This is a short summary on the book I’ve recently read from the author Ashlee Vance, title “Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future”. The book focuses upon the entreprenuerial pursuits of Musk and the way of thinking the genius has embodied.

Elon Reeve Musk had a tough childhood and suffered through the divorce of his parents, Elon choose to live with his father after the split. Having two siblings Kimbal Musk and Tosca Musk, both fairly successful in their life, Elon was the one who’d shoot for the stars, quite literally!

Childhood

Since childhood, Elon was a geeky boy who was always seen with a book in his hand, his mother Maye said in an interview. While in 4th grade Elon exhausted all the books from the school library and two neighborhood libraries and hounded the librarian to buy more books for him to read!

While in grade school Elon developed a trans-like state where he’d meditate upon any idea and not respond to anyone speaking to him, being totally unaware of their presence. This was a big deal as everyone thought Elon had an auditory malfunction and took him to doctor for treatment. Elon, while in reality, had found a way to isolate himself and thoughts from the world noise. Elon, at present, says

“I still experience such state, though not as vividly, as there are many things nowadays that seek my attention”

The initial venture: Zip2

Elon Musk started a company Zip2 (initially named GlobalLinks) in 1995 with his brother Kimbal Musk, this was providing an online presence to the retailers around the block.

Elon, while selling his idea, always gave the pizza example,

“Everyone has a right to know where the nearest pizzerias are…”.

The site would list out the nearest outlets and give turn-by-turn navigation to the place. Note that this was way before Google-Maps become a commonplace. Most of the code was written by Elon himself. This technology was far ahead from its time and faced many initial challenges as internet was a new thing, people had to be convinced about this internet fad that’d keep up with time, etc. Elon wanted the company to be a customer-directed product but rather due to the boards direction it was the company that became the internet city-guide of Newspaper publishing industry.

Elon wanted to be the CEO, which the board rejected, and wanted to stare the company in the vision in which he started it. Nonetheless, Zip2 was acquired by Compaq in 2001 for $307 M and Elon made $22M dollars from his 7% shares.

Elon takes on banking: PayPal

Rather than basking in the glory of newfound silicon millionaire, elon spent almost all of his gains in his next grand venture. Elon, now wanted to make a virtual bank as this was the industry that had not been changed for the past 50 years. Elon, did not know a thing about the banking industry and there were a myriad of laws in place to prevent something like that from happening.

Elon believed in the vision, however,

“Money is low bandwidth, it’s just a number in a database”.

He started reading about the industries and inspite of the challenges he made an online bank system. The company was called X.com, a rather counter-intuitive name. It was the first of the kind to introduce a money transfer option by pressing a button. This company then merged with its rival Confinetiy, which had a service named PayPal. Later, the merged company would come to know as PayPal.

Musk was ousted in October 2000 from his role as CEO (although he remained on the board) due to disagreements with other company leadership, notably over his desire to move PayPal’s Unix-based infrastructure to Microsoft Windows.

PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5B and Musk having 11.7% of the shares recieved $165M.

SpaceX

In 2001, Musk conceptualized Mars Oasis, a project to land a miniature experimental greenhouse on Mars, containing food crops growing on Martian regolith, in an attempt to regain public interest in space exploration.

Elon was a rocket enthusiast since childhood and looked forward to see humanity evolve as a multi-planetary species. Initially, the idea was to buy ICBMs(Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles) from Moscow,Russia and use them to send the payload to space. But Musk was treated as a novice and not taken seriously, he stormed out of a meeting once and on the way back to US made an elaborate excel sheet totalling the cost of the raw materials required for building rockets. It was 3% of the sales price of rocket at that time and decided he’d build the rockets himself.

“It was concluded that theoretically, by applying vertical integration and the modular approach from software engineering, SpaceX could cut launch price by a factor of ten and still enjoy a 70-percent gross margin.”

After initial will-breaking failures SpaceX was able to deliver exceptional feats like docking the Dragon capsule with ISS, launching a rocket and re-using the boosters to provide for future flights. These achievements were thought impossible by the space industries, well before they were not anymore.

Tesla

Tesla was originally incorporated by Martin Eberhart and Marc Tarpenning, which Elon later funded leading the Series A round of investment in February 2004, joining Tesla’s board of directors as its chairman. During the financial crisis of 2008 the company ousted out Eberdard and Musk assumed the CEO and product architect position. Musk lead the company through the financial crisis overviewing the developement of roadster.

Arguably, Musk feels a genuine concern about oil being a major accessory in plethora of industries. He says,

“On a daily basis, enough sunlight hits the Earth to power all the world for months, that is more than all the other resources combined”

Musk has a drive for making sustainable clean-tech products. In 2014, Musk announced that Tesla would allow its technology patents to be used by anyone in good faith in a bid to entice automobile manufacturers to speed up development of electric cars.

“The unfortunate reality is electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales,”