MUSK – The Visionary

A fact-based literary narrative · 374 pages

Pretoria, a child's bedroom: a boy with a broken nose and a backpack full of books. South Texas, four decades later: he is standing between two factory halls when a bell rings for him at the Nasdaq — and for twelve days a human being is worth, on paper, a trillion dollars.

Between the two lies a life no novelist would have dared invent. Three rockets that fell, and a fourth that made it to orbit. A Christmas Eve on which two companies were saved in the last hour of the last possible day. A machine on the edge of Memphis that never sleeps.

The events, dates, and statements that carry this book are publicly documented and cited one by one in the appendix; where the book tells scenes and inner lives, that is recognizably the work of the narrator. It contains no invented evidence, sources, or quotations. Told with respect, without flattery.

And with an ending no marketing department would have chosen: the trillion did not hold. Twelve days after the bell, it was gone.