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Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson  · 11 Sep 2023  · 562pp  · 201,502 words

to own the playground. 1 Adventurers Winnifred and Joshua Haldeman Errol, Maye, Elon, Tosca, and Kimbal Musk Cora and Walter Musk Joshua and Winnifred Haldeman Elon Musk’s attraction to risk was a family trait. In that regard, he took after his maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, a daredevil adventurer with strongly held

Sunday in January 2002, while they were working in a rented warehouse on their amateur engine, Garvey mentioned to Mueller that an internet millionaire named Elon Musk wanted to meet him. When Musk arrived accompanied by Justine, Mueller was shouldering the suspended eighty-pound engine as he tried to bolt it

, they were bestowed with outsized capabilities in math and science, but without the demons and harshness of their father and grandfather. Being the sons of Elon Musk was difficult, but they were “stoics,” as Musk called them. He discussed with Kai, then sixteen, the possibility of leaving high school and coming

sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world. With Grimes and Maye after the launch Acknowledgments Elon Musk allowed me to shadow him for two years, invited me to sit in on his meetings, indulged scores of interviews and late-night conversations, provided

. Senior manager, Tesla Energy. Tom Mueller. Founding employee and engine designer, SpaceX. Andrew Musk. First cousin of Musk. Christiana Musk. Wife of Kimbal Musk. Elon Musk. Errol Musk. Father of Musk. Griffin Musk. Son of Musk. James Musk. First cousin of Musk. Justine Musk. First wife of Musk and mother of

Grimes), Peter Thiel. Tom Junod, “Triumph of His Will,” Esquire, Dec. 2012 (includes the quip about having no navel). 1. Adventurers: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Maye Musk, Kimbal Musk, Tosca Musk, Errol Musk, Jared Birchall. Joseph Keating and Scott Haldeman, “Joshua N. Haldeman, DC: The Canadian Years,” Journal of the

House Preparatory School, Glenashley Senior Primary School, Bryanston High School, and Pretoria Boys High School; Neil Strauss, “The Architect of Tomorrow”; Emily Lane Fox, “How Elon Musk’s Mom (and Her Twin Sister) Raised the First Family of Tech,” Vanity Fair, Oct. 21, 2015; Andrew Smith, “Emissary of the Future,” The

Telegraph (London), Jan. 8, 2014. 4. The Seeker: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk, Maye Musk, Errol Musk, Peter Rive. Elon Musk, The Babylon Bee podcast, Dec. 21, 2021; Tad Friend, “Plugged In,” The New Yorker, Aug. 17, 2009; Maureen Dowd, “Blasting

Talk, Apr. 2017; Davenport, Space Barons; Berger, Liftoff. 15. Rocket Man: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Adeo Ressi. Amit Katwala, “What’s Driving Elon Musk?,” Wired, Sept. 8, 2018; Anderson, “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars”; Levine, “Entrepreneur Elon Musk Talks about His Background in Physics”; Junod, “Triumph of His Will.” 16. Fathers and Sons: Author’s

, “I Was a Starter Wife”; Junod, “Triumph of His Will”; Strauss, “The Architect of Tomorrow.” 17. Revving Up: Author’s interviews with Tom Mueller, Elon Musk, Tim Buzza, Mark Juncosa. Jeremy Rosenberg, interview with Tom Mueller, KCET Public Radio, May 3, 2012; Michael Belfiore, “Behind the Scenes with the World’s

University, June 14, 2021; Chad Anderson, “Rethinking Public-Private Space Travel,” Space Policy, Nov. 2013. 20. Founders: Author’s interviews with Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning, Elon Musk, JB Straubel, Ben Rosen. Michael Copeland, “Tesla’s Wild Ride,” Fortune, July 9, 2008; Drake Baer, “The Making of Tesla,” Business Insider, Nov. 12,

2014; Higgins, Power Play; Vance, Elon Musk. 21. The Roadster: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning, JB Straubel, Kimbal Musk, Michael Moritz, John Doerr, Alan Salzman, Jessica Switzer, Mickey Drexler. Baer, “The Making of

“Batteries Included,” Wired, Aug. 1, 2006; Matthew Wald, “Zero to 60 in 4 Seconds,” New York Times July 19, 2006; Copeland, “Tesla’s Wild Ride”; Elon Musk, “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan,” Tesla blog, Aug. 2, 2006; interview with Martin Eberhard, Watt It Takes podcast, Sept. 2021; Higgins, Power Play; Vance

, Elon Musk; Niedermeyer, Ludicrous. 22. Kwaj: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Gwynne Shotwell, Hans Koenigsmann, Tim Buzza. Berger, Liftoff. Berger reported the scramble to replace the faulty capacitors. 23. Two Strikes: Author

May 22, 2007; Brian Berger, “Pad Processing Error Doomed Falcon 1,” SpaceNews, Apr. 10, 2006; Berger, Liftoff. 24. The SWAT Team: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Martin Eberhard, JB Straubel, Antonio Gracias, Tim Watkins, Deepak Ahuja. Zak Edson, “Tesla Motors Case Study: Sotira Carbon Fiber Body Panel Ramp, May–Oct 2008

”; Gene Bylinksy, “Heroes of U.S. Manufacturing: Michael Marks,” Fortune, Mar. 20, 2000; Higgins, Power Play. 26. Divorce: Author’s interviews with Justine Musk, Elon Musk, Maye Musk, Kimbal Musk, Antonio Gracias. Justine Musk, “I Was a Starter Wife”; Justine Musk, TEDx Talk, Jan. 26, 2016; Justine Musk, “From the Head

, Drew Baglino. John Markoff, “Tesla Motors Files Suit against Competitor over Design Ideas,” New York Times, Apr. 15, 2008; Chris Anderson, “The Shared Genius of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs,” Fortune, Nov. 27, 2013; Charles Duhigg, “Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk,” Wired, Dec. 13, 2018; Chuck Squatriglia, “First Look at Tesla’s

Aviation Week & Space Technology, June 15, 2009; Garver, Space Pirates; Berger, Liftoff; Davenport, Space Barons. 34. Falcon 9 Liftoff: Author’s interviews with Tim Buzza, Elon Musk, Lori Garver. Brian Vastag, “SpaceX’s Dragon Capsule Docks with International Space Station,” Washington Post, May 25, 2012; Garver, Space Pirates; Berger, Liftoff; Davenport, Space

Barons. 35. Marrying Talulah: Author’s interviews with Talulah Riley, Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk, Bill Lee, Navaid Farooq. Hermione Eyre, “How to Marry a Billionaire,” The Evening Standard (London), Apr. 10, 2012. 36. Manufacturing: Author’s interviews

with Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Franz von Holzhausen, Dave Morris, JB Straubel. Angus MacKenzie, “Shocking Winner: Proof Positive That America Can Still Make (Great) Things,” Motor Trend, Dec

Wander (Public Affairs/Harvard Business Review, 2021); Explorers Club 2014 dinner video, https://vimeo.com/119342003; Amanda Gordon, “Scene Last Night: Jeff Bezos Eats Gator, Elon Musk Space,” Bloomberg, Mar. 17, 2014; Jeffrey P. Bezos, Gary Lai, and Sean R. Findlay, “Sea Landing of Space Launch Vehicles,” Patent application US8678321B2, June

Trung Phan, Twitter thread, July 17, 2021; Davenport, Space Barons; Berger, Liftoff; Fernholz, Rocket Billionaires. 38. The Falcon Hears the Falconer: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Sam Teller, Steve Jurvetson, Antonio Gracias, Mark Juncosa, Jeff Bezos, Kiko Dontchev. Calia Cofield, “Blue Origin Makes Historic Reusable Rocket Landing in Epic Test Flight

Chancery Court, “Memorandum of opinion in re Tesla Motors stockholder litigation,” C.A. No. 12711-VCS, Apr. 27, 2022; Austin Carr, “The Real Story behind Elon Musk’s $2.6 Billion Acquisition of SolarCity,” Fast Company, June 7, 2017; Austin Carr, “Inside Steel Pulse,” Fast Company, June 9, 2017; Josh Dzieza,

Jared Birchall. Joe Kernen, Donald Trump interview, CNBC, Jan. 22, 2020; Barbara Jones, “Inter-galactic Family Feud,” Mail on Sunday, Mar. 17, 2018; Rob Crilly, “Elon Musk’s Estranged Father, 72, Calls His Newborn Baby with Stepdaughter ‘God’s Plan,’ ” The National Post (Canada), Mar. 25, 2018; Strauss, “The Architect of Tomorrow

.” 45. Descent into the Dark: Author’s interviews with Jon McNeill, Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk, Omead Afshar, Tim Watkins, Antonio Gracias, JB Straubel, Sam Teller, James Musk, Mark Juncosa, Jon McNeill, Gage Coffin. Duhigg, “Dr. Elon & Mr.

Musk.” 46. Fremont Factory Hell: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Sam Teller, Omead Afshar, Nick Kalayjian, Tim Watkins, Antonio Gracias, JB Straubel, Mark Juncosa, Jon McNeill, Sam Teller, Lars Moravy, Kimbal Musk, Rodney Westmoreland. Musk

Securities Litigation, U.S. District Court, Northern District California, motion filed Apr. 22, 2022; David Gelles, James B. Stewart, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Kate Kelly, “Elon Musk Details ‘Excruciating’ Personal Toll of Tesla,” New York Times, Aug. 16, 2018; Dana Hull, “Weak Sauce,” Bloomberg, Apr. 24, 2022; Jim Cramer, Squawk on

Off in Domestic Bliss,” New York Times, July 25, 2020. 50. Shanghai: Author’s interviews with Robin Ren, Elon Musk. 51. Cybertruck: Author’s interviews with Franz von Holzhausen, Elon Musk, Dave Morris. Stephanie Mlot, “Elon Musk Wants to Make Bond’s Lotus Submarine Car a Reality,” PC Magazine, Oct. 18, 2013. 52. Starlink: Author’

from the FAA before December Launch,” The Verge, June 15, 2021. 58. Bezos vs. Musk, Round 2: Author’s interviews with Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson. Christian Davenport, “Elon Musk Is Dominating the Space Race,” Washington Post, Sept. 10, 2021; Richard Waters, “Interview with FT’s Person of the Year,” Financial Times, Dec

split-adjusted prices for the stock. 68. Father of the Year: Author’s interviews with Shivon Zilis, Claire Boucher (Grimes), Tosca Musk, Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk, Maye Musk, Christiana Musk. Elon Musk interview with NPQ, Winter 2014; Devin Gordon, “Infamy Is Kind of Fun,” Vanity Fair, Mar. 10, 2022; Ed Felsenthal, Molly Ball,

S. Quietly Paying Millions to Send Starlink Terminals to Ukraine,” Washington Post, Apr. 8, 2022; Yaroslav Trofimov, Micah Maidenberg, and Drew FitzGerald, “Ukraine Leans on Elon Musk’s Starlink in Fight against Russia,” Wall Street Journal, July 16, 2022; Mehul Srivastava et al., “Ukrainian Forces Report Starlink Outages During Push against Russia

,” Financial Times, Oct. 7, 2022; Volodymyr Verbyany and Daryna Krasnolutska, “Ukraine to Get Thousands More Starlink Antennas,” Bloomberg, Dec. 20, 2022; Adam Satariano, “Elon Musk Doesn’t Want His Satellites to Run Ukraine’s Drones,” New York Times, Feb. 9, 2023; Joey Roulette, “SpaceX Curbed Ukraine’s Use of Starlink

,” Wall Street Journal, July 24, 2022. Errol Musk often copied me on his emails to his son. 76. Starbase Shake-up: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Sam Patel, Bill Riley, Andy Krebs, Jonah Nolan, Mark Juncosa, Omead Afshar, Jake McKenzie, Kiko Dontchev, Jared Isaacman, Sam Patel, Andy Krebs, Claire Boucher

Birchall, Alex Spiro, Antonio Gracias, Robert Steel, Blair Effron, Ari Emanuel, Larry David, Joe Scarborough. 79. Optimus Unveiled: Author’s interviews with Franz von Holzhausen, Elon Musk, Steve Davis, Lars Moravy, Anand Swaminathan, Milan Kovac, Phil Duan, Tim Zaman, Felix Sygulla, Anand Swaminathan, Ira Ehrenpreis, Jason Calacanis. 80. Robotaxi: Author’s

Birchall, Alex Spiro, Michael Grimes, Antonio Gracias, Brad Sheftel, David Sacks, Parag Agrawal, Tejas Dharamsi, Ro Khanna. 83. The Three Musketeers: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, James Musk, Andrew Musk, Dhaval Shroff, Ben San Souci, Chris Payne, Thomas Dmytryk, Yoni Ramon, Ross Nordeen, Kayvon Beykpour, Ben San Souci, Alex Spiro,

Tiffany Hsu, “Two Weeks of Chaos,” New York Times, Nov. 11, 2022. 84. Content Moderation: Author’s interviews with Yoel Roth, David Sacks, Jason Calacanis, Elon Musk, Jared Birchall, Yoni Ramon. Cat Zakrzewski, Faiz Siddiqui, and Joseph Menn, “Musk’s ‘Free Speech’ Agenda Dismantles Safety Work at Twitter,” Washington Post, Nov.

