Reading Reflection - Elon Musk's Biography - A Must Read!

1) I read about an entrepreneur: Elon Musk

What surprised me the most?

Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for A Fantastic Future told a detailed background story of Elon Musk, from before birth to the present.
I was most surprised to find out that Musk’s ancestors were Swiss German, and they left Europe for America during the Revolutionary War.
Musk was born in South Africa. I found it ironic that his ancestry was partially American. When he heard about America as the land of abundant
opportunity, he knew he would do whatever it took to live there. He eventually made it to America, but he moved to Canada first after receiving
a Canadian passport when a law changed, allowing him to receive Canadian citizenship passed down from his mother, Maye. He was seventeen
when he left South Africa.

What about the entrepreneur did I most admire?

I most admired Elon’s perseverance when it came to getting what he wanted. He never took “no” for an answer. While this is famously apparent
in his business ventures, the book exemplified this character strength when describing how he met his first wife, Justine. They first met in college
at Queen’s and Musk pursued her for ten years before finally getting her to agree to marry him. That’s persistence and resilience!

What about the entrepreneur did I least admire?

The book writes about how harsh and down-right mean Elon could be to people. He didn’t have a filter when he first started out in Silicon Valley,
pursuing the Zip2 venture, and he had no idea how to be a leader. Old employees of his told the author that he would criticize them whenever
something wouldn’t work, or wasn’t what he had envisioned. Musk was a mean control freak in the beginning of his entrepreneurial career.
However, he did come to realize that not many people wanted to be “productive” for an insensitive, authoritative figure. He worked harder to keep
his mouth shut after this realization.

Did the entrepreneur encounter adversity and failure? If so, what did they do about it?

Yes, Elon Musk had a difficult childhood. He was often picked on as a kid at school, and one time he was beaten up so badly by a gang (at school)
that he blacked-out. He was upset because he couldn’t attend school for a week. Musk didn’t let the adversity stop him though. This example, along
with the other hard experiences he lived through (i.e his parents divorcing, his dad’s strictly negative authority, apartheid and racial tensions in
South Africa, etc.) made him a stronger person and it put many things into perspective for him. When Musk had a goal, he would direct his entire
attention to achieving it.

2) What competencies did you notice that the entrepreneur exhibited?

Elon Musk had a gift of producing thought visually in his conscious from a very young age. He could see physics equations and their applications
in his mind’s eye, for example. Basically, he had a very good photographic memory and imagination. Musk also, as previously mentioned, was
very resilient to “no” and criticism. He was self-motivated and fully-invested in his endeavors (i.e. when Zip2 sold for $307m, Elon received a $22m
payout and put $12m into X.com which would later become Paypal and be acquired by Ebay for $1.5bn).

3) Identify at least one part of the reading that was confusing to you.

One part of the reading that was confusing overall was the first impression Ashley Vance gave of Elon Musk. She opened the book with a scene
depicting him walking into the high-end restaurant they decided to meet at, to discuss writing his biography. Readers were first introduced to Musk
via a description that framed him as a shy and insecure type of man. However, reading into the book, you learn that this depiction is not at all who
Musk is as an individual. The author later seems to describe him as being exactly the opposite of what she previously described. This inconsistency
was obvious and a bit confusing in terms of character depiction.

4) If you were able to ask two questions to the entrepreneur, what would you ask? Why?

If I could, I would ask Elon Musk why he doesn’t want to try to solve some of the world’s biggest problems (i.e. poverty, starvation, disease) first,
instead of looking to colonize Mars. Also, I would ask him if he would be one of the first people to try to go to Mars, or if he would just have other
people go first and perhaps be satisfied with accomplishing this goal remotely from Earth. I would ask these questions because I’m curious to know
how he would respond. Questions like these were not specifically addressed in the biography.

5) For fun: what do you think the entrepreneur's opinion was of hard work? Do you share that opinion?

Elon Musk was very fond of hard work. I know this because he devoted much of his life to it, losing sleep to pursue it, and hard work ultimately
rewarded him in so many ways. Yes, I agree that hard work is necessary to achieve or build something the world has never seen before, like the
numerous businesses Musk created. Nothing in life worth having comes easy!