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• Print length 416 pages
• Language English
• Publisher VIRGIN BOOKS
• Publication date 1 January 2021
• Dimensions 19.8 x 12.9 x 2.49 cm
• ISBN-10 0008279659
• ISBN-13 978-0008279653
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0753555646
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ VIRGIN BOOKS (1 January 2021); Penguin Random House UK
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0008279659
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0008279653
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 290 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 19.8 x 12.9 x 2.49 cm
• Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ United Kingdom
• Importer ‏ : ‎ Penguin Random House
• Packer ‏ : ‎ Penguin Random House
• Generic Name ‏ : ‎ Books
• #3 in Engineering & Technology (Books)
• #7 in Industries
• #20 in Entrepreneurship (Books)

About the author

Ashlee vance.

Ashlee Vance is an award winning feature writer for Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. Vance is also the host and writer of the Emmy-nominated "Hello World" TV series and producer of several upcoming documentary films. Previously, he worked for The New York Times and The Register. He's the author of the best-selling biography on Elon Musk and his most recent work is "When The Heavens Went on Sale" about the rise of the commercial space industry. HBO is currently developing a TV series and a documentary based on Vance's books.

Vance was born in South Africa, grew up in Texas and attended Pomona College. He has spent more than two decades covering the technology industry from San Francisco and is a noted Silicon Valley historian.

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‘Elon Musk,’ by Ashlee Vance

By Jon Gertner

• May 12, 2015

Since the death of Steve Jobs in 2011, only one Silicon Valley titan seems to carry a similar air of dark mystique. This would be Elon Musk, currently the C.E.O. of the rocket company SpaceX as well as the electric-car company Tesla Motors. The 43-year-old Musk is also chairman of SolarCity, the largest American solar power installation company. His wealth at the moment is estimated by Forbes to be around $13 billion, yet Musk emigrated from South Africa to Canada at age 17 with barely enough money to feed himself, living off the kindness of Canadian relatives and working odd jobs — cleaning boilers, cutting wood — before ultimately signing up for undergraduate classes at Queen’s University in Ontario. Not long after, Musk switched to the University of Pennsylvania to study economics and physics. Then he moved west to Silicon Valley and began to build and sell companies. He is now, quite arguably, the most successful and important entrepreneur in the world.

The actual details of Musk’s ascent are more complicated. As Ashlee Vance explains in this exhaustively reported biography, written with the cooperation (but not the final approval) of the subject, Musk had left home in Pretoria with the ultimate dream of making it big in the United States. His emigration was also a way of running from an emotionally ­abusive father and a country whose small-­mindedness he despised. Dreamy, awkward and bookish, Musk was a teenager with little interest in athletics but a serious interest in science fiction and computers. His natural inclinations explain part of what set his course in life. For those wondering about the deeper roots, Vance, a technology writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, traces aspects of Musk’s childhood that made him an extraordinary engine of resilience — for instance, the times his father ordered him and his brother to sit silent for four hours as he lectured them. Or when a band of school toughs that constantly bullied Musk pushed him down a concrete staircase and beat him so badly he needed to be taken to the hospital. “It was just like nonstop horrible,” Musk recalls of his school and home life. It is a surprise to feel empathy for a jet-setting celebrity billionaire, but Musk’s childhood as recounted in “Elon Musk” is painful to read about — and no doubt excruciating to have lived through.

The book makes a persuasive case that money never drove Musk; ideas did. But from the evidence Vance compiles, Musk seems to have been motivated by more than just ideas, which, by themselves, might have pushed the brilliant young technologist toward a career in academia. Rather, he appears to have been driven to show that his beliefs about business and engineering were unassailably correct.

Musk’s first start-ups, both begun in the 1990s, were built on his computer prowess and the commercial potential of the Internet. These were the web software Zip2 (sold to Compaq, netting Musk $22 million) and the online bank X.com (which merged with the company that owned PayPal and was sold to eBay, with Musk making about $180 million after taxes). He then wagered a large chunk of his fortune on a rocket start-up that aimed to drastically reduce the costs of space travel and, eventually, transport humans to Mars. His friends considered the gamble just shy of insane. Soon after, he invested millions more in a tiny electric-car company, begun by two other Silicon Valley engineers, that ultimately came under his control.

Vance traces the chaotic early years of these two firms — SpaceX and Tesla, respectively — with a compelling ticktock of events. We see that Musk is brutal on himself, routinely working 100-hour weeks. He is brutal as a boss, too, often berating or summarily firing colleagues while hogging credit for ­others’ accomplishments. Yet he is without question a leader who pushes risky ideas forward through a ­combination of long-range vision and deep technical intelligence. He knows how to hire good people and how to motivate them. Most important, he never, ever gives up.

This is not a judiciously contextual ­biography. While rich in stories and scenery, the second half of the book, which describes the more recent successes of SpaceX and Tesla, is marred by chronologically confusing narratives, frequent gushes of admiration and insider jargon. (At one point we learn that “SpaceX ­needed an actuator that would trigger the gimbal action used to steer the ­upper stage of Falcon 1.”) Readers, moreover, are repetitively told that Musk asks employees for the impossible, though in one ­instance we’re regrettably informed that he also asks for “the impossible on top of the impossible.” Most damaging to the latter chapters, I think, are the moments when Vance loses his reportorial distance and adopts Musk’s own Silicon Valley business perspective — on the aerospace industry’s incompetence, for instance, or on the automotive industry’s myriad weaknesses. All too frequently we’re left without enough background to ­understand a highly complex global marketplace, or why Tesla and SpaceX still have significant vulnerabilities as well.

These faults hardly make Vance’s book unreadable, however. And until we see how things finish up many years from now — Will Tesla crash? Will SpaceX take us to Mars before NASA? Will Musk become the richest person in the world? — this work will likely serve as the definitive account of a man whom so far we’ve seen mostly through caricature. By the final pages, too, any reader will sense the need to put comparisons to Steve Jobs aside. Give Musk credit. There is no one like him.

Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

By Ashlee Vance

Illustrated. 392 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $28.99.

Jon Gertner is the author of “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.”

