individual freedom and have difficulties compromising their relationship with loved and close ones in the name of an elusive goal.
There has been numerous cases where Musk has discarded people around him whom he considers not as enthusiastic (including his most loyal assistant — Mary Beth Brown).
Elon has his own gems, you may ponder upon :
1.”When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”
2.“If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not.”
3.“There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.”
4.“When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars, people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.”
5.“Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.”
6.“It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.”
7.“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
8.“Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.”
9.“Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive and determination of the people who do it as it is about the product they sell.”
10.“We’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.”
11.“The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.”
12.“People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.”
13.“I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.”
The real gem comes when Elon points out that one of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask,” He said. “Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy. I came to the conclusion that really we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask.” The teenage Musk then arrived at his ultralogical mission statement. “The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment.
Elon is honest enough about bureaucracy.He says, ‘There is a fundamental problem with regulators. If a regulator agrees to change a rule and something bad happens, they could easily lose their career. Whereas if they change a rule and something good happens, they don’t even get a reward. So, it’s very asymmetric. It’s then very easy to understand why regulators resist changing the rules. It’s because there’s a big punishment on one side and no reward on the other. How would any rational person behave in such a scenario?’
Musk feels that whatever he has achieved it is due to adversity and his struggle to win over. That is why he sometimes bothers about future of his kids . He feels that the suffering helped to make him who he is and gave him extra reserves of strength and will. “They might have a little adversity at school, but these days schools are so protective,” he said. “If you call someone a name, you get sent home. When I was going to school, if they punched you and there was no blood, it was like, ‘Whatever. Shake it off.’ Even if there was a little blood, but not a lot, it was fine. What do I do? Create artificial adversity? How do you do that? The biggest battle I have is restricting their video game time because they want to play all the time. The rule is they have to read more than they play video games. They also can’t play completely stupid video games. There’s one game they downloaded recently called Cookies or something. You literally tap a fucking cookie. It’s like a Psych 101 experiment. I made them delete the cookie game. They had to play Flappy Golf instead, which is like Flappy Bird, but at least there is some physics involved.’
Life After 2015 ie writing his biography.
Elon Musk isn’t a stranger to controversies. Due to his flamboyancy, Musk has also faced his share of criticism. In some cases, like the infamous tweet about taking Tesla private, Musk crossed the line and was fined by the SEC. Vernon Unsworth also sued Musk for calling him a “pedo guy” and a “child rapist.” However, Unsworth lost the case. Musk also stroked a controversy a year after he smoked cannabis during a podcast. Musk and famed Tesla stock short-seller David Einhorn also got into a Twitter war last year. Meanwhile, Musk has never shied away from controversies. He faces detractors head-on. He has experienced victory as Tesla stock zoomed to record highs.
At times, Tesla and Musk have been at loggerheads with legacy automakers. Musk and Tesla frequently slam gasoline cars. Last year, Ford (NYSE:F) criticized Musk for portraying its F-150 in poor light. Notably, Ford will launch the electric model of its best-selling F-150 truck, which will compete with Tesla’s Cybertruck.
Recently Musk created a fresh controversy with his tweet on the coronavirus. He tweeted, “The coronavirus panic is dumb.” Like with every Musk tweet, he received support and criticism. Right now, I don’t think that the tweet was appropriate. Governments around the world struggling to control the coronavirus. Forced shutdowns helped China control the epidemic. Now, most of the new cases have been reported outside of China.