22, 2022; Elon Musk, “Time 100: Kanye West,” Time, Apr. 15, 2015; Steven Nelson and Natalie Musumeci, “Twitter Fact-Checker Has History of Politically Charged Posts,” New York Post

Magazine, Jan. 17, 2023; Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer, “Inside the Twitter Meltdown,” Platformer, Nov. 10, 2022. 87. All In: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Jared Birchall, Larry Ellison, Alex Spiro, James Musk, Andrew Musk, Ross Nordeen, Dhaval Shroff, David Sacks, Yoni Ramon. Gergely Orosz, “Twitter’s Ongoing Cruel Treatment

of Software Engineers,” Pragmatic Engineer, Nov. 20, 2022; Alex Heath, “Elon Musk Says Twitter Is Done with Layoffs and Ready to Hire Again,” The Verge, Nov. 21, 2022; Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer, “The Only Constant at

David Sacks, Yoni Ramon Larry Ellison, employees at Apple. Schiffer, Newton, and Heath, “Extremely Hardcore.” 89. Miracles: Author’s interviews with Shivon Zilis, Jeremy Barenholtz, Elon Musk, DJ Seo, Ross Nordeen. Ashlee Vance, “Musk’s Neuralink Hopes to Implant Computer in Human Brain in Six Months,” Bloomberg, Nov. 30, 2022. 90. The

Twitter Files: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Bari Weiss, Nellie Bowles, Alex Spiro, Ross Nordeen. Matt Taibbi, “Note from San Francisco,” TK News, Substack, Dec. 29, 2022; Matt Taibbi, Twitter File

26, 2022; Freddie Sayers and Jay Bhattacharya, “What I Discovered at Twitter HQ,” unherd.com, Dec. 26, 2022. 91. Rabbit Holes: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Claire Boucher (Grimes), Kimbal Musk, James Musk, Ross Nordeen, Bari Weiss, Nellie Bowle, Yoel Roth, David Zaslav. Drew Harwell and Taylor Lorenz, “Musk Blamed

a Twitter Account for an Alleged Stalker,” Washington Post, Dec. 18, 2022; Drew Harwell, “QAnon, Adrift after Trump’s Defeat, Finds New Life in Elon Musk’s Twitter,” Washington Post, Dec. 14, 2022; Yoel Roth, “Gay Data,” University of Pennsylvania PhD dissertation, Nov. 30, 2016. 92. Christmas Capers: Author’s

: Martin Schoeller/August Page 347 Top: Courtesy of SpaceX Bottom: Courtesy of Jehn Balajadia Page 353 Left: Courtesy of Blue Origin Right: Courtesy of Elon Musk Page 358 Top left: Courtesy of Andy Krebs Bottom left: Courtesy of Lucas Hughes Right: Nic Ansuini Page 376 Left: Will Heath/NBC/NBCU Photo

right: Courtesy of Twitter Bottom left: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images Bottom right: Duffy-Marie Arnoult/WireImage/Getty Images Page 532 Top: Courtesy Elon Musk/Twitter Bottom: Courtesy of Maye Musk Page 546 Top: Courtesy of Christopher Stanley Page 561 Top: Courtesy of Neuralink Bottom: Courtesy of Jeremy Barenholtz

Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter

by Zoë Schiffer  · 13 Feb 2024  · 343pp  · 92,693 words

Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Schiffer, Zoë, author. Title: Extremely hardcore : inside Elon Musk’s Twitter / Zoë Schiffer. Description: New York : Portfolio/Penguin, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2023048761 (print) | LCCN 2023048762 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593716601 (hardcover) | ISBN

” 71. “The Stakes” 72. “Zero Sum” Conclusion ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES ABOUT THE AUTHOR _146181130_ INTRODUCTION “This App Makes Zero Fucking Sense” On February 12, 2023, Elon Musk sat on his private jet, fuming. He was flying home from the Super Bowl in Glendale, Arizona, but his mind wasn’t on the game

wint, Twitter post, May 22, 2012, 5:46 p.m., twitter.com/dril/status/205052027259195393. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT INTRODUCTION damp sock puppet: Elon Musk, Twitter post, January 2022, 10:24 a.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1486767109275328516. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the engineer, Yang: Per source’s

request, I am using only his first name. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “This is a battle”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, November 28, 2022, 8:41 p.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1597405399040217088. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT fled the platform: Alexander

Times, February 11, 2020, latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-11/musk-tesla-fans. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT an army of Elon Musk fans: “Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & ‘Meme Lord,’ ” On with Kara Swisher, Spotify, October 2022, open.spotify.com/episode/0W0GzlE4j8iHBEdNo5HAKH. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “

I suspect that the Thai govt”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, July 4, 2018, 10:02 a.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1014509856777293825. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Construction complete in about 8

hours”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, July 7, 2018, 2:39 p.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1015666557458964480. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “to make complimentary public statements

/lin-woodlawyer-closely-tied-to-trumppermanently-banned-from-twitter-after-claiming-capitol-siege-was-staged/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Am considering taking Tesla”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, August 7, 2018, 12:48 p.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026872652290379776. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT he did not respect

Washington Post, April 7, 2022, washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/07/musk-twitter-employee-outcry. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT retweeted a Hitler meme: Elon Musk, Twitter post, January 30, 2022, 1:52 p.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1487861173626101760. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I keep forgetting that

you’re still alive”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, November 14, 2021, 6:29 a.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1459891238384115722. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Employees were not pleased:

April 13, 2022, Exhibit B, sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/ 000110465922045641/tm2212748d1_sc13da.htm. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I made an offer”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, April 14, 2022, 7:23 a.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1514564966564651008. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “No one believes this is

on-musks-twitter-offer-190442334.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Prince Alwaleed bin Talal: Kateryna Kadabshy and Brandon Sapienza, “Billionaire Prince Alwaleed Rejects Elon Musk’s Twitter Bid,” Bloomberg.com, April 14, 2022, bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-14/billionaire-prince-alwaleed-rejects-musk-s-twitter-bid?sref=

Exchange Commission, November 5, 2013, sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/ 000119312522120474/d310843ddefa14a.htm. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Free speech is the bedrock”: “Elon Musk to Acquire Twitter,” Securities and Exchange Commission, exhibit 99.1, sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/ 000119312522117720/d319190dex991.htm. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

playing a game”: Dewayne Perkins, Twitter post, April 21, 2022, 9:20 p.m., twitter.com/DewaynePerkins/status/1517312377573679105. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Elon Musk was able”: Dividend Hero, Twitter post, April 25, 2022, 7:58 a.m., twitter.com/HeroDividend/status/1518559997478813700. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Can

Elon R. Musk, X Holdings I, Inc., Complaint, in the United States District Court for the State of Delaware, documentcloud.org/documents/22084462-twitter-v-elon-musk-complaint. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “The longer the merger transaction”: Rebecca Kern, “Judge Sets Expedited Twitter v. Musk Trial for October,” Politico,

20, 2022, washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/20/musk-twitter-acquisition-staff-cuts/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a coffee, microwaved please: Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I saw [Musk] as the guy”: Esther Crawford, Twitter post, July 26, 2023,

IN TEXT “Who’s critical?” they asked: Zoë Schiffer, Casey Newton, and Alex Heath, “Extremely Hardcore,” New York, January 17, 2023, nymag.com/intelligencer/article/elon-musk-twitter-takeover.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “We envisioned a world”: Amir Shevat, “Developer Platforms Are All About Trust, and Twitter Lost It

2022, pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/16/5-facts-about-twitter-lurkers. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, November 1, 2022, 10:16 a.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587498907336118274. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I wasn’t really thinking

, Twitter post, November 5, 2022, 11:59 a.m., twitter.com/esthercrawford/status/1588969361976741888. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I just killed it”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, November 9, 2022, 11:38 a.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1590383366213611522. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I predict that over time

post, November 9, 2022, 8:12 p.m., twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/1590512775385976832. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Musk claimed impressions on hate speech: Elon Musk, Twitter post, December 2, 2022, 1:53 p.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598752139278532610. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT an article that cited

, theinformation.com/articles/musks-twitter-saw-revenue-drop-35-in-q4-sharply-below-projections. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “until there is high confidence”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, November 21, 2022, 8:11 p.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1594861031670820864. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Apple has mostly stopped

, 2022, macrumors.com/2022/11/20/phil-schiller-deactivates-twitter-account. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT private data of Twitter Blue subscribers: Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “This is the attitude”: Jay Peters, “Geohot Resigns from Twitter,” The Verge, December 20, 2022, theverge.com/2022/

12/20/23519922/george-hotz-geohot-twitter-internship-resigns. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Sure, let’s talk”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, November 16, 2022, 3:23 p.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592976585858351105. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The hacker believed: “Transcript for

Beckett, Twitter post, May 23, 2023, 12:57 a.m., twitter.com/dajobe/status/1660872612837466112. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “This will be awesome”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, December 2, 2022, 3:48 p.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598781280015073281. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT potentially explosive front-page story

Binder, Twitter post, December 24, 2022, 10:48 a.m., twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1606723471475605505. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Same doxxing rules apply”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, December 15, 2022, 6:12 p.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603573725978275841. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “You’re a citizen”: NowThis

, 2022, cnn.com/2022/09/12/tech/twitter-data-center-california-heat-wave/index.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Even after I disconnected”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, December 24, 2022, 7:15 a.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1606624671100997634. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT PART III: MAIN CHARACTER

post, July 31, 2022, 9:40 p.m., twitter.com/AlexanderMcCoy4/status/1553918627581149185. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The CEO had 124 million followers: Elon Musk, Twitter profile, web.archive.org/web/20230102031613/twitter.com/elonmusk. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the typical daily view count: Faiz Siddiqui and Jeremy

February 14, 2023, 12:11 a.m., https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1625407245218648065. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “The ‘source’ of the bogus Platformer”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, February 17, 2023, 5:05 a.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1626523188149764096. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT explosive report detailing alleged privacy

Twitter post, April 14, 2023, 8:19 p.m., twitter.com/SFBARTalert/status/1647031817889783812. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Sunlight is the best disinfectant”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, May 3, 2022, 3:35 p.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1521574200183566338. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I made peace”: Esther Crawford

Houghton, Twitter post, March 7, 2023, 9:42 a.m, twitter.com/danielhoughton/status/1633115945534214145. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT video call with Thorleifsson: Elon Musk, Twitter post, March 7, 2023, 5:58 p.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1633240643727138824. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In contrast, Meta employees: Mark

Division, July 3, 2023, fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/akveqdzngvr/EMPLOYMENT_TWITTER_ARBITRATION_complaint.pdf. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Should be fixed now”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, February 17, 2023, 6:06 a.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1626538656487059460. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “the whole Sacramento shutdown”:

Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the sixth major outage: Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer, “How a Single Engineer Brought

, “ ‘Sometimes Things Break’: Twitter Outages Are on the Rise,” The New York Times, February 29, 2023, nytimes.com/2023/02/28/technology/twitter-outages-elon-musk.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “employees who purchased shares”: Zoë Schiffer, “The Secret List of Twitter VIPs Getting Boosted over Everyone Else,” Platformer

Twitter post, May 13, 2023, web.archive.org/web/20230513210815/https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/165742240175425946. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “The choice is”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, May 13, 2023, 12:27 p.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657422401754259461. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “What Wikipedia did”: Jimmy Wales

on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, US House of Representatives, “The Weaponization of the Federal Trade Commission: An Agency’s Overreach to Harass Elon Musk’s Twitter,” March 7, 2023, judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/Weaponization_Select_Subcommittee_Report_on_FTC

TEXT “Twitter is essentially following”: Charlie Warzel, “Twitter Is a Far-Right Social Network,” The Atlantic, May 23, 2023, theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/elon-musk-ron-desantis-2024-twitter/674149/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT an “uncancelable” free speech alternative: Todd Spangler, “Parler Shut Down by New Owner: ‘A

Tucker Carlson, Twitter post, May 9 2023, 4:42 p.m., twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1656037032538390530. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “On this platform”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, May 9 2023, 7:31 p.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1656079504778092544. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT David Sacks, Musk’s longtime

Boreing, Twitter post, June 1, 2023, 8:59 a.m., twitter.com/JeremyDBoreing/status/1664255339309531139. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “This was a mistake”: Elon Musk, Twitter post, June 1, 2023, twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1664324213023424531. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT people who’d seen the tweet: Daniel Chaitin, “ ‘What

Times, June 29, 2023, nytimes.com/2023/06/29/technology/twitter-ceo-linda-yaccarino.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT start sharing ad revenue: Elon Musk, Twitter post, February 3, 2023, 11:21 a.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1621544497388875777. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Gigi Hadid deleted: Alyssa

Crawford, Twitter post, July 1, 2023, 4:90 p.m., twitter.com/esthercrawford/status/1675235246365880321. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “the reason I set”: Elon Musk (Parody), Twitter post, July 1, 2023, 3:21 p.m., twitter.com/ElonMuskAOC/status/1675268446089773056. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “effects on advertising”: “

8, 2023, washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/08/israel-hamas-disinfo-musk-twitter-x/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT his preferred news-vetting methodology: Elon Musk, Twitter post, February 21, 2023, 3:30 p.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1628175431315644419. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “This is an old

Ben Goggin “Inside X’s Community Notes, Fact-Checks on Known Misinformation Are Delayed for Days,” NBC News, October 10, 2023, nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/elon-musk-x-fact-check-israel-misinformation-rcna119658. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT EU regulators opened an inquiry: European Commision, “The Commission Sends Request for Information

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

by Jacob Silverman  · 9 Oct 2025  · 312pp  · 103,645 words

government power, personal and private interests. In about five months on the campaign trail and six months in office as a “special government employee,” Elon Musk enacted an extraordinary degree of disruption, becoming a dominant political force during what I believed to be America’s slide into authoritarianism. The MAGA-tech