“I think he’s battling with his own self”: Inside Elon Musk’s brain

Musk biographer Ashlee Vance explains why Twitter isn’t Tesla or SpaceX.

by Peter Kafka

If you buy something from a Vox link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

It was easy to predict that Elon Musk’s first few weeks as Twitter’s owner would be a mess. But even if you thought the world’s richest man and Twitter’s most high-profile user would stumble once he owned his favorite messaging service, the scale of the chaos seems staggering . 

The chaos is also, quite frankly, confusing: No matter what you want to say about Musk, he’s been successful multiple times in his career. But here it seems like he has no idea what he was doing, starting with his on-off-on approach to buying the thing for $44 billion in the first place. So what’s different about Twitter than the rest of Musk’s history as a businessman — or is there any difference at all? 

To find out, I asked a man who’s spent years paying close attention to Musk: Ashlee Vance, the veteran Bloomberg reporter who talked to Musk and hundreds of people in his orbit for his 2015 book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future . In Vance’s telling, you can see a lot of the elements of the Musk on display today: ambitious, stubborn, and willing to make bets that seem like terrible ideas to any normal human. But Vance, whose portrait of Musk was a generally admiring one, says he thinks Musk has changed in recent years, and not necessarily for the better. You can listen to our entire conversation in a special edition of my Recode Media podcast ; the following interview has been excerpted from that conversation:

Peter Kafka

Is the version of Musk we’re seeing now — the one struggling with this Twitter acquisition —  the one you wrote about seven years ago?

Ashlee Vance

Yes and no. Elon went through an interesting change [from] when I was doing the reporting for my book. You would hear all these stories about some of the more extreme bits of his behavior at Tesla or SpaceX , or with his circle of friends. But this sort of darker, other side of Elon was contained to those spheres. He wasn’t quite as active on Twitter for a long time — he didn’t really let what I call Bad Elon out. But somewhere around three years ago, I think we got the Full Elon, both good and bad, out on Twitter, in full display. The version of Elon who exists today — I do think some of these elements were always there. But he’s a bit more extreme than the guy I was covering. 

But beyond the fact that he’s tweeting a lot, is there something different about the Twitter situation than those he’s faced in the past?

There’s two sides to this. I think the chaos that we see unfolding at Twitter, I don’t think that really frightens Elon. Tesla and SpaceX have been on the verge of bankruptcy, they’ve been in sort of life-and-death struggles most of their existence. And that’s kind of like where he seems to exist. 

Every time those companies got to a stable point, he would just immediately go all-in and risk the entire company on the next new venture. I’ve always thought of him as the biggest gambler, the highest risk-taker you can find.

I think Twitter is a different and unique challenge. This is not something where you’re building a rocket or a car and you can marshal tons of troops to push toward this goal. There’s part of this that takes a sense of consumers’ tastes, of society’s tastes. If this company is really going to make more money, it has to get bigger and it has to have another hit. We’ve seen the hit, which is that it’s this place where everybody gathers to  chat. But that hasn’t paid enough of the bills.

So this is where you start getting into kind of a territory where we just don’t know. There’s not a lot of evidence that Elon’s necessarily good at reading these kinds of signals. And it takes a bit of luck.

Musk founded two companies — Zip2 and X.com, which became PayPal — which were successful and made him lots of money. But he was pushed out as CEO at both of them. What did that do to his psyche?

It taught him that any new venture he started, he wanted to be the majority owner of, to make getting thrown out as CEO as close to impossible as he could. It certainly did not color or change his risk tolerance. If anything, he gets emboldened and risks ever more as he goes. But that was the biggest thing: He never wanted to lose control of Tesla or SpaceX. 

In his mind, did he make mistakes that led to him getting pushed out? Or was the mistake not having control of the company? 

Definitely the latter. And [regarding] the former: When we would talk, he would say, “Yes, I was a little rough on people” — part of the reason he had these big fights was that he was very hard on employees, to the point that it was demoralizing to the workforce. The other was strategic: In both cases, Elon wanted to go bigger and bigger and take more risks. And the other people on the board and executives wanted to focus on what was making money and just do that for a while. 

“I think Elon thinks he cannot fail”

He took the money he made from his two internet companies and put them into a car company and a rocket company — very difficult and risky. What was his mindset? “It’s a huge bet. Odds are, I’ll lose. If I win, it’s an enormous win.” And that’s the thrill. How much of it is that? And how much of it is, “I am so smart that even though my first two successes were on the internet, my raw brain power and ambition will allow me to succeed in two vastly different industries?” 

I think Elon thinks he cannot fail. If there’s anything Elon believes in, it’s himself. I think he looked at two markets that he thought should be better and thought he was the guy who could fix all these problems. 

Musk told his employees last week that if things didn’t improve, maybe there’d be bankruptcy . A lot of people rightly are freaked out about that. But a lot of folks have said, “Look, he’s talked about that in the past with Tesla and SpaceX.” It seems like that’s a mix of real concern and also maybe something he’s using motivationally? 

It’s a motivation tactic for sure. We’ve seen him do this, especially during Tesla’s most dire moments.

He definitely does it to motivate the workers. [And] often it has been true. Tesla has been close to death many times. And I think Elon’s been pretty serious about these moments. It’s often when they need X number of sales to hit the quarter, in order to pay the rest of the bills. And he gets this push from people. 

So it’s not, “We’re near bankruptcy. I’m going to take on a risky loan.” It’s, “We’re near bankruptcy. You guys need to work harder, make better cars faster.” 

Yeah, almost always. And then usually what this gets accompanied by is some sort of broad proclamation about a wonderful technology that’s coming in the future. It’s sort of like, “The company’s dying but there’s this bright, awesome thing that we’re heading toward. And not only the employees, but all the investors and everyone should care because of that. We’re heading somewhere great.”

Peter Kafka  

Musk often promises a new product or invention that doesn’t arrive when he says it’s going to. Is he bummed out when he says, “ I’m going to build an autonomous robot in the next number of years ,” and then some time passes and the robot doesn’t exist? 

