Connect with us

Lifestyle

Ashlee Vance Book Unlocks The Real Elon Musk

Ashley Vance has published a book about how Elon Musk became the superb entrepreneur he is, what drives him to succeed and what damage his quest has caused.

Published

on

Ashlee Vance has published a new book entitled Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. It’s available now on Amazon.com.

Have you ever found yourself wanting to be Elon Musk? He is certainly one of the most important entrepreneurs of our time. Wealthy beyond words, he is the epitome of an American success story. But his climb to the top is littered with several ex-wives and former colleagues who didn’t have the stamina to keep up with Musk’s almost maniacal pursuit of his dreams.

Julie Ankenbrandt, a former c0-worker who was with Musk at X.com before it merged with Confinity and became PayPal recalls, “We all worked 20 hours a day, and he worked 23 hours.” Ryan Popple, a former employee, recalls Musk’s acerbic retort when someone told him his people were working too hard. “I would tell those people they will get to see their families a lot when we go bankrupt.”

One story, which Musk denies happened, involves an employee who missed a company function to be at the birth of his first child. He recounts that Musk told him later, “That is no excuse. I am extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We’re changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don’t.”

Advertisement

Updated May 12: Elon Musk refuted this claim via Twitter

Elon-Musk-Stage-Powerwall-Event

Elon Musk presenting #TeslaEnergy at Hawthorne, CA on April 30th, 2015.

Elon Musk’s early years were anything but comfortable. A nerdy kid in school, he attracted the attention of a gang of bullies. He told Vance, “They got my best [expletive] friend to lure me out of hiding so they could beat me up. And that [expletive] hurt. For some reason they decided that I was it, and they were going to go after me nonstop. That’s what made growing up difficult. For a number of years there was no respite. You get chased around by gangs at school who tried to beat the [expletive] out of me, and then I’d come home, and it would just be awful there as well.”

Young Elon didn’t get much sympathy at home. He tells of a domineering father who was impossible to please and took delight in being hard on Elon and his brothers. To escape his tormentors, he would retreat into himself. His mother told Vance, “He goes into his brain, and then you just see he is in another world. He still does that. Now I just leave him be because I know he is designing a new rocket or something.”

Elon Musk does not take kindly to people who thwart his plans. When Ford claimed it owned the rights to the letter E, preventing Tesla from naming its upcoming smaller sedan the Model E, he fumed to Alan Mullaly, Ford’s CEO at the time,  “Like, why did you go steal Tesla’s E? Like you’re some sort of fascist army marching across the alphabet, some sort of Sesame Street robber?”

For anyone who wants a better understanding of what drives Elon Musk, Vance’s book is a must read.

Advertisement

"I write about technology and the coming zero emissions revolution."

Advertisement
Comments

Elon Musk

SpaceXAI just launched into your kitchen with their new app

SpaceXAI just powered its first consumer app and it predicts what you want to buy.

Published

on

By

SpaceXAI just made its first move into consumer AI, and it involves your grocery cart. On June 3, 2026, Gopuff and SpaceXAI announced the launch of Go, a Grok-powered shopping assistant built directly into the Gopuff app that predicts what you need before you even start searching for it.

Gopuff is an instant delivery platform that operates more than 400 micro-fulfillment centers across the U.S., delivering everyday essentials, snacks, drinks, and household items in as little as 15 minutes. It is not a restaurant delivery app or a marketplace. It owns its inventory, controls its warehouses, and handles its own logistics, which means it has built one of the most detailed consumer behavior datasets in retail over its 13-year history.

Go combines SpaceXAI’s advanced reasoning, voice, and image generation models with Gopuff’s dataset of hundreds of millions of orders and real-time cultural signals from X to prepare a suggested cart the moment a customer opens the app. It learns each shopper’s habits and automatically builds a personalized cart based on time of day, location, order history, and real-time indicators. Returning customers can check out with a single tap.


Rather than searching for specific items, users can describe a situation like a game-day party or the desire for a healthy breakfast and Go will assemble a cart automatically. It can also predict when shoppers are running low on items like coffee or paper towels and have them packed and delivered in under 15 minutes. Grok voice integration lets users talk to the app in plain conversational language and check out completely hands-free.

Advertisement

Gopuff co-founder and co-CEO Yakir Gola said: “Today, we believe the greatest friction left in commerce is not delivery or instantaneous access to the essentials customers need. It’s the moment before: the thinking, the deciding, the remembering. We’re combining Gopuff’s demand intelligence with xAI’s frontier reasoning to create an everyday shopping experience that feels like a true extension of you.”

Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO

The timing carries context beyond the product launch. SpaceXAI was formed after SpaceX completed an all-stock merger with Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year, folding one of the most advanced AI labs in the world into the same corporate structure as the company preparing what could be the largest IPO in history. SpaceXAI is dipping into consumer-focused AI just as it prepares for its public debut, and while Musk has openly discussed building an everything app, this launch uses Grok to power another company’s product rather than launching a standalone consumer platform. Every consumer-facing deployment of Grok ahead of the IPO roadshow adds tangible evidence that SpaceXAI is not just an infrastructure play but a direct competitor in the AI application layer where OpenAI and Google are already fighting for dominance.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Lifestyle

Tesla saves its passengers again – This time after a 300-foot cliff fall in Malibu

A Tesla Model 3 fell 300 feet off a Malibu cliff and both passengers survived.

