Musk had struck me as a well-intentioned dreamer—a card-carrying member of Silicon Valley’s techno-utopian club. This group tends to be a mix of Ayn Rand devotees and engineer absolutists who see their hyperlogical worldviews as the Answer for everyone. If we’d just get out of their way, they’d fix all our problems.
“I think there are probably too many smart people pursuing Internet stuff, finance, and law,” Musk said on the way. “That is part of the reason why we haven’t seen as much innovation.”
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook engineer, told me. “That sucks.”
What Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview.
“I would like to allocate more time to dating, though. I need to find a girlfriend. That’s why I need to carve out just a little more time. I think maybe even another five to ten—how much time does a woman want a week? Maybe ten hours? That’s kind of the minimum? I don’t know.”
“Maybe I read too many comics as a kid,” Musk said. “In the comics, it always seems like they are trying to save the world. It seemed like one should try to make the world a better place because the inverse makes no sense.”
The Haldemans had a laissez-faire approach to raising their children, which would extend over the generations to Musk. Their kids were never punished, as Joshua believed they would intuit their way to proper behavior. When mom and dad went off on their tremendous flights, the kids were left at home. Scott Haldeman can’t remember his father setting foot at his school a single time even though his son was captain of the rugby team and a prefect. “To him, that was all just anticipated,” said Scott Haldeman. “We were left with the impression that we were capable of anything. You just have to make a decision and do it. In that sense, my father would be very proud of Elon.”
“He goes into his brain, and then you just see he is in another world,” Maye said. “He still does that. Now I just leave him be because I know he is designing a new rocket or something.”
Elon ended up enrolling at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, in 1989. (He picked Queen’s over the University of Waterloo because he felt there were more good-looking women at Queen’s.)
“We were overwhelmed and just thought these guys must know what they’re doing,” Kimbal said. “But they’ didn’t. There was no vision once they took over. They were investors, and we got on well with them, but the vision had just disappeared from the company.”
Musk began thinking back to his time as an intern at the Bank of Nova Scotia. His big takeaway from that job, that bankers are rich and dumb, now had the feel of a massive opportunity.
“The point is that it’s fucking backed by Uncle Sam. It doesn’t matter what the South Americans do. You cannot lose unless you think the U.S. Treasury is going to default. But they still didn’t do it, and I was stunned. Later in life, as I competed against the banks, I would think back to this moment, and it gave me confidence. All the bankers did was copy what everyone else did. If everyone else ran off a bloody cliff, they’d run right off a cliff with them. If there was a giant pile of gold sitting in the middle of the room and nobody was picking it up, they wouldn’t pick it up, either.”
Musk also began to hone his trademark style of entering an ultracomplex business and not letting the fact that he knew very little about the industry’s nuances bother him in the slightest.
The rhetoric sounded good, and the four men were enthused. The only thing stopping them was reality.
Musk ended up with a shell of a company and a handful of loyal employees. “After all that went down, I remember sitting with Elon in his office,” said Julie Ankenbrandt, an early X.com employee who stayed. “There were a million laws in place to block something like X.com from happening, but Elon didn’t care. He just looked at me and said, ‘I guess we should hire some more people.’”
“Money is not his motivation, and, quite frankly, I think it just happens for him,” Justine said. “It’s just there. He knows he can generate it.”
“I came very close to dying,” Musk said. “That’s my lesson for taking a vacation: vacations will kill you.” 6 MICE IN SPACE ELON MUSK TURNED THIRTY IN JUNE 2001, and the birthday hit him hard.
“I came very close to dying,” Musk said. “That’s my lesson for taking a vacation: vacations will kill you.”
The start-up life, which Musk described as akin to “eating glass and staring into the abyss,”
The spirit of Manifest Destiny had been deflated or maybe even come to a depressing end, and hardly anyone seemed to care.
“This concept had been floating around in various forms for a while,” said Dave Bearden, a space industry veteran who attended the meetings. “It would be, yes, there is life on Mars, and we put it there.
“This guy in a funny accent said, ‘I really need to talk to you. I am a billionaire. I am going to start a space program.’”
The men were heading to Russia at the height of its freewheeling post-Soviet days when rich guys could apparently buy space missiles on the open market.
“It made me extremely sad to talk about it,” Musk said. “I’m not sure why I’d want to talk about extremely sad events. It does no good for the future. If you’ve got other kids and obligations, then wallowing in sadness does no good for anyone around you.
