Fascinating excerpts from an upcoming book about Tesla CEO Elon Musk are slowly but surely starting to trickle in. Earlier in the week we highlighted a few choice quotes allegedly delivered by Musk, including one instance where, it is claimed, he tore into an employee for missing a company event so that he could witness the birth of his child. Notably, Musk has since come out and denied that any such exchange took place.
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The most recent book excerpt to hit the web focuses on Musk’s fascination and perhaps borderline obsession with the future. Hardly a bad trait, it’s this very quality that has allowed Musk to quite literally turn Tesla into a household name while simultaneously doing amazing things with SpaceX.
In any event, one passage of the book recently obtained by Business Insider details how Musk will sometimes drop in on a secret Google apartment in Palo Alto where he’ll discuss all sorts of futuristic projects and ideas with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
One venture capitalist who was in attendance at one such gathering explained what he witnessed to author Ashlee Vance.
I was there once, and Elon was talking about building an electric jet plane that can take off and land vertically. Larry said the plane should be able to land on ski slopes, and Sergey said it needed to be able to dock at a port in Manhattan. Then they started talking about building a commuter plane that was always circling the Earth, and you’d hop up to it and get places incredibly fast. I thought everyone was kidding, but at the end I asked Elon, ‘Are you really going to do that?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’
Wild stuff, but it’s hard to dismiss anything Musk and Page are dead serious about given their respective track records.
Commenting on these Silicon Valley meetings of the minds, Page told Vance that they all enjoy talking about “kind of crazy things” as it can sometimes lead to very real product initiatives. While Musk typically gets a lot of credit for his forward-thinking ways, anyone who is familiar with Page knows that the Google CEO is just as committed to bringing wild and seemingly crazy and futuristic ideas to life.
The book, titled Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, is slated for release on May 19.