I’m sure he’s furious. But this has happened so many times, it’s sort of standard operating procedure. I remember I was talking to some Tesla employees when I was doing my book and [they said], “Elon wants the car to drive from Los Angeles to New York on a single charge. Obviously that’s not going to happen. But we try and then if we get from LA to New Mexico, it’s a huge win.”

What’s it like to work for Elon and have to tell him the car can’t get from LA to New York on a single charge? 

It’s brutal, an awful place to be. There’s sort of an operating strategy for the employees — you kind of want to be in Elon’s orbit because you’re working on interesting stuff, but you don’t want to be in there too often when the bad news is getting handed out.

[There is] this weird dichotomy between Tesla and SpaceX. At SpaceX, lots of the top executives have been there for most of the company’s history and delivered tons of bad news to Elon. But he sort of expects you just to take some abuse, and come with some numbers or a way you’re going to solve this problem. At Tesla, for reasons that aren’t totally clear — maybe because Gwynne Shotwell is the president of Space X and she’s an amazing executive and Tesla has never had quite that person — the firing line has been more volatile at Tesla over the years. 

It seems like he’s a solo show. Does he have an inner circle of people he relies on for counsel? Does he have mentors? 

At the end of the day, Elon’s going to believe in Elon and he’s going to drive things forward as he sees fit. He definitely has an inner circle — particularly people who have been on the boards of both SpaceX and Tesla, people like [investors] Steve Jurvetson , Antonio Gracias , Bill Lee . These are confidants who have been by Elon’s side before people gave a crap about Elon. And you can tell they’re loyal to him and have his ear. [But you could also] see from all those cellphone records that got released when Elon was trying to acquire Twitter that, you know, it’s a bit of a crapshoot, man. Even among the brain trust, people are just lobbing ideas. Some of them ridiculous, some of them maybe decent. 

But no one in those messages was saying, “Hey, this doesn’t sound like a good idea. You sure you want to do this?” Are there people in his world who might say, “I think you got this one wrong”?

Ashlee Vance  

Probably not. I think there are engineers, on technical things, who will come to him and say, “We shouldn’t do it this way” — at their risk. But I think on this business side, what we saw was just a lot of yes people. I do think they tried to save him from some of his worst instincts sometimes, but definitely not in the hard talk kind of way. 

Let’s go back to last spring. Musk was accumulating a stake in Twitter . He says, “I’m just a passive investor. I’m not doing anything.” Did you think he was going to eventually want to own Twitter himself? 

“My working assumption is just that he’s obviously something of a Twitter addict”

I was really surprised. I’m still surprised. This just seems so opposite of everything he’s been interested in and has stood for for the last 20 years. It seems like a massive distraction.

My working assumption is just that he’s obviously something of a Twitter addict. He enjoys the service. I think he wanted to exert a little more control over it. I fully believe he joined the Twitter board , and they said, “Hey, we’d love to have you, but you’ve got to kind of tamp things down a little bit .” And he was like, “Well, that’s not really what I do. Why don’t I just buy this company?”

Advertisers I’ve spoken with say they like hearing from him, but they’re worried about his behavior . Are you surprised that he’s unable to comport himself in a way that won’t cause his advertisers to flee? 

I think he’s battling with his own self. It’s sort of like I talked about earlier: Now that the full Elon is out in the world, there’s just no reining it back in. And he kind of can’t control himself on some of that.

I think the central battle he faces right now is that he wants Twitter to be sort of separate from his personality and for people to judge it that way. And he doesn’t seem to get that that’s impossible. The only way maybe that works is if somebody else is CEO of the company and he’s not talking about Twitter on a day-to-day basis. But he just doesn’t seem to get that this is all intertwined. 

Is there a version of Elon where he looks around and says, “I’ve lost a lot of money. I’m not going to get it all back. But let me see what I can salvage. I just need someone to take this off my hands .” And he either finds someone to run it for him or sells it to an investor group and says, “You know what, you can’t win them all .”

It’s very hard for me to imagine any sort of scenario where he takes a loss on this thing publicly. Because I don’t think Elon’s ever going to admit something like that. I hope to God, for everybody, that he gets a CEO to run this company.

But you don’t think he’s ever giving it up.

There’s just this one thing about him that I know to be true, which is that he’s the most relentless human being, probably on the planet. And I just cannot see him giving up, especially something as public as this. 

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Elon Musk’s biographer doesn’t think Twitter is ruining his legacy

Ashlee Vance on exploring the Wild West of space in his new book, ‘When the Heavens Went on Sale,’ and why he thinks Musk is wasting his talents

In “ When the Heavens Went on Sale ,” Ashlee Vance surveys what he calls the Wild West of aerospace engineering. Such ventures no longer require governmental approval or vast personal wealth, he writes; it’s easier than ever for an entrepreneur to launch a rocket or send a satellite into orbit. His exuberant book crisscrosses the world to follow the development of four companies: Planet Labs, Rocket Lab, Astra and Firefly. “Writing a book like this is dangerous,” Vance allows, because conditions are likely to change overnight.

It’s a risk he’s encountered with his past work: His last book, a best-selling biography of Elon Musk, was the first up-close portrait of the entrepreneur when it was published in 2015. We spoke on May 11, just before Musk announced that there would be a new chief executive at Twitter — and several days before he compared George Soros to a fictional Jewish supervillain . Whatever has unfolded in the years since Vance wrote his biography, he argues that people have a “simplistic view” of Musk — though he too has his misgivings about the billionaire’s recent choices.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What made you interested in telling the story of this slice of the space industry?

A: With all this attention on billionaires and space tourism, I thought the public was missing a huge chunk of the real story — which is that most of the money and activity is directed towards building this economy in low Earth orbit. Commercial space has been this thing people have been chasing for decades, and it’s had a lot of false starts — and then all of a sudden in the last five years, it’s happening. I just do not think the average person knows how dramatically things have changed and how far they’ve already gotten. So often with these big tech changes — social media, for example — by the time the public sort of wakes up to what’s going on, it’s too late.

Q: Are there risks or consequences that we should worry about? My understanding from pop culture is the “Gravity” scenario — where one thing that gets knocked off course can crash into everything else, and it just becomes a disaster .

