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

01

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson · Biography

Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs was authorized by Jobs himself, who gave Isaacson more than forty hours of interviews and opened up his family, friends, and colleagues to the same scrutiny.

Shares innovation and technology with Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

02

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

Phil Knight · Memoir

Shoe Dog is Phil Knight's account of the first two decades of Nike, from the $50 loan he borrowed from his father in 1964 to fund his first shipment of Japanese running shoes to the company's IPO in 1980.

Shares entrepreneurship and risk-taking with Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

03

Becoming

Michelle Obama · Memoir

Becoming is Michelle Obama's account of how a girl from a modest house on Chicago's South Side became one of the most recognized people in the world — and what that journey cost and revealed.

A kindred biography read.

04

Outliers: The Story of Success

Malcolm Gladwell · Psychology

Outliers is Malcolm Gladwell's argument that exceptional success is less a product of individual genius or drive than it is of hidden advantages, timing, and accumulated opportunity.

A kindred biography read.

05

Americana

Bhu Srinivasan · History

Americana is Bhu Srinivasan's attempt to tell the history of American capitalism through its defining industries and the entrepreneurs who built them.

Shares entrepreneurship and innovation with Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

06

Continuous Discovery Habits

Teresa Torres · Business

Continuous Discovery Habits is Teresa Torres's practical guide to making product discovery a sustainable, weekly team practice rather than a periodic research event.

Shares innovation and technology with Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

07

Disciplined Entrepreneurship

Bill Aulet · Business

Bill Aulet's Disciplined Entrepreneurship is a structured walkthrough of 24 steps for building a new venture, developed from MIT's entrepreneurship curriculum and Aulet's own experience as a serial entrepreneur.

Shares entrepreneurship and innovation with Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

08

Empires of Light

Jill Jonnes · History

Empires of Light is Jill Jonnes's history of the War of Currents — the late-nineteenth-century battle between Thomas Edison's direct-current electrical system and George Westinghouse's alternating-current system, with Nikola Tesla as the third figure whose genius made AC practical.

Shares innovation and technology with Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

09

Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

Marty Cagan and Chris Jones · Business

Empowered is Marty Cagan and Chris Jones's guide to what separates product organizations that consistently build products people love from those that operate as feature factories.

Shares innovation and technology with Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

10

How the Internet Happened

Brian McCullough · History

How the Internet Happened covers the commercial history of the internet from the release of Mosaic in 1993 to the launch of the iPhone in 2007 — the window in which the web went from academic experiment to the defining infrastructure of modern life.

Shares entrepreneurship and innovation with Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

11

How to Get Rich

Felix Dennis · Business

Felix Dennis was a British publishing magnate who built a multi-hundred-million-pound empire from nothing, and How to Get Rich is his attempt to tell the whole truth about how that actually happened.

Shares entrepreneurship and risk-taking with Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

12

Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Peter F. Drucker · Business

Innovation and Entrepreneurship is Drucker's systematic treatment of a subject that, in 1985, most people still regarded as the province of lone geniuses and lucky accidents.

Shares entrepreneurship and innovation with Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.