Book Report: Elon Musk
Author: Walter Isaacson
Publication: 2013
Pages: 615
Completion Date: 4/17/25
This book was a deluge of detailed information about Elon Musk that makes writing a book report difficult. I will attempt to condense it down as much as possible without losing the flavor of the book.
In short, Musk drives himself relentlessly (almost maniacally) all day & night. He will often set very short, almost insane deadlines and drive his colleagues to make it. He is an extreme risk taker, but once he sold PayPal, he could afford to be. He is detached, possibly due to his Asperger’s Syndrome, and can be extremely rude.
He developed something called the Idiot Index, which is the cost of finished goods divided by the cost of basic materials. There were multiple times in the book where he was quoted something like $120K for a part that they made themselves for $6,000 or $90,000 for a part that they obtained for $300 from a car wash.
He developed an algorithm used at SpaceEx. It am listing it below:
1) Question every requirement. Each should come up with the real name of the person who made it. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement comes from Musk himself. Then make the requirement less dumb. You should never accept that a requirement from a legal or safety department.
2) Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough.
3) Simplify & optimize. This should come after step 2. A common mistake is to simplify & optimize a part that should not exist.
4) Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have completed steps 1-3. In the Tesla factory, I spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.
5) Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada & at Fremont was that he began by trying to automate every step. He should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts & processes deleted, and the bugs shaken out.
6) Corollaries:
a) All technical managers should have “hands-on” experience.
b) Comradery is dangerous. It makes it hard to challenge other people’s work.
c) It is OK to be wrong – just don’t be confident & wrong.
d) Never ask troops to do something you are not willing to do.
e) Whenever there are problems to solve, don’t just meet with your managers. Do a skip level, where you meet with the level right below the managers.
f) When hiring, look for the people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude requires a brain transplant.
g) A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle.
h) The only rules are the ones dictated by physics. Everything else is a recommendation.
* Elon Musk was born 6/28/71 in Pretoria, South Africa. His parents divorced when he was 8. He had a hard upbringing with a detached father, lots of fights due to his social awkwardness and was extremely stubborn.
* He moved to Canada when he was 18 (his mom was a Canadian citizen & so was he). His mom, younger brother & sister soon followed. They moved to Toronto where he began attending Queen’s University. He got an internship at Microsoft and worked as a bank trainee. He transferred to UPenn his junior year to major in physics. After his junior year, he got an internship at Pinnacle Research Institute in Palo Alto, CA during the day and worked evenings at Rocket Science, a video game producer.
* He & his brother, Kimbal, started Zip2 during his senior year – a kind of yellow pages on computer. It later merged with CitySearch and sold it 4 years later (1999). His cut was $22 million.
* In 1999, he started X.com, a type of online bank. He married Justine Wilson in January 2000, who he had met at Queen’s University. X.com merged with PayPal in March 2000. He was ousted as CEO in September 2000 while on his honeymoon. PayPal went public in early 2002 & was acquired by eBay in July 2002. Musk got paid $250 million. In January of 2001, he almost died from malaria that he got while visiting South Africa earlier.
* In 2001, he decided to start a rocket company – starting SpaceX in May 2002. He & Justine had a baby in 2001 that died of SIDS. As SpaceX got started, he made the engineers question everything and as they progressed, they started wooing NASA in 2003.
* In October 2004, Musk met Martin Eberhard, Mark Tarpenning & Brian Straubel, who owned Tesla. He invested $6.4 million. He forced them to do more insourcing and roll out the roadster, which allowed them to get $40M in financing. In my opinion, he did not “start” Tesla, but was the money behind getting it going.
* They were ready to launch their first rocket, Falcon 1 in Spring of 2005, but were unable to do it at Vanderburg AFB because the Air Force was already launching a super-secret satellite from there at that time. They needed to be near the equator for launch, so he moved to Kwajein Atoll in the Marshall Islands for launching. The first four Falcon 1’s launched as listed below. After each crash, the root cause was determined & updated.
– Falcon 1-1 03/24/06 crashed
– Falcon 1-2 March 07 crashed in flight
– Falcon 1-3 08/03/08 crashed in the upper atmosphere
– Falcon 1-4 09/28/08 Made it into space
– NASA committed $1.6 billion contract to SpaceX for 12 trips to Space Station
* By the time the fourth rocket made it into space, SpaceX had 500 employees. Boeing’s rocket division had 50,000 employees and had not yet done anything of value.
* From 2006-08, he was simultaneously working to get Tesla going. Eberhard was ousted in early 2008, which was about the same time the first Tesla roadster rolled off the production line. He got divorced in 08 & also met his second wife, Talulah Riley in 08, who he married in 2010. By this time, Musk was almost bankrupt. He needed $2.5 million immediately to “keep the lights on” at Tesla & SpaceX, which he got from friends & family. His former PayPal investors put $20M into Tesla, he sold $50M in equity to Daimler and got a $465M loan from the Department of Energy.