A: Which is real, you know? We’re building all this new stuff, but there are things like GPS that are already up there that could be disrupted — and GPS is like the glue that holds our smartphones and the modern world together. For better and quite possibly worse, this is new territory that is actively being conquered. There is some regulation, but it’s not really keeping up with the times.

On the whole my book has an optimistic tone, because the immediate stuff that’s come out, I think, is quite beneficial to the world. If we are actually going to address climate change, there’s things about our planet that I can’t see being solved any other way. Planet [Labs] can actually look out in the world and see what’s happening to our forests: How much carbon dioxide are these trees actually sucking down? Is somebody illegally cutting down parts of that Amazonian rainforest? And if we’re to put metrics around things like carbon credits and stuff like that, the only way to do that is from space. So, yes, we could screw this all up and make this place unusable — but we will for sure be able to analyze and understand our world better than ever before.

Q: You write that not only do you feel confident the commercial space industry will grow, it will profoundly change the world: “This is the nature of technology and of the human spirit when offered a new playground.” What makes you feel so confident about this playground?

A: I do argue there is what I call this “shared hallucination” around space. Rockets are one of the worst businesses you can possibly be in: no money, extremely high risk. All the money is in satellites. But you still see these venture capitalists, even though there are already 10 small rocket companies, who are like, “I want one of my own” — because there’s this excitement that comes with it. There’s this irrational exuberance.

I think we’re 100 percent going to make a go of this. But something else has to come along, new ideas have to come along, to really make all of these business cases check out. The people that look like winners right now might not be the ones that stick around for the duration. It really reminds me of the consumer internet in 1996 — though this probably comes with more doubts and higher risks.

Q: But why do we feel that the playground of space is more significant than others? There are other big, exciting problems out there — like in medicine, or AI, or what have you.

A: Space is the last real estate left, the last new land to go check out; there’s that fundamental calling inside of people. With something like vaccines — yes, that’s the pinnacle of what mankind can achieve. But rockets are so clearly the top of our engineering. It’s like, “We’re going to defeat this planet that is holding everything in.”

But also, I think, if you’re wondering, “What’s the point of all this stuff?” — the point to humanity is that we do sort of have to get off this planet that’s going to blow up one day.

Q: I want to ask about your last book, about Elon Musk. Some reviews at the time called it borderline hagiographic . Obviously, a lot has happened since then, with Musk’s acquisition and management of Twitter. Have any of those intervening events made you reassess how you depicted him?

A: It’s funny because half the people who read it say I was too nice, and half the people who read it say I was too mean, and so I feel like it ended up in a good place. Nobody had ever uncovered anything, really, about him before. I was not shy about sharing how difficult he is to work for, his interpersonal issues.

He was just a different sort of figure when that book was ending. Obviously, in the intervening years, he’s let [ laughs ] the full Elon loose on the public and has also gotten much more involved in politics, which he stayed away from in the past. I love the book because I think it captures this moment in time and the reality of the moment. But yeah, things have totally changed.

People have this very simplistic view of him, and he has himself to blame for some of it — for most of it. But it seems like people either love him or hate him. He’s almost like a religious figure: Do you believe in him or not? I understand where it comes from; I just find it really silly, because if you talk to him in person — like any human, he’s extremely nuanced and complicated and not at all like some caricature. When you talk to him in person, he’s nothing like his Twitter self, either. He’s actually very thoughtful. [ laughs ] So anyway, yeah, I think it’s funny — he’s become this caricature.

Q: Part of the thesis of the book was that, at a time when it felt like there was no more interest or energy in physical innovation or engineering, he was interested in those things — in cars and rockets. And now it seems like he’s interested in culture wars. From your perspective as a biographer, was that an unexpected turn?

A: The Twitter thing really threw me for a loop. It was quite surprising. [ laughs ] SpaceX has just been this thing that was calling in his soul for so long, and I always expected that over time, he would gradually pull away from more and more stuff until he was just working on SpaceX full time. And it seems like he’s spending most of his time at Twitter and engaging in all of these political battles.

I’m trying to find the right word. You know, I don’t — love where it’s ended up. I think it’s a waste of his talents. I think Twitter is generally more frivolous than he seems to think. Everything he does has this humanity-level theme to it. This time he’s picking freedom of speech. I just don’t know that … how to put it? I think his talents are much better served elsewhere. I don’t think this is his strongest suit.

Q: The risk you take, that any writer takes, when you’re capturing someone is that they can change.

A: I think Elon’s a one-of-a-kind character. We’re not used to having the world’s richest person just living out their life in public, doing hand-to-hand combat with people, you know?

Q: Well, it would be one thing if it were just a reputational hit. There’s been reporting that suggests some of the core ventures that we associate with Musk and his legacy, like Tesla and SpaceX , are getting hindered or harmed by his new interests.

A: I don’t think so. People were arguing maybe that he was not spending as much time [at those companies], but SpaceX is running laps around the entire industry and nation-states. Tesla always seems to have its ups and downs but overall is as healthy as it’s ever been. Neuralink is barreling forward. So yeah, I don’t think I buy in. I saw some of that, but I would disagree.

My sense is that he’s always going to live this way. He goes to wherever he thinks the biggest problems are. I think he thinks the biggest problems are at Twitter right now, and that’s where he’s spending his time.

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Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance

Title: Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of Spacex and Tesla is Shaping Our Future

Authors: Ashlee Vance

Publisher:  Virgin Books

Genre: Biography, Business

First Publication: 2015

Language:  English

Book Summary: Elon Musk

The book captures the life and achievements of South African interpreter and innovator, Elon Musk, the brain behind series of successful enterprises such as PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and Solarcity. The real-life inspiration of the Iron Man Series, Musk wants to be the saviour of the planet, send people into space and set up a colony on Mars.

Bullied in school and scolded tremendously by his father, Musk was actually a brilliant student and his life story is nothing less than a drama packed film. Ashlee Vance’s brilliant description of Musk’s character, simple language and neat choice of words indeed makes this book a great read.

Considered by some as the innovation, entrepreneurial Steve Jobs of the present and future, Elon Musk became a billionaire early in life with his successful online ventures. One of the successful companies that he co-founded was the online payment gateway PayPal that was later acquired by e-Bay in 2002.