Chinese invasion. In short, he spoke like a full-blooded Republican, and he developed the requisite alliances. Silicon Valley figures with right-wing sympathies—especially Elon Musk and David Sacks—loved him. It seemed to me this was a step-change in American politics. Once, corporate titans built libraries, museums, and universities

transphobic, bigoted, and wackily conspiratorial. Part of this book’s project is to explain how and why that happened.  As this book’s subtitle implies, Elon Musk is at the heart of this right-wing radicalization overtaking America’s business class. During the 2020 election cycle, Musk sounded, at least in public

homelessness and criminal justice reform. They funneled money to right-wing politicians and bloggers trying to breathe life into the phony bigotry of race science. Elon Musk and his venture-capitalist buddies led a political revolt that at times included a rejection of basic democratic governance. On X, Musk expressed his

than about some vague menacing notion of “wokeness,” with each viral story about overwrought identity politics adding fuel to a fire that only grew on Elon Musk’s X. Along with directing huge flows of investment money, often solicited from Middle Eastern dictatorships—such as the Saudi cash which helped with

catalyze an authoritarian shift that was years in the making. 3 Tech Libertarians Embrace the Security State This new political reality didn’t start with Elon Musk or Peter Thiel or the 2016 election. Beyond the personal computer and smartphones, the history of Silicon Valley is just as much the history

friends and business partners. (Women are typically underrepresented at this echelon of the tech-finance power structure.) Three of the key figures in this book—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks—spent parts of their youth in apartheid South Africa, where they belonged to the privileged white minority in one

about class involving people who, since they stand atop the economic pyramid, don’t wish to acknowledge its existence. This became practically a tic for Elon Musk, who despite his incredible wealth, adopted the same mantle of false populism worn by Donald Trump and other social-media-addicted billionaires. They may

course, only one person’s attention really mattered, and the biotech mogul turned political firebrand got it. The top reply to the post was from Elon Musk, who had this to say: “True.” Fiery political-media operative Andrew Breitbart was famously devoted to the idea that “politics is downstream of culture.”

the royal family, like Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Through his Kingdom Holding Company, Prince Alwaleed had interests in businesses like Lyft and Snapchat. And until Elon Musk came along, he was Twitter’s largest outside shareholder. In March 2018, six months before the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, MBS visited the United

successful encounter. Oprah would get a tweeted photo of herself with the crown prince; the meeting with “prominent political donors” would go unphotographed. With Elon Musk, MBS would tour a Hyperloop model—a proposed rapid-transport system using pressurized pods—and offer the following “key message”: “This is a very exciting

prophet of urban decline, describing a formerly thriving city undone by crime- and drug-loving Democrats. With his sizable following on X, his friendship with Elon Musk, and his popular podcast All-In, which he hosted with fellow tech investors Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Friedberg, Sacks became a tech celebrity

Working Model The political battles playing out in San Francisco would mirror ones playing out in Miami, Austin, and nationally during the 2024 presidential election. Elon Musk’s ruthless purge of Twitter’s staff and David Sacks’ reactionary campaigns against liberal Democrats would be replicated in various political arenas—including, eventually, the

to shape their public image, maintain advantages in business, keep privileged information secret, or to exercise control over others. The Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk required partygoers to sign NDAs at events where he allegedly consumed drugs like LSD and ketamine.5 Similar stories abound for entertainment-industry celebrities engaging

was deserved and virtuous not because of some specious notion of hard work or innovation but because they were leading humanity to a brighter future. “Elon Musk is projected to become world’s first trillionaire,” posted Doge Designer, one of the Musk-centered accounts that the billionaire frequently quoted. “He said

On May 24, 2023, Florida governor Ron DeSantis officially announced his entry into the race for the Republican presidential nomination in that disastrous appearance on Elon Musk’s Twitter Spaces discussed earlier. Spaces is an audio chat space where masses of people could listen to speakers and digitally raise their hands to

Chinese invasion of Taiwan. In this heady atmosphere, US tech executives styled themselves as hardened national-security experts. Helberg was one of them. So were Elon Musk and David Sacks, especially with their interest in Ukraine. In Musk’s case, it was at least partly a financial interest, with his Starlink

the SEC’s crackdown on crypto fraud and securities law violations were unacceptable breaches of norms. It wasn’t just venture capitalists, tech executives, and Elon Musk who were putting their wealth behind Trump. The libertarian-minded cryptocurrency industry was dominating that cycle’s political giving. The industry’s super PACs were

future of infinite abundance. One of his popular mantras went: “We wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters.” (Thiel’s friend and PayPal colleague Elon Musk fixed that issue by doubling X’s character limit.) The éminence grise of the powerful network of investors and executives known informally as the PayPal

and shell companies could be traced to their ultimate beneficiaries. My attention kept returning to X’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, which started long before Elon Musk acquired the company and persisted under his ownership. It was about more than Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the major company shareholder and billionaire Saudi industrialist

interest of self-preservation and avoiding expensive legal settlements, would never acknowledge its own negligence or potential liability. Twitter might have become X, buttressed by Elon Musk’s militant devotion to free speech, but the Saudi government ownership and influence remained—indeed, appeared more prominent than ever. The new company’s army

bad information, AI-generated fakes, and bad-faith hysteria about crime and migrants; infiltrated by authoritarian foreign governments; presided over practically 24/7 by Elon Musk—this ridiculous, debauched platform was one of the most powerful media tools that a power-hungry mogul could ever have in his political arsenal. And

trans youth and the healthcare programs that served them.18 Musk’s ability to disrupt Americans’ lives would be vast. It sounded like Shadow President Elon Musk. We had never seen the American plutocracy operate quite like this. The richest person in the world spent the homestretch of the 2024 presidential

dismissed as an aberration, but a second victory, after everything that had happened, would signal that something fundamental had changed in the political firmament. Elon Musk, David Sacks, and Marc Andreessen watched the election returns come in alongside Trump at Mar-a-Lago.3 Musk left early, already certain that Trump

an unmitigated triumph. “Trump will fill his top ranks with billionaires, former CEOs, tech leaders and loyalists,” Axios reported two days after the election. “Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Joe Lonsdale and other tech leaders are helping pick staff and drive policies to quickly expand AI, crypto and other business

frontiers.”8 They had unfettered power and influence. They were going to make so much money. The stock market and cryptocurrencies surged. Elon Musk’s estimated worth passed the $300 billion mark.9 According to one calculation, the world’s ten richest people added $64 billion to their

away licenses from media organizations they resented. They wanted to prosecute advertisers for engaging in a supposed criminal conspiracy by choosing not to advertise on Elon Musk’s X. They wanted an end to all regulatory and legal investigations that might harm their interests. They wanted personal liberty, so they elected

the presidency. Other members of Thiel’s network would find jobs throughout the administration and the military and intelligence apparatus. His companies would surely prosper. Elon Musk, Thiel’s friend and former PayPal colleague, was acting as the potential dictatorial CEO figure that Curtis Yarvin had forecast as an American savior who

Lago, receiving high-level briefings, advising on presidential appointments, and sitting in on calls with world leaders. Trump’s family took to calling him Uncle Elon. Musk vowed that his America PAC would stay in business, spending big in the midterm elections and supporting challengers to Republican politicians who were not sufficiently

Trump and Musk. Offering them his polite support, Ramaswamy officially bowed out of the administration to run for governor in his home state of Ohio. Elon Musk was the shadow president—or perhaps simply the president, at least until his 130-day term as a “special government employee” was up. Perhaps

rut of societal stagnation, decline, corruption, and mistrust. But we would have to find a way to build that world. For now, we live in Elon Musk’s. Acknowledgements Thank you to Liz and the kids, Harry, Scott, Loretta, Gary, Rachel, the ghosts of my grandparents, Adam Chandler, Tomasz Hoskins and

. Finally, with special gratitude, thank you to those who cannot be named. Notes introduction 1 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/world/europe/elon-musk-roman-salute-nazi.html 2 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/27/us/politics/vivek-ramaswamy-wealth.html 3 https://www.oilandgas360.com/edenver22-strive

Is2MyuUfz9h-KyqnILRrcCL9A7N-RM0VFyG7Bp 11 https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/12/15/twitter-journalists-suspended-musk/ 12 https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/23/business/elon-musk-nazi-jokes/index.html 13 https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/musk-holocaust-public-workers-union-1235296401/ 14 https://www.france24.com/en/live

25 https://apnews.com/article/twitter-musk-texas-mall-shooting-misleading-claims-c297797d1eb0f708cc84d05e0735d8cc 26 https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2023/05/16/george-soros-elon-musk-adl/ 27 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1724908287471272299?s=20 28 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1527748229470646272 29 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1527774704018280448 30

california-for-texas/ 4 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/the-stanford-undergraduate-and-the-mentor.html 5 https://www.wsj.com/business/elon-musk-illegal-drugs-e826a9e1 6 https://ciceroinstitute.org/issues/homelessness/ 7 https://blog.joelonsdale.com/p/banning-street-camping-gets-people 8 https://nypost.com/

school-vouchers/ 21 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcDiN5gIrNo 22 https://fortune.com/2024/11/09/timothy-mellon-net-worth-top-donor-trump-campaign-elon-musk/ 23 https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/vivek-ramaswamy-flip-flops-tiktok-rcna105062 24 https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-

teslas-fremont-car-factory-blockbuster-racism-lawsuit-to-go-before-a-jury-next-year/ 13 https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/04/03/tesla-racism-lawsuit-elon-musks-firm-to-pay-3-2-million-after-137-million-award-tossed/ 14 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1854791544374804784 15 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/

mean-hardship-for-americans-rcna177807 26 https://x.com/PirateWires/status/1856517841916145756 https://archive.ph/hTScX 27 https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/14/politics/elon-musk-doge-trump/index.html 28 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-announces-musk-and-ramaswamy-will-lead-outside-advisory-group-department-of-government-efficiency

nbcnews.com/business/economy/economy-if-trump-wins-second-term-could-mean-hardship-for-americans-rcna177807 30 https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/14/politics/elon-musk-doge-trump/index.html 31 https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/musk-putin-secret-conversations-37e1c187 32 https://x.com/ianbremmer/status/1579941475613229056?lang=

(CFTC) here, here, here conspiracism/conspiracy theories here, here, here, here and the Cicero Institute here and Joe Lonsdale here and Maguire here and Elon Musk here, here and Sovereign Citizen here and Twitter here, here, here conspiracy and Sam Bankman-Fried here, here, here, here and James Beeks here and

, here, here DeSantis, Ron here, here and the “1776 Returns” document here and CBDCs here on cryptocurrency here and Disney here homeless law here and Elon Musk here, here and David Sacks here and Twitter here digital currencies here, here, here, here disinformation here, here, here, here, here Disney here, here,

, René here Glacier Ventures here Google here and AI here, here and defense tech here governance here government contracts here, here, here, here, here and Elon Musk here Palantir here Qwest here Gracias, Antonio here, here, here, here Grants Pass (OR) here Great Replacement Theory here, here Greenberg, Joel here Greene,

Marjorie Taylor here Griffin, Ken here, here GrowSF here, here Groypers here, here Hamilton family here Harris, Kamala here, here, here, here Elon Musk on here Hashemi, Nader here, here Helberg, Jacob here and defense tech here, here and national security here and TikTok here, here and Donald Trump

to Florida here and PayPal here racism here, here, here, here anti-white here and the Great Replacement Theory here Jean-Marie Le Pen here Elon Musk on here and the “Nextdoor Election” here and South Africa here Tesla lawsuit here Raichik, Chaya here Ramaswamy, Vivek here, here, here on assassination

Valley Bank (SVB) here Singh, Nishad here Snailbrook (TX) here Solano County (CA) here Soros, George here, here, here, here and Duran here, here Elon Musk on here and Vivek Ramaswamy here Soros Foundation here South Africa here Southern District of New York’s District Attorney’s Office here, here Sovereign

assassination attempts here and cryptocurrency here, here Bitcoin here, here, here and the Hill and Valley Forum here meeting with tech industry executives here and Elon Musk here, here and David Sacks here and Saudi Arabia here and the SEC here and Peter Thiel here, here, here, here, here, here and

Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets That Launched a Second Space Age

by Eric Berger  · 23 Sep 2024  · 375pp  · 113,230 words

now Reentry, capture the story of perhaps the world’s most remarkable and ambitious corporate endeavor, led by an exceptionally bold and accomplished visionary in Elon Musk. These works take the reader on a behind-the-scenes journey through SpaceX’s highs and lows, the flaws, failures, and world-changing accomplishments.” —Jared

Isaacman, commander of the first all-civilian spaceflight “Ever wonder how Elon Musk and SpaceX have managed to single-handedly disrupt the entrenched and all-powerful aerospace industry in record time? Eric Berger takes us inside the meeting

critical addition to humanity’s historical record.” —Andy Lapsa, cofounder and CEO of Stoke Space Also by Eric Berger Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX REENTRY SPACEX, ELON MUSK, AND THE REUSABLE ROCKETS THAT LAUNCHED A SECOND SPACE AGE ERIC BERGER BenBella Books, Inc. Dallas, TX Reentry copyright © 2024

life, ready to burst into the sky above and noisily proclaim a new era of spaceflight. This was Starship. After two decades of relentless toil, Elon Musk had pushed and cajoled and bullied and single-mindedly driven SpaceX to the precipice of history. His company had launched hundreds of rockets. But Starship

just might get there, it is critical to understand how its people built the future. This is their story. It is also the story of Elon Musk and his outsized spaceflight ambitions. Moments after Starship broke apart in the sky, a conflagration of another sort broke out online. His critics seized on

asked his mother if the Sun had exploded. Those who had actually heard of the SpaceX test site wanted to know just what the hell Elon Musk and his rocket company thought they were doing in the middle of the night. Even as Mueller and his propulsion team basked in the glow

