Sometimes, taste can be predictable. The pantheon for teenagers trying to flex their reading habits typically includes The Great Gatsby, Catcher in The Rye, or 1984. But even before becoming a CEO who tries to position himself apart from other CEOs, Elon Musk was trying to break from the mold, shirking the usual classics in favor of famous sci-fi lit. It differentiated him from his peers, but was nonetheless a predictable move for the man behind SpaceX and OpenAI.
Musk found that sci-fi addressed a curiosity brewing during his teen years in a way that religion and science alone couldn’t. Neither gave satisfactory answers to his questions about where the universe came from and why it exists, Walter Isaacson wrote in his new biography of the CEO, titled Elon Musk.
