Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance

Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance was a well-written and really interesting biography on someone with a combination of brilliance, drive for himself and employees, and willingness to bet big.

Musk is unique among business leaders with his leading role in three huge and potentially impactful companies, SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity and it's written about in the book that SpaceX is really the big thing for Musk as his overarching goal is to put someone on and then colonize Mars. Vance wrote a really detailed portrait of Musk and some of what struck me as particularly important or interesting is below...

Musk's grandfather was Joshua Norman Haldeman, who in 1950 decided to emigrate from Canada to South Africa, then along with Musk's grandmother in 1954 flew a private plane from Africa to Australia, believed to be the only private pilots to have done this. They also did bush expeditions in Africa and one of their children was Maye, who married Errol Musk, with one of their offspring Elon, born in 1971. He was a bright child who read obsessively and constantly corrected people, but with him not really understanding why they didn't like it. When Elon was around 8, his parents divorced and he went to live his father, someone described in the book as an intense and unpleasant man. When Musk was 10, he got his first computer and loved it, but around the middle school years was picked on relentlessly and had a miserable time, with things then improving in high school.

At 17, Musk left South Africa for Canada and then enrolled at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. In 1992, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania to pursue degrees in economics and physics and Musk today talks about then being interested in solar energy. In 1994, Musk and his brother Kimbal took a road trip to California and Musk had internships in Silicon Valley at Pinnacle Research Institute and Rocket Science Games and after graduating Penn, he and Kimbal moved to Silicon Valley. In 1995 they formed the company that would become Zip2, a web-based Yellow Pages type service, with it purchased by Compaq in 1999 for $307M, leaving Musk with $22M. Also in 1999, Musk used $12M of his money to found X.com, a finance startup that would become PayPal. In 2000, Musk was pushed out of the leadership of the company by employees and investors and in 2002, PayPal was sold to eBay for $1.5B, with Musk getting $250M.

In 2001, Elon became actively involved in space exploration, developing contacts in the industry and founding the Life to Mars Foundation. Musk tried to buy rockets from the Russians to explore space but got nowhere, then decided to build his own. The idea would be to build rockets that would serve the low end of the satellite industry, doing launches cheaper than had been done, with Space Exploration Technologies founded by Musk in June 2002. The first successful SpaceX rocket launch was in September 2008, but not with an actual customer payload onboard and the survival of the company was uncertain until it in December 2008 received a $1.6B payment from NASA to take supplies to the International Space Station. SpaceX has now become a truly solid company, selling satellite launches for less than competitors, and doing so as an American company in a largely non-American industry. In May 2012, SpaceX docked with the ISS for the first time and SpaceX wants to next send astronauts to the ISS by 2017 as well as move to reusable rockets. a first in the industry and idea that many view as impossible. Another interesting thing noted in the book about SpaceX is how it's a privately held company and Musk wants to keep it that way for a while, something that makes sense in enabling freedom of decisions, but would of course limit the huge paydays that employees of a publicly traded SpaceX might receive from selling stock.

As SpaceX was in it's early years, Musk in 2003 met J.B. Straubel, someone who shared Musk's interest in electric cars. Shortly after, Musk was courted as an investor by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who had an electric car company, Tesla Motors. Musk in 2004 put in $6.5M and became the largest shareholder as well as Chairman and also got Straubel hired. In 2007, Eberhard was taken out as CEO by investors and replaced by an interim chief who wanted to sell Tesla, with this not taking place and Musk later becoming CEO. In late 2008, Tesla was having financial problems at the same time as SpaceX and even though the financial markets had imploded, Musk was able to secure additional financing for the company. Tesla then was selling just enough roadsters to survive, previewed the Model S in 2009, went public in 2010 and then began shipping the Model S in mid-2012. In November of that year, the sedan was named Motor Trend's Car of the Year and in early 2013, Consumer Reports gave it their highest rating ever awarded. In April 2013, Tesla was having difficulty delivering Model S's and had discussions with Google CEO Larry Page about Tesla being acquired. Then in May 2013, impressive results were given to Wall Street and the stock soared, making the sale not needed. Next up for Tesla is the Model X SUV in 2015 and due out in 2017 is the Model 3, a four-door car with around a $35K price tag.

Musk's three companies, with two in Tesla and SpaceX that he's CEO of and SolarCity that he's the largest investor in and non-executive Chairman of, seem to be starting to intertwine somewhat with Tesla and SolarCity both to build products at the forthcoming Tesla battery Gigafactory in Reno and the success of SpaceX and Tesla coming in part from hardware and software working together.

Whether it's from one of these companies and current core products or other ideas Musk has put forth more recently around the Hyperloop for transportation or a space Internet, it'll be extremely interesting to see what's to come from Musk in the future and Vance wrote a very solid book on what he's done so far.

Solid business writing - on Elon Musk & Tesla, wine thieves, ILM & Dr. Charles Arntzen

Some of the pieces are from a week or two ago, but there's been some really interesting business writing that I haven't posted on up until now.

From Businessweek were two excellent features, starting off with "Elon Musk's Space Dream Almost Killed Tesla," excerpted from the recently released Ashlee Vance book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. It's a fascinating look at the Tesla and Space X CEO and related to Tesla were two additional interesting pieces, first a transcript of Musk's speech introducing Tesla Energy and then San Jose Mercury News article "Is Tesla's Powerwall home battery worth the price?" by Jonathan Fahey.

The other Businessweek story to note here was "A Pinot Noir: Hunting the Thieves Behind a Rash of Six-Figure Wine Heists" by Claire Suddath, a highly interesting read which brought to mind the Max Potter book Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine.

The other two pieces of really interesting recent business writing to mention were from other sources with Alex French and Howie Kahn for Wired writing "Inside the Magic Factory: The Untold Story of ILM, a Titan That Forever Changed Film," an oral history of the George Lucas created Industrial Light & Magic, and Adam Bluestein for Fast Company writing "Meet Ebola's Soft-Spoken, Plant-Loving Arch Nemisis" on Dr. Charles Arntzen, who came in at number one on the Fast Company "100 Most Creative People 2015" list.

Interesting Bloomberg Businessweek pieces - by Wieners, Vance, Clark & Coen

There's been some particularly interesting writing from Bloomberg Businessweek magazine over the past few weeks including a great feature story and multiple smaller pieces.

The feature was "Dying at Europe's Doorstep" by Brad Wieners and it's an important look at refugees from Africa dying as they try to cross the Mediterranean into Europe and the husband and wife team of Chris & Regina Catrambone attempting to rescue as many as possible. The parts of the story about many Europeans not wanting the immigrants to come there made me think of a June 2013 blog post I wrote linking to stories of xenophobic behavior and also fascinating from the Wieners piece was mention of Catrambone partnering with The World's Most Dangerous Places author Robert Young Pelton.

The smaller pieces from BW that struck me over the past few weeks included two at least in part by Ashlee Vance. Along with Jack Clark, he wrote "How Amazon Swooped in to Own Cloud Services" and excerpted from Vance's May 19 book release of Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future was "Elon Musk Had a Deal to Sell Tesla to Google in 2013."

The other short piece to note here was written by Jessica Coen with "Nick Kokonas Is Selling Tickets to Dinner" about the restaurateur, who co-owns three Chicago-area restaurants with chef Grant Achatz, and his forthcoming for wide release restaurant reservation system Tock that revolves around diners prepaying for meals and flexible pricing based on time selected.

Interesting business writing - on Tesla & Google related topics

Some interesting business writing I've seen lately included two large features from Fortune along with several short pieces of note published elsewhere.

The Fortune stories were "Inside Elon Musk's $1.4 Billion Score" by Peter Elkind and "Google's Larry Page: The Most Ambitious CEO in the Universe" by  Miguel Helft. Both were interesting pieces of writing with the Elkind story having the particularly intriguing tale of how Tesla Motors went about deciding on Reno as the location for the forthcoming electric car battery gigafactory.

