Author: Ashlee Vance
File under: Big Ideas, Strategy
Executive Summary: Elon Musk, is a biography of the eponymous eccentric industrialist up to 2015. The book chronicles his early life, business success and challenges that he has surmounted to build Tesla and SpaceX into the household names they are today.
Often when reading a biography of a well known person, I’m usually left with a insight into ‘the person behind the persona’. Not in this case. Musk’s public image and personal self appear to be one and the same – and that’s not necessarily a bad thing! His supreme work effort, drive and vision has kick-started revolutions in two different industries, and likely more in the years to come.
The biggest take away for me from this book was that I don’t know what hard work is. Elon’s personal work hours would be considered outrageous in a normal workplace and his expectations of others are cut from this same mould. To call his expectations of his teams at SpaceX and Tesla ‘High performance’ is an understatement. He sets ambitious targets, publishes them and then pushes his teams to work like hell to hit those targets.
The book makes it clear that Musk is not a normal person, his high expectations of his team are matched by his willingness to dispose of employees once they no longer serve a purpose. His decisions in this regard, while making logical sense, come off as cold.
Reading around the book’s main theme (Elon), there are some interesting nuggets of business wisdom that can be distilled. Both SpaceX and Tesla are fully vertically integrated businesses in that they make as much of their components in-house as possible. This allows much greater control and a faster iterative process than in a globally distributed supply chain which provides a competitive advantage. It also allowed Musk to personally triage any blocks in the production line.
Musk would hound the person responsible for the delays, but, typically he would also do everything in his power to help solve problems
Extract – “Elon Musk” – Ashlee Vance
Further, the secret to pushing high-performing teams to the limit and past it appears to be down to mission. Both of Musk’s primary ventures are solving existential problems, (climate change for Tesla and making us multiplanetary for SpaceX), and as a result employees are will to look past the hard hours and pay as they feel like the work they are doing is fundamentally important and critical to our survival.
Finally, it seems that the ‘start-up’ mindset (doing something in a new way cheaper and better) is clearly not something that just works in software but is widely applicable and works at scale – provided you have someone like Musk at the helm.
Musk Had set out to make an electric car that did not suffer from any compromises. He did that. Then, using a form of entrepreneurial judo, he upended decades of criticisms against electric cars. The Model S would not just be the best electric car. It would be the best car, period, and the car that people desired.
Extract – “Elon Musk” – Ashlee Vance
This book provides a look inside the workings of Tesla and SpaceX and a view of Musk’s superhuman work effort wrapped up in a nice easy to read narrative. What it does not provide is a look inside Musk’s head – something I fear we will never get.
B>llets:
- Its possible to be both vertically integrated and compete on price, but to do this you need to lean on strong human capital, a willingness to employ unorthodox solutions and a incredible fiscal discipline.
- Hyper-performance teams can be created but require a unique mix of exceptional human capital, excellence in management, and a underlying mission that is existential in nature.
- Large incumbent business leaders often rely on barriers to entry, lobbying and existing market share to keep new competitors out, meaning under investment in R&D.
- The reason for this appears to be that its cheaper and safer to lobby for compliance laws than risk spending R&D which has an uncertain pay-off
- There is ‘hard work’ and hard work.
- Elon Musk is a unique combination of hard work, smarts and vision.
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Great Read for: Startups, Growth, Strategy
Bvlletpoint 
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