-SQUARED AND THE AMOS-6 DISASTER February 2009 McLean, Virginia Matt Desch thought he might be able to squeeze a few extra bucks out of Elon Musk. So after summoning his best negotiating skills, Desch telephoned the SpaceX founder in early 2009. The chief executive of a satellite company named Iridium, Desch

fired, at least in part for their involvement with the open letter. The message was crystal clear: to work for SpaceX meant to work for Elon Musk. The company and the man, for better or worse, were inseparable. “This thing better look like a goddamn beehive 24/7.” In the weeks following

single-lane, paved road just inside the Launch Complex 39A fence line. It drove directly up a ramp, onto the launch pad. When it stopped, Elon Musk and his five children tumbled out, walking right up to the base of the titanic Falcon Heavy rocket. Sunlight glinted off its three lambent white

the threat of SpaceX early on and delayed reacting in a meaningful way for too long. By the early 2020s, however, these facts were ineluctable. Elon Musk and his rocket company now stand alone, atop the hierarchy of spaceflight. SpaceX launched nearly 100 rockets in 2023, about the same total as the

the Falcon 9, destiny beckoned. EPILOGUE Four days after astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley triumphantly splashed into the Gulf of Mexico in August 2020, Elon Musk hit send on a companywide email. Though Dragon had barely been lifted from the water, it was time to pivot. “Please consider the top SpaceX

January 2009. | PHOTO CREDIT: ROGER CARLSON All of the elements of the first flight-ready Falcon 9 rocket in February 2010. | PHOTO CREDIT: ROGER CARLSON Elon Musk and Chris Thompson in the Falcon 9 flight one control room. | PHOTO CREDIT: ROGER CARLSON Party on the Cocoa Beach pier after Falcon 9 flight

Space Center. | PHOTO CREDIT: NASA Bob Behnken, left, and Doug Hurley inside Crew Dragon during training. | PHOTO CREDIT: NASA SpaceX investor Steve Jurvetson, left, with Elon Musk at the McGregor Dairy Queen. | PHOTO CREDIT: STEVE JURVETSON The Falcon 9 used for flight six, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in 2013, with the

and made their indelible mark on the Falcon 9 and Dragon programs. I thank them all. For this book I had far less access to Elon Musk and current employees at SpaceX. Musk said he was eager to participate, but every time we got close to an interview it would be canceled

Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World

by Anna Crowley Redding  · 1 Jul 2019  · 190pp  · 46,977 words

older, going through a divorce, had five kids, and was running two impossibly challenging companies, and whom she now loved very much. Meet the Musks Elon Musk and Talulah Riley at the 2012 Environmental Awards. (Photo by Kathy Hutchins / Shutterstock.com.) NAME: Talulah Riley DATE OF BIRTH: September 26, 1985 HOMETOWN

Elon and his critics and the media filled into Elon’s Twitter feed. That snowballed into more bad coverage. Headlines read: ELON MUSK’S MEDIA MELTDOWN; ELON MUSK LASHES OUT AT MEDIA, AGAIN; ELON MUSK’S SILLY WAR WITH THE MEDIA; and more. While tweeting, Elon proposed a solution: Pravduh, an online rating of journalists

P. Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space. New York: Smithsonian Books, 2007. Bloomberg Risk Takers. “Elon Musk: How I Became the Real ‘Iron Man.’” 10 June 2014. YouTube video, 44:59. youtu.be/mh45igK4Esw. Boring Company. “The Chicago Express Loop.” www.

“The Boring Company Information Session.” Los Angeles, 17 May 2018. YouTube video, 57:55. youtu.be/AwX9G38vdCE. _____. Interview by Alison van Diggelen. “An Evening with Elon Musk.” Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA, 23 Jan. 2013. YouTube video, 1:16:51. youtu.be/AHHwXUm3iIg. _____. Interview by Chris Anderson. “The Future We’

: ‘Everything Feels like the Future but Us.’” Guardian (Manchester, England), 18 May 2017. www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/18/tesla-workers-factory-conditions-elon-musk. Zhao, Helen. “California Workplace Safety Agency Opens Probe into Tesla.” CNBC, 18 April 2018. www.cnbc.com/2018/04/18/california-workplace-safety-agency

.ag/03j. ENDNOTES 1. Vance, Elon Musk, p. 31. 2. Vance, p. 32. 3. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 4. Elon Musk, interview by van Diggelen. 5. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 6. Friend, “Plugged In.” 7. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 8. Vance, p. 24. 9. Vance, p. 33. 10. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 11. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 12. Elon Musk, interview by Neil deGrasse Tyson. 13

. Vance, p. 38. 14. Vance, p. 38. 15. Vance, p. 38. 16. Elon Musk

, interview by Neil deGrasse Tyson. 17. Vance, p. 37 18. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 19. Vance, p. 37. 20. Vance, p. 37. 21. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 22. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 23. Strauss, “Elon Musk

.” 24. Junod, “Elon Musk

.” 25. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 26. Elon Musk and Kimbal Musk, interview by Jeff Skoll. 27

. Friend, “Plugged In.” 28. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 29. Belfiore, Rocketeers

, p. 171. 30. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 31. Elon Musk, interview by Neil deGrasse Tyson. 32. Elon Musk, interview

by Tyson. 33. Vance, Elon Musk, p. 46.

34. Vance, p. 50. 35. Vance, p. 48. 36. Vance, p. 47 37. Vance, p. 77. 38. Vance, p. 53. 39. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 40. Elon Musk, interview by Khan. 41. Elon Musk, interview by Khan. 42. Elon Musk, interview

by Khan. 43. Elon Musk and Kimbal Musk, interview by Jeff Skoll. 44. Musk and Musk, interview. 45. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 46. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 47. Musk and Musk, interview by Jeff

Skoll. 55. Musk and Musk, interview by Jeff Skoll. 56. Musk and Musk, interview by Jeff Skoll. 57. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 58. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 59. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 60. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 61. Vance, p. 96 62. Vance, p. 95. 63. Kimbal Musk, interview

by Susan Adams. 64. Musk and Musk, interview by Jeff Skoll. 65. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 66. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 67. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 68. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 69. Elon Musk, interview

by Sal Khan. 70. Elon Musk, interview by Sarah Lacy. 71. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 72. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 73. Elon Musk, interview by Sarah Lacy. 74. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 75. Elon Musk, interview by

Sal Khan. 76. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 77. Elon Musk, interview by

Sal Khan. 78. SpaceX.com/about 79. Elon Musk,

interview by Sarah Lacy. 80. Shotwell, interview by Chris Anderson. “SpaceX’s Plan to Fly.” 81. Junod, “Elon Musk.” 82. Paris Productions, “EV1 Funeral.” 83. Elon Musk

, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 84. Elon Musk

, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 85. Elon Musk, interview by

Alison van Diggelen. 86. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 87. Elon Musk,

interview by Sarah Lacy. 88. Elon Musk, interview by Kevin Rose. 89. Elon Musk, interview by Sarah Lacy. 90

’s High Speed Innovation.” 91. Vance, p. 148. 92. Rive, “Turning Toward the Sun.” 93. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 94. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 95. Elon Musk, interview by Joe Rogan. 96. Urban, “The Elon Musk Post Series.” 97. Gaiman, “What Was He Like?” 98. Vance, p. 140. 99. Justine Musk

p. 210. 117. Tesla Inc., www.tesla.com/autopilot. 118. Elon Musk, interview by Kevin Rose. 119. Elon Musk, interview by Sarah Lacy. 120. Elon Musk, interview by Sarah Lacy. 121. Elon Musk, interview by Sarah Lacy. 122. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 123. Elon Musk, “@rileytalulah.” 124. Elliott, “Elon Musk to Divorce.” 125. Tesla Motors Inc., “Tesla Model X Reveal.”

126. Oremus, “Romney Decides.” 127. Robertson, “Tesla Repays $465 Million.” 128. Bloomberg, “Elon Musk.” 129. Elon Musk, interview

by Chris Anderson. 130. Elon Musk, interview

by Alison van Diggelen. 131. D’Angelo, “SpaceX Makes History.” 132. Campbell, “SpaceX’s Successful Landing.” 133. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 134. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 135. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 136. Tarpenning, “Tesla’s High Speed Innovation.” 137. National Geographic, “

Exclusive: Watch Elon Musk.” 138. Chang, “First Private Craft.” 139. Elon Musk, interview by Alison van Diggelen. 140. Shotwell, “SpaceX’s Plan to Fly.” 141. Shotwell

365. 146. Elon Musk, interview by Chris Anderson. 147. Elon Musk, interview by Chris Anderson. 148. Elon Musk, “The Boring Company Information Session.” 149. Elon Musk, “The Boring Company Information Session.” 150. Elon Musk, “The Boring Company Information Session.” 151. Elon Musk, interview by Chris Anderson. 152. Elon Musk, “The Boring Company Information Session.” 153. Elon Musk, “The Boring Company Information Session.” 154. Elon Musk, interview by

Joe Rogan. 155. Brooks, Spaceballs. 156. Elon Musk, interview

158. Emanuel, “Boring Company Chicago O’Hare.” 159. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 160. Elon Musk, interview by Sal Khan. 161. Elon Musk, “The Boring Company Information Session.” 162. Elon Musk, interview by Chris Anderson. 163. Elon Musk, “The Boring Company Information Session.” 164. Vance, p. 43. 165. Strauss, “Elon Musk.” 166. Paine, Do You Trust This Computer? 167.

? 173. Elon Musk, interview by Joe Rogan. 174. Neuralink, www.neuralink.com. 175. Elon Musk, interview by Mohammad Abdullah Al Gergawi. 176. Elon Musk, interview by Mohammad Abdullah Al Gergawi. 177. Elon Musk, interview by Chris Anderson. 178. CBS News, “Tesla CEO Elon Musk.” 179. Wong, “Tesla Factory Workers Reveal Pain.” 180. Elon Musk, “What’s actually amazing.” 181. Elon Musk, “Am

considering taking Tesla.” 182. Elon Musk, interview by Chris Anderson. 183. Elon Musk, interview

BIT Your Backyard Pyramid Dig In Extra Loopy Ad Astra Chapter 13 DANGER Cyborg XPRIZE Chapter 14 PRODUCTION HELL The Future Chapter 15 GENIUS BOY Elon Musk Bibliography Endnotes Acknowledgments About the Author Copyright A FEIWEL AND FRIENDS BOOK An Imprint of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC 120 Broadway, New York,

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

by Christian Davenport  · 20 Mar 2018  · 390pp  · 108,171 words

(or their content) that are not owned by the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Davenport, Christian, author. Title: The space barons : Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the quest to colonize the cosmos/Christian Davenport. Description: First edition. | New York : PublicAffairs, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN

headquarters outside Los Angeles on this evening just before Christmas 2015 cheered it just as their rivals at Blue Origin had done—and then some. Elon Musk watched the rocket reappear from outside on a causeway. Then, he sprinted back into the control room to see the image of the rocket standing

step in a race that was only just beginning. TIMELINE September 2000 Jeff Bezos founds Blue Operations LLC, the precursor to Blue Origin. March 2002 Elon Musk incorporates Space Exploration Technologies. December 2003 First powered flight of SpaceShipOne. December 2003 Musk shows off the Falcon 1 rocket in Washington, DC. September 2004

it. “Well, you’re talking to the man who owns it,” the city manager said. Cantrell told him that he worked for a man named Elon Musk, who had made a lot of money on the Internet and had started a company called Space Exploration Technologies. Never heard of him, the city

culture. Imagine rough—well, it’s rougher than that. Kids gave Elon a very hard time, and it had a huge impact on his life.” Elon Musk fled South Africa after high school when he was seventeen. First, he went to live with relatives in Canada, where he enrolled in Queen’s

hundredth anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight—to send a signal about the importance of what he planned to accomplish. The same day that Elon Musk was parading his Falcon 1 rocket down Independence Avenue in Washington, DC, Rutan was getting ready for the first powered flight of the spaceplane he

participants had to get along. They were trying to figure out how to start a new industry. At least they had a place to meet. Elon Musk had graciously offered to host the meeting at SpaceX’s El Segundo factory. Even though he was still far from being a household name, he

of the program, but because it was already well under development. Walker, the program manager, had never heard of the company SpaceX, or its founder, Elon Musk. But once he saw Musk’s plan to develop a rocket that could launch extremely inexpensively, he wanted to know more about this Internet tycoon

ridiculously long; the work, challenging. It was great for young, energetic, and brilliant workaholics, but not so great for those seeking a “work-life balance.” Elon Musk was demanding and known to yell at employees on the middle of the factory floor. A former executive at Lockheed who got to know Musk

eccentric billionaire who had started a space company from scratch with absolutely no experience with rockets, but talked about colonizing Mars—a wild card named Elon Musk, who was now on an improbable, but epic, roll. THE FALCON 9 had flown successfully. And SpaceX was moving ahead with developing a more robust

NASA administrators in Houston. At SpaceX’s headquarters just outside of Los Angeles, employees broke into raucous applause, chanting their boss’s name, “We love Elon!” Musk was now developing a cultlike following, and SpaceX had swelled to more than two thousand employees with an average age of thirty, with $4 billion

it!” THE F-1 TEAM wasn’t the only space-related award of the evening. The president of the Explorers Club had become fascinated with Elon Musk, and what he was accomplishing in space, and had decided to present him with a special President’s Award. As an image of Musk in

injured. And it was only a test, one that SpaceX stressed “was particularly complex, pushing the limits of the vehicle further than any previous test.” Elon Musk even had coined an acronym for such spectacular failures: RUD, or rapid unscheduled disassembly. But it was also a reminder that for all the advancements