“There needs to be a reason for a grade. I’d rather play video games, write software, and read books than try and get an A if there’s no point in getting an A.”

Getting sacked as the CEO, Musk did not cease to amaze friend and foes alike with his out of the box ideas, like investing in rockets! Needless to say, this deconstructed obsession with technology had his marital life go haywire.

The book ‘Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and TESLA is Shaping Our Future’ is a brilliant and intelligent account of this genius young ‘iron man’ told in a gripping manner.

Book Review: Elon Musk

Ironically, one of the quotes that made the biggest impression on me in Elon Musk: Inventing the Future didn’t come from Musk, but from data scientist Jeffrey Hammerbacher: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”

I mean, da-amn. This is so true. (And it stung even more because I’m a marketer.) Where have we gone wrong as a generation? Where is the passion and quest for knowledge? What is the real purpose of innovation? To improve mankind or to become wealthy? Can we have both?

“If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules.”

I’ve long been a fan of Musk; his name comes up quite a bit in my geeky circle and is always spoken with reverence: from Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, Solar City, The Boring Company … this is a techno-utopian fellow who wants to affect real change in the world. Despite any character flaws (and the book points out many), it’s real hard not to respect the guy.

Now coming to the book, It’s a very insightful account on a man who wants to reach the stars (well, Mars) and save humanity from extinction and global warming, yet often falls short from showing a modicum of kindness toward his employees and prone to going ballistic over typos in emails and abbreviations. Oh, did I mention he is downright misogynistic as well? He basically said all smart women must breed and he’s the alpha in his marriage.

“I think there are probably too many smart people pursuing Internet stuff, finance, and law, That is part of the reason why we haven’t seen as much innovation.” -Elon Musk

The book provides succinct insights on the situation surrounding the industries the mercurial Musk works in: automotive, finance, power generation, and aerospace. Admittedly, most of them had become bureaucratic, imploding, sunset industries, and had not shown any significant achievements for decades. Musk changed it, with his then-crazy ideas and gung-ho attitudes which include over optimistic deadlines and clashes with friends and employees who did not suit him. He made those happened nonetheless. Not just a big talker, but also a doer.

I wish he could be more humane about all of it but his vision seems to be more abstract – future humanity – than taking a good care of people surrounding him (including his loyal ex-secretary, his own Pepper Potts) and himself, all the people in the now that could bring that grand vision to life. If you want to bring changes to the world, you need to start from yourself and people surrounding you then work from that gradually.

“If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules.”

Semi-philosophical rambling aside, this is a recommended read for those who love innovation (or disrupt) and how to get there. One of the must read books for entrepreneurs and innovators. The SpaceX and Solar City chapters were quite entertaining. All in all, I appreciate the way he managed to reach self-sufficiency in Tesla and SpaceX (if I were an American I’d be thankful for the employment opportunity) where his other competitors have to rely on other countries.

I now wonder when his space internet and submarine cars will be finished. Speaking of submarines, I hope he also does something with the oceans. Like a machine that collects plastic waste that is cheap, could be mass produced everywhere, solar charged, etc. Just use the SpaceX rockets to deploy them to the far reaches of the ocean surface. Can you do that, Musk, since you said you want to save the world?

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Book Review: Ashlee Vance's Fascinating 'Elon Musk'

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In a phone call with prominent investor Richard Strong about fourteen months ago, he asked me my thoughts on Elon Musk. While I didn’t have deep or detailed opinions on the entrepreneur, I’d written a few opinion pieces over the years making a case that Musk had achieved on a breathtaking level and that the subsidies that have distracted too many wise people for too long had blinded them to his genius. Love or hate the $7,500 federal tax credit that only applies to the first 300,000 or so automobiles sold by electric vehicle makers, no reasonable person would ascribe Tesla’s valuation to purchases made by people way too rich to care about $7,500.

Strong didn’t disagree, only for him to tell me his own Musk story. He’d been short Tesla shares only to come across Ashlee Vance’s 2015 biography of the iconoclastic billionaire (A redundancy? Yes is the answer here), Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future . He soon closed his short position.

Up front, some will wonder about the review of a book that’s seven years old, but sometimes what’s interesting isn’t read right away. Better yet, Musk was “only” worth $10 billion then, so it arguably makes for a more informative, accessible (to Musk in particular) biography than would be possible now. And since Musk’s reputation hadn’t yet caught up with his immense wealth (Vance actually reports of Musk asking who the top PR person was in the U.S. given the relentlessly bad press he was enduring as the book was being written), a seven-year-old biography could also potentially be more honest than anything written today.

Readers can decide. Vance interviewed hundreds of people for the book, including Musk himself. The view here is that it’s a fascinating read, and happily one free of Vance’s political leanings one way or the other.

Vance began his project in 2012 at a point when it was no longer realistic for the media to ignore Musk. Though his success had been longstanding considering the formation and lucrative sales of Zip2 ($300 million) and Paypal ($1.5 billion), there was a perception perhaps that Musk’s achievements were in the rearview mirror. Maybe with good reason. It’s rare for even the immensely talented to keep hitting home runs. Also, it’s well known that most Silicon Valley start-ups fail, and logically so: these are individuals working feverishly to create an all new future. Except that the people are the market, and the people don’t always take well to change.

Considering Tesla, Vance reports that its doors were opened by single “exit” and very rich entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, only for the duo to meet immense skepticism among VCs about the fanciful notion of an electric car. As one friend exclaimed upon hearing of their new company at a Woodside pub, “You have to be kidding me.”

All of which speaks to what entrepreneurs truly are, but also to why most of what they introduce or try to introduce belly flops: entrepreneurs believe deeply in something that’s viewed as impossible, ridiculous, or both by the wise, and most certainly by the established commercial order. Eberhard and Tarpenning’s company was met with near universal VC skepticism other than from the VC who’d made out big with their initial venture (loyalty more than anything led to a small capital commitment), only for the two to win an audience with Musk.

Vance is clear that Musk from the very early days of his “miserable childhood” in South Africa had been interested in the idea of electric cars. Upon his initial move to Canada for college, Musk actually told the daughter of a prominent executive at the Bank of Nova Scotia about his vision for a different way of powering automobiles. Yes, he was a bit eccentric in actions and thought.

