I finished Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk today. If you don’t already know, Musk is now the richest man on earth and soon to be the most powerful,  a true visionary, a mad and impulsive genius,  loved and hated in roughly equal numbers by everyone around him. He is the new CEO-to-be of Twitter, perhaps the least interesting of his ambitions,  a doer of the impossible. He has done more for the future of Mother Earth to fight climate change than all of the fat and lazy governments of the world combined.

It is impossible to put a label on Musk, which makes him unique among the community of runaway billionaires taking over the planet. He is almost everything at once, kind and vicious, brilliant and impulsive, a mystic and ruthless businessman, a geek, and a wizard; he fails spectacularly and succeeds and always lands on his feet.

One thing stands out: He has shamed the giant corporations of America, who have given up boldness, risk, or genuine innovation. Musk shames all of them. There is something broken in him and something heroic about him. He is an epic, not a CEO.

Musk had a brutal childhood in South Africa, moved to Canada, interned his way to Silicon Valley, and then took off as dramatically as one of his new and gleaming Space X rockets. I had no idea how fascinating and vital he is until I read this book. He loved sci-fi tales and became an odd geek and loner as a child.

Many people paid him little attention until he went after Twitter successfully and in the face of significant doubt and controversy, as always.

Twitter may be the least of his achievements, no matter what he does with it. And he will surely do something unexpected and believed to be impossible.

Reading all the hysteria about his plans for social and then reading this book, I realize he will think in another dimension about what to do with a robust communications network like that. He lives to do what others deem impossible. Our mass media is myopic and selfish, as usual.

They can’t see to see past Trump and the red-blue wars on social media. They haven’t figured out that this is not what most Americans worry about.

Reviving Donald Trump and bringing back to Twitter will be the farthest thing from his mind,  even if he does it. Musk is a winner, and Trump, a  shameless and dishonest ignoramus, is addicted to losing, most often with other people’s money. Those two will never get together in the same space.

Musk will never suck up to the man who recommended drinking bleach to cure Covid. He is too smart if nothing else.

It’s a waste of time to focus on the political wars, and Vance didn’t; it keeps us from seeing the real story. Suitable on Ashlee Vance for bringing it to us in his book.

Musk cares nothing about politics for itself; he is way beyond our world in that way. He is label proof; he is everything at different times.

He means to use technology and communications to change our lives, not waste them on foolish, destructive arguments and the bloated egos of men. He also has a good-sized ego, but he wants to do something meaningful with it, not dominate other people’s lives. When Trump took America out of the Paris climate change accords, Musk immediately resigned from an economic advisory panel.

When Twitter silenced Trump, he thought it was a bad idea. That’s Musk; he is not predictable or shy. And he is passionate about responding to climate change.

I know of no label that works for him; bless him. He thinks for himself.

Musk has struggled with the loss and near ruin  – and some anxiety and depression – but those are distractions, not my business. We all have anxiety and depression at times.

Musk is. says everyone who knows him, simply unstoppable. He has 80 million followers on Twitter and loves to tweet his mind.

He has five sons and three marriages under his belt and is currently CEO of three enormous companies (soon to be four). Everyone who works with or for him loves or hates him, frequently both simultaneously. He is a great boss in that he is exhilarating ambitious, and most often is right and succeeds; he is a dreadful boss who can be cruel, impatient, intolerant, and unable to contain a wicked temper.

He has zero tolerance for failure, excuses, or weakness.

I’ve read a few books that I would say are “must-read” books, but this one is one of them. I realize just how weak and ineffectual American politics and industry have become after reading about Musk. All of the things he has done could have been done years ago. American business, along with Silicon Valley, has gone to sleep. All they care about is making more money than they made the previous year and keeping stockholders off of their backs.

I put aside my delicious book on the royal family – The Palace Papers: Inside The House Of Windsor –  by Tina Brown because I couldn’t put this book down. (I will get back to it tonight or tomorrow).

Author Ashlee Vance did a great job; the book is thorough, fair-minded, carefully and honestly researched. He stood down Musk’s demand that he be given prior approval and won his trust and wrote a remarkably evenhanded,  thorough, well-researched book; no holds barred, far, credible, with all sides of every story. All the failures, all the successes, all the praise, all the criticism – and other was and is a lot.

Every other chapter triggers a different emotion – hatred, fear, wonder, awe, wonder, hope, and the thrilling reminder that Musk, even though he was born in South Africa, is restoring the nearly dead American tradition of the great invention   – Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk – innovation and industry and hard work that improves the world. America was famous for this; we have gotten soft and lazy.

No one I ever read about works as hard as Musk does.

He is perhaps the most interesting public figure in America.

Hatred, lies, and greed paralyze our politicians, and corporations are fat and fearful. We have become, in many ways, lazy, cautious, and risk-averse. As Vance (and other writers) portrayed, Musk is precisely the opposite of the overpaid, greedy, and slow CEO dinosaurs of modern America. Politicians have nothing to offer him except government contracts.

It costs the Air Force and NASA or the airspace industry about $115 million and more than a decade to build a new spacecraft. It takes Musk and his crew $2 million less than a year. Everything in the spaceship is made in America. In a few years, promises Musk, his spacecraft will cost one-sixth of his competitors or the builders in China and Russia.

