For many of us, Elon Musk is a hard man to like. He’s the richest man in the world (or second richest, as he and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos whirr back and forth in top spot), but acts online like a bratty teenager astonished by his own intelligence.
He proposes underground tunnel networks as a transport solution for Miami (which is a swamp less than 10ft above sea level), moots takeovers of his companies with 420-themed weed jokes and hypes cryptocurrencies. Yet as you read Liftoff you can see what so many people find to admire in the man — at least for a while.
The story of SpaceX’s early days is an extraordinary one, of a company started with $100 million of the money Musk made from his previous start-up, PayPal (from which he had been ousted as CEO), and which everyone wrote off as the vanity project of an eccentric dotcom millionaire.
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