-Be-with-You ritual, a curbside tent party with costumed storm troopers, Han Solos and Yodas. Behind the locked doors, their Yoda was getting ready. Elon Musk wanted to get the details right. This was his big moment, and he wasn’t going to rush it. For months, he’d been teasing

. With the Ansari X Prize, Allen had been at the vanguard of the commercial space movement, which was now dominated by his fellow billionaire tycoons—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Branson, all of whom were pushing ahead with their own plans, showing it could be done. Allen wanted back in the game

were gone. A race past even their own imaginations, deep into the cosmos, to a point in the beyond where there was no finish line. Elon Musk unveils the version of the Dragon spacecraft designed to fly astronauts at an event at SpaceX’s headquarters, 2014. Courtesy of NASA/Dimitri Gerondidakis. Jeff

front of SpaceShipOne after Binnie successfully flew the spacecraft in 2004, winning the Ansari X Prize. Copyright © Mojave Aerospace Ventures LLC; courtesy of Scaled Composites. Elon Musk gives President Barack Obama a tour of SpaceX launchpad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, 2010. Courtesy of NASA/Bill Ingalls. Paul Allen speaks as

airplane ever flown. It is designed to “air launch” as many as three rockets. Copyright © Stratolaunch Corporation. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The four billionaires featured in this book—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Paul Allen—all run multiple companies and have huge demands on their time. So, I’m grateful that all of

the dozens of interviews I conducted for this book, my research depended on many texts, a few of which merit specific mention: Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, and Julian Guthrie

Announce That It Is Ceasing All Business Operations Effective October 23, 2000.” “Our parents had no idea”: Tom Junod, “Elon Musk: Triumph of His Will,” Esquire, November 14, 2012. “I thought the Internet”: Elon Musk, “The Future of Energy and Transport,” Oxford Martin School, Oxford University, November 14, 2012. “Well, I don’t think

you’ll be coming back”: Elon Musk, “Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders” lecture, October 8, 2003. “The online financial payment system”: Ibid. Given the size of the rock: https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=xaW4Ol3_M1o. “We were both interested”: Junod, “Elon Musk.” “Because, of course”: Elon Musk, “Mars Pioneer Award” acceptance speech, 15th Annual International Mars Society Convention, August 4, 2012. “I just did not want Apollo”: Pat Morrison Q

& A with Elon Musk, “Space Case,” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 2012. As a winged spaceplane: Elon Musk, Stanford lecture. Space was still the exclusive: For more on SpaceX’s early days, see Ashlee Vance

, “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” Ecco, May 19, 2015. On March 14, 2002, Musk founded: Ibid. At the dawn of the

Conflicts?” Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2004. “We do everything”: Ibid. “Northrop wasn’t expecting us”: Ibid. As a kid in South Africa: Ashlee Vance, “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” Ecco, May 19, 2015, 40. “I’ve never heard”: Renae Merle, “U.S. Strips Boeing of

York Times, February 5, 2006. The failures were so frequent: Vance, Elon Musk, 124. “I tell folks”: Sandra Sanchez, “SpaceX: Blasting into the Future—A Waco Today Interview with Elon Musk,” Waco Tribune, December 22, 2011. Early on, Musk pegged: Megan Geuss, “Elon Musk Tells BBC He Thought Tesla, SpaceX ‘Had a 10% Chance at Success

, 1985. Branson’s version of space: Paul Allen, Idea Man (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2011), 243. 7. THE RISK “The United States is a distillation”: Elon Musk, “Mars Pioneer Award” acceptance speech, 15th Annual International Mars Society Convention, 2012. As a guidebook pointed out: David Goodman, Best Backcountry Skiing in the Northeast

had always had a bit: Kerry A. Dolan, “How to Raise a Billionaire: An Interview with Elon Musk’s Father, Errol Musk,” Forbes, July 12, 2015. His maternal grandparents: “Tesla and SpaceX: Elon Musk’s Industrial Empire,” Segment Extra, “Elon Musk on His Family History,” 60 Minutes, March 30, 2014. “There is something particularly”: Fay Goldie

Orbit,” Reuters, July 14, 2009. Looking back on it: Michael Griffin, NASA Oral History Project, January 12, 2013. “I’m going to watch”: Carl Hoffman, “Elon Musk Is Betting His Fortune on a Mission Beyond Earth’s Orbit,” Wired, May 22, 2007. “This was a pretty nerve-racking”: Tariq Malik, “SpaceX’s

. “We wanted to keep”: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/the-making-of-the-apollo-11-mission-patch. And when the NASA officials: “Tesla and SpaceX: Elon Musk’s Industrial Empire,” 60 Minutes, March 30, 2014. Goddard was derided: “Apollo 11: How America Won the Race to the Moon,” Associated Press, August 21

don’t”: Marcia Dunn, “PayPal Millionaire’s Rocket Making 1st Test Flight,” Associated Press, June 3, 2010. “A dramatic launch failure”: Andy Pasztor, “Space Pioneer Elon Musk Faces Big Risks with Upcoming Launch,” Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2010. Eventually a reporter: Andy Pasztor, “Amazon Chief’s Spaceship Misfires,” Wall Street Journal

Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Competitive Procurement,” US Government Accountability Office, March 4, 2014, http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/661330.pdf. “Musk is”: Aaron Mehta, “Elon Musk on Russian Assassins, Lockheed Martin, and Going to Mars,” Defense News, June 10, 2014, http://intercepts.defensenews.com/2014/06

-russian-assassins-lockheed-martin-and-going-to-mars/. “Our toughest competitor”: Ibid. “SpaceX is trying to cut”: Christian Davenport, “ULA Chief Accuses Elon Musk’s SpaceX of Trying to ‘Cut Corners,’” Washington Post, June 18, 2014. 208 “It’s kind of the best”: Joel Achenbach, “Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin

a NASA slide showed: Jeff Foust, “Progress Anomaly Strains Space Station Supply Lines,” SpaceNews, April 28, 2015. “The vast majority of people”: Christian Davenport, “Hearing Elon Musk Explain Why His Rocket Just Blew Up Shows Why He’s Such an Intense CEO,” Washington Post, June 20, 2015. 13. “THE EAGLE HAS LANDED

, “The Inside Story of How Billionaires Are Racing to Take You to Outer Space,” Washington Post, August 19, 2016. As Musk once said: Carl Hoffman, “Elon Musk Is Betting His Fortune on a Mission Beyond Earth Orbit,” Wired, May 22, 2007. SpaceX compared it to: “X Marks the Spot: Falcon 9 Attempts

/2014/12/16/x-marks-spot-falcon-9-attempts-ocean-platform-landing. “Well, at least we got close”: Christian Davenport, “After SpaceX Sticks Its Landing, Elon Musk Talks About a City on Mars,” Washington Post, December 22, 2015. “It really quite dramatically”: Ibid. The National Transportation Safety Board: NTSB press release, “Lack

, John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 77–78. 14. MARS “Essentially what we’re saying”: Christian Davenport, “Elon Musk Provides New Details on His ‘Mind Blowing’ Mission to Mars,” Washington Post, June 10, 2016. “So,” he said, “how do we figure out”: “Making Humans

suddenly: Christian Davenport, “Implication of Sabotage Adds Intrigue to SpaceX Investigation,” Washington Post, September 30, 2016. But it was also all a bit: Christian Davenport, “Elon Musk on Mariachi Bands, Zero-G Games, and Why His Mars Plan Is Like ‘Battlestar Galactica,’” Washington Post, September 28, 2016. If Musk were going to

: Opportunity Nears to Reassess Launch Vehicle and Ground Systems Cost and Schedule,” US Government Accountability Office, July 2016. “His job is to provide”: Christian Davenport, “Elon Musk Offers Glimpse of Plans to Deliver Humans to Mars,” Washington Post, September 27, 2016. “There’s so much interest”: Christian Davenport, “Why Investors Are Following

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

by Ashlee Vance  · 18 May 2015  · 370pp  · 129,096 words

PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT 7 ALL ELECTRIC 8 PAIN, SUFFERING, AND SURVIVAL 9 LIFTOFF 10 THE REVENGE OF THE ELECTRIC CAR 11 THE UNIFIED FIELD THEORY OF ELON MUSK EPILOGUE APPENDIX 1 APPENDIX 2 APPENDIX 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES ABOUT THE AUTHOR ALSO BY ASHLEE VANCE CREDITS COPYRIGHT ABOUT THE PUBLISHER 1 ELON’S WORLD

DO YOU THINK I’M INSANE?” This question came from Elon Musk near the very end of a long dinner we shared at a high-end seafood restaurant in Silicon Valley. I’d gotten to the restaurant

to make his judgment. A split second later, we shook hands and Musk drove off in a red Tesla Model S sedan. ANY STUDY OF ELON MUSK must begin at the headquarters of SpaceX, in Hawthorne, California—a suburb of Los Angeles located a few miles from Los Angeles International Airport. It

-down shops, and run-down eateries surround huge, industrial complexes that appear to have been built during some kind of architectural Boring Rectangle movement. Did Elon Musk really stick his company in the middle of this dreck? Then, okay, things start to make more sense when you see one 550,000-square

between good and evil is anything but amazing. A boy who takes these fantasies seriously is more remarkable. Such was the case with the young Elon Musk. By the middle of his teenage years, Musk had blended fantasy and reality to the point that they were hard to separate in his mind

. South Africa, by contrast, presented far less opportunity for an entrepreneurial soul. As Kimbal put it, “South Africa was like a prison for someone like Elon.” Musk’s opportunity to flee arrived with a change in the law that allowed Maye to pass her Canadian citizenship to her children. Musk immediately began

set out to prove his point with what would end up being even more dramatic results. 5 PAYPAL MAFIA BOSS THE SALE OF ZIP2 INFUSED ELON MUSK WITH A NEW BRAND OF CONFIDENCE. Much like the video-game characters he adored, Musk had leveled up. He had solved Silicon Valley and become

fit. “I came very close to dying,” Musk said. “That’s my lesson for taking a vacation: vacations will kill you.” 6 MICE IN SPACE ELON MUSK TURNED THIRTY IN JUNE 2001, and the birthday hit him hard. “I’m no longer a child prodigy,” he told Justine, only half joking. That

, and invitations to the usual characters had been mailed out. What stunned Robert Zubrin, the head of the group, was the reply from someone named Elon Musk, whom no one could remember inviting. “He gave us a check for five thousand dollars,” Zubrin said. “That made everyone take notice.” Zubrin began researching

the size of a six-car garage. The two men were fiddling around with the eighty-pound engine when Garvey mentioned that a guy named Elon Musk might be stopping by. The amateur rocketry scene is tight, and it was Cantrell who recommended that Musk check out Garvey’s workshop and see

interest in what Straubel was selling. Investors dealt him one rejection after another for months on end. Then, in the fall of 2003, Straubel met Elon Musk. Harold Rosen had set up a lunch with Musk at a seafood restaurant near the SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles and brought Straubel along to

would be their first milestone and give them something physical to show off, which could aid a second round of funding. Eberhard and Tarpenning had Elon Musk’s name in the back of their heads as a possible lead investor from the outset. They had both seen him speak a couple of

ideas of a big man who shook up industries and did things his own way. Downey heard some rumblings about a Hughes-like figure named Elon Musk who had constructed his own, modern-day industrial complex about ten miles away. Instead of visualizing how life might have been for Hughes, Downey could

the willingness to spend vast sums of money on spaceships and electric cars, which came across as a combination of daring, flamboyant, and downright flabbergasting. “Elon Musk has been called ‘part playboy, part space cowboy,’ an image hardly dispelled by a car collection that has boasted a Porsche 911 Turbo, 1967 Series

—poof—it’s gone. Only a cynical dullard could come away from witnessing this feeling anything other than wonder at what man can accomplish. For Elon Musk, this spectacle has turned into a familiar experience. SpaceX has metamorphosed from the joke of the aeronautics industry into one of its most consistent operators

Tesla’s share price and that General Motors, among other automakers, pulled together a team to study the Model S, Tesla, and the methods of Elon Musk. It’s worth pausing for a moment to meditate on what Tesla had accomplished. Musk had set out to make an electric car that did

went on sale, Tesla had posted a profit, hit $562 million in quarterly revenue, raised its sales forecast, and become as valuable as Mazda Motor. Elon Musk had built the automotive equivalent of the iPhone. And car executives in Detroit, Japan, and Germany had only their crappy ads to watch as they

was the willingness to charge after its vision without compromise, a complete commitment to execute to Musk’s standards. 11 THE UNIFIED FIELD THEORY OF ELON MUSK THE RIVE BROTHERS USED TO BE LIKE A TECHNOLOGY GANG. In the late 1990s, they would jump on skateboards and zip around the streets of

and asking if they needed any help managing their computing systems. The young men, who had all grown up in South Africa with their cousin Elon Musk, soon decided there must be an easier way to hawk their technology smarts than going door-to-door. They wrote some software that allowed them

much government funding and too many incentives to create a viable market. Much of this criticism was fair. It’s just that there was this Elon Musk guy hanging around who seemed to have figured something out that everyone else had missed. “We had a blanket rule against investing in clean-tech

to prove that the technology could work. Some people had their fun with all of this. “Billionaire unveils imaginary space train,” teased Valleywag. “We love Elon Musk’s nutso determination—there was certainly a time when electric cars and private space flight seemed silly, too. But what’s sillier is treating this

well, that would be the case. If my wife and I have a bunch of kids, she would probably stay with them on Earth.” EPILOGUE ELON MUSK IS A BODY THAT REMAINS VERY MUCH IN MOTION. By the time this book reaches your hands, it’s quite possible that Musk and SpaceX

in 1995 for his doctorate work in physics. “Based on the information you provided, we are unable to locate a record in our office for Elon Musk,” wrote the director of graduate admissions. When asked during the case to produce a document verifying Musk’s enrollment at Stanford, Musk’s attorney declined

and the fees associated with transactions are low. These are all good things. Why aren’t they doing this? It’s mad.” APPENDIX 3 From: Elon Musk Date: June 7, 2013, 12:43:06 AM PDT To: All <All@spacex.com> Subject: Going Public Per my recent comments, I am increasingly concerned

one shaped like a rocket. In 2011, he also received a lot of grief from the Wall Street Journal for having a high-end camp. “Elon Musk, chief executive of electric-car maker Tesla Motors and co-founder of eBay Inc.’s PayPal unit, is among those eschewing the tent life,” the

