Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Elon Musk, the
entrepreneur and innovator behind SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, sold one
of his internet companies, PayPal, for $1.5 billion. Ashlee Vance
captures the full spectacle and arc of the genius’s life and work, from
his tumultuous upbringing in South Africa and flight to the United
States to his dramatic technical innovations and entrepreneurial
pursuits. Vance uses Musk’s story to explore one of the pressing
questions of our age: can the nation of inventors and creators who led
the modern world for a century still compete in an age of fierce global
competition? He argues that Musk is an amalgam of legendary inventors
and industrialists including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes,
and Steve Jobs. More than any other entrepreneur today, Musk has
dedicated his energies and his own vast fortune to inventing a future
that is as rich and far-reaching as the visionaries of the golden age of
science-fiction fantasy