title: [Book Sharing] The Elon Musk Biography
published: false
date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00 UTC
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canonical_url: https://www.evanlin.com/reading-elon-musk/
---
[](https://moo.im/a/4cmzGQ "The Elon Musk Biography")
The Elon Musk Biography: The Only Unrestricted, Fully Public Biography
Author: Walter Isaacson
Original Author: Walter Isaacson
Translator: Kailin Wu
Publisher: Global Views Monthly
Published Date: 2023/09/27
#### Recommended Purchase Link:
- Readmoo: [Purchase Link](https://moo.im/a/4cmzGQ)
# Preface:
This is the second book I finished reading in 2024. It's a rather thick book, but I think it includes many of the major technological events of recent years, and it's not tiring to read at all; in fact, it's quite interesting.
# Content Summary:
The Only Unrestricted, Fully Public Biography of Musk
A heavyweight work by the authoritative biographer Isaacson
Two years of in-depth follow-up, decoding the world's most curious and controversial innovator—
Is he a madman or a hype genius? Is he a destroyer or an innovator? Is he a jerk or a hero?
If you want to understand the real Musk, you can only do it through this book!
★ First-person perspective observing Musk's unique hero mode and demon mode
★ In-depth interpretation of the business and innovation strategies of Musk's six major businesses
★ Revealing the three cutting-edge technology trends: AI, autonomous driving, and space exploration
"Whether you like it or not, we live in a world created by Musk." —《TIME》
Musk has led the world into the electric vehicle era, developed private space exploration, and seriously imagined artificial intelligence. He has changed three key industries and also changed our future. Oh, and he also bought Twitter.
He is a rule-breaking dreamer, with no path he can't create, no framework he can't break, and no baggage he can't shed. He calmly calculates risks and embraces them with passion, without limits to adventure. While other entrepreneurs are developing their worldviews, Musk is already building his worldview.
A legendary life more exciting than any science fiction novel, each of his businesses: Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink, X (formerly Twitter), The Boring Company, Neuralink, xAI, are rewriting history. In the future, how will he further change the world of technology?
Isaacson, the author of 《Steve Jobs》 and the one who can best capture the genius's mind, followed Musk for two years, attending meetings with him, visiting factories, and interviewing Musk himself, his family, friends, colleagues, and opponents, writing this well-documented life story filled with amazing insider information. During the writing process, Musk never controlled the content's direction, nor did he ask to see it before publication, and even encouraged his opponents and former employees to talk to the author.
Isaacson vividly describes Musk's successes and storms, and also explores a question: Does the demon that drives Musk also drive innovation and progress?
Musk's success cannot be replicated; no one can be like him. But his effective methods in growth, innovation, and entrepreneurship are worth reading.
‧ What are the secrets of the design factory?
‧ What will Tesla disrupt next?
‧ How should we set practical business goals for ambitious plans?
‧ How does Musk, who emphasizes a hard-core spirit, use people?
‧ What can we learn from video games about life lessons or business thinking?
‧ How to improve learning ability, quickly form insights, and master new fields?
‧ How does reading allow a person's influence to extend from the earth to space...
# Thoughts:
The whole book includes several important milestones related to Musk:
- His unique personality shaped by his father's extremism in childhood
- Paypal and x.com
- SpaceX's rocket dream
- Tesla's electric vehicle future dream
- Tesla's autonomous driving and robots
- Twitter's love-hate relationship
These important achievements revolve around his unique way of thinking:
The "first principles" thinking method is a way of looking at the world from a physics perspective, that is, peeling back the surface of things layer by layer, seeing the essence inside, and then going up layer by layer from the essence.
Through the first principles approach, Musk often makes many incredible demands, making his employees quite painful and uncomfortable. And through Musk's frequent activation of the acceleration mode, many originally impossible projects are gradually completed. For example:
- How to continuously reduce the cost of rockets
- How to recover rockets
- Cost analysis of electric vehicles, how to save battery costs.
- And most recently, how to save Twitter developers' costs.
It is also found that Musk is extremely harsh on cost savings and detail pursuit, which makes his followers unable to bear it. But it is also because of these reasons that these related achievements are possible. As a technology professional, I agree that the ultimate pursuit of details and the desperate study of costs will create amazing technology.
As for whether the relevant employees can accept the same idea, creating the related perfect pursuit and desperate personality. Some YouTubers have shared that Tesla is like a startup company, with almost unbelievably long working hours every day and frequent large-scale project pursuit teams. This will make the employees inside feel nervous and quite painful. But the sense of accomplishment after completion will also be immense. But how many people can stay in such a company long enough? Perhaps after pursuing their own perfect milestone, they will return to the balance they want to maintain?
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