Published

on

By

A Tesla Model 3 plunged roughly 300 feet off a cliff on Mulholland Highway in Malibu on Friday morning, May 29, 2026, and both occupants survived. The crash was reported at approximately 7:30 a.m. near the 2500 block of Mulholland Highway, triggering a multi-agency rescue operation involving Malibu Search and Rescue, the Los Angeles County Fire Department, the California Highway Patrol, and McCormick Ambulance.

When first responders arrived, the male driver was outside the vehicle shouting for help while the female passenger remained pinned inside the Tesla. Rescue crews rappelled down the cliffside on ropes to reach the wreckage. A flight medic was lowered by helicopter to begin treating both victims, and the driver was hoisted up to the roadway before crews used the Jaws of Life to free the trapped passenger. Both were airlifted to a local trauma center with moderate injuries despite a remarkable result for a fall that steep.

The outcome is not surprising, considering Model 3 earned an overall 5-star rating from NHTSA in every category and sub-category, and recorded the lowest probability of injury of any car ever evaluated by the U.S. New Car Assessment Program. The absence of a traditional engine in the front of the vehicle creates a longer crumple zone that absorbs impact energy before it reaches occupants, and the battery pack running along the floor gives the car an unusually low center of gravity that reinforces structural rigidity.

Advertisement

This is not the first time a Tesla has kept passengers alive after going off a cliff. A Tesla Model Y carrying a family of four survived a plunge off a cliff at Devil’s Slide near San Francisco in January 2023, with two adults and two children walking away from a 250-foot fall. That incident drew widespread attention to how the structural integrity of Tesla’s electric platform performs in extreme crash scenarios that most vehicles would not survive.

Tesla Model Y driver who drove off cliff with family attempts to avoid criminal conviction

Continue Reading

Elon Musk

NASA’s first human outpost on the Moon starts now – SpaceX on deck

NASA named the rovers, landers, and vendors that will build America’s first Moon Base.

Published

on

By

NASA has laid out its most detailed Moon Base plan to date, describing a permanent outpost near the Moon’s south pole that the agency intends to build over the coming decade as a direct stepping stone to Mars. “The Moon Base will be America’s and humanity’s first outpost on another celestial world,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said, adding that every mission crewed and uncrewed “will be a learning opportunity as we return to the lunar surface, build the infrastructure to stay, and master the skills required to live and operate in one of the most demanding and dangerous environments imaginable.”

The plan is structured in three phases involving both uncrewed and crewed missions to deliver equipment, vehicles, and infrastructure to the surface, with the first three moon base missions targeted to launch before the end of 2026.

Moon Base I, targeting fall 2026, will use Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander to deliver scientific instruments to the Shackleton Connecting Ridge, the same region where Artemis astronauts will land. Moon Base II will send Astrobotic’s Griffin lander carrying more than 1,100 pounds of cargo including Astrolab’s FLIP rover to begin developing mobility systems on the surface. Moon Base III will carry the Lunar Vertex science mission on Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C Trinity lander to study lunar swirls near the south pole, with ESA and Korean science payloads aboard.

Elon Musk pivots SpaceX plans to Moon base before Mars

Advertisement

 

On the rover side, NASA awarded Astrolab $219 million and Lunar Outpost $220 million to build the first phase of Lunar Terrain Vehicles, with both rovers targeted for deployment to the lunar surface by 2028. Astrolab’s crewed rover weighs roughly 2,000 pounds and can reach over 6 mph. Lunar Outpost’s Pegasus rover can operate autonomously or via remote control at over 9 mph. Blue Origin separately received $188 million with an option worth $280.4 million to deliver cargo landers for rover transport.

NASA also confirmed that MoonFall, a mission deploying four survey drones to scout Artemis landing sites, has selected Firefly Aerospace to build the transport spacecraft, with a 2028 launch target.

SpaceX sits at the center of that commercial layer. SpaceX holds the NASA Human Landing System contract for the Starship-derived lander that will put astronauts on the surface under Artemis IV, currently targeting 2028. Before that can happen, SpaceX must demonstrate in-orbit propellant transfer at scale, a process requiring multiple Starship tanker launches to fuel a single mission. Water ice at the lunar south pole is central to the base’s long-term viability, as it can be converted into drinking water, breathable oxygen, and rocket fuel, directly reducing dependence on Earth resupply. That resource loop becomes far more practical if Starship can land and be refueled on or near the Moon itself.

Advertisement

Elon Musk has publicly stated that Starship V3, which recently completed its first flight, should be capable enough for initial Mars missions. The Moon Base plan announced Tuesday is the infrastructure layer that connects everything between those two ambitions, and SpaceX is the only American company currently contracted to build the rocket that gets humans to either destination.

Continue Reading