The first of the smaller pieces to mention here was also Tesla related with Ashlee Vance for the Businessweek site last week posting "Tesla Grabs a New (Old) Spokesman From Square" about Ricardo Reyes returning to head Communications at Tesla. The background that Reyes has is fascinating, particularly in relation to the idea of narrative and storytelling within business communication.

The last two pieces to cover are very much connected to one another with Jordan Shapiro for Forbes writing "Is Everything Good About 'Minecraft' Gone?" about "active vs. passive computer time" in relation to viewing Minecraft videos on YouTube and then James Hong posting "Introducing Cakey: A better way for your kids to watch YouTube" to the site Medium.

Stories of technology & the future - on Graphene and Space X

Two pieces of recent interesting writing very much dealt with future technology and also brought to mind some past stories of note.

Posted to Medium was "Materials That Will Change the World: Graphene" by Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize awarded for private spacecraft development and author of the book Abundance: The Future is Brighter Than You Think that I wrote about a few months ago. It's a fascinating piece on Graphene as a material that Diamandis notes as having potential applications in the following areas: energy storage, flexible screens, desalinization/filtration of water, medical applications/sensors, photovoltaics/solar cells, material composites and computing/electronics. Graphene is obviously written of as a material with breakthrough technological ramifications and it will be interesting to see what occurs with it.

The other story to note here was "What it took for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to disrupt Boeing, leapfrog NASA, and become a serious space company" by Tim Fernholz for the business news site Quartz. It's a pretty lengthy, but also solid piece on one of the efforts from a fascinating individual, with Musk someone that's at least in part the subject of multiple pieces I've linked to and written about.

Great Magazine writing - by Dan P. Lee, Tom Junod & Julian Rubinstein

As I a few days ago posted on recent great newspaper stories I've seen, it seemed fitting to move on to posting about some excellent magazine writing I've come across lately.

The oldest piece (from May, but which I just recently read) was "Welcome to the Real Space Age" by Dan P. Lee for New York Magazine and a look at the pending wave of commercial space travel. It's a fascinating story and included was one of the major players in the industry, Elon Musk... with this inclusion reminding me of the excellent Esquire profile "Triumph of His Will" on Musk by Tom Junod that I wrote about and linked to last year.

In the same area of writing about larger the life type people was another profile by Junod for Esquire, "A Life So Large" on Brad Pitt. The piece was the second in a sort of "celebrity actor cover story profile series" done in recent months by Junod, with the first on Leonardo DiCaprio and third on Matt Damon. While all three very well written, the one on Pitt struck me as particularly interesting with the actor constantly working the balance between the celebrity life he's chosen and the private life with his family. Additionally of interest to me around the profiles was a short Esquire essay by Junod in the latest issue (with the Damon profile). Titled "Assimilation! The Fame Trilogy" it's about writing the three pieces and includes the interesting note from Junod that "If I had to say anything about all three of them collectively, it would be that they are better than they have to be and quite relieved they are not worse."

Another great feature piece I've seen recently was well written to be sure, but initially fascinating to me just for who wrote it. "Operation Easter" was done for the New Yorker by Julian Rubinstein, author of The Whiskey Robber, a non-fiction account account of Attila Ambrus, an Eastern European bank-robbing folk-hero of sorts. I read the book in late 2005, enjoyed it quite a bit, and up until now hadn't seen anything else by Rubinstein. This recent New Yorker piece an excellent one about rare bird eggs in Great Britain, the collectors who try to illegally take them and inspectors tasked with preventing that. Definitely an obscure topic on animal obsessives that made me think of the recent Jon Moallem book Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America, which I reviewed here.

Esquire Features on Elon Musk & John Hickenlooper

There was excellent writing throughout the December '12 Esquire Americans of the Year issue and two profiles that struck me as particularly great were on John Hickenlooper and Elon Musk respectively.

