Showing posts with label entrepreneur. Show all posts
Showing posts with label entrepreneur. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Elon Musk's Recommended Reading List

If you haven't noticed before, on the right sidebar of the website we've catalogued various recommended reading lists from top investors.  Many of these investors have recommended expanding your horizons beyond just books on investing.

So this time around we're taking a look at a recommendations from an entrepreneur.  Elon Musk is the founder of electric car company Tesla (TSLA), space exploration company SpaceX, and he also previously co-founded online payments firm PayPal (PYPL).

Here are books Elon Musk has recommended over the years, as well as books he said shaped him into who he is today.


Elon Musk's Recommended Reading List

  Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel

  Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

  Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Orestes and Erik M. Conway

  Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down by J.E. Gordon

  Nikola Tesla Biographies: Musk didn't specify which one but there's The Tesla Autobiography as well as Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson

  The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

  Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson

  Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

  Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele

  Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John D. Clark  


Musk has also recommended various fiction books such as The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, as well as The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams, and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.


If you're looking for more investing-focused books, be sure to check out Charlie Munger's recommended reading list as well as Seth Klarman's favorite books.


Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Mark Cuban Interview On Business, Investing, Entrepreneurship: Young Investors Society

Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban recently sat down for an interview with the Young Investors Society.  In it, they talked about a wide range of topics focused on business: entrepreneurship, investing, risk, and more.  Here's some highlights:


- "I avoid risk by trying to know more about what I'm trying to do than anybody."

- Talked about advocating the Peter Lynch method of investing by focusing on what you know.  He was always using tech hardware and knew which companies' products worked and which didn't.  Parlayed that into a hedge fund based on his research/picks and then sold that.  Noted there's less companies going public these days so "there's more money chasing fewer choices."

- On what he thinks is going to be different in 5-10 years: "Artificial intelligence is gonna eat the world."

- Owns a lot of Amazon.com (AMZN) stock.  Mainly because they're involved in a lot of the areas he was discussing (A.I. etc)

- Also a previous article said he owns a lot of Netflix (NFLX).  In the interview, Cuban talked about how their content aggregation and focus on data allowed them to be able to recommend content to users.  (And then they obviously took that a step further by seeing what was being watched the most and then created their own content based on those metrics.)

- Big time screw ups in investing: he liked the Uber idea but didn't like how they were pricing it.  "Sometimes you make it and sometimes you miss 'em."

- "There's a hundred apps that let you sell your time."  Thinks there's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur.

- On being an analyst:  "Everyone has the same information so it's hard to package it uniquely.  Find the companies where you may have an edge.  Using your unique perspective is what I did when I started investing in stocks."  He talked about how a high school kid's viewpoint on companies like Snapchat or Twitter would be vastly different than someone who's in their 40's or 50's.

- On advice for young investors:  "Understand the hierarchy of return on investment.  Investing in stocks is not the first place you should invest.  Number one is pay off your debt.  Two: save some money.  Life doesn't match up to your returns.  You might have the best investment in the world but find yourself having to sell it to pay for school or to fix your car.  Always have some savings first."

Embedded below is the video of Mark Cuban's interview with Young Investors Society:



h/t A Wealth of Common Sense for the find