BOOK REVIEW
Elon Musk: Risking It All by Michael Vlismas 2022
About the Author
Michael Vlismas is an award-winning journalist and author of seven books, including biographies of legendary golfer Gary Player, cyclist Chris Froome, renowned sports scientist Tim Noakes, and Springbok rugby great Schalk Burger Snr. He lives in Somerset West in the Cape winelands of South Africa with his wife and two sons where he pursues his love for the outdoors, running, flyfishing, and the ocean.
About the Book
‘How did a bullied, introverted Pretoria schoolboy become the world’s richest person and arguably humanity’s greatest change agent? Vlismas’s extensively researched biography does a great job of unwrapping Elon Musk’s remarkable life story.’– TOBY SHAPSHAK.
Often in the news for his entrepreneurial exploits and his controversial tweets, Elon Musk is one of the richest and best-known people on earth. In 2022 he made headlines worldwide with his bid to buy Twitter. Who is this boundary-pushing billionaire with grand plans of inhabiting Mars, and what lies at the heart of his vision? Why is he so utterly unafraid of risk?
As an awkward Pretoria schoolboy who loved comics and science fiction, Musk’s early years and singular family background were crucial in forming his stellar ambitions. Journalist and author Michael Vlismas, who attended the same high school as Musk, knows well the environment that shaped him and offers new insights into Musk’s development, including his troubled relationship with his father.
Tracing his remarkable life, from his South African childhood to his move to Canada at 17 and then to the US – where Musk made millions out of PayPal and built Tesla and SpaceX into two of the world’s most famous companies – this is the story of a man driven to preserve the optimism he sees in humanity and find a future for humans ‘out there among the stars’.
Summary of Introduction
Introduction ELON Musk, the richest man on planet Earth, is doing everything he possibly can to leave planet Earth.
Space does indeed seem to be the final frontier for Musk, and even its vastness appears not enough to contain one of the greatest geniuses of our age, one who is determined to make human beings an interplanetary species.
This is the future towards which Musk has been moving ever since the age of five, when he first realised that not everybody has a million new ideas exploding in their brains all the time, and that people thought he was strange, and that he might be locked away because of it.
The greatest challenge in writing a biography of Elon Musk is that he does not sit still.
Walter Isaacson (author of Steve Jobs and various biographies) is busy with the supposedly definitive biography on Elon.
I know nothing about the supposed Walter Isaacson biography, and Jonathan Ball Publishers did not regard the ‘Raising Elon’ articles Errol says he proposed to them as publishable in book form.
It is for this reason (and others) that I did not read Ashlee Vance’s 2015 biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.
The world of Elon Musk is quite a journey.
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