Reuters Elon Musk is a lifelong reader, and books ranging from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" to "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life" have shaped his outlook.
"I read books," he reportedly likes to say.
Musk - who was smart enough to get into a physics Ph.D. program at Stanford University and then drop out because it didn't seem that relevant to him - has always been hungry for the written word.
In its profile of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, the New Yorker observed that he was picked on a lot during his South African childhood, and he would retreat into fantasy (J.R.R. Tolkien) and
As we'll see in below, books have always been important to Musk: inspiring him as a child, giving him heroes as a young adult, and helping him to learn rocket science while launching SpaceX.