Arguably, members of the space community reside in one of two camps regarding Elon Musk: those who feel he is a publicity-seeking egotist with a crazy wish to colonise Mars; and those who know he has revolutionised the space business and want to know more about what ‘makes him tick’. This book should satisfy the latter, but it may leave Musk’s supporters feeling they got more than they asked for.
Although the author characterises Musk as a “rule-breaking visionary”, he also recognises the personality of a “vulnerable man-child with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive”. A quote from the man himself, interviewed on ‘Saturday Night Live’ in 2021, seeks to deflect any criticism: “To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was going to be a chill, normal dude?”.
Along with 14 pages of chapter notes and a 30-page index, this book has some 600 pages of text, illustrated by around a hundred monochrome photos. It is the result of the author’s two years spent shadowing Musk in the workplace and “scores of interviews and late-night conversations”; it also references more than a hundred separate interviews with the likes of Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Bill Gates.
One thing SpaceX fans have had to come to terms with is that Musk is not a one-trick pony and is often distracted by other ventures. Indeed, back in 2008, when both SpaceX and Tesla were struggling, his close advisors urged him to choose between the two. However, he likened it to choosing between two children: “I couldn’t bring myself to decide that one was going to die, so I decided I had to give my all to save both”.
Some readers may find that Musk’s multifaceted interests continually interrupt the story of his space company, but this is the nature of a biography. For most ordinary mortals, it is ‘life’ that ‘gets in the way’; for Elon Musk, it is battery factories, hyperloops and purchasing social media networks. For space-aware Musk supporters, the question is what more could he do if only he was focused on space? Perhaps we’d be on Mars by now.
For this slightly disappointed reviewer, the final chapters of the book descend into a world of Twitter, AI and other non-space elements. Although the final section (chapter 95, no less!) returns to SpaceX with “The Starship Launch” of April 2023, it is too little, too late. During a pre-launch pep-talk, Musk is quoted as saying, “the thing you’re working on is the coolest fucking thing on Earth. By a lot. What’s the second coolest? This is far cooler than whatever is the second coolest”. One wonders how many times he has given the same pep-talk at Tesla.
In June 2021, Musk turned 50. So despite his marijuana-smoking, jig-dancing image he is approaching the senior executive stage of his life. No doubt there will be plenty of material for a second edition.
