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

Ashlee Vance's Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future was the first full-length biography of its subject, published by Ecco in May 2015 while the companies it describes were still deciding whether they would survive.

Vance, a technology journalist who had covered Silicon Valley for two decades, spent more than thirty hours in conversation with Musk and interviewed close to three hundred people around him — family, executives, engineers, and a good many former employees. The book follows Musk from a difficult childhood in Pretoria, South Africa, through his emigration to Canada at seventeen and on to the United States, and then through the companies: Zip2, the online banking venture that became PayPal, and finally SpaceX, Tesla Motors and SolarCity.

Crucially, the book is unauthorised. Musk sat for the interviews but had no control over its contents, and Vance's account is candid about the cost of Musk's methods — the punishing demands on the people around him alongside the engineering achievements. It became a New York Times bestseller and was named a book of the year by the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Amazon, Fast Company and Audible.