13A – Reading Reflection No. 1

I choose to read the Elon Musk biography written by Ashlee Vance. This really was a no-brainer for me as I consider Elon to be one of the most interesting, intelligent and forward-thinking people of our time. It was a great opportunity to be able to sit down and learn more about his life from someone who was able to really talk to the man and not the person that we see in the media. I think the biggest thing that surprised me about Elon and his life was the sheer success he’s had. In a little over twenty years, he was able to get a world-class education at UPenn and then proceed to head some of the most innovative and important companies in the world. I think it is surprising and rather remarkable that he was able to have success at not just one company but at almost all of them (SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity, Hyperloop, The Boring Company, OpenAI). With all his success aside, I think the thing I ended up admiring most about Elon was the fact that he does not see himself as the billionaire businessman the world sees him as. He very much still considers himself an engineer first and foremost. He frequently would work side-by-side with the engineers at SpaceX and Tesla just as if he was just another employee and not the CEO. I think this is admirable, not only because it shows humility but also shows what he considers to be his main function. He may be the co-founder and CEO, but he also still wants to work on the nitty-gritty like any good engineer. I’d say the thing I least admire is his somewhat stubborn attitude when it comes to developing products for his companies or dealing with the outside media. Elon faced many failures throughout his career, more recently the failed launches and landings of rockets launched by SpaceX. Elon and many of his head engineers were quoted as saying that they took the crashes as a way to collect more data and hopefully improve for future launches.

Elon Musk is known for setting very ambitious goals for his companies/projects to achieve. Goal setting is a competency that all good entrepreneurs’ practice. He has not always met his goals in the timeframe set out in the beginning (Tesla’s vehicle rollout dates in particular) but he uses them as a means to show the big picture of what he hopes to accomplish.

It was confusing to understand how Elon failed many times to get financial backing for his first company Zip2. He met with many venture capitalists and had a strong idea that was new at the time but was turned down countless times. He was a young and hungry entrepreneur but the VC’s turned him down anyway which was a little confusing and hard to believe.

Elon’s vision for Mars and AI are some of the topics covered in the book and therefore the topics of my two questions. My first question would be to ask how realistic he sees the possibility of terraforming Mars. He “jokingly” said it could be done by detonating thermonuclear weapons above the surface, but I am curious if he has an outline or plan as to how to achieve what would be a monstrous feat. And secondly, I’d ask if he feels humanity is ready to accept the fact that merging with AI might be the only way to avoid being destroyed by it. He has claimed this so I would be curious to hear him elaborate on it more.

I think that Elon looks at hard work and perseverance as many of us do. In the biography, the author claims that the only reason she was probably given the chance by him to write the book was that she never gave up after being told no and constantly bugged Elon to reconsider. Elon saw that she wanted to write the book and that she didn’t give up so I think he values hard work and really striving to achieve something even when stuff stands in your way.