Book Summary 44 — Elon Musk
Published in
2 min readMar 4, 2018
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