But there is a problem with aluminum- car manufacturers almost never use it because it tears during production and develops lines that make applying paint extremely difficult.

Musks decides to compensate by making the body of the car out of aluminum. One of the early problems was that the battery pack was heavy. When Ashlee talks about Tesla he gets into the details of production problems that Tesla experienced from the beginning. A few hours in he turns around and says: 'guys, I think we can build our own rocket.' He hands his friends the laptop with a spreadsheet- an exhaustive list of materials that go into making a rocket, along with the expected cost.īut let me get back to the juxtaposition with Steve Jobs. Everyone is processing the events Elon is typing on his laptop. He's on a flight back to America with friends and associates who went with him. One memorable part of the story was his return trip from Russia, after he attempted to buy a rocket and was laughed out of every meeting. You learn pretty quickly that Elon has a high IQ, had a difficult, partially unhappy childhood, that he has unusually high levels of self-belief and inexhaustible tolerance for pain, that he can be ruthless with employees, business associates and even family, that he never stops working and never takes anything on faith. (Did you know that Elon ran weekly parties upwards of 500 people in an off campus college house to make rent? His mom even visited and worked the door once.) That works out to ~80 pages per topic on average, which considering the subject matter can leave you wanting much more. In 392 pages you get to learn about five things- Elon's first company Zip2, his time at PayPal, Space X, Tesla, and Elon himself. You'll learn a lot that you wouldn't find on the internet (at least not easily). Ashlee has dedicated years to interviewing people in Elon's life, and eventually got regular access to Elon himself. But it's no wikipedia page stretched into a book to make money. It's 392 pages, which is ~50 pages longer than it should be. The book is worth reading and I recommend it. I'll get to it in a minute, but here's a preview: it doesn't look good for the public.

The juxtaposition of the two books is fortuitous- not because they let you compare the two men, but because they let you compare how the public responds to the same actions in different circumstances. Today I want to review Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance. Last time I reviewed Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing.

Elon musk autobiography review