"John Hickenlooper's Long, Hot Summer" is a relatively short piece on the Colorado governor and in it, Robert Sanchez portrays someone who's faced very difficult events and seems to do about as good of a job as possible. The writing by Sanchez feels almost quiet in it's portrayal and very fitting with much of the piece centered around Hickenlooper's actions after the Aurora movie theater shooting. Again, short piece, but pretty darn riveting.

The second profile that stood out to me was on Elon Musk, founder of both Space X and Tesla and who I've earlier this year written on and linked to profiles on him from Fast Company, Time and Businessweek. This latest piece done for Esquire was "Triumph of His Will" by Tom Junod and it's really well done writing on a fascinating individual. Junod starts off the profile with a great hook alluding to Musk's audaciousness and then in the piece shows the drive Musk has in looking forward, and often past what others want from him. The character trait comes out in writing on Musk from other magazines as well, but just a remarkable willingness to place huge bets.

Also in this issue of Esquire and related to Musk's goal of going to Mars was a solid Mike Sager profile of NASA Mars Curiosity rover engineer Tom Rivellini. The Sager piece isn't online at this point, but in it he makes reference to the NASA video "Seven Minutes of Terror" about the landing of Curiosity on Mars.

Time Magazine Pieces - on Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts / Elon Musk / Howard Schultz

There's been a few tremendously interesting pieces of writing from Time Magazine lately to note here.

Cover story from the most recent issue was "Roberts Rules: What the Health Care Decision Means for the Country" by the always solid David Von Drehle. About the deciding vote cast and rationale behind it from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, it's informative writing on what seems to be an extremely measured decision.

Two feature pieces from the past month or two that also stood out as well written pieces on interesting topics were about business efforts from Elon Musk and Howard Schultz respectively. Jeffrey Kluger wrote "Rocket Man" on the founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX who has had big months at each company he leads and Bill Saporito provided "Starbucks' Big Mug" on efforts to both grow the business and aid the economy overall.

Interesting writing in each piece on big steps taken by both company leaders.

Fast Company April Issue: Features on Facebook, Tesla Motors & MLB Advanced Media

The April issue of Fast Company had three different features with solid writing on some tremendously interesting companies.

The cover story was "'Boy CEO' Mark Zuckerberg's Two Smartest Projects Were Growing Facebook And Growing Up" by Ellen McGirt and it included some excellent "then to now" material. McGirt wrote of first meeting Zuckerberg and writing the May 2007 Fast Company cover story "Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: Hacker. Dropout. CEO." and how he's since evolved as a leader. Pretty remarkable personal transformation and probably more remarkable progress for the company with Facebook going from 19M to 845M users during that time. McGirt notes as well how Facebook in early 2007 opened up to outside developers... a step which for me brings to mind Apple and the transformative effects of its iTunes store.

Another piece from this issue was similar to McGirt's in that it featured a rock-star stature CEO, in this case Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. "Why Tesla Motors Is Betting On The Model S" was written by Jon Gertner and covers the much anticipated and planned for July launch of its $50,000 sedan. Musk is a fascinating guy and the thing that stood out from this piece was his mention of needing iterations (three progressive car models in his view) to reach his ultimate goal of a low priced mass market vehicle. This translates to the Model S sedan as the mid-point between the high priced roadster that's been out for a while now and the planned for the future third model. With this story told, another similarity between the pieces on Tesla and Facebook comes from how McGirt finished off with mention of a circa-2007 Zuckerberg speaking of this same iteration concept and moving towards an end-state.

Finally, a third feature from the April FC issue didn't share the same parallels as those on the companies of Musk and Zuckerberg, but was very interesting in its own right. Written by Chuck Salter, "MLB Advanced Media's Bob Bowman Is Playing Digital Hardball. And He's Winning" is about the innovative and money-making digital arm of Major League Baseball.