how does it work then people get upset at you if you do certain things today we're counting down 30 of the most interest in takeaways from the Elon Musk biography and we're going in chronological order so you can get a summary of Ellen's life as well as some practical insights we can all learn from him enjoy number one elem read up to ten hours a day from a very early age even ran out of library books to read at one point so he just read an entire encyclopedia and because he had a photographic memory this
turned him into a walking fax machine once one of the kids said to him look at the moon it's a billion miles away and he said oh no it's actually under 250,000 miles away and they said here on number two he grew up in South Africa and was pretty nerdy with not many friends he even got bullied and beaten and his best friend at the time got bullied in to stop hanging round with him at a pretty poor home life as well number three because of all this he moved school but ended up a place
with a strong athletics culture this combined with the fact that must didn't really try that hard in the subjects he deemed to be pointless meant he wasn't on anyone's radar so when students from his old school heard what he'd become a billionaire quite literally changing the world to say they were shocked is an understatement number four Elon would read a newspaper and identify interest in people he'd like to meet and then he pulled call them which often was actually very successful at number five one of the first signs of true entrepreneurship was when Elon and
his friend turned their house into a nightclub on the weekends charging $5 for entry and hosting up to 500 people at a time this wasn't because Elon was a party animal he was actually pretty straight-laced but he did it to pay his way number six Elon then created an internet directory startup called zip to after they got investment Elon was no longer CEO which he didn't really like but the investors felt he lacks leadership skills as he often annoyed people with his bluntness and fixing or criticizing their work you also set hugely unrealistic targets and
demanding amounts from others something Steve Jobs was notorious for as well whilst Ilan's management has improved over time by all accounts his style is harsh of handsome can handle and things had to be done the Elom way or he just ended up doing them himself many people who spoke of him noted that he cares so deeply for the human species as a whole that sometimes that can come at the expense of the individual number 7 Elon sold zip2 for 307 million dollars giving him a big cash payout of 22 million dollars by the age of
27 number 8 Elon then reinvested a large chunk of his millions into XCOM to try and revolutionize the banking industry despite people thinking him crazy Elon would come home 11:00 p.m. and work even more he was quoted as asking how many hours would a woman need a week tends kind of the minimum right and this is because he clearly struggled to juggle work with having any sort of personal life I mean he literally used to sleep in his office and then just get up the next day and do another day of work so workaholic as
an understatement however when he finally took his first vacation in years nearly died of a very severe case of malaria number 9 XCOM later merged with PayPal however whilst many would argue PayPal did revolutionize the banking industry he not had much grander plans for the company than simply being a payment processor however before he could go and make his vision a reality another CEO coup took place and he was ousted as leader of his own company yet again number 10 you remain the largest shareholder though so he got a two hundred fifty million dollar payout
when PayPal was sold to eBay number eleven many of the people who originally worked on PayPal went on to great other hugely successful companies in fact they became collectively known as the PayPal mafia these companies include LinkedIn Yelp and even YouTube as well as countless others number 12 after this next huge payout Iran realized he wanted to focus on something bigger and turn to a passion of his space he recruited the best minds he could find for example he would personally reach out to the top graduates from the best colleges thus SpaceX was born and
his focus became making space cheaper and more accessible as the industry had kind of stalled number 13 his long-term goal was always to colonize Mars people who knew him well have said that money genuinely never was the main drive they just found him along the way as he took on all of these crazy ideas number 14 that said people who knew him well also said he did have a pretty big ego for example his eyes apparently lit up at the mention of being TIME's Person of the Year number 15 Musk's first child died just ten
days after being born when the biographer of the book wrote to ask him about it he simply said he didn't want to talk about it and said it does no good for the future number 16 musk then went on to have twins and then triplets he's quoted as saying how important it is for intelligent people to have more children as typically they have less children than people with lower intelligence number 17 whilst working on SpaceX Elon invested heavily in a startup called Tesla and became the majority shareholder it didn't operate like a normal car company
though but instead like a typical Silicon Valley startup of young engineers using trial and error everyone working there had to give their Walter the company though Elon once told an employee that going to his child's birth was not a good enough reason to miss a company event as if they had to be all-in because to quote Elon we're making history here number 18 whilst musk was now heavily committed to both Tesla and SpaceX two extremely promising and revolutionary companies things weren't actually going so well SpaceX rocket launch has kept failing and Tesla plans kept getting
massively delayed and both projects became over-budget and burn through over half of musts fortune with very little to show through however must said that he'd spend his last dollar on the companies even if it meant moving into his parents basement number 19 Elon tried to hide the severity of the money issue and keep people focused but the reality was a got to a point where they couldn't afford any more failures engineers have spent years of their lives working on these projects tirelessly many separated from their families and after three failed rocket launch attempts they reached
