Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future

Ashlee Vance

Apr 2016 · Virgin Digital · Narrated by Fred Sanders

4.6

530 reviews

Audiobook

13 hr 23 min

Unabridged

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About this audiobook

Brought to you by Penguin.

A remarkable man in possession of limitless curiosity and intellect, Elon Musk makes a fascinating subject.

Tech reporter Ashlee Vance has shadowed him for a year to bring us an engaging and deeply personal account of the man who wants to send us into outer space.

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.

© Ashlee Vance 2015 (P) Penguin Audio 2016

Ratings and reviews

4.6

530 reviews

Tony Morley

February 21, 2018

This book abounds with fascinating and inspiring content. The reader is left with the overwhelming drive to be part of something later than him or herself. I very much enjoyed this text and would have rated the work 5/5, however, I felt I still wished for slightly more technical, engineering and physics data. It's still must read none the less! Grab the audiobook, you won't regret it.

190 people found this review helpful

A Google user

December 1, 2018

The writer is pretty sycophantic, and over the top at times. But it's a very good read, all the same, lending some good insight into the history of SpaceX, Tesla, and Musk himself.

Panteleimon Zaikis

February 6, 2018

I am a big fan of Elon Musk and his pursuit of innovative solutions to the worlds problems. I have only listened to the preview so far which was very intriguing and I look forward to hearing the complete story.

141 people found this review helpful

About the author

Ashlee Vance is one of the most prominent writers on technology today. After spending several years reporting on Silicon Valley and technology for the New York Times, Vance went to Bloomberg Businessweek, where he has written dozens of cover and feature stories for the magazine on topics ranging from cyber espionage to DNA sequencing and space exploration.

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