Needless to say, Musk quickly relayed to Eberhard and Tarpenning that he was in for Tesla, followed by him becoming its biggest shareholder and Chairman. With Tesla, “a couple of guys” with no background in carmaking (more on this in a bit), but who “really liked cars” had a vision for reinventing the automobile industry. Vance points out that the last successful U.S. car start-up had been Chysler….in 1925. Perhaps more pertinent, the industry was globally crowded with the crowd very much focused on winning U.S. market share. Tesla? Electric cars? Is it any wonder that investors were much more than skeptical?

Of course, with Tesla we’re getting way ahead of ourselves. Elon Musk before Elon Musk is interesting, as Vance’s book reveals. While it’s well known that Musk grew up in South Africa, it’s less well known that at least on his mother’s side, his origins begin in North America. Joshua Norman Haldeman (Musk’s grandfather) actually had a thriving chiropractic business in Canada, which on its own speaks to Musk’s contrarian ways. Figure that chiropractors have long rejected the conventional wisdom of doctors, and have done so in the face of immense ridicule.

In Haldeman’s case he left behind his booming business for South Africa. The father of Maye (Musk’s mother) wasn’t just contrarian in profession. Opposite the view that kids needed to be raised, Haldeman had the arguably B.F. Skinner-ian view that kids would “intuit their way toward proper behavior,” such that there was no yelling in the Haldeman household. Haldeman also had an airplane that he flew around the country. Vance indicates that Musk himself believes he came upon his plainly different ways care of his grandfather. Basically, Elon isn’t the first Musk. How interesting it would have been for someone like Haldeman to have been born later, at a time when knowledge had taken such great leaps. It’s no reach to say the achiever in Haldeman would have likely accomplished many great things.

So while Musk himself grew up economically privileged (including routine global travel) with a mother who was a prominent model (of the magazine cover kind) and a father (Musk’s parents sadly divorced when he was young) who was a successful engineer (Vance reports that Errol Musk directed $28,000 to Elon and brother Kimbal Musk’s first start-up, Zip2), it would be Musk who would get to bring his inherited iconoclasm to the wide world. But first he needed to get back to the North America that his hereditary twin had exited. It was what Musk always wanted.

Vance writes that “from his earliest of days,” Musk “plotted an escape from his surroundings and dreamed of a place that would allow his personality and dreams to flourish.” Which meant he had to get to the United States. About it, Vance writes that Musk “saw America in its most clichéd form, as the land of opportunity and the most likely stage for making the realization of his dreams possible.” Yes!

Though commerce was advanced enough in Pretoria that Musk acquired his first computer in 1980 (a Commodore VIC-20 the manual for which he devoured), brother Kimbal relayed to Vance that “South Africa was like a prison for someone like Elon.” The previous truth is something for readers to think a lot about. No doubt Musk is the rarest of rare, but it’s the rarest of rare who relentlessly improve the present by re-creating it. The rare elevate us all. The simple truth is that we would likely have never heard of Elon Musk if he’d spent all of his days in South Africa in much the same way that we would never have heard of Andrew Carnegie if he’d stayed in Scotland, or Steve Jobs if his ancestors had stayed in Syria. It raises an obvious question: what is the unseen in terms of non-innovation taking place thanks to ever more sizable barriers to immigration in the U.S.? One argument conservatives have long made against abortion is that the latter could be killing off a future creator of a cancer cure, a great artist, or a sporting genius. Ok, but by the same token what breathtaking advances are we essentially firebombing through rules against foreign entry into the U.S. now? The sad thing is that we’ll never know, while also knowing with certainty based on history that we’re most certainly limiting progress.

In Musk’s case, he made his way to Canada and ultimately Queen’s University in 1989, and eventually switched to Penn. While in Canada, a stint as an intern at the Bank of Nova Scotia proved useful exposure to Musk of the industry’s stodgy ways; “stodgy” no doubt blood in the water for someone like Musk bent on transforming how things are done. In particular, Musk made a call to an institutional desk at Goldman Sachs during his time at Bank of Nova Scotia, only to ask how much distressed South American debt inventory the investment banking giant had access to. Vance reports that the answer was of the “billions” kind, at which point Musk raced to tell his superiors of a once-in-a-lifetime arbitrage opportunity. From his calculations, South American government debt was trading at .25 cents on the dollar at a time when the U.S. Treasury had agreed to insure the debt to the tune of .50 cents. Remember “Brady Bonds” named after Bush-era (George H.W.) Treasury secretary Nicholas?   

Needless to say, the executives at the Bank didn’t see what Musk saw. Which was and is the point. The people staffing banks, and in particular highly regulated Canadian banks, were not unique or innovative in thought. Which means that Musk learned a great deal in the presence of individuals who could teach him very little. The lack of knowledge paradoxically gained proved an information gusher for Musk. As Vance puts it, Musk “had an inkling that the bankers were doing finance all wrong and that he could run the business better than anyone else.” This insight eventually led to X.com, and the latter’s difficult but legendary merger with PayPal. As readers know, PayPal’s stature in Silicon Valley lore grows by the day given all the talent Musk and Peter Thiel brought to one company. Vance tells how Musk was eventually relieved of control of the merged payments systems innovator, and he even wonders what might have happened if Musk had remained in control; as in could Musk have led the combination of X.com and PayPal to even greater heights. About it, books about PayPal are new to the bookstores now , which means the story is still being written. Vance’s was as mentioned published in 2015, and it’s a reminder yet again that disruption of any industry rarely comes from within the industry.

The above truth speaks as a loud and consistent rebuke of the small minds who populate antitrust, and for that matter the similarly small minds who spend their days worrying about “IP theft” from China, here, or anywhere else. About the antitrust crowd, as a rule they’re looking at competition within a specific industry. Except that the combination that led to PayPal and its still prominent payments systems emerged from well outside the banking industry . Despite the previous truth, readers might ask themselves a simple question: would the DOJ sit back passively if J.P. Morgan sought acquisition of Wells Fargo and Citi? The question answers itself.