* From 2009-13, he focused a great deal of energy at Tesla. The Model S rolled off the production line in June 2012. He built the Gigafactory (to make batteries) in Nevada in June 2012, which was 40% owned by a Japanese company. The Model 3 came off the line in July of 2017.
* From 2009-2010, the needed a bigger rocket to get astronauts into space. They developed the Falcon 9, which used 9 of the Merlin engines at the same time – the same engine that was on the Falcon 1. It was twice as tall as F1, ten times more powerful and twelve times heavier. In addition to the new rocket, they needed a space capsule to dock with the ISS & it needed to carry a larger payload. The F9 became the workhorse of SpaceX.
* In 2015, things really started taking off in Musk’s life, as you can see by the following:
– 2015 – helped launch OpenAI.
– 2015 – Launched Tesla AutoPilot – did not really get established until early 2020’s.
– 2015 – Bought Solar City. The idea behind this is that they could use solar power to power a PowerWall battery, which could charge the Tesla, making it 100% powered by renewable energy.
– Starlink was created. By 2018, 2000 satellites were in orbit, installed by SpaceX. He intends to have 40,000 Starlink satellites soon.
– 2016 – started a Boring company to bore tunnels underground.
* In 2015-19, he got a Tesla factory built in Shanghai that was 100% owned by him, not a standard JV normally required by China.
* In 2017-20, he developed Neuralink, a way to embed a computer chip in a brain and carry messages to the limbs. The original concept was to speed up the connection between the brain & limbs for playing computer games, but ultimately became a way to help paralyzed people walk and use their limbs again.
* In 2018, the Starship rocket was designed & built. This had 33 engines and could carry 4 times the payload of the F9. Its rockets were designed to be reusable and landed 33 times safely for re-use (as of the time of this book).
* Musk also bought & built Starbase on the southern tip of Texas for the launching of all future rockets.
* In 2019, the Cybertruck was designed & built.
* In 2020-21, he built the Gigafactory in Texas.
* In 2021, he made a big push on solar, trying to make the installation of solar panels on roofs a viable venture. He ultimately dropped this pursuit because it was not scaleable.
* In 2021, he pushed for Opimus – the development of a humanoid robot that walked like a human and had working hands & wrists like a human.
* In 2021, he became the richest person. By this time, he had at least ten kids: 5 with Justine Wilson, 3 with his third wife Grimes and 2 with his friend Shivon Zilis – most of which were done by in-vitro fertilization into surrogates. He has even more now.
* In 2020, he became more engrossed in politics, largely as a result of what he thought were overly aggressive policies from Covid. He switched from a Democrat to a Republican due to excessive pushing on woke policies.
* In 2022, the Ukraine-Russia war began. Ukraine was saved by access to and use of Starlink, which was primarily funded by Musk. Later on, he only funded civilian access. Anything war related was funded by the US government.
* In 2022, he started giving some money to Bill Gates Foundation, but was against this type of thing as he felt that what he was doing would have a greater postive impact on society.
* In 2022, he began promoting the concept of a driverless Robotaxi.
* In 2022, he made an offer on Twitter. By the time he was getting closer to buying it, he realized he had bid too high of a price and tried to get out of it, but was unable to do so. He bought it on 10/27/22 and closed it down that night, preventing the old board from being able to exercise their stock options. Chapters 83-91 largely dealt with how he cut 80% of the staff of Twitter, tried to increase its ability to transmit free speech and monetize it through advertising & subscription fees. I have personally never used Twitter, so I learned some things when reading these chapters.
* Not all went well for Musk. In 2018, things began to fall apart. JB Straubel left Tesla and the SEC began investigating him for some of his Twitter posts, plus he publicly smoked marijuana while doing a podcast on the Joe Rogan show. He was having trouble managing all of the companies and his health suffered greatly. Additionally, he was dealing with multiple children through multiple ex-wives and those who were raising children fathered by him. He ultimately toned down his tweets and re-focuced his energy on improving aspects of some of his companies. He always handled himself best emotionally when focusing all his energy on improving operations within a company.
I learned the following that will help increase my prospects for success after prison (I learned a lot, but will limit it to the main three):
- When you have a goal, pursue it relentlessly. Let nothing get in your way – even if you have to work 20 hours per day.
- Relentlessly cut costs when starting a new venture. Use the idiot index to determine appropriate costs for new products. On sophisticated equipment, you may be able to make it yourself much cheaper than buying it. Use his algorithm when starting a new venture.
- You can accomplish more than you think you can if you set almost unrealistic goals. At one point, he halved a deadline and then halved it again and still got it done.
