What to read to understand Elon Musk

YOU WOULD have thought Elon Musk was busy enough building brain implants, electric cars, grid-scale batteries, robots, rockets, satellites and tunnelling machines. Apparently not. Mr Musk has also become a close adviser to Donald Trump. On November 12th he took on a new role as the co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency, a new body hoping to slash trillions from the federal budget. With that outsize role in mind, here are six books to help understand the history, personality, hopes and opinions of the tech titan.

Elon Musk. By Walter Isaacson. Simon & Schuster; 688 pages; $35 and £28

Walter Isaacson spent two years shadowing his subject; this authorised biography covers Mr Musk’s unhappy early years in South Africa, move to America and early success in the dotcom bubble, right up to his impulsive $44bn buy-out of Twitter (as it then was) in 2022. Mr Musk is described as brilliant and as a taker of huge, calculated risks—as well as an aggressive, impossibly demanding figure.

Foundation. By Isaac Asimov. Bantam Spectra; 296 pages; $8.99. HarperCollins; £9.99

To get a sense of why Mr Musk is fond of pronouncements about “turning-points” and the “fate of civilisation”, try one of his science-fiction favourites. Inspired by the fall of the Roman Empire, “Foundation” revolves around the invention of a statistical theory of history that predicts the imminent fall of the Galactic Empire, which will usher in a 30,000-year dark age. A visionary historian and mathematician conceives a plan to ensure the dark age will last a mere 1,000 years instead.

Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX. By Eric Berger. HarperCollins; 288 pages; $27.99. William Collins; £20. Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age. By Eric Berger. BenBella Books; 400 pages; $31.95 and £26.99

This pair of books chronicles SpaceX’s transformation from a cash-strapped insurgent scrabbling to launch small rockets to the world’s dominant space power, without losing its pell-mell startup culture. Both contain entertaining vignettes and insights into Mr Musk’s restless, chafing management style, the role played by vital lieutenants such as Gwynne Shotwell and Mark Juncosa, and Mr Musk’s desire to have humans settle on Mars.

Surface Detail. By Iain Banks. Orbit; 656 pages; $19.99 and £10.99

Mr Musk once described himself as a “utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks”. Of Banks’s “Culture” novels—which describe a society whose citizens enjoy hyper-abundant luxury thanks to the godlike AIs, called Minds, that run things—“Surface Detail” is one of his favourites. (SpaceX’s drone ships are named after Minds.) “Surface Detail” concerns a conflict with another civilisation that has built a virtual-reality hell into which sinners can be thrown. The villain is a rich industrialist.

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century. By Tim Higgins. Doubleday; 400 pages; $30. Ebury; £20

Unlike SpaceX, Tesla was not Mr Musk’s idea. But he put in most of the early money and came to control the firm, the first mass-market carmaker to be founded in America since 1925. Tesla’s vital insight was that technology had advanced to the point where electric cars could be fun and desirable, yet turning that idea into a working company proved almost impossibly hard. Once again Mr Musk comes across as focused, demanding, relentless—and frequently self-sabotaging.

Zero to One: Notes on Start-Ups or How to Build the Future. By Peter Thiel with Blake Masters. Crown Business; 210 pages; $27. Virgin Books; £16.99

Mr Musk cites this book as one of his favourites. Like Mr Musk, Peter Thiel is part of the “Paypal Mafia”, an influential group of Silicon Valley veterans involved in the payments startup in the 1990s. Mr Thiel’s book offers blunt advice for budding entrepreneurs. The best way to build a successful company, he writes, is not to compete in existing markets but to establish entirely new ones—in re-usable rockets, say, or luxury electric cars.