Considering IP theft, we’re in many ways talking about something parallel. No one in the automobile industry cared one bit about what a bunch of car enthusiasts at Tesla were doing with EVs. Which was and is the point. What would they steal? What would the banks have taken from Musk and Thiel? The reality is that if they’d deemed their payments visions realistic, they would have long before put both X.com and PayPal out of business. Except that they didn’t. That they didn’t tells a bigger story than the one about Musk et al. It exposes as very foolish all the time spent on the “market power” presently enjoyed by Big Tech, plus it reveals as ferociously stupid all the conservative nailbiting about IP theft from “China” during the Trump years. Referencing the title of one of your reviewer’s books, They’re Both Wrong .

It cannot be stressed enough that what’s innovative is only revealed as such long after it’s actually innovative. In Vance’s words, while Tesla opened its doors in 2003, few in Silicon Valley or Detroit took it seriously. It wasn’t until 2012 and the rollout of Tesla’s Model S that Tesla “slapped Detroit sober.” Notable there is that having finally woken the powers-that-be up, Musk wasn’t locking down his factories to maintain a hold on his secrets. His factories were open given his view that the bigger the market for electric vehicles and players in the EV industry, the better the market for Tesla. Amen.

As always with Musk, we get ahead of ourselves. Retreating somewhat, upon completing two degrees at Penn, Musk headed west. He’d been accepted to Stanford, but the internet bug had already caught him. This led to a now primitive, but then well-ahead-of-its-time online information and mapping company, Zip2. Elon and Kimbal started it, and the stories are very much what one would expect. Days without sleep, loud fights between the brothers, management errors, and all the rest.

The good news is that as mentioned, Musk’s first leap into start-up world attracted a $300 million exit care of Compaq. Musk made $22 million on Zip2, while Kimbal pocketed $15 million. This is notable for many reasons, but the most important one is that Musk’s gains weren’t wholly banked for safety, or spent. He directed $12 million into X.com, which was rare. Having proven his abilities, Musk was better positioned to go to VCs for X.com’s financing while placing his Zip2 gains in safer ideas. Instead, he put it to work with an eye on exposing a need not so far met by banks.

The same pattern emerged with his eventual PayPal exit. Rather than sit on his $300 million gains, or spend wildly, Vance reports that Musk once again chose to back his expansive visions with his own money: $100 million in SpaceX, $70 million in Tesla, and $10 million in Solar City. In Vance’s words, Musk is driven to build “something that has the potential to be much grander than anything [Howard] Hughes or [Steve] Jobs produced.” Vance’s bigger or smaller point was that Musk putting so much of his own wealth into his new ideas was kind of rare. Except that as the author notes, Musk’s “ready willingness to tackle impossible things” arguably makes it essential that he put his money where his vision is.

More important for the Elizabeth Warren’s of the world, Musk is pursuing an all-new future without much rest; for himself, or his employees. Having nearly died from a rare form of malaria after a vacation with first wife Justine, he views vacations in a negative light. They can be dangerous. The guess here is that he can’t get enough of what doesn’t feel like work to him. Whatever the answer, Musk is a rejection of the idiot left-wing, occasional Hollywood-driven vision of the rich idling away in their mansions. In Justine’s words, “Elon would come home at eleven and work some more. People didn’t always get the sacrifice he made in order to be where he was.” To read Vance’s book is to see that in many, or most ways, Justine was actually downplaying the sacrifices made by Musk. How will readers know that? The answer is that Musk very nearly lost his whole fortune from Zip2 and PayPal on the companies (Tesla, SpaceX, and Solar City) that followed.

Figure that the initial Tesla cars weren’t very reliable. In Musk’s blunt, f-word laden words, “about a third of the cars didn’t flat-out fucking work.” This was a problem because while Tesla had, in the words of Vance, “produced the fastest, most beautiful electric car the world had ever seen,” the need to fill customer orders “would end up almost bankrupting the company.” Despite the existence of Tesla and SpaceX (it turns out rocket launches into space are a bit challenging to engineer….) very much hanging in the balance, an occasional employee would express a desire for more family and free time. To which Musk would reply that everyone “will get to see their families a lot when we go bankrupt.”

And then 2008 happened. Time of course smooths the rougher edges of the past (which perhaps explains the odd nostalgia that paralyses the thinking of so many), but in the year mentioned it was true that even established corporate names (Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs), not to mention legacy automakers (think GM and Chrysler) saw their corporate lives flash in front of them. All four were bailed out. Please keep this in mind with Tesla and SpaceX top of mind. With capital tight to non-existent for established players, imagine the position Musk was in as both companies were slowly running out of money. Please think about all this in consideration of noted Silicon Valley blog Valleywag having listed Tesla’s Roadster as its #1 fail of 2007. Yet Musk was supposed to find cash for his commercial babies?

Needless to say, the financing environment was bleak. It got to the point that the parents of Talulah Riley, Musk’s second wife, had “offered to remortgage their house” to aid his desperate cash situation. Eventually a few lucky breaks, including a NASA contract for SpaceX, saved both companies. And for faux “purists” who will say “taxpayer dollars” saved Musk, try to be serious. Love or hate the space program (there’s a good argument for hate), Vance indicates that SpaceX “can undercut its U.S. competitors – Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Orbital Sciences – on price by a ridiculous margin.”

After which, it’s time for these same faux purists (they know who they are) who opined endlessly about Musk being a “crony capitalist” to hang their heads in shame. And also to publicly admit how wrong they were. Looking back, seemingly the biggest source of ammunition for Musk’s oh-so-pure critics was the $7,500/car federal tax credit. There was also a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy that was plainly made available in various forms to all manner of companies doing what the powers-that-be there liked. About both handouts, get rid of them. Of course. At the same time, to pretend as some did that the latter was source of Tesla’s viability was thoroughly idiotic. For one, all one needed to do was to look at the eventual skyrocketing valuation of Tesla to see the $7,500 tax credit was irrelevant. That’s the case because equity markets are a look into the future, which means even at $10, $20 and $50 billion valuations, it was obvious that investors had looked well beyond the company’s ability to sell 300,000 cars. As for the loan, it was paid back with interest.

