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

Ashlee Vance wrote this biography after spending 18 months interviewing Musk, his family, colleagues, and the hundreds of engineers and operators who built Tesla and SpaceX from nothing into companies that redefined their industries. Published in 2015, before Musk became as polarising a figure as he is today, the book captures him at the moment of maximum credibility: two companies that by any rational analysis should have failed, both on the verge of changing the world. The account of SpaceX's early rocket failures and the near-death of Tesla in 2008 are among the most gripping passages written about startup survival.

For founders and investors, the most instructive part of this book is Musk's approach to first principles thinking: the refusal to accept industry norms, cost structures, or received wisdom about what is possible. When SpaceX found that rocket components were being sold at 20 times their raw material cost, Musk's response was to manufacture them internally. When battery costs were treated as a fixed constraint in the automotive industry, Tesla treated them as an engineering problem. This pattern, applied consistently across every part of the business, is what separates companies that create new categories from those that compete within existing ones.

Vance's biography is the best account of Musk before the character became larger than the work. Read it alongside Zero to One for a complete picture of what building something genuinely new actually requires. The ambition is instructive even if the methods are not always transferable.