He worries that Google is building a fleet of robots that may accidentally destroy mankind. His five children don’t merely have nannies but have had a nanny manager. Other eye-popping details, not all of them previously reported, are flecked atop this book like sea salt. He also veers away from his subject just often enough, offering profiles of the frequently brilliant people who work alongside Mr. Vance brings us up to date on the states of green energy and space launches. It’s a book with many ancillary pleasures. Musk, so that we comprehend both his friends and his enemies. Vance curbs his enthusiasm and delivers a well-calibrated portrait of Mr. save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.” As the Beast from “X-Men” likes to remark, Oh my stars and garters. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to. chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. “He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted.

Musk’s grand vision is to colonize Mars, for example, Mr. Vance can occasionally veer toward hagiography and the diction of news releases. The result is a book that is smart, light on its feet and possesses a crunchy thoroughness. Musk, who initially declined to be interviewed, impressing him with his diligence after he had interviewed some 200 people.

Vance is a technology writer for Bloomberg Businessweek. Musk has cooperated with, though he had no control, the author says, over its contents. “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” isn’t the first biography we’ve had of Mr. Tesla’s Model S sedan was not only Motor Trend’s car of the year in 2013 - the first non-internal-combustion engine vehicle to win that award - but it also has a sound system that, in a homage to the film “Spinal Tap,” you can turn up to 11. Along with his swagger, he totes surprise, style and wit. Musk is about as close as we have, circa 2015, to early industrial titans like Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie and John D. This South African-born entrepreneur, inventor and engineer is the animating force behind companies (Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity) that have made startling advances in non-indoor-cat arenas: electric cars, space exploration and solar energy. If Silicon Valley was holding out for a hero after Steve Jobs’s death, a disrupter in chief, it has found a brawny one in Mr. Vance, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” The author quotes the venture capitalist Peter Thiel: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” “A nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers.”Īshlee Vance, in his new biography of the celebrity industrialist Elon Musk, delivers a similar notion of the deflating American soul. “We’ve become a nation of indoor cats,” Dave Eggers wrote in “A Hologram for the King” (2012), his existential novel about an American doing IT work in the Saudi Arabian desert.

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