, Stanford, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, San Jose, San Francisco CREDITS COVER DESIGN BY ALLISON SALTZMAN COVER PHOTOGRAPH © BY ART STREIBER/AUGUST COPYRIGHT ELON MUSK. Copyright © 2015 by Ashlee Vance. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century

by Tim Higgins  · 2 Aug 2021  · 430pp  · 135,418 words

: Hitandrun Media @ Début Art Cover design by John Fontana Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Higgins, Tim (Journalist), author. Title: Power play : Tesla, Elon Musk, and the bet of the century / Tim Higgins. Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020048532 (print) | LCCN 2020048533 (

Red Tidings Epilogue A Note from the Author Acknowledgments Notes PROLOGUE THE BEGINNING On a breezy night in March 2016 at the Tesla design studio, Elon Musk took the stage in front of a crowd of supporters. Dressed like a James Bond villain, in a black jacket with the collar up,

have not gone bankrupt: Ford—and Tesla. * * * — So you’d pretty much have to be delusional to enter such a competition; which some think Elon Musk is. But he hasn’t shrunk from the challenge. Instead he has willed himself and his company to where the lofty visions of Silicon Valley

his hubris be his undoing? Amid the controversial figures to have emerged from Silicon Valley in recent years, you couldn’t help but wonder: Is Elon Musk an underdog, an antihero, a con man, or some combination of the three? PART I A REALLY EXPENSIVE CAR CHAPTER 1 THIS TIME COULD

deferred to his colleague. CHAPTER 5 MR. TESLA “Elon is the perfect investor,” Martin Eberhard had confided to a colleague during the honeymoon period with Elon Musk. In the early days, Musk seemed to think highly of Eberhard too, showering him with praise. “The number of great product people in the

time for new leadership. Their conflict pointed at yet another rift taking shape. When Eberhard had brought his idea for an electric sports car to Elon Musk, they had seemingly shared a vision for what the company might become. But with each hard-won milestone, the company’s—and Musk’s—

their normal pay of between $200,000 and almost $2 million. CHAPTER 8 EATING GLASS When he was a kid growing up in South Africa, Elon Musk’s mother called him Encyclopedia after his reading habits and ability to absorb information. “We could ask him anything,” she’d later write. “Remember,

own statement that the ruling was “consistent with Tesla’s belief in a team of founders, including the company’s current CEO and Product Architect Elon Musk, [and] Chief Technology Officer JB Straubel, who were both fundamental to the creation of Tesla from inception.” In private, some cautioned circumspection. Michael Marks,

invented in house. Straubel and his team packed their bags for a frustrated return to San Carlos. * * * — “I don’t have time for this,” Elon Musk bellowed. “I’ve got to launch the fucking rocket!” And with that he stormed out of the glass conference room at SpaceX, abruptly ending a

. Tesla’s weekly sales of Roadsters numbered in the handful. Zak Edson, director of product planning, was presenting the results at Tesla’s headquarters as Elon Musk looked over the figures. “Sales suck,” Musk said. “They don’t just suck—sales suck monkey dick.” The group tried to swallow their laughter.

estate business, he was accustomed to unsolicited offers, typically from local shopping centers. Brown persisted, though, and one of her emails caught his attention: “Elon Musk would like to speak to you about the things you did at Apple. Please give me a call.” Blankenship called, was greeted by Brown, and

was a jolt compared to the pleasant weather in Hawthorne, California, where he had set up the automaker’s vehicle engineering operations to be near Elon Musk’s desk at SpaceX headquarters. Rawlinson and Musk faced twin challenges that called for close coordination. They were engineering a car from the ground

influence the company’s culture, would play a larger role in the success of the company than even the money would. When Akio Toyoda and Elon Musk celebrated an arrangement that included the two automakers working together on electric cars, the details remained far from complete. The idea was that the

learned and poured it straight into the Model S. * * * — Tucked away in a complex of industrial buildings next to the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Elon Musk opened a new design studio for Tesla. He picked an old airplane hangar that had been converted into a basketball gym a few years earlier

the former Lexus factory manager who had served as a cultural bridge during the acquisition of the Fremont factory, and his deputy, Dag Reckhorn, whom Elon Musk hired for his experience working with aluminum. They had spent months haggling over what pieces of machinery Tesla would buy from Toyota and what would

, would later write about his experience: “What would have been deemed as unacceptable by any carmakers was seen as part of an ongoing process by Elon Musk who believed, rightly so, that the user experience of driving a truly innovative automobile would outweigh minor defects that will be eventually corrected.” * * * — As

on road trips. A similar network of so-called Supercharger stations was being deployed across major interstate highways in the U.S. Now, aboard Elon Musk’s private jet in 2013 on the way to Los Angeles, Straubel thought through the ramifications of his boss’s next ambitions for Tesla. Ever

to produce billions of batteries, it needed to enter a market where millions of buyers might help boost its sales. With George Blankenship’s departure, Elon Musk turned sales and service over to Jerome Guillen, a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan, who had already proven himself

kind of flexibility Tesla would need in the future if it wanted to move beyond its niche. * * * — On a breezy March night in 2016, Elon Musk, Doug Field, Jon McNeill, and the other senior leadership stood backstage at the Tesla design studio, where hundreds of customers and supporters waited for a

we just became a real car company,” he wrote. What should have been a time of celebration quickly turned into the ugliest public spectacle in Elon Musk and Tesla history. CHAPTER 26 TWITTER HURRICANES As Tesla workers wearily marked their production milestone at Fremont, Musk landed in Portugal just in time

Fossi continues to write about Tesla, he would sue him and drag Rahr into it. The next day, Fossi announced he was retiring his blog: “Elon Musk has won this round. He has silenced a critic.” * * * — As the Twitter winds swirled, Tesla’s executives kept their heads down. They had met

months trying to get the Model 3 out—nearly missing his brother’s wedding, spending his birthday on the factory floor. The resulting headline read “Elon Musk Details ‘Excruciating’ Personal Toll of Tesla Turmoil.” It described him as emotional, having “choked up multiple times” during the interview. He talked of his

there were a million Nikola Teslas? he asked. Musk said things would have advanced very quickly. Right, Rogan added, but there’s not a million Elon Musks. “There’s one motherfucker,” Rogan said. “Do you think about that?” Musk checked his phone. “You getting text messages from chicks?” Rogan asked. No,

of April 2020 proved wrong. Months later, he announced on Twitter that he had tested positive. A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR Popular myth is that Elon Musk, sleeping on the factory floor, willed Tesla into being. His determination and stubbornness surely played a big part in the company’s rise and

me—dogged reporters who have covered Tesla over the years and blazed a trail for me to follow. Ashlee Vance wrote the definitive biography of Elon Musk. Dana Hull, Lora Kolodny, Kirsten Korosec, Edward Niedermeyer, Alan Ohnsman, Susan Pulliam, Mike Ramsey, and Owen Thomas are among those journalists who broke some

by the author. “Why the fuck”: Michael V. Copeland, “Tesla’s Wild Ride,” Fortune (July 21, 2008), https://fortune.com/​2008/​07/​21/​tesla-elon-musk-electric-car-motors/. He suggested being vague: Details taken from emails between the men reviewed by the author. Musk fired them: Michael V. Copeland, “Tesla

by author. “If this is true”: Michael V. Copeland, “Tesla’s Wild Ride,” Fortune, July 21, 2008, https://fortune.com/​2008/​07/​21/​tesla-elon-musk-electric-car-motors. He calculated that the cost: Tim Watkins’s declaration filed with California court on June 29, 2009. “Martin seems to be focused

complained: Author interviews with people involved with the funding plan. “We either do this”: Author interviews with Tesla workers at the time. Reclaiming the narrative: Elon Musk, “Extraordinary times require focus,” company blog (Oct. 15, 2008). “I actually talked a close friend”: Owen Thomas, “Tesla Motors Has $9 Million in the

https://play.acast.com/​s/​howididit/​investorjasoncalacanis-howiwasbroke-thenrich-thenbroke-andnowhave-100million. There were other: Ibid. “Elon, looks like”: Ibid. but, as Musk: Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 157. Musk suspected the delay: Ibid. To stoke their competitive juices: Ibid

Justine Musk, “I Was a Starter Wife,” Marie Claire (Sept. 10, 2010), https://www.marieclaire.com/​sex-love/​a5380/​millionaire-starter-wife. The practical effect: Elon Musk, “Correcting the Record About My Divorce,” Business Insider (July 8, 2010), https://www.businessinsider.com/​correcting-the-record-about-my-divorce-2010-7. Looking for

Jonathan Gol, et al., “Valor and Tesla Motors,” University of Chicago case study (2017), https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/​-/media/​faculty/​steven-kaplan/​research/​valortesla.pdf. “Elon Musk would like”: Nikki Gordon-Bloomfield, “From Gap to the Electric Car: Tesla’s George Blankenship,” Green Car Reports (Nov. 24, 2010), https://www.greencarreports.com

Tesla manager. “What would have been deemed”: Philippe Chain and Frederic Filloux, “How Tesla Cracked the Code of Automobile Innovation.” “They presented a better face”: Elon Musk’s appearance recorded by C-Span (Sept. 29, 2011), https://www.c-span.org/​video/​?301817-1/​future-human-space-flight. CHAPTER 15 If Tesla

,” Consumer Reports (July 2013), https://www.consumerreports.org/​cro/​magazine/​2013/​07/​tesla-model-s-review/​index.htm. Musk’s relationship with Blankenship: Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 216. “For Tesla to succeed”: Author interview with Blankenship. He had

quietly reached: Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk, 217. CHAPTER 16 But their innovations: Author interviews with people familiar with Akerson’s thinking. The first fire occurred: Tom Krisher and Mike Baker, “Tesla

same-london-club-weeks-after-miami-sighting/. “Lack of sleep”: Author interview with former Tesla executive. Among the first: Tim Higgins and Dana Hull, “Want Elon Musk to Hire You at Tesla? Work for Apple,” Bloomberg Businessweek (Feb. 2, 2015). Many knew that Musk: Interviews with Tesla employees at the time,

“You are now working”: Charles Duhigg, “Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Life Inside Tesla’s Production Hell,” Wired (Dec. 13, 2018), https://www.wired.com/​story/​elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-gigafactory/. If a critical workstation: Author interviews. Musk told him to: Claim laid out in a federal lawsuit against Tesla filed in

taken on June 4, 2019. Wheeler’s team calculated: Presentation presented to the Tesla board of directors, dated July 24, 2016. “We are going to”: Elon Musk deposition taken on Aug. 24, 2019. “Latest feedback from major”: Emails reviewed by the author. It wasn’t foolproof: Author interviews with Tesla engineers. They

. “He’s always pitching”: Video of interview posted on Business Insider’s website on Feb. 21, 2018: https://www.businessinsider.com/​jim-chanos-tesla-elon-musk-truck-video-2018-2. He thought: Details from Martin Tripp deposition taken as part of litigation between him and Musk. She kept a schedule: Sarah

over the Weekend as He Was ‘Scrounging for Investors,’ ” Business Insider (Aug. 13, 2018), https://www.businessinsider.com/​azealia-banks-claims-to-be-at-elon-musks-house-as-he-sought-investors-2018-8. “Don’t they have something”: Email exchange reviewed by the author. From LA: Liz Hoffman and Tim Higgins

Pennsylvania: Author interviews with former Tesla executives. They were warmly received: Author interviews with Tesla managers from that period. Bloomberg Businessweek: Matthew Campbell et al., “Elon Musk Loves China, and China Loves Him Back—For Now,” Bloomberg Businessweek (Jan. 13, 2021), https://www.bloomberg.com/​news/​features/​2021-01-13/​china-loves

-tsla-how-long-will-that-last?sref=PRBlrg7S. He proposed an idea: Author interview with a Tesla manager familiar with the trip. “Traffic is driving”: Elon Musk said on Twitter (Dec. 17, 2016), twitter.com/​elonmusk/​status/​810108760010043392?s=20. As things dragged into 2018: Bruce Einhorn, et al., “Tesla’s

www.wsj.com/​articles/​tesla-seeks-rent-savings-amid-coronavirus-crunch-11586823630. “Over the past week”: Jeremy C. Owens, Claudia Assis, and Max A. Cherney, “Elon Musk vs. Bay Area Officials: These Emails Show What Happened Behind the Scenes in the Tesla Factory Fight,” MarketWatch (May 29, 2020), https://www.marketwatch.com

