What to read to understand Elon Musk
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. YOU WOULD have thought Elon Musk was busy enough building brain implants, electric cars, grid-scale batteries, robots, rockets, satellites and tunnelling machines. Apparently not.
Mr Musk has also become a close adviser to Donald Trump. On November 12th he took on a new role as the co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency, a new body hoping to slash trillions from the federal budget. With that outsize role in mind, here are six books to help understand the history, personality, hopes and opinions of the tech titan.
Elon Musk. By Walter Isaacson. Simon & Schuster; 688 pages; $35 and £28 Walter Isaacson spent two years shadowing his subject; this authorised biography covers Mr Musk’s unhappy early years in South Africa, move to America and early success in the dotcom bubble, right up to his impulsive $44bn buy-out of Twitter (as it then was) in 2022.
Mr Musk is described as brilliant and as a taker of huge, calculated risks—as well as an aggressive, impossibly demanding figure. To get a sense of why Mr Musk is fond of pronouncements about “turning-points" and the “fate of civilisation", try one of his science-fiction favourites. Inspired by the fall of the Roman Empire, “Foundation" revolves around the invention of a statistical theory of history that predicts the imminent fall of the Galactic Empire, which will usher in a 30,000-year dark age.
A visionary historian and mathematician conceives a plan to ensure the dark age will last a mere 1,000 years instead. Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX. By Eric Berger.
HarperCollins; 288 pages; $27.99. William Collins; £20. Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second
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