5 books you should definitely read (recommended by Elon Musk)

When a young Elon Musk was asked how he developed an interest in rockets, he simply answered, “I read books.” The 45-year-old multibillionaire, who is idolised by scores of young men and women today, credits the most of his infinite success to the simple act of just picking up a book.

Musk recently warmed hearts of all alike by launching Tesla’s new Project Loveday as a response to 10-year-old Bria Loveday’s written request that the company launch a commercial contest. Other than running Tesla, actively supporting the case for a carbon tax, and helping a number of tech startups turn their idea into a funded reality, Musk spends his free time reading.

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“I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future,” he has often said.

As rumour has it, Musk is said to have read an entire encyclopaedia as a nine-year-old, when other boys and girls his age spent their time glued to the television. He has a library full of books of different genres, eras, and authors, and here are five of his top choices which he believes helped shape him into the revolutionary entrepreneur he is today.

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson

We will always remember Benjamin Franklin as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. However, few have shed light on his inspiring journey as one of the earliest entrepreneurs in history. In this engaging biography by Isaacson, Franklin is viewed as an urban entrepreneur who climbed the social business ladder from the bottom-up.

His scientific discoveries, practical persona, and constant desire to reinvent reached out on a personal level to Musk, who said, “You can see how [Franklin] was an entrepreneur. He was an entrepreneur. He started from nothing. He was just a runaway kid."

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Almost everyone who has ever read this bestselling sci-fi delight enjoyed its side-splitting humorous dialogues and vivid imagination, and Elon Musk was no exception. Musk had once confessed that he was going through an existential crisis when he was 12 to when he was 15. Having read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and receiving no solace to his life’s questions, Musk encountered A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and found resonance in the fact that not all questions of life are answered, while in the greater scale, the answer to everything lay in the number 42.

“If you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. So, to the degree that we can better understand the universe, then we can better know what questions to ask,” he said.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel

Musk’s preference for former business Peter Thiel’s work has little to do with forced biases and more with the infinite amount of useful knowledge he has penned down in the book. According to Thiel, the most open yet unexplored ‘secret’ of our time is the fact that there are still so many uncharted frontiers left to explore and even more new inventions to create. The in-depth and realistic story of innovation, passion, and the desire to make something different and new is an optimistic read for the future of the global startup ecosystems and one that should be read by all those wishing to become an active presence in it.

As Elon Musk himself put it, “Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.”

The Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov

A story about a new chapter in the future of humankind, Asimov’s Foundation trilogy explores the forces of an enlightened threshold that men and women stand at today, as well as the centuries of barbaric hold that they are finally brushing off. Asimov attributes this threshold as the link to the beginning of a ‘new empire’, dedicated to art, science and technology.

As for Musk, to whom the book taught that “civilisations move in cycles”, exploring its theme helped and encouraged him to pursue his entrepreneurial passions. “Given that this is the first time in 4.5 billion years where it's been possible for humanity to extend life beyond Earth, it seems like we'd be wise to act while the window was open and not count on the fact it will be open a long time,” he told The Guardian.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Golding’s iconic Lord of the Flies is an avid representation of the base-emotions that make up man, the ones which comes into play when he faces the end of a barrel. Believed to touch upon the theme of the ‘survival of the fittest’, its narrative revolves around the lives of a few children and how they attempt to survive on an abandoned island. Its powerful theme is a lesson to readers of all ages.

To Musk, the book speaks volumes about the three characteristics making up the life of an entrepreneur: survival, competition, and greed.

Musk’s choices all seem to point to the same idea- the creation of something new, the belief that there is magic in the different and the willpower to remain standing in the battle for the survival of the fittest. Pretty much summing up entrepreneurship, isn’t it?