their fourth and final attempt the company was within days of going bankrupt but must they focus and it was a success they achieved a feat normally attributable to an entire country not just one company number 20 Robert Downey jr. set out to meet Elon as the real-life inspiration for Ironman it was a big stretch to say that musk was the inspiration for the character but the press lapped up the comparison and it raised the Lance profile as an eccentric businessman which he enjoyed and some of the similarities were hard to deny number 21 Ilan member
a house in Bel Air and got into Hollywood party circles he even produced the film thank you for smoking with some form of PayPal executives his author wife Justine kept a blog of their antics such as Leonardo DiCaprio unsuccessfully begging for a free Tesla however the Hollywood party life didn't last so long the press gradually turned against Elon and problems at his company started to mount up again and to make even worse his personal life deteriorated and was very publicly written about on his wife's blog as well for example how she felt like a trophy
wife his personal problems resulted in a brutal public divorce number 22 Ilan then met British actress Talulah Riley who should an interest in his work and the two of them hit it off Ilan told Riley a virgin at the time he wanted to show her his pockets they went back to his place and actually watched rocket videos number 23 after just weeks of knowing each other and her being 22 him being 36 they agreed to marry they shook on it out there was no rain number 24 despite numerous scares where the company almost went bankrupt
SpaceX did eventually become hugely profitable with an estimated 12 billion dollar value SpaceX still to this day has huge plans to lower space costs such as making reusable rockets nope many claim this is impossible and a waste of Yvonne's time if they can pull it off though it will change space exploration entirely number 25 Jeff Bezos his secretive rocket company Blue Origin coach the loss SpaceX employees and Jeff Bezos his relationship with Elon Musk soured as a result Elon is quoted as saying Jeff's not the most fun guy number 26 what must continued to create
shockwaves in the space industry Tesla was also revolutionizing another stored industry if you looked at most car ads then new features were things like a bit more room in the car but Tesla wanted to not only change the industry change the world number 27 there were several other unique things about the weight has operated compared to competitors for example they solved directly to the end customer with their own store modeled on the Apple store also the device actually got better after you bought it due to software updates which were remotely installed for long wall car
companies dismissed Hessler completely as it looked like a bit of a gimmick but when tesla released the Model S dubbed by many as the best car ever and a computer on Wheels car company started to panic a little bit Elon proved that electric cars could be fun and luxurious and he was actually making something hugely desirable not just efficient number 28 what must get done the rivals missed was that Tesla didn't just sell someone a car sold them an image a feeling they were tapping into the future but they also sold them a relationship as
they provided free charging points with the promise someone could travel the entirety of the USA with no cost number 29 Iran's brother was heavily involved in all of this too and his cousins founded a company called solar city which along then helped with he eventually became a chairman and the largest shareholder of Solar City just in case we thought he didn't have enough to do number 30 however there was logic for this the company is part of the unified theory of musk which is that each one of his businesses is connected in the short and
long term they kind of work together they're often intertwined in some way and can help each other out of course Elon also has lots of other grand ideas like Hyperloop to transport people between cities and 30 minutes and vertical electric planes in fact since the biography about him has been written musk has already started developing several other things he said I think this needs to be done I don't see anyone else doing it that really is his approach to solving the world's biggest problems if someone else isn't doing it he's gonna take it on himself
now whilst that concludes the list of 30 takeaways from the book I'll just add this was a really interesting read biographies often give you a much fairer representation things than an autobiography and so I definitely recommend checking out the book if you're interested in understanding more about Elon Musk Walt repeatedly stressed throughout the book though is that Elon really is one of the few people focused on revolutionary innovation and invention whereas it could be argued a lot of the tech industry has lost sight of that for example Peter Thiel's VC firm tagline kind of emphasizes
this it says we want it flying cars instead we got 140 characters although Twitter have since doubled the character limit so progress but anyway if you are interested in more from Elon Musk I also highly recommend what in the interview he did with Joe Rogan if you haven't seen it yet it really encapsulates what a strange but incredible guy he is and the way he just thinks so differently of course the only thing the media picked up from that interview was the fact that he very briefly smoked weed despite the fact there is literally hours
and hours of really interesting and important topics for example the fact that Elon is kind of terrified of AI and thinks it poses a real threat to humanity so it's definitely worth a watch but right now I just want to say that I hope you enjoyed this book summary and let me know if you'd like me to do this with any other books and please give this video a thumbs up if you've made it all the way to the end it would be very appreciated thanks again for watching and I'll see you in the next
one Cheers
