Elon Musk - Walter Isaacson

In essence, it's the story of a man, that wants to find a way to get to Mars before he dies, and therefore puts forward a maniacal sense of urgency.

Why I recommend it

Highly recommend any entrepreneur to read Elon Musk. While his story from upbringing to today's struggles with X, and everything in-between is fascinating and interesting, it does a lot more than that. It puts your efforts into perspective. Elon Musk's drive, attention to detail in every aspect of his businesses is like nothing ever seen before.

Notes

• At 13 Elon Musk created his first video game.
• His inspiration to create Paypal came from losing travelers checks his mom gave him. He went on to sell Paypal for 250M.
• He almost died of Malaria, and conceived his first baby (which did not survive) at burning man
• His mission in life is to colonize mars, and to make our species multi cultural, multi planetary
• Elon Musk questions every cost at his companies
• 2015 Altman and Musk cofounded openAI to compete with Google
• Starlink was created to fund the bigger mission of getting to Mars
• Musk's style: question every cost, question every part and delete. If we don’t have to add parts back, we didn’t delete enough. This applies to cost and time.
• A maniacal sense of urgency is his operating principal.
• Ultra hardcore simplification
• Neurolink and AI supercomputers, what if robots take over. Can a universal basic income solve the impending problem?
• Musk thrives in survive or die mode, and when things are calm, he creates chaos/ surges etc.
• Musk vs Gates. How can one be involved in philanthropy but tries making money when shorting a company that tries to change climate. Musk on Gates shorting Tesla.
• Autopilot: Testa moves from rule based code to neural network based - learning from human behavior.
• Tesla's videos can train machines to navigate while Twitter can train machines how to converse. It's a powerful synergy.

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