Ashlee Vance | |
|---|---|
 Vance at a signing for his book, Elon Musk | |
| Born | South Africa |
| Education | Pomona College, Claremont, California |
| Subjects | Technology, business |
| Notable work | Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future |
| Website | |
| www | |
Ashlee Vance is an American reporter, writer, and filmmaker. He is known for his 2015 biography of Elon Musk, titled Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future .
Ashlee Vance was born in South Africa, and grew up mostly in the state of Texas in the United States. [1]
He attended Pomona College in Claremont, California, graduating in 2000. [2]
Vance wrote for The Register from March 2003 [3] to August 2008. [4] He moved to The New York Times in September 2008 [5] and then to Bloomberg Businessweek in January 2011. [6]
During his time at The Register, Vance covered companies such as IBM, HP, Intel, and Dell, and also wrote about a wide range of technology topics, including robots, Segway scooters, and the R programming language. [7] [8] In 2007, Vance wrote a book, called Geek Silicon Valley, on the history of Silicon Valley. [9] His writing often also appeared in such publications as The Economist , Chicago Tribune , CNN.com, The Globe and Mail , the International Herald Tribune , and CNET.
Vance hosted an audio podcast called Semi-Coherent Computing from 2007–2008, [10] in which he discussed enterprise computing topics such as data center cooling and blade servers, and interviewed guests including chip pioneer David Ditzel of Transmeta, Sun Microsystems, and Bell Labs. [11]
In 2015, Vance started writing, producing and hosting the "Hello World" video series for Bloomberg, focusing on the tech scene in various countries. [12] [13] The show was nominated for an Emmy in 2016. [14] In 2015, Vance published his biography about Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and other tech companies. The book became an immediate best-seller. [15] Vance says that Musk "really hated some of the things in the book, so we didn't talk for three years." [8]
In late 2020, Vance was working on a TV series based on his Elon Musk book for HBO. [16]
In May 2023, Vance published When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space within Reach about the rise of commercial space. The book focused on Planet Labs, Rocket Lab, Astra Space and Firefly Aerospace. It became an immediate best-seller. [17] A documentary inspired by the book, Wild Wild Space was released in July 2024, by HBO. [18] [19]
At the beginning of 2025, Vance left Bloomberg to found Core Memory, a new digital media company focused on science and technology. [20] Core Memory has a YouTube show, a podcast, and a Substack newsletter, but also aims to produce production-quality documentaries, the first of which is on brain-computer interfaces and was in production as of January, 2025. [20] He is also working on a book on OpenAI, for which he says he has already sold the movie rights. [20]
Vance lives in California with his wife and their two children. [1]
He is an atheist. [8]
Elon Reeve Musk is a businessman and political figure known for his key roles in the automotive company Tesla, Inc. and the space company SpaceX. Since January 2025, he is serving as Administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), under the second Donald Trump presidential administration of the United States. He is also known for his ownership of X Corp., and his role in the founding of the Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink, and OpenAI. Musk is the wealthiest individual in the world; as of January 2025, Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$427 billion.
The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World is a book by Esquire editor A. J. Jacobs, published in 2004.
X.com was an American online bank founded by Ed Ho, Harris Fricker, Elon Musk, and Christopher Payne in 1999 in Palo Alto, California. It merged with competitor Confinity in 2000 and the merged company changed its name to PayPal in 2001. Starting in 2023, the x.com domain began to be used for Twitter, which was acquired by Elon Musk in 2022 and subsequently rebranded to X.
Tesla, Inc. is an American multinational automotive and clean energy company. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, it designs, manufactures and sells battery electric vehicles (BEVs), stationary battery energy storage devices from home to grid-scale, solar panels and solar shingles, and related products and services.
Kimbal James Musk is a South African-born Canadian and American businessman and restaurateur. He co-owns The Kitchen Restaurant Group, a collection of restaurants in Colorado, Chicago, and Austin. He is the co-founder and chairman of Big Green, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has built hundreds of outdoor classrooms called Learning Gardens in schoolyards across the United States. Musk is also the co-founder and chairman of Square Roots, an urban farming company growing food in hydroponic, indoor, climate controlled shipping containers. Musk currently sits on the boards of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX; his brother Elon is the current CEO of both companies. He was on the board of Chipotle Mexican Grill from 2013 to 2019. He is the brother of Elon Musk, Tosca Musk, son of Errol and Maye Musk, and a major shareholder in Tesla.
Alan E. Salzman is an American venture capitalist and managing partner. He is the co-founder, CEO and Managing Partner of VantagePoint Capital Partners, a venture capital firm in the U.S. and an investor in clean technology companies.