/​story/​elon-musk-vs-bay-area-officials-these-emails-show-what-happened-behind-the-scenes-in-the-tesla-factory-fight-2020-05-29. “Frankly this is the final

”: Tim Higgins, “Tesla Files Lawsuit in Bid to Reopen Fremont Factory,” Wall Street Journal (May 10, 2020), https://www.wsj.com/​articles/​elon-musk-threatens-authorities-over-mandated-tesla-factory-shutdown-11589046681. “I will be on the line”: Rebecca Ballhaus and Tim Higgins, “Trump Calls for California to Let

Circle,” The Wall Street Journal, (Feb. 19, 2021), https://www.wsj.com/​articles/​how-tesla-made-it-to-the-winners-circle-11613739634. “This is very”: Elon Musk told author in an email on May 7, 2020. “I’ve never met”: Scarlet Fu, “Chanos Reduces ‘Painful’ Tesla Short, Tells Musk ‘Job Well

Done,’ ” Bloomberg News (Dec. 3, 2020), https://www.bloomberg.com/​news/​articles/​2020-12-03/​tesla-bear-jim-chanos-says-he-d-tell-elon-musk-job-well-done?sref=PRBlrg7S. What’s next on your reading list? Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date

Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

by Eric Berger  · 2 Mar 2021  · 304pp  · 89,879 words

Goulash Index Photo Section About the Author Copyright About the Publisher Prologue September 14, 2019 A fat, red sun sank into the Texas horizon as Elon Musk bounded toward a silvery spaceship. Reaching its concrete landing pad, Musk marveled up at the stainless steel, steampunk contraption looming above, which shone brilliantly in

tank that had fed propellant to a Raptor rocket engine. “It’s in remarkably good shape considering we had an inferno in there,” he said. Elon Musk traveled a long road to reach these plains rolling down to the Gulf of Mexico. In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX with the intention of eventually

SpaceX had only just begun to cut metal on its first rocket. Although its inaugural launch remained a few years away, the firm’s founder, Elon Musk, had already taken the first step toward Mars. He understood he would go nowhere without the right people. So interview by interview, Musk sought out

employee number fourteen at SpaceX. The story of SpaceX begins toward the end of the year 2000, on the other side of the United States. Elon Musk was driving on the Long Island Expressway with a friend and fellow entrepreneur named Adeo Ressi, shortly after PayPal’s board of directors had ousted

right person, but, he said, “Nobody who seemed to be good would join, and there was no point in hiring somebody who wasn’t good.” Elon Musk assumed the role of chief engineer himself. He also liked Cantrell, thinking the smooth-talking engineer could serve as the chief of business development for

, harsh, reflective, and a stickler for the finest details of rocket science. But most of all, he channeled a preternatural force to move things forward. Elon Musk just wants to get shit done. The engineers sitting in those seats around the conference table had to possess a certain amount of mania, too

feed the engine. They had nicknamed their booster “BFR,” short for Big Fucking Rocket. In January 2002, Garvey told Mueller that an internet millionaire named Elon Musk wanted to come by and meet him that weekend, and see their amateur engine. Mueller didn’t think much of it until Musk and his

phone and called Mango at his desk in Alabama. To Mango, the call came out of nowhere. After the caller identified himself as someone named Elon Musk, he proceeded to explain in his slightly foreign accent that he was a millionaire who had sold his interest in PayPal and gotten into the

suffered a similar fate, limping along for a few years before selling its intellectual property rights to SpaceDev, a subsidiary of Sierra Nevada Corporation. When Elon Musk showed up at Vandenberg a decade later, some of the Air Force graybeards thought they knew pretty much what to expect from this private company

no tables, so everyone just sat in a circle,” he said. “It was a beautiful night, and a sad night.” In moments of high tension, Elon Musk often tries to break the stress with laughter. Musk has a rollicking wit. He will say something funny, realize it is funny, and iterate on

not quite quench her thirst for making a difference. Deep inside, Shotwell knew she had more to offer the world. So the idea of selling Elon Musk’s unproven rocket, and working for someone regarded as a demanding boss, did not faze her. “I knew the business by then,” she said. “I

Boeing, did, too. They now had a monopoly on national security launches for the next decade, along with guaranteed profits. Everyone was happy—except for Elon Musk. He sued in U.S. District Court to stop the merger, arguing that SpaceX should be allowed to compete for these missions. While it was

of its biggest rivals in the launch industry, gone against the Air Force with the proposed United Launch Alliance merger, and protested a NASA contract. Elon Musk was not walking on eggshells on the way to orbit. He was breaking a lot of eggs. This, of course, made life difficult for Shotwell

and stylish clothes. And it was her time to show the good old boys how it was done. | 6 | Flight Two March 2006–March 2007 Elon Musk recognized the extraordinary demands he placed on SpaceX’s early hires. He therefore decided to reward employees who spent the majority of 2004 traveling to

, with a shiny Falcon 1 rocket in tow—transfixed Dunn. This was the future. He knew what he must do. He would go and help Elon Musk build rockets to change the world. Only by early 2005, SpaceX was nearly three years old. The company was already preparing for its first launch

of them stripped. The warm water beckoned. | 11 | Always Go to Eleven September 2008–May 2020 After sinking six years and $100 million into SpaceX, Elon Musk finally had a real rocket. Only a handful of countries had ever built a liquid-fueled booster and launched it into orbit before. With the

Ocean. For eight years, the company had scrabbled to make ends meet, struggling to put rockets into orbit, and nearly dying on several occasions. For Elon Musk and SpaceX’s rapidly growing workforce that night, those failures were behind them. Overhead, their rocket soared among the stars. Below, waves dashed against the

Mars,” he said. “Not even close,” I replied. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Not even close. It’s a goddamn outrage.” This is the passion that fires Elon Musk, and impels him to drive his teams forward every single day. Decisions in his world come down to a simple calculus: Will this get humans

SpaceX had done. The chief executive of United Launch Alliance, Tory Bruno, sent Shotwell flowers in congratulations. They have proven to be quite a pair, Elon Musk and Gwynne Shotwell. She understood the industry he wanted to change. And when he pushed for that change, she helped guide him and stood by

did not believe the Mars stuff in the beginning. “I kind of ignored it,” she said. “I wasn’t even bought in.” She is today. ELON MUSK, Founder And what of the ringmaster? Since the early years of his rocket company, Musk has ascended from semi-anonymous dot-com millionaire status to

2016 to build machines that can interface directly with the human brain, and he formed a company to dig tunnels beneath congested cities. In short, Elon Musk had a lot on his mind when I nudged his memories back to the tiny island of Omelek. He wanted to help. Musk understands the

telling the story in full, or to allow an author free rein inside SpaceX to speak with employees about the company’s formative years. But Elon Musk wanted me to talk to everyone for this book. And he meant it. “It was a high-drama situation,” he said of launching rockets from

from those who toiled on Kwaj to make the impossible possible. For this experience I have many people to thank. The list must start with Elon Musk. When I first proposed this book idea in early 2019, he eagerly agreed. His message to me was that I should talk to everyone. With

if it was not. I love you; and this book is for you, for always believing in me. Key SpaceX Employees from 2002 to 2008 ELON MUSK, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Mary Beth Brown, assistant TOM MUELLER, VICE PRESIDENT OF PROPULSION Jeremy Hollman, director of propulsion development Dean Ono, director of in-space

David Giger, Flight One mission manager BOB REAGAN, VICE PRESIDENT OF MACHINING OPERATIONS BRANDEN SPIKES, CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER Timeline 2002 MAY 6 SpaceX founded by Elon Musk OCTOBER 31 First gas generator full-duration test-firing (Mojave, California) 2003 MARCH 11 First Merlin engine thrust chamber firing (McGregor, Texas) MAY 31 SpaceX

) Bigej Island, just south of Omelek, is where the SpaceX team would sometimes stop for a swim on their way home from work. (Hans Koenigsmann) Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, tours Cape Canaveral with President Barack Obama in 2010. (NASA/Bill Ingalls) Gwynne Shotwell, right, was instrumental in making the

Omelek. (Hans Koenigsmann) A C-17 aircraft flies by Omelek Island during the Flight One campaign after delivering an emergency shipment of LOX. (Tim Buzza) Elon Musk, center top, with the Flight One launch team and Air Force officials prior to launch. (Tim Buzza) Collecting the wreckage after Flight One. (Hans Koenigsmann

) A solemn Elon Musk surveys debris collected after Flight One. (Hans Koenigsmann) Kestrel engine with its expanded nozzle. (Hans Koenigsmann) Zach Dunn poses with a Merlin 1C rocket engine

the plane: Flo Li supports Zach Dunn as they work furiously after the Falcon 1 first stage implodes midflight. (Ron Gargiulo) The moment of truth: Elon Musk and Tom Mueller watch Flight Four from the Command Van. (SpaceX) It wasn’t all hard work: Departing Omelek on the Peregrine Falcon, it’s

Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History

by Ben Mezrich  · 6 Nov 2023  · 279pp  · 85,453 words

and character names have been altered at the request of my sources to protect privacy. This is not an authorized narrative of the events surrounding Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter—as was his wont, Elon chose not to respond to requests for his participation. I can only imagine that this

-up to one of the most important social media sites online, with an outsized imprint on culture, journalism, and politics. When the news of Elon Musk’s interest in the site first broke—on Twitter, of course—I was instantly intrigued. To me, Elon is one of the most complex characters

of Twitter’s main headquarters. Esther had her laptop open in front of her, the screen casting a cone of light across her porcelain skin. Elon Musk, hovering over her right shoulder, was in shadow, his wide, square face, impish eyes, and ever-present smirk barely lit by the fluorescent ceiling

what remained of it, along with him. PART ONE “I say something, and then it usually happens. Maybe not on schedule, but it usually happens.” —ELON MUSK CHAPTER ONE More Than Two Years Earlier, January 15, 2020 The George R. Brown Convention Center, downtown Houston, Texas. Spotlights danced over a packed auditorium

the center of the video call. The audience recognized the man, instantly identifiable, at the same moment, and an excited murmur moved through the auditorium. Elon Musk was one of Twitter’s biggest users, with over 30 million followers, and his tweets were a constant source of entertainment and controversy; at times

his molecules, he had the sudden feeling that something was heading his way. CHAPTER TWO March 25, 2022 A little after 1:30 a.m. Elon Musk, CEO and techno-king of Tesla, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX, founder of Neuralink and the Boring Company, soon to be the richest

his glasses and wiped at the smudges of humidity that had just formed across the lenses. According to the texts, news sites, and tweets, Elon Musk, currently the world’s richest man, had just filed with the SEC, effectively announcing that he had acquired a 9.5 percent stake in Twitter

uncomfortable with the lengths Twitter had gone to try to police its platform. Parag couldn’t be sure when Jack had first reached out to Elon Musk regarding his concerns about Twitter, but at least as far back as a year ago, Jack had been pushing the Twitter board to reach

least, that Yoel led with it, even as he hung up his phone and slipped the device back into the pocket of his skinny jeans. “Elon Musk,” he said, shaking his head. “This should be… interesting.” The pause told Jessica everything she needed to know. The billionaire—was he still a

aura. In marketing, she worked with a lot of CEOs, many big personalities, who were usually insulated from people with differing points of view. Elon Musk was a legendary businessman, but Twitter wasn’t a car company. It was a social media site, providing a platform for hundreds of millions of

that—he’d only bought a few billion dollars’ worth of shares. But still, it was hard not to wonder: What could a man like Elon Musk possibly want with Twitter? CHAPTER FIVE Boca Chica, Texas. It might have looked something like this: a hundred-thousand-acre compound of sand and

seemed like everyone had seen the news before he had; after opening Twitter, Slack, and his text app, he’d immediately understood the commotion. Elon Musk’s offer to take Twitter private had hit everyone by surprise. To Mark, the numbers had seemed insane—a 40 percent bump over the stock

sign that he understood that his background as an engineer, and his lack of experience in management, hadn’t prepared him for handling someone like Elon Musk. The way Mark saw it, Parag had already “managed” Elon into quitting the Twitter board, making an offer to take the company private, and

sustainable living, made by a company called Boxabl—fifty thousand dollars all in if you could get off the wait list, or happened to be Elon Musk, for whom there was no such thing as a wait list. Despite Elon’s initial impulse, he left the laptop open. It wasn’t

poison pill” share maneuver to keep Elon from taking over Twitter, now to fire off a lawsuit demanding he finish the job. In April 2022, Elon Musk entered into a binding merger agreement with Twitter, promising to use his best efforts to get the deal done. Now, less than three months later

, and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?” —ELON MUSK “The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear

toward the front of the coffee shop just in time to see what had sucked all the attention out of the room. There he was, Elon Musk, moving quickly through the open space. He looked bigger in person than he seemed on TV, though he’d obviously lost weight. Back in

grinned at her and raised both thumbs up in the air. She laughed, then shrugged. It was impossible to know what was going on in Elon Musk’s head, but Esther had definitely taken her shot. She waited until nine p.m. to send the email, even though she’d been

revenue per employee 365B rev/154k employees = 2.37M… Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k: 5B rev/3k employees -= 1.66 m…” Elon Musk: “Insane potential for improvement.” Jason Calacanis: “Sharpen your blades boys.” A little after 4 p.m., and the party was already in full swing.

the husband of the Speaker of the House: “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” Elon Musk wasn’t some conspiracy theorist sitting in a dark corner of the internet. He was the new CEO of Twitter. When gently approached about the

inappropriate nature of the tweet, he’d responded that although he was the head of Twitter, he wasn’t going to stop tweeting as himself—Elon Musk, the person, not the CEO. Jessica knew this was an impossible stance. To the general public, he was now the face of Twitter. To

blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron. Then Elon seemed to get the message: @Elon Musk We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8? Just like that, Twitter Blue’s price shifted from