Of course, to focus on the tax credit and the loan was and is to miss the point. For one, though Tesla, SpaceX, and Solar City were and are alleged beneficiaries of government meddling in the economy, what government gives it also takes away. Vance writes that the “incumbents” in autos, space exploration and solar used their “connections in Washington to make life as miserable as possible on all three of Musk’s companies.” It’s a reminder that wrong as the subsidies were that Musk’s companies received, the immigrant from South Africa was hardly unique on the matter. He had visions for changing a variety of industries only to arrive to a business environment that Washington had long before planted its flag in. Better yet, Solar City actually became a multi-billion dollar company at a time when clean tech companies were proving major duds for their investors. Read up on John Doerr and Vinod Khosla if you’re doubtful.  

At which point it’s crucial just to talk about the quality of Musk’s businesses. Solar City as mentioned soared into the multi-billion category alongside all manner of failures in the sector, SpaceX proved capable of undercutting its competitors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin by “ridiculous margins,” and then there’s Tesla. Neither tax credits nor loans can be used to explain the endless challenges that Musk and his engineers overcame on the way to making a car that is a remarkable feat of engineering. The Tesla Model S in 2012 had the highest safety rating in history, it was faster and handled better than its competitors, it had more storage space than the competition did, plus it was the first unanimous Motor Trend Car of the Year victor that anyone within the magazine could remember.

And then there are the ways that Tesla autos are repaired. While owners of traditional cars take them in for routine maintenance (a big source of revenue for dealerships) and for anything that requires fixing, Teslas are literally “computers” on wheels. A dodgy door handle or windshield wiper is fixed remotely by engineers working on computers. As opposed to 2022 Tesla models, these computers on wheels are constantly enhanced via computer in the way that Apple iPhones receive routine updates.

Lastly, the early buyers of Teslas also rate prominent mention too when it comes to further exposing the foolishness of Musk’s tax-credit focused critics. The early adapters were celebrities, CEOs, technology billionaires, etc. To think for even a second that a $7,500 credit would prove meaningful to these people brings new meaning to absurd. People who hand over $100,000 for a car that hasn’t yet been made aren’t thinking about the tax credit they’ll eventually get.

The simple truth is that Musk nearly lost everything. To then act as though he risked everything on a subsidy of any kind is truly ridiculous. Libertarians did themselves and the ideology’s reputation no favors with their potshots back in the day. To be fair, however, it wasn’t just them. In particular, there’s more that people don’t get beyond the droolings about Musk and “cronyism.”

Which brings us back to Sen. Elizabeth Warren. She’s been very critical of Musk the taxpayer, despite the billions he’s handed over to Treasury, including an estimated $10 billion+ in 2021 alone. This is important, as it speaks to another unseen. What could Musk have done with those billions? As Vance’s bio makes clear, he routinely plows his own funds into existing and new ventures. Assuming Treasury properly taxed capital gains at zero, what innovative ideas would Musk have hatched, or what innovative ideas now hatched could he have directed more money at? The question staggers the mind. The U.S. is so abundantly prosperous, but our plenty is arguably small relative to what it could be absent the long fingers of the political class. No one wins when the innovative (Musk) or even idle rich have their wealth taken from them. The latter is a tax on all of us. On the other hand, when wealth is not taxed, there’s the potential for the matching of remarkable minds with crucial capital. Warren deserves the criticism, not individuals like Musk working to create an all new, and much better future.

In closing, I have my own Elon Musk story. Working at a libertarian think tank in 2003, I read about Musk in USA Today . It was about his efforts to bring market discipline to space exploration via SpaceX. The Cato Institute had recently published  a book by Ed Hudgins about the importance of markets as a way of enhancing space exploration. I sent Musk a copy and asked for a meeting. His office (presumably Mary Beth Brown) responded that he’d read the book, and would take a meeting with me. At the meeting, I told him we had a conference on free markets and space coming up, only for Musk to ask if he could speak at the event. My Cato colleague said the speakers’ slots were full….Hopefully readers get where this is going.

The great Elon Musk has been underestimated for the longest time, including by those most likely to share his view of the world. If you’re a doubter, read Ashlee Vance’s excellent book. If you’re an investor who is short Musk, read this book. You’re likely to “cover.”

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

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Elon Musk; Tesla, Space X, And The Quest For A Fantastic Future Rocky by Ashlee Vance

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Elon Musk: a Biography by Ashlee Vance

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future a Biography by Ashlee Vance

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This research’s content is the analysis of biography texts about Elon Musk taken from four websites by combining SFL’s transitivity and Leeuwen’s social actor representation approach. The aims of this research are (1) to find the portrayal patterns of the social actor using social actor approach, (2) to find the linguistic evidences of the patterns using transitivity, (3) to explain the portrayal of the social actor based on the patterns found, and (4) to compare the results with the context and genre of biography. This research is categorized as a descriptive-qualitative research by using transitivity and Leeuwen’s social actor approach. Spradely’s method of domain, taxonomy, componential, and cultural context analysis is used to collect and analyze the data. The data sources for this research are four biography texts about Elon Musk taken from Britannica, BBC, Business Insider, and Investopedia. The research produced several results as follows: (1) various social actor representat...

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This brief, systematic summary, designed as a map, will familiarize the reader through quotations with one of the greatest minds of our history; Nikola Tesla's life and work.

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Elon musk: tesla, spacex, and the quest for a fantastic future audible audiobook – unabridged.

In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball , Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs - a real-life Tony Stark - and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new makers.

Elon Musk spotlights the technology and vision of Elon Musk, the renowned entrepreneur and innovator behind SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, who sold one of his Internet companies, PayPal, for $1.5 billion. Ashlee Vance captures the full spectacle and arc of the genius' 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 - one of the most unusual and striking figures in American business history - is a contemporary, visionary 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.

• Listening Length 13 hours and 23 minutes
• Author Ashlee Vance
• Narrator Fred Sanders
• Audible release date May 19, 2015
• Language English
• Publisher HarperAudio
• ASIN B00UVY52JO
• Version Unabridged
• Program Type Audiobook
• See all details

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