He believes that science and technology should improve life on the planet and that engineers should take bold risks for big payoffs and comprehensive solutions to big problems.

No one thought he could build an electric car so quickly, or at all; indeed, not the bloated dinosaurs of the American automobile industry. The United States had inexplicably given up on space exploration, ceding the building of shops and spaceships to China and Russia. They charged outrageous prices and made inferior ships and engines. He was attacked, belittled, and ridiculed every step of the way.

Musk wants to make ships that can go to Mars, land safely anywhere, service and supply the satellites and research modules, and space stations are popping up all over the earth’s atmosphere. One of his ships now has a multi-billion dollar contract to supply the International Space Station. No one seems able to compete against him, he has ferocious drive and strength.

His critics concede that they have never seen a competitor who could take so much and stay on his feet.

No bank in America believed he could maneuver through mountains of red tape to create the first Internet bank, which turned out to be PayPal. . He did it. GM didn’t think a successful electric car was possible for decades. He did it in a few years.

Musk’s life is framed by something I admit I believe in deeply – he never permits other people to tell him what he can or can’t do or listens to strangers or friends or professors tell him how to think and feel or what to say and believe. He follows his heart and goes all-out every time.

This has made him the richest man on earth and perhaps the most influential. He is, above all else, an individual who believes in himself and never lives for the wishes of others.

I have to say I want to know everything there is to know about this man. Biographer Walter Isaacson has undertaken to write another biography of Musk; I will be happy to read that one as well.

Musk’s genius comes from being a visionary; he can see over the heads of almost all of us and into what he believes could be a “fantastic future.”  This is the quality most lacking in our corporate and political worlds. Bezos had it when he imagined Amazon and also space travel. Jobs imagined the power of the Iphone and also believed in using technology to make life easier for creative people, not technocrats.

I’m not sure I can name anybody else in my lifetime.

The quickest way to get fired by Musk is to tell him something is impossible. He has no real politics beyond a kind of sci-fi, tech libertarianism. He has his visions and brings them to life, by any means, at all costs.

Musk was flying under the weather for most people until he decided to buy Twitter, which everyone said he couldn’t do and shouldn’t do. He did it, of course, and while I have no idea what he will do with it, I am confident it will be nothing I foresaw or thought of and that it will be successful and earn him more billions.

That is just the Musk story.

Nothing stops or deters, or discourages him.  He sees things most of us don’t see. He is a force of nature. People worry if he is on the left or the right, that’s how narrow our thinking has become. He is a million miles beyond that.

Musk has triggered a revolution in the auto industry that will alter the climate if the sales of his Tesla continue to soar.

He has revived space exploration and believes technology can help more than by creating countless apps we don’t need. He wants to make things that matter.

If his solar busses work (they are cheap to build and they can operate underground, and yes, he is producing powerful hole drillers that can make tunnels in days), the need for fossil fuels will nearly disappear. Solar City is transforming the solar energy market.

His cars are fast, silent, and do not need service or oil changes.

If something goes wrong, you call Tesla, and their engineers will work on the software that runs the car overnight and get it to work by morning.  If it doesn’t work, they will come to your house and give you a loaner.

Battery charges, necessary only every 600 miles, are accessible at charging stations Tesla is building all over the West and, soon, the rest of the country. He is also building a space internet that works without cables, is five times faster than cable connections, and is far less expensive to make and use.

Musk, one of the co-founders of Paypal, has made his Tesla electric car the most popular new car on the planet (Consumer Reports says he has made the very best car in the history of vehicles and has single-handedly revived the sluggish and moribund American aerospace business. He isis committed to building new solar-powered transit vehicles and rushing ahead with his vision of an all space Internet.

“The next decade of Musk Co. should be quite something,” writes Ashlee. “Musk has given himself a chance to become one of the greatest businessmen and innovators. Buy 2025 Tesla could have a lineup of five or six cars and be the dominant force in a booming electric car market. Playing off its current growth rate, Solar City will have had time to emerge as a massive utility company and the leader in a solar market that has finally lived up to its promise. Space X? Well, it’s perhaps the most intriguing.”

According to Musk’s detailed calculations, Space X would be conducting weekly flights to space by 2025, carrying humans and cargo, and will have put most of its competitors out of business. Its rockets should be capable of doing several laps around the moon and then landing with pinpoint accuracy back at the spaceport. And the preparation for the first few dozen trips to Mars should be well underway.

During a time in which countries and most prominent businesses were paralyzed by indecision and inaction, Musk has mounted the most viable challenge to global warming, bringing crucial manufacturing back to the United States in the process,  (His companies build all of their creations with American workers and goods) and planning to launch a new age of technological revolution and machinery.

His goal, he says, is to renew people’s faith in the power of technology to demonstrate what it can do for humanity and the future of life on earth.

This would be a wildly ambitious, even ludicrous dream,  except for his stunning track record of innovation, determination, technological brilliance, and success. When he wants to do something, it seems to happen.

As portrayed in this book, he is by no means a perfect human being and lusts for conquering the impossible, not for political power. But this isn’t about how nice he is, but how creative and successful he is.

He is a remarkable person. I would highly recommend reading this book to get to know him and prepare for his fantastic future.