; he had chosen to leave. And that, to Elon, wasn’t simply a business decision. It was a betrayal. CHAPTER SIXTEEN November 16, 2022 Elon Musk 12:00 AM To Team: Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to

posting in the current age. Even so, dredged up, on its own, the tweet probably would have made little more than a ripple—had not Elon Musk, with his hundred and twenty million followers—not responded: This explains a lot. Then the billionaire had gone much further, following up with a

callers and anonymous, virulent texts, their lives upended by hate: hate speech, hate tweets, hate texts, hate calls, hate upon hate upon hate… While Elon Musk stood in the wings of a massive stage at the front of an even more massive arena, waiting for his cue, bouncing from one foot

take a damn joke? In real life, did it matter what a bunch of failing newspaper boomer pundits thought of him? IRL, he was still Elon Musk. Beloved, praised, applauded— His thoughts were interrupted by a voice from the stage, reverberating even louder than the noise from the audience. Dave Chappelle,

and glistening, like a water snake just beneath the surface of a stream. The driver skilled, professional; in the backseat, the most precious of cargo: Elon Musk’s two-year-old son, X. Maybe the driver was chatting with the toddler, maybe he was checking the GPS or the time, but eventually

driver; that he believed X’s mother, the pop star known as Grimes, had been communicating with him through coded messages in her Instagram; that Elon Musk was “monitoring his real-time location”; and that Musk was able to “control Uber Eats to block him from receiving delivery orders.” X’s

duel, cameras capturing each other in cones of flickering light, as their heated conversation rose up into the LA air… A short time later, Elon Musk was sitting in a dark conference room at Twitter headquarters, staring at his phone. Having just taken the sort of call that would leave any

the New York Times saw the suspensions as “questionable and unfortunate.” CNN added “impulsive and unjustified.” The Washington Post stated that the action “directly undermines Elon Musk’s claim that he intends to run a platform dedicated to free speech.” Melissa Fleming, the UN undersecretary-general for global communication, put it succinctly

to hang out with him. Although she was very close to her own kids, she knew that teenagers could be difficult. But this was Elon Musk, a man who made self-driving cars and rocket ships and flamethrowers, who dug tunnels under Las Vegas and was going to put a man

” and believed, with a start, that the two women were actually considering calling San Francisco law enforcement to ask for a wellness check. On Elon Musk. Elon had cut himself off from the rest of the company so thoroughly that the only way these two employees thought they could make sure

he would not be the same Elon who had walked through those front doors carrying a sink. The way Jessica saw it, Elon Musk didn’t break Twitter. Twitter broke Elon Musk. She wasn’t going to wait around for the billionaire, or what was left of the platform, to pick up the pieces

next afternoon, the problem would indeed be solved, in a particularly blunt manner. The engineers would rewrite Twitter’s code to emphasize any tweets by Elon Musk. Twitter’s vaunted “algorithm” would reportedly magnify tweets by Elon by “a factor of 1,000,” something Platformer would report was called “a power

user multiplier” that “only applies to Elon Musk.” Sitting on the edge of his couch in his darkened living room, staring at James Musk’s urgent Slack message, Mark could only shake his

Mezrich) Bringing Down the Mouse NOVELLAS Q NOTES CHAPTER TWO “I wanted my circumstances”: Tom Randall, Josh Eidelson, Dana Hull, and John Lippert, “Hell for Elon Musk Is a Midsize Sedan,” Bloomberg Businessweek, July 12, 2018. CHAPTER THREE behind the wheel of one of three other vehicles: Harsh, “Car Collection of Ousted

, April 14, 2022. CHAPTER SEVEN A twenty-by-twenty prefab: Brittany Chang and Tim Levin, “See inside the $50,000, prefab tiny house that Elon Musk uses as a guest house in Texas,” Business Insider, August 5, 2022. CHAPTER NINE The message was from Leslie Berland: Zoe Schiffer, Casey Newton, and

Alex Heath, “Extremely Hardcore,” The Verge, January 17, 2023. Spiro was one of the top trial lawyers: Dan Adler, “How Alex Spiro Became Elon Musk’s (and Megan Thee Stallion’s and Jay-Z’s) Go-to-Lawyer,” Vanity Fair, March 6, 2023. CHAPTER TEN Jason Calacanis: “Back of the

envelope”: Elon Musk text exhibits, Exhibit H. Hardwood floors culled: Mae Rice, “Inside Twitter’s Fun and Functional San Francisco Headquarters,” builtinSF, February 18, 2020. She wasn’t

Edgett, Twitter’s lead legal counsel: Zoe Schiffer, Casey Newton, and Alex Heath, “Extremely Hardcore,” The Verge, January 17, 2023, https://www.theverge.com/23551060/elon-musk-twitter-takeover-layoffs-workplace-salute-emoji. Jessica was only familiar: Conger, Isaac, Mac, and Hsu, “Two Weeks of Chaos.” As would later be reported by

the Verge: Schiffer, Newton, and Heath, “Extremely Hardcore.” “Elon puts rockets into space”: Alex Heath, “Elon Musk is putting Twitter at risk of billions in fines, warns company lawyer,” The Verge, November 10, 2022. CHAPTER ELEVEN In fact, he’d given Robert

Kaiden: Kate Conger, Mike Isaac, Ryan Mac, and Tiffany Hsu, “Two Weeks of Chaos: Inside Elon Musk’s Takeover of Twitter,” New York Times, November 11, 2022. CHAPTER THIRTEEN “Devil’s Champion-Leather Armor Set”: Brock Colyar, “It Was a Real Wormy

Inside Heidi Klum’s Halloween Party,” USA Today, 11/1/2022. CHAPTER FOURTEEN over three hundred fake accounts: Dan Milmo, “Twitter Trolls Bombard Platform after Elon Musk Takeover,” Guardian, October 30, 2022. CHAPTER FIFTEEN Yoel would tell Kara Swisher: Informed Conference 2022, Knight Foundation, Kara Swisher and Yoel Roth, Session 10.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN “Let me be crystal clear”: Alex Heath, “Inside Elon Musk’s First Meeting with Twitter Employees,” The Verge, November 10, 2022. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Dressed entirely in black: Zoe Schiffer, Casey Newton, and Alex Heath, “Extremely

Hardcore,” The Verge, January 17, 2023, https://www.theverge.com/23551060/elon-musk-twitter-takeover-layoffs-workplace-salute-emoji. “This isn’t a right-wing takeover of Twitter”: Ibid. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN “I think one of the things that

is tricky about Elon”: Informed Conference 2022, Knight Foundation, Kara Swisher and Yoel Roth, Session 10. CHAPTER NINETEEN “Ladies and gentlemen”: “Elon Musk Tries to Tweet Through It after Getting Booed at Dave Chappelle Show,” Salon, December 12, 2022. CHAPTER TWENTY the billionaire had dissolved Yoel’s Trust

Taylor Lorenz, “Musk Blamed a Twitter Account for an Alleged Stalker, Police See No Link,” Washington Post, December 18, 2022. The truth was: Jack Sweeney, “Elon Musk Wanted to Buy My ElonJet Twitter Account—I’ve Named My Price,” Newsweek, November 3, 2022. “It’s impossible to square”: Rebecca Kern, “Musk Reinstates

Majority of Suspended Journalist Accounts,” Politico, December 17, 2022. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Nearby stood the CEO: Pete Syme, “Elon Musk was photographed with the CEO of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund hours before asking followers if he should quit as Twitter boss,” Business Insider, December

21, 2022. A few seats over from Jared: Sanya Jain, “Elon Musk with Lakshmi Mittal in Viral Pic from FIFA World Cup Final,” MoneyControl, December 20, 2022. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE but many of Twitter’s big-name

to Return to Twitter despite Musk’s Claims,” Search Engine Land, April 14, 2023. Even more surprising, the message: Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton, “Yes, Elon Musk Created a Special System for Showing You All His Tweets First,” The Verge, February 14, 2023. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX However, a Slack employee: Casey Newton

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by Varun Sivaram  · 2 Mar 2018  · 469pp  · 132,438 words

How We'll Live on Mars (TED Books)

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Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

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Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

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Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

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The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors

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Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything

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How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs

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WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

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Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

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The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated

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Beyond: Our Future in Space

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Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War

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Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane

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12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next

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Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

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Vassal State

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The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip

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Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis

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Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI

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Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere

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AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

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The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism

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The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future

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Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight

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Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire

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The Moon: A History for the Future

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You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

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The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

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The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity's Future

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Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism

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The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work

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Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future

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Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley

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Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

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Gambling Man

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Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

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The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

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Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

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Interplanetary Robots

by Rod Pyle

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us

by Dan Lyons  · 22 Oct 2018  · 252pp  · 78,780 words

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

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The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity

by Byron Reese  · 23 Apr 2018  · 294pp  · 96,661 words

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again

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The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World

by Aaron Hurst  · 31 Aug 2013  · 209pp  · 63,649 words

The Simulation Hypothesis

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Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

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Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass

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Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

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Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

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If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All

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Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World

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The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future

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Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

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Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay

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The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything

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Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

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The Wealth Ladder: Proven Strategies for Every Step of Your Financial Life

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Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

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Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead

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4th Rock From the Sun: The Story of Mars

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Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence

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Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind

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Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist

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Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side

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Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives

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I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict

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Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World

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Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World

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Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car

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Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence

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Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

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To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

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Fully Automated Luxury Communism

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Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI

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Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments

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Facebook: The Inside Story

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The Crux

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Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US

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Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

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Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation

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Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future

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Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

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Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley

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A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next

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The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend

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Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism

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How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age

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Amazing Stories of the Space Age

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Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

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Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything

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How to Spend a Trillion Dollars

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The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power

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The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values

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Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork

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Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

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A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond

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Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road

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Lurking: How a Person Became a User

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Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

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Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

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Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason

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Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail

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Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

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Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism

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Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

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Nothing but Net: 10 Timeless Stock-Picking Lessons From One of Wall Street’s Top Tech Analysts

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The Deepest Map

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The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance

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Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future

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Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

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Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

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The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard

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Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination

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Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

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The Knowledge Illusion

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Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians

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The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

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Artificial Whiteness

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Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think

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Immortality, Inc.

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Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

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Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination

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Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller

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Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters

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The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership

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Long Game: How Long-Term Thinker Shorthb

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Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future

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Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines

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The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World

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The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now

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Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today

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Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology

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The Economic Consequences of Mr Trump: What the Trade War Means for the World

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The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (And Who Benefits)

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Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World

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Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture

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The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century

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Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World

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Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference

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The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality

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Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy

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SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World

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On the Future: Prospects for Humanity

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Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It

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The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

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The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention

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Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less

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Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

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Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future

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Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

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Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond

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Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

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Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business

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Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth

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California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--And What It Means for America's Power Grid

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Growth: A Reckoning

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Badvertising

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The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation

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The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism

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Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality

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Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

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Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy

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Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now

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Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life

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Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance

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The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion

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The New Class Conflict

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Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys: 50th Anniversary Edition

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Makers

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The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It

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This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook

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Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

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Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

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Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth

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Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn

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The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands

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Lonely Planet Hong Kong

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Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America

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Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice

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Climate Change

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Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service

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Failed State: The Sunday Times Bestselling Investigation Into Why Britain Is Struggling

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Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

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The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family

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One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger

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Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

by Sarah Jaffe  · 26 Jan 2021  · 490pp  · 153,455 words

Left Behind

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Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy

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A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner

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Demystifying Smart Cities

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A Primer on Utopian Philosophy: An Introduction to the Work of Ernst Bloch

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Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement

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Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs

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Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization

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The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony

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All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art

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Bit Rot

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The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire

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Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives

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Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex

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B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z

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If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

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The Twittering Machine

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Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

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Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire

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Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

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The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5

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Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Workflow

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Think Like an Engineer: Use Systematic Thinking to Solve Everyday Challenges & Unlock the Inherent Values in Them

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Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

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What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence

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Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed

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Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era?

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Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness

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The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era

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Everything's Trash, but It's Okay

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The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism

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The Narcissist Next Door

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A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income

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Programming Rust: Fast, Safe Systems Development

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Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

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Asteroid Mining 101: Wealth for the New Space Economy

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Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

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Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

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Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson  · 26 Jun 2017  · 472pp  · 117,093 words

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work

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But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past

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Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

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The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small

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Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

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The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency

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WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World

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Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality

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Be Obsessed or Be Average

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Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account From Curiosity's Chief Engineer

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The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything

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Hands-On Machine Learning With Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems

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Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight

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European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right

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The 1% Rule: How to Fall in Love With the Process and Achieve Your Wildest Dreams

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Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

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Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists

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Know Thyself

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Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal That Undid Him, and All the Justice That Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein

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I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59

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The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

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Financial Statement Analysis: A Practitioner's Guide

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Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol

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Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You

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Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking

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The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World

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A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

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Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future

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Greater: Britain After the Storm

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Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield

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This Book Could Fix Your Life: The Science of Self Help

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Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

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Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber

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Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century

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New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You

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Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism

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Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence

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Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It

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Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events

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Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together

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Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

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Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts

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The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions

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After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

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Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation

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Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

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Longshot

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Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds

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Dreams of Leaving and Remaining

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Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children

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Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick

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Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse

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The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World

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For the Love of Autism: Stories of Love, Awareness and Acceptance on the Spectrum

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Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are

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Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs

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Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters

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My Friend Anna: The True Story of a Fake Heiress

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Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

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The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth

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Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics

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AI in Museums: Reflections, Perspectives and Applications

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