'Elon Musk: Risking it all'
Author: Michael Vlismas
Publisher: Icon Books / 2023
Pages: 262
On 20 January, at the inauguration of Donald Trump's second term, the members of the new Cabinet lost their place in the front row.
Instead, their places were taken by a group of billionaires who singly and collectively were taken to symbolise the new regime.
This group included household names such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sergej Brin. Foremost among them, as if he was their leader, there was Elon Musk who at the end of the swearing-in was immortalised making the open hand gesture associated in people's minds with Nazism and Fascism.
That gesture, and accompanying controversy, may have brought Musk to symbolise the new Trump regime. In fact, as I write, Musk has assumed a huge position in the Trump regime, greater than the vice-president, the Secretary of State and the rest.
It will only be in years to come that one will be able to analyse his contribution to American policy.
This book takes the reader in the opposite direction, the past, to see how this boy from South Africa has managed to become at a rather early stage of his life the richest man on earth.
His father had taken up flying some years previously to his son's birth and showed a remarkable pioneering spirit. Then he moved the family to Pretoria. With a rare courage he took up chiropractice and was quite successful.
He sent all his children to private schools. Elon was quite small as a boy and this seemed to encourage his companions to bully him. His family changed school for him and the situation improved somewhat but the bullying remained a terrible memory for him.
All this happened in the worst years of apartheid. The law then was that all young men had to spend some time as recruits. Remembering the bullying of previous years Elon opted to go to stay with relatives in Canada and even though he was only 17 he crossed over to the US. The US meant for him progress and above all the internet.
He was a dreamy boy, shunned company and was an avid reader. His brain threw at him all sorts of ideas and sometimes quite overwhelmed him.
After he graduated he chose to move away from academia and into the real world of business.
He tried to be employed by Netscape but was not successful. Instead, with few injections of capital he created his first company, Zip2, formerly Global Link Information Network, an internet-based telephone directory.
However, the company ran into huge internal problems and when new professional employees changed Musk's DIY coding he was reportedly going in at night to recode what his employees had done by day.
In 1999, Compaq announced it was purchasing Zip2 for $300m. Musk, then 27 years old, got $22m for his share. It was time to move on. This man with only a brief education in economics and an even briefer experience at the Bank of Nova Scotia set about transforming the world's banking sector.
The next big thing was online banking. Hence X.com, later called PayPal - a really convenient site that combined all of people's financial needs into one, seamless, easy-to-use location. Strangely, the ability to send money over the internet proved to be a far simpler problem to solve.
Another start-up by name of Cofinity, based in Palo Alto, was on the same track as X.com.; it called its website PayPal. The two companies merged in March and moved away from the name X.com because it could be thought as pornographic. So PayPal it was.
Musk was made CEO but less than two years later he returned from a business trip to learn he was out.
Instead of sitting and weeping and bemoan his ill-luck, he moved on. In 2002, eBay purchased PayPal for $1.5bn.
Musk walked away with $180 million. But not alone. Other people who had been with him in PayPal moved on too and set up other companies.
Gustave Thiel and others set up Facebook. Steve Chen and Chad Hurley co-founded YouTube. Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn.
With his earnings from the sale Elon invested $100m into starting SpaceX, $70m into Tesla and $10m into SolarCity.
But the two-week investment trip was also to lead to the first great tragedy of the dotcom multimillionaire.
He and Justine Wilson had an on-and-off relationship ever since they were young and unknown. She was on the Arts side while he was on the science side.
They dated long-distance because she was teaching in Japan. Then they got married in January 2000. And they then went for the long-postponed two-week honeymoon.
The trip almost killed him as he contracted malaria. Worse, he returned to learn he had been sacked by his own employees. It reinforced his long-held belief that holidays are bad for you.
After the sale of PayPal in 2002, they had their first child, a boy, Nevada Alexander. But in the same week that news of eBay's purchase of PayPal was made public Nevada died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
Then they tried to bury the tragedy. First they had, through an IVF clinic, twins. Then triplets. Justine sold three novels.
Their marriage was one of parties with the rich and the famous, like Paris Hilton and Leonardo DiCaprio.
The couple drifted apart, then tried counseling, which failed. They divorced in 2008. Six weeks later Elon informed Justine he was dating the English actress, Talulah Riley.
They got married in 2010, divorced in 2012, married again in 2013 and divorced again in 2016.
In that same year Elon began dating another actress, Amber Heard, who was still married to Johnny Depp.
The relationship didn't develop and Heard ended it.
Then in 2018 Musk somehow developed a relationship with Claire Elise Boucher, a Canadian musician known as Grimes.
In May 2020 the unmarried couple gave birth to a boy and announced his name to the world - X AE A-12 - later changed for legal reasons to X Ash A Twelve.
On 10 March 2022 the still unmarried couple announced the birth of a daughter, named Y, conceived via a surrogate.
But we are anticipating things. There's Tesla. On 1 July 2003 Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpennig set up Tesla Motors Incorporated, named after the Serbian American inventor Nikola Tesla.
But they could not find investors, until one day they met Elon Musk at an unrelated event. Somehow, they clicked and in 2004 Musk invested $6.35m in Tesla.
Driver autonomy was seen as the next big thing in vehicle transport. According to a 2017 study by Intel, when we no longer have to drive ourselves and can instead be passengers, it will spark an economic boom predicted to be worth $7 trillion by 2050. Intel predicts 250 million hours of commuting time will be freed up for people to do other things - entertain themselves, work more, buy more, invest more, think more, create more. Humanity will also be spared needless road deaths.
But Tesla has also become a fight to death between Eberhard and Musk that repeated Musk's own ousting as CEO of PayPal but in reverse.
Lastly, space.
On 5 October 1957, that is, 16 years before Elon Musk was born, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, sparking huge panic all across America. Some Americans even claimed they could hear the "beep, beep, beep" it made as it passed over their heads. Russia was winning the space race. It seemed like a death knell of the American dream.
In retaliation the US poured millions of dollars to catch up and surpass the Russians. NASA was born and only 11 years later Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon.
But with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Space race came to a halt. It moved from government-centralised programmes to a multitude of private projects.
Space capitalists like Musk himself, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson came up with various initiatives.
Musk attempted to offer the cheapest launch services in the world. In October 2001 he met a few Russian experts over a very liquid, vodka-fuelled lunch and tried to purchase three SS-18 missiles to ferry things to space.
The Russians made fun of him and Musk decided to build them all by himself as cheaply as possible.
In 2011 the US grounded the Space Shuttle because it had become too expensive to run.
But if this was true of going to the moon it was even more so in the case of going to Mars.
On 6 May 2002 SpaceX was born.