Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance
$7.99
Elon Musk
- By: Ashlee Vance
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Professionals & Academics
Publisher's Summary
South African-born Elon Musk is the renowned entrepreneur and innovator behind PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity. Musk wants to save our planet; he wants to send citizens into space, to form a colony on Mars; he wants to make money while doing these things; and he wants us all to know about it.
He is the real-life inspiration for the Iron Man series of films starring Robert Downey, Jr. The personal tale of Musk's life comes with all the trappings one associates with a great, drama-filled story. He was a freakishly bright kid who was bullied brutally at school and abused by his father. In the midst of these rough conditions and the violence of apartheid South Africa, Musk still thrived academically and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he paid his own way through school by turning his house into a club and throwing massive parties.
He started a pair of huge dot-com successes, including PayPal, which eBay acquired for $1.5 billion in 2002. Musk was forced out as CEO and so began his lost years, in which he decided to go it alone and baffled friends by investing his fortune in rockets and electric cars. Meanwhile Musk's marriage disintegrated as his technological obsessions took over his life...
Elon Musk is the Steve Jobs of the present and the future, and for the past 12 months he has been shadowed by tech reporter Ashlee Vance. Elon Musk is an important, exciting and intelligent account of the real-life Iron Man.
©2015 Ashlee Vance (P)2016 Random House Audiobooks
Michael
An underwhelming narrative of a really cool guy
This book is a bit of a let-down. You will learn a bit about Elon and his companies, but it will sap 13 hours of your life away and you won’t be a better person for it.
You’d think there’s so much you can learn from Elon Musk, but this author didn’t really make much effort to gather any nuggets of insightful information, just snippets of hearsay from sources that have worked around Elon. Listening to the book feels kind of perverted because it’s written in a way where the author digs up lots of dirt on him the way a trash magazine reports on the secret lives of celebrities.
The Author even gloats mildly about his tenacity in pestering Musk until he agreed to let him write the book.
Don’t bother listening to this one.
71 people found this helpful
Mikhail
Fascinating story of an exceptional man
Things I liked:
1. Elon Musk’s story is nothing like you have ever heard, even if you have studied the greatest men and women to grace this planet.
2. His big picture thinking and pursuit of ideals, never backing down until those ideals are achieved is grandiose.
3. The idea that a man like this is alive at this present moment gives me the extra motivation to work hard on my purpose and perhaps come across Elon one day.
4. Both the writing by Ashlee Vance and reading by Fred Sanders is fantastic. The story flows very well and I will undoubtedly be listening to this again.
Things I disliked:
1. I wish there was more.
24 people found this helpful