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

Inside story of the real-life Tony Stark

Subsidy junkie? Well, the evidence says otherwise

It’s become fashionable to say that the US government “created" Musk’s success. Reg columnist Tim Worstall expands this into the suggestion that Musk deliberately designed his businesses to maximise state aid, and therefore can’t be a real, risk-taking entrepreneur. I doubt many people will parrot this idea once they have read this book.

Musk invested in Tesla in 2004 (a year after it was created) when oil family man George W Bush was at the height of his presidential pomp. The idea of performance electric cars, or of SMEs doing the work of huge government contractors, were both very fanciful indeed.

The great green gravy train only got rolling after President Obama took office in 2009. It’s hard to think of a better example of risk-taking. Musk’s success is not down to corporatism, but by the private sector doing what the bloated state, couldn’t.

We should also note here that Tesla’s “aid” cost a fraction of the $80bn Detroit bailout, which saw GM invest $1bn in Brazil. Tesla paid its small SpaceX loan back promptly. The US taxpayer is still reckoned to be $11.2bn out of pocket. It’s also worth contrasting Musk’s “third” company SolarCity – founded and run by his cousins, the Rive Brothers – is privately financed and prospers.

Compare and contrast with taxpayer-funded basket case Solyndra. Vance reveals that the point of announcing Hyperloop (he can’t help himself making ambitious announcements) was to torpedo the vastly expensive, and fairly pointless LA-SF high-speed rail project.

There are some notable casualties during the course of the book as Musk dispenses with his talent brutally, if it’s deemed to fail. Or sometimes, if he notices it’s still there. Most shocking of all is the departure of Marybeth Brown, Pepper Potts to Musk’s Stark, and the public face of Tesla ([e-mail] was how you reached the company). “She gave up her life for Musk,” Vance writes.

Brown asked for a pay rise. Musk told her to go on a two week vacation, during which he would do her job to assess whether her request was justified. On her return, Musk decided it wasn't. “Twelve years is a good run for any job,” Musk tells Vance, coldly.

We also get a glimpse – and I wish it was more, but it’s a whole other book – of Musk’s co-ordinated strategy, in a chapter called The Unified Field Theory of Elon Musk. The battery R&D at Tesla benefits the energy capture at SolarCity. We’re starting to see a glimpse of this with Musk's recent Powerpacks announcement. The portable battery pack will store domestically-generated energy, and it will also power a Tesla. But the Tesla itself is a giant battery – it will also feed your home.

Perhaps, as grids become destabilised by unreliable renewable energy sources, the entire Musk business empire is an arbitrage opportunity? Perhaps, as Steve Bong suggested, the space programme is a way of dropping batteries over America?

How much of Musk's ingenuity is pre-mediated, and how much occurs to Musk as a result of improvisation, is a good question. Having read the book, I think it’s the latter.

By the end of this cracking read – which engineers and developers should rush to get hold of – I wondered where else Muskiness could yield results. Pharmaceuticals, maybe. Functional markets for stuff on the Internet. But it seems he’s fixated on getting to Mars. ®

Author Ashlee Vance
Title Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future
Publisher Virgin Books
Price £20 (Hardback), £11.99 (eBook)
More info Publication web site