Elon Musk, by Walter Isaccson

For two years, Isaccson shadowed Musk - attending all of his meetings - even making sure to take the urinal next to him whenever Musk had to go.

When Musk was a kid, he had to attend Veldschul or Veldskul in South Africa where bullying was not forbidden. It was like the Spartans sending their boys out to survive in the woods. In his first camp, Musk lost 10 pounds. The next time, he figured that if he punched the bigger kid in the nose, at the start of the contact, that same kid, even if he got the food and gave Musk a sound thrashing, wouldn't trouble Musk again.

In school, Musk was politically incorrect to the point of calling another kid, who did have some sort of handicap (I don't remember what exactly) "stupid." The kid and his buddies later cornered Musk and gave his face and head such a beating that Musk was in the hospital a week. Upon returning home, he had to endure hours-long tirade from his Dad - "how could YOU be so stupid as to call THAT kid stupid. I'm not surprised you got your comeuppance!" Kimball, Musk's brother, only watching, felt the pain of this parental antipathy. Says Isaccson. And, to this day, Musk has issues with his vision arising from that violent incident.

The design process : https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/musks-5-step-design-process

Gems from Ashlee Vance

Musk has taken industries like aerospace and automotive that America seemed to have given up on and recast them as something new and fantastic. At the heart of this transformation are Musk's skills as a software maker and his ability to apply them to machines. He's merged atoms and bits in ways that few people thought possible, and the results have been spectacular.

Okay, I thought that was good, until I read :

(oh, thanks to Omkar Pawaskar, you can read for free without Vance getting richer :) :

While Musk had exceled as a self-taught coder, his skills weren’tnearly as polished as those of the new hires. They took one look atZip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software.Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientistsneeded just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects intochunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into theclassic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers callhairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk formysterious reasons.