Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

If Elon Musk was not successful, no one would want to relate to him. He would be one of those idiots in the community whom no one wants to be friends with.

If Elon Musk was not successful, no one would want to relate to him. He would be one of those idiots in the community whom no one wants to be friends with. Elon Musk is an idiot who does not know how to relate to others. On the day of his second wedding, he told his wife, “I am the alpha in this relationship”. As you can guess, his relationships are a mess. 

Father Musk 

Most of Elon’s most terrible traits can be traced. To where? His father. Elon’s father is the kind of dude you would read about in books that describe some terrible Uncle who was manipulative, unreasonable and just bordering on evil. Errol Musk is not the kind of father anyone would want. Of course, he has some good sides. He baptized Elon into engineering, and Elon’s penchant for risk-taking was an inherited family gene. 

A Family of risk takers 

This is Elon’s grandfather; 

Elon Musk’s attraction to risk was a family trait. In that regard, he took after his maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions who was raised on a farm on the barren plains of central Canada. He studied chiropractic techniques in Iowa, then returned to his hometown near Moose Jaw, where he broke in horses and gave chiropractic adjustments in exchange for food and lodging.

He was eventually able to buy his own farm, but he lost it during the depression of the 1930s. For the next few years, he worked as a cowboy, rodeo performer, and construction hand. His one constant was a love for adventure. He married and divorced, traveled as a hobo on freight trains, and was a stowaway on an oceangoing ship.

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At one point he wanted to learn ballroom dancing, which is how he met Winnifred Fletcher, whose adventurous streak was equal to his. As a sixteen-year-old, she got a job at the Moose Jaw Times Herald, but she dreamed of being a dancer and actress. So she lit out by train to Chicago and then New York City. Upon her return, she opened a dance school in Moose Jaw, which is where Haldeman showed up for lessons. When he asked her to dinner, she replied, “I don’t date my clients.” So he quit the class and asked her out again. A few months later, he asked, “When will you marry me?” She responded, “Tomorrow.”

They had four children, including twin girls, Maye and Kaye, born in 1948. One day on a trip, he spotted a For Sale sign on a single-engine Luscombe airplane sitting in a farmer’s field. He had no cash, but he convinced the farmer to take his car in exchange. It was rather impetuous, since Haldeman did not know how to fly. He hired someone to fly him home and teach him how to pilot the plane.

A Mission Man

With his love for space travel, it became clear to Elon that he would never achieve his dream in South Africa. He had to leave. He left for Canada with $4,000. From Canada, he moved to the United States. It is almost certain that if Elon Musk had stayed back in South Africa, he will not achieve half of the things he has achieved today. It was a perfectly calculated move. 

After the sale of Paypal, he wrote down three things that would affect humanity; “the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel.” 

Elon has played a major role in all three of these areas. He was part of Paypal, a company that changed online payment. He is part of Tesla, which is at the forefront of making electric cars possible for all humanity, and he is part of SpaceX, a space company that has completely changed space travel. 

I use “part of” because in all of these companies, Elon Musk is a co-founder. Although Elon has remained the public image of these companies and the visionary, it is important to state that others played important roles in founding and especially making these companies work. 

It is very clear that Elon Musk is driven by an obsessive mission. So far, it has been good for the progress of the human race . his predisposition to setting insane deadlines most times achieves one thing: it motivates his team to deliver results that they themselves do not believe is possible. Elon will be seen by many as a maniac, but none of the people who have had contact with dare to diminish his genius, his intensity, or his ability to get the job done.

All of his successes always find a way of being connected to his ability to reason without emotions. For example, when his space company Spacex was going through a difficult time following three failed attempts to send Falcone one, their first rocket, into space, Elon chose to escape despair by thinking about the future, not that moment. In the minutes that preceded the countdown for the launch, he was asking his engineers questions about a Falcon 5 –how crazy is that?

He has been able to maintain a single template throughout all of the companies he has been involved: to follow passion first, and then find a way to monetize along the way. This model has worked tremendously for him, and his penchant for breaking rules, questioning everything, including specifications, and narrowing every idea down to the basics, has helped the companies he has found stay above water, especially in turbulent times. He often told his engineers that the only things that were sacrosanct were the laws created by physics.

Cutting costs –idiot index

To produce cars or rocks or satellites in the manner that would be most efficient and save costs, Elon had to battle with the costs of most of the components that went into the production process that often came from third-party manufacturers. To solve this problem, Elon often resorted to what he called the idiot index. The idiot index to Musk was a measure of how much more the cost of a finished product is than the cost of its basic components. Elon says it is worth redesigning if there is a widespread, as was often the case. This principle has helped cut costs and promote efficiency across all of Musk’s companies. He even banks on it as the only way that humans can become a multi-planetary species. 

Reading the story of Elon Musk’s life so far makes it look like he was ordained to be where he is today. Even though the man himself doesn’t acknowledge it, Elon Musk has enjoyed an unusual amount of luck. What would the story be if he had died or was rendered incapacitated due to the accident that happened as a result of his decision to floor the throttle of his McLaren? What if his mother was not the kind of person to have invested the money she won from a pageantry competition at a young age? What if that malaria he got on his return to South Africa had got the better of him? In all of these instances, things needed to have gone a bit south, and the man we know today as the world's richest man would have had a different story entirely.

Let's celebrate luck, hard work, vision, and one of the greatest entrepreneurs of history. This biography is worth the hours I canceled so many activities to read it.