This whole book read like a massive Elon propaganda piece. If you went in blind you might think Elon himself wrote this with his other hand down his pants.

The author manages to somehow simultaneously portray Elon as some eccentric genius and as a victim at the same time. I especially did not like the first chapter of the book: It’s a little tone deaf for a rich white boy in apartheid South Africa to play victim.

I liked the chapter on Canada a little bit better. It was the first time Elon went through any sort of adversity and they should’ve probably started with this chapter if they wanted to nail the hero formula.

You can love or hate the man, but you can’t deny his ability to exercise his free will to the fullest degree. Most of us dream of the extraordinary when we’re kids. Living on Mars, flying cars, you name it. Elon is the kind of guy who goes: “this seemingly impossible thing may be feasible in the next 100 years… Let me get started with what I have and see what happens”. He is the most complete expression of the phrase “you can just wake up and do shit”.

The early Space X and Tesla teams were incredibly resourceful, and they were the unseen stars of this book. (It is possible this is true for just about any early startup employees). Ashlee does a great job of highlighting their strengths, and how their roles shaped the companies. Here’s a great excerpt:

“Before another attempt could be made, SpaceX discovered on a Saturday night that the rocket’s power distribution systems had started malfunctioning and would need new capacitors. On Sunday morning, the rocket was lowered and split into its two stages so that a technician could slide in and remove the electrical boards. Someone found an electronics supplier that was open on Sunday in Minnesota, and off a SpaceX employee flew to get some fresh capacitors. By Monday he was in California and testing the parts at SpaceX’s headquarters to make sure they passed various heat and vibration checks, then on a plane again back to the islands. In under eighty hours, the electronics had been returned in working order and installed in the rocket. The dash to the United States and back showed that SpaceX’s thirty-person team had real pluck in the face of adversity and inspired everyone on the island. A traditional three-hundred-person-strong aerospace launch crew would never have tried to fix a rocket like that on the fly. But the energy, smarts, and resourcefulness of the SpaceX team still could not overcome their inexperience or the difficult conditions. More problems arose and blocked any thoughts of a launch”

Something else I respect about Elon is his ability to take on risk and throw his weight around to see his projects through. Throughout the book, he makes highly leveraged bets that pretty much everyone would cower from.

Unexpected, but I quite like Ashlee’s writing. I know him mostly from the Bloomberg segment he used to host, but was surprised by how well written his work is. It is logical and concise. It is almost as if his writing is meant for engineers. A + B in C circumstance led to D. I like it, he should write more biographies.

The book provides some insight into Elon’s politics (relevant in 2025)

“Musk has spent years buttering up the Democrats. He’s visited the White House several times and has the ear of President Obama. Musk, however, is not a blind loyalist. He first and foremost backs the beliefs behind Musk Co. and then uses any pragmatic means at his disposal to advance his cause. Musk plays the part of the ruthless industrialist with a fierce capitalist streak better than most Republicans and has the credentials to back it up and earn support.”

Some positive externalities from Elon:

  • He is probably the reason behind the resurgence of deep tech companies; some of which were started by ex-Space-X and Telsa employees
  • He is probably the reason why so many of these new deep tech companies are vertically integrated. This in itself has some positive externalities in improved efficiency (time, cost, etc.)
  • If you put this altogether, he might be biggest individual contributor to the end of the great stagnation

“As Page puts it, “Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not.” It’s a principle he’s tried to apply at Google. When Page and Sergey Brin began wondering aloud about developing ways to search the text inside of books, all of the experts they consulted said it would be impossible to digitize every book. The Google cofounders decided to run the numbers and see if it was actually physically possible to scan the books in a reasonable amount of time. They concluded it was, and Google has since scanned millions of books. “I’ve learned that your intuition about things you don’t know that much about isn’t very good,” Page said. “The way Elon talks about this is that you always need to start with the first principles of a problem. What are the physics of it? How much time will it take? How much will it cost? How much cheaper can I make it? There’s this level of engineering and physics that you need to make judgments about what’s possible and interesting. Elon is unusual in that he knows that, and he also knows business and organization and leadership and governmental issues.””