—BY NAVAL RAVIKANT
You’re holding in your hands the only book an entrepreneur needs. A lone founder takes a unique journey to discover and encapsulate the truth into a product. Weighted by responsibility and expectation, the founder seeks out mentors and books—but the best mentors can’t be hired, and the books are either anecdotal or academic. The only reliable teacher is bitter experience.
In this book, Eric put his ego aside and did the thankless work of compiling Elon’s best lessons, in Elon’s own words, as practical as possible. This isn’t a tedious biography or recounting of events, it’s the explanation and the manual. An eager co-founder stole my first copy, and my coworkers will get the next twenty.
Elon is the greatest entrepreneur since Steve Jobs, but he isn’t just a copy. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme, and it’s the occasional Napoleon, whether in science, art, or politics, who appears and reroutes the inexorable forces of history with a unique vision and drive. Hard work is common, intelligence uncommon, courage rare—and Elon combusts all three.
The banal observation is that he’s a founder of Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Neuralink. These companies, however, are just means to products—the self-driving cars, the autonomous robots, the thinking machines, and the awe-inspiring, ground-shattering, heavy rockets that thunder into space and land on their toes. Even the products are just a means unto the mission. If it’s allowed by the laws of physics, and takes us into our sci-fi dreams, Elon will drag us there.
The wealth, the fame, and the envy are a byproduct. Crabs in the gravity well, blinded by politics, will point to his father’s and the government’s money. But envy says more about the envious than the envied. Elon sleeps on the factory floor, doubles down every time, and never gives up. The people worth impressing are impressed, and millions of children are inspired to make real change. Culture is downstream of the technology that enables us to be generous and free, and Elon will be remembered long after the big talkers and small doers are forgotten.
As Chief Engineer, Elon reminds us that building value is building things, not financing or managing them. It’s a better world when the richest man is one who creates wealth, rather than shuffles it around, or seizes it in the name of the people.
Wealth, as the physicist David Deutsch wrote, is the set of physical transformations that we can effect—true for both individuals and societies. The main component of wealth is knowledge, not capital. By creating new knowledge, and then instantiating it in products that are duplicated and distributed, Elon and his fellow entrepreneurs are engines of wealth creation and distribution.
You may have the opportunity to ask yourself: When humanity went to the stars, what were you doing? When men walked on Mars, were you mocking them or exhorting them? When they mined the first asteroids and built the first space stations? When fleets of self-driving cars reclaimed cities from parking and traffic? When the paraplegics rose up and walked alongside us? When the robots took over the miserable and repetitive work? Were you in the front row, cheering? Or sourfaced in the bleachers, jeering?
There is even a third option—young or old, your life isn’t over yet. Elon’s methods are copy-able, in matters big and small. Eric has laid them out for you as plainly as possible. If your motives are pure and greater than yourself, the world will conspire in its subtle ways to help you. When one man shows what’s possible, a million arise, not as followers, but as missionaries in their own right.
You don’t have to do what Elon does, and you don’t have to do it his way, but this short life is best spent in the arena, on something other than the mundane and insatiable self. Reject the craving for comfort and social approval. Reorient to the optimism of youth. Leave those talking and dividing, and get on the path to learning and building.
Your energy is best spent with like-minded people who are unstoppable on a mission to make something beautiful. Don’t make the thing to make the money, make the money so that you can make the thing. Don’t get paid for work, get paid so that you can do your best work. Rise up, choose inspiration over envy, and show your younger and older selves that the desires of this life were completely and totally exhausted into the universal will.