My father-in-law brought this over a couple of month’s ago and I couldn’t quite bring myself to read it given the shitshow that Musk wrought during his time running Doge. But finally decided to pick it up, and it’s everything I expected and more.
I was anticipating stories of amazingly bold, intense, and risk-taking behaviour to create and build his businesses and the book certainly delivers. It really is an amazing series of companies that Musk has either founded or been intimately involved with, at least 5 of which have been globally impactful in different domains (Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, and OpenAI), and a few others that have the potential to become so.
I wasn’t quite so aware of the personal chaos that has followed Musk throughout his life, starting with an emotionally and physically brutal childhood, followed by his quite simply bonkers relationships and parenting approach since. His inability to empathise explains a lot of his behaviours; the stress he puts onto himself through his “hardcore” work ethic and insane risk-taking shed some light onto the public descent into madness that has occurred over the past few years.
The very definition of a mad genius, this is a compelling account of one of the key figures of the 21st century, but it makes for very uncomfortable reading that so much wealth and power is in the hands of somebody whose grip on reality appears to be slipping slowly away.