The "PayPal Mafia" is a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and/or developed additional technology companies based in Silicon Valley, such as Tesla, Inc., LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer. Most of the members attended Stanford University or University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at some point in their studies.
Emily Chang is an American journalist, television host, executive producer, and author. In 2023, she launched a new show with Bloomberg Originals called The Circuit where she interviews influencers in technology, business, entertainment and culture. In addition to a premium show, extended interviews are released in The Circuit podcast. Chang was the anchor and executive producer of Bloomberg Technology for over a decade, a daily TV show focused on global technology, and Studio 1.0, where she regularly spoke with top executives, investors, and entrepreneurs. Chang is the author of Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley, which explores gender inequality in the tech industry.
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future is an unofficial biography of Elon Musk, written by Ashlee Vance and published in 2015.
Zip2 Corp. was a company that provided and licensed online city guide software to newspapers. The company was founded in Palo Alto, California as Global Link Information Network, Inc. on November 9, 1995, by Greg Kouri and brothers Elon and Kimbal Musk. Initially, Global Link provided local businesses with an Internet presence, but later began to assist newspapers in designing online city guides before being purchased by Compaq Computer in 2000.
How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight is a 2016 non-fiction book by journalist Julian Guthrie about the origins of the X Prize Foundation and Peter Diamandis, the first X Prize, the Ansari X Prize and Anousheh Ansari, the entrants into that suborbital spaceflight competition, and the winning team, Mojave Aerospace Ventures of Vulcan Inc., Paul G. Allen, Scaled Composites, Burt Rutan, and their platform of Tier One of SpaceShipOne and WhiteKnightOne.
TSLAQ is a loose, international collective of largely anonymous short-sellers, skeptics, and researchers who openly criticize Tesla, Inc. and its CEO Elon Musk. The group primarily organizes on social media, often using the $TSLAQ cashtag, and on Reddit to coordinate efforts and share news, opinions, and analysis about the company and its stock. Edward Niedermeyer, in his book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors (2019), pinpoints the July 2018 doxxing of Twitter user Lawrence Fossi, a Seeking Alpha writer and Tesla short seller operating under the pseudonym Montana Skeptic, as the catalyst for the formation of TSLAQ.
Elon Musk is the CEO or owner of multiple companies including Tesla, SpaceX, and X Corp., and has expressed many views on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from politics to science.
Tesla, Inc. has been criticized for its cars, workplace culture, business practices, and occupational safety. Many of the criticisms are also directed toward Elon Musk, the company's CEO and Product Architect. Critics have also accused Tesla of deceptive marketing, unfulfilled promises, and fraud. The company is currently facing criminal and civil investigations into its self-driving claims. Critics have highlighted Tesla's downplaying of issues, and Tesla's alleged retaliation against several whistleblowers.
X Corp. is an American technology company headquartered in Bastrop, Texas. Established by Elon Musk in 2023 as the successor to Twitter, Inc., it is a wholly owned subsidiary of X Holdings Corp., which is itself mostly owned by Musk. The company owns the social networking service X, and has announced plans to use it as a base for other offerings. While the official name of the company and social network is now X, many users and media outlets continue to refer to it as Twitter.
Jared John Birchall is an American business executive and a former banker. He is the chief executive officer of neurotechnology company Neuralink and the wealth manager of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk since 2016. As Musk's adviser, right-hand man, and fixer, Birchall holds executive or administrative positions in other endeavors of his including the Boring Company, Musk Foundation, xAI, and managing his family office.
Elon Musk is a South African-born businessman.
Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$436 billion as of January 2025, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and $426 billion according to Forbes, primarily from his ownership stakes in Tesla, Inc. and SpaceX. In November 2021, he became the first person in the world to have a net worth above $300 billion, and in December 2024, he became the first person to reach a net worth of $400 billion.
The Musk family includes Maye Musk, a model and author; Errol Musk, a businessman and politician; their children Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk, and Tosca Musk, as well as nephew Lyndon Rive. Elon Musk's ex-wives are Justine Musk and Talulah Riley, and he has many children. Maye's father Joshua N. Haldeman was a notable chiropractor, aviator, and politician who was a well known proponent of Technocracy. Geographically, the family has roots in England, Canada, South Africa, and the United States of America.
Wild Wild Space is a 2024 American documentary film, directed by Ross Kauffman. Inspired by the book When Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance, it follows the quests of three rocket and satellite companies Astra Space, Rocket Lab, and Planet Labs.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |
