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.
Musk has openly warned against the dangers of artificial intelligence.
In a 2014 interview at MIT's AeroAstro Centennial Symposium, he called AI "our greatest existential threat." He's also invested in the AI firm DeepMind "just to keep an eye on what's going on with artificial intelligence."
So it's no surprise that he labeled "Our Final Invention" "worth reading" in a tweet. Barrat takes a close look at the potential future of AI, weighing the advantages and disadvantages.
As Barrat says on his website, the book is at least partly "about AI's catastrophic downside, one you'll never hear about from Google, Apple, IBM, and DARPA."
This award-winning science-fiction novel, originally published in 1966, paints the picture of a dystopia not too far in the future. It's exactly the kind of vivid fantasy world that would satisfy an active imagination like Musk's.
In the book, a group of people have been exiled from earth to the moon, where they have created a libertarian society. In the year 2076, a group of rebels including a supercomputer named Mike and a one-armed computer technician leads the lunar colony's revolution against its earthbound rulers.
It is, Musk said in an interview at MIT's Aero/Astro Centennial, Heinlein's best work.
Now a documentary, "Merchants of Doubt" is written by two historians of science who make the case that scientists with political and industry connections have obscured the facts surrounding a series of public-health issues.
Musk recommended the book in 2013, at a D11 conference.
Around the same time, he summarized the book's key takeaway in a tweet: "Same who tried to deny smoking deaths r denying climate change."
In an interview with CNN, Musk said that he had just finished Barlett and Steele's "Howard Hughes," a biography of the eccentric filmmaker and aviation tycoon, who famously got a little nutty at the end of his life.
"Definitely want to make sure I don't grow my fingernails too long and start peeing in jars," Musk says.
But it's easy to see why Musk would be attracted to Hughes, who worked in multiple industries and pushed the boundaries of flying, breaking air-speed records.
Given his leadership roles at SpaceX, SolarCity, and Tesla, Musk has a bird's-eye view of the advance of technology.
It's not all good news.
"We need to be super careful with AI," he tweeted, because it's "potentially more dangerous than nukes."
To find out why, he says it's "worth reading" Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence," a book that makes the daring inquiry into what would happen if computational intelligence surpassed human intelligence.
Musk is a committed autodidact, devouring the subjects he needs to know about.
When he decided to start SpaceX, he needed to learn the basics of rocket science.
One of the books that helped him was "Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down," a popular take on structural engineering by J.E. Gordon, a British material scientist.
"It is really, really good if you want a primer on structural design," Musk said in an interview with KCRW.
Musk has said that Ben Franklin is one of his heroes.
In Franklin's biography, "you can see how [Franklin] was an entrepreneur," Musk says in an interview with Foundation. "He was an entrepreneur. He started from nothing. He was just a runaway kid."
Something about that is similar to Musk's story — growing up in Pretoria, South Africa, going to school in Canada, transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, then using an invitation to Stanford University's Ph.D. program to land in Silicon Valley.
Musk's review: "Franklin's pretty awesome," he says.
Musk says he had an "existential crisis" when he was between 12 and 15, burrowing into Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and other moody philosophers to find the meaning of life.
It didn't help.
Then he came upon "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," a comic interstellar romp by Douglas Adams. In the book a supercomputer finds the "answer" to a meaningful life is the number 42 — but the question was never figured out.
This was instructive to a young Musk.
"If you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part," Musk said in an interview. "So, to the degree that we can better understand the universe, then we can better know what questions to ask."
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