Book Summary 44 — Elon Musk

The book is a really well written biography of Elon Musk’s insane life. I thought I knew the most important and biggest things about Elon before I read the book. The book completely opened my eyes just how tough Elon’s journey was to get to where he is.

There were many, many things which completely surprised/disillusioned me

— here are some of them:

• He worked/still works absolutely insane hours, often slept under the desk
• He is a programmer himself
• Never writes anything down as he has a great memory
• Was kicked out as CEO twice by the board
• His first son died young, he then had twins and triplets (all boys)
• Won a D&D tournament
• Cleaned the boiler room of a lumber mill (because best paid job) — insanely hot and small
• Cold called execs and got an internship at Bank of Nova Scotia
• Loved Civilization when it came out
• Doesn’t drink much alcohol — never has
• Founded Zip2 (searchable directory tied to maps)
• Board demoted Musk to CTO
• Always way to optimistic how long something is going to take
• Compaq bought Zip2 for $307m making Musk $22m (7.2% of the value (!) pre-tax)
• Founded X.com which is going to be a complete digital bank
• Early on employees staged a coup and when Musk didn’t step down as CEO, lots of them left
• Peter Thiel worked on Confinity (with a service called Paypal) from the same building as X.com
• Paypal and X.com really didn’t get a long — so Paypal even moved to a different building
• Merged because Paypal had better tech, but X.com had the cash
• Peter Thiel resigned as didn’t see eye to eye with Musk after 2 months
• Nastiest coup ever — as Musk was on a flight to his Honeymoon, employees together with board kicked out Musk and reinstated Thiel as CEO
• eBay bought Paypal for $1.5 billion, Musk made $250m (17%) pre-tax, $180 post-tax (28% tax)
• Had Malaria for 6 months after sale of Paypal (“holidays kill me”)
• Tried to buy rocket from Russians, didn’t work so started SpaceX
• Musk hired pretty much every one of the first thousand employees
• Often called in dorm rooms to get people fresh out of uni to join
• Was often an Extreme saver and promoter of making things in-house by 10x cheaper
• Was part of production of movie “Thank you for smoking”
• Even then Musk almost ran out of money — Tesla & SpaceX close to bankruptcy
• He had to borrow money from friends to make payroll
• Tesla almost got sold to Google, luckily enough Musk put 500+ people from all departments on the phone who sold enough cars in 2 months to keep the company afloat