Is There a Scent of Musk In The Air?
This Highly Anticipated Biographical Release Should Clear That Up
The Kitchen American Bistro is in my view one of Colorado’s top fine dining experiences. Co-founded by Kimbal Musk, brother of Elon, the restaurant group is based in the Colorado front range town of Boulder. Featuring eclectic cocktails, a well-appointed aesthetic feel, and community tables for large gatherings to eat and converse, each of its locales hum with vitality during the lunch and dinner hours.
I frequented the location on 16th Street Mall often back in the mid to late 2000s while living in Denver. It’s where I first met small business advisor and author Kim Brady after a spirited conversation one night at the bar. A long time “Great Books, Great Minds” subscriber and member supporter, Kim and I have an amazing friendship to this day.
Honestly, I knew very little about the Musk family back then or even now. But the experience of riding in a Tesla car through through the now shuttered startup called Tesloop — the one vehicle in the Tesla fleet that possessed the most miles of any of their vehicles in the world — opened my eyes to Musk’s presence.
Fast forward to today, Tuesday September 12th — the scheduled release of the much anticipated biography called “Elon Musk.” Written by my favorite biographer Walter Isaacson, who is the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographical works, this gargantuan 688 page look at one of the world’s most polarizing figures of our times is destined to rocket to the top of The NY Times Bestseller list faster than a meteorite descends from space.
It's the intimate story of an iconoclastic, rule-breaking innovator who helped propel the world into a new period of electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, private space exploration, and a wonky new era of social media disrupted by Twitter, now an oddly rebranded company called X.
The book starts out with a bang, chronicling the early life of Musk, now the richest man in the world, and the violent environment he experienced during his formative years in his native South Africa. It explores how he was frequently belittled, beaten, and bullied during his youth. There are also reports of the emotional abuse he faced from his father which have had a profound impact on who he is today.
He later graduated with a dual degree in physics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania before getting accepted into a PhD program at Stanford. Yet he elected to forgo the latter in favor of taking a leap into the startup ocean affectionately known as Silicon Valley.
Musk then experienced early entrepreneurial success through a company he launched with his brother Kimbal. He later sold it, yielding a crapload of money for his next venture. Interestingly enough his next company was ironically called X.com. It later merged with the financial services company PayPal.
After a reign as CEO of these dual companies he was ousted from both. Word on the street is that he was summarily dismissed from PayPal because of his obsession to the letter X as well as the idea that PayPal should try to “take over the world’s financial system.”
Having been booted, he was left with a large pool of cash along with a fervent desire to take on a bold new set of world changing endeavors
In 2022, the year SpaceX launched thirty-one rockets into orbit, and Tesla sold a million cars, Musk the ever-present rabble rouser and malcontent became one of the wealthiest men on earth, if not the wealthiest.
It is reported that for two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attending meetings with visiting factories with him, along with interviews with family, friends, and close associates. It’s here where I hope Isaacson’s book will expose the deep recesses of Musk’s story — not only his massive success and bone crushing failure but the existential nature of what drives him.
There is no doubt that this book will unearth some kernels of controversy pertaining to Musk’s backstory and sordid business past ( a friend of mine who is heavily immersed in the tech world has deemed Musk the ultimate welfare queen, a nod to all of the taxpayer money Musk has received from the Feds for his bold projects).
While uncertain of what I’ll uncover by thumbing through the pages of this book, I’m sure the story narrative that Isaacson has written and curated will be quite riveting.
As a side-note, Musk’s favorite book, Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,”is about how knowing that the question is more important than knowing the answer. It’s here where I’ll conclude with this thought, namely, will Isaacson’s book leave us with more questions than answers. All I can say is stay tuned for my upcoming review later this month here at “Great Books, Great Minds” for a deep dive into what I discover.
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