“The worst call was the first one,” Hollman said. “Something had gone wrong, and Elon asked me how long it would take to be operational again, and I didn’t have an immediate answer. He said, ‘You need to. This is important to the company. Everything is riding on this. Why don’t you have an answer?’ He kept hitting me with pointed, direct questions. I thought it was more important to let him know quickly what happened, but I learned it was more important to have all the information.”
At 2 A.M., an off-the-books crew showed up with a cherry picker and ran fiber to the telephone poles and then ran cables straight to the SpaceX buildings. “We did that over a weekend instead of taking months to get permits,” Spikes said. “There was always this feeling that we were facing a sort of insurmountable challenge and that we had to band together to fight the good fight.”
“I know they did a lot of hanky stuff at night,” he said. “They were smart, needed to get things done, and didn’t always have time to wait for things like city permits.”
Doing this favor bought Spikes no special treatment. “SpaceX’s mail server crashed one time, and Elon word for word said, ‘Don’t ever fucking let that happen again,’” Spikes said. “He had a way of looking at you—a glare—and would keep looking at you until you understood him.”
‘The longer you wait to fire someone the longer it has been since you should have fired them,’”
“It was like Gilligan’s Island except with rockets,”
Had anyone from Detroit stopped by Tesla Motors at this point, they would have ended up in hysterics. The sum total of the company’s automotive expertise was that a couple of the guys at Tesla really liked cars and another one had created a series of science fair projects based on technology that the automotive industry considered ridiculous.
they were at Eberhard’s house in Woodside celebrating Independence Day and figured it was as good a moment as any to see what happened when the Roadster’s batteries caught on fire.
Every time Tesla interacted with Detroit it received a reminder of how the once-great city had been separated from its own can-do culture. Tesla tried to lease a small office in Detroit. The costs were incredibly low compared with space in Silicon Valley, but the city’s bureaucracy made getting just a basic office an ordeal. The building’s owner wanted to see seven years of audited financials from Tesla, which was still a private company. Then the building owner wanted two years’ worth of advanced rent. Tesla had about $50 million in the bank and could have bought the building outright. “In Silicon Valley, you say you’re backed by a venture capitalist, and that’s the end of the negotiation,” Tarpenning said. “But everything was like that in Detroit.
Rarely did Tesla get hung up overanalyzing a situation. The company would pick a plan of attack, and when it failed at something, it failed fast and then tried a new approach.
Elon said, ‘I will spend my last dollar on these companies. If we have to move into Justine’s parents’ basement, we’ll do it.’”
(ULA, a partnership between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, sees itself as an engine of job creation rather than a model of inefficiency.)
“I do think Bezos has an insatiable desire to be King Bezos,” Musk said. “He has a relentless work ethic and wants to kill everything in e-commerce. But he’s not the most fun guy, honestly.”
Musk initially relied on textbooks to form the bulk of his rocketry knowledge. But as SpaceX hired one brilliant person after another, Musk realized he could tap into their stores of knowledge. He would trap an engineer in the SpaceX factory and set to work grilling him about a type of valve or specialized material. “I thought at first that he was challenging me to see if I knew my stuff,” said Kevin Brogan, one of the early engineers. “Then I realized he was trying to learn things. He would quiz you until he learned ninety percent of what you know.”
Where a typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership of their own delivery dates. “He doesn’t say, ‘You have to do this by Friday at two P.M.,’” Brogan said. “He says, ‘I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?’ Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You’re working hard for yourself. It’s a distinction you can feel. You have signed up to do your own work.”
“I put every ounce of intellectual capital I had into that e-mail and one minute later got that simple response,” Davis said. “Everyone in the company was having that same experience. One of my favorite things about Elon is his ability to make enormous decisions very quickly. That is still how it works today.”
Watson learned that SpaceX needed just this type of thinking. Musk wanted the bulk of a rocket’s computing systems to cost no more than $10,000. It was an insane figure by aerospace industry standards, where the avionics systems for a rocket typically cost well over $10 million. “In traditional aerospace, it would cost you more than ten thousand dollars just for the food at a meeting to discuss the cost of the avionics,”
If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics.
the absolute worst thing that someone can do is inform Musk that what he’s asking is impossible. An employee could be telling Musk that there’s no way to get the cost on something like that actuator down to where he wants it or that there is simply not enough time to build a part by Musk’s deadline. “Elon will say, ‘Fine. You’re off the project, and I am now the CEO of the project. I will do your job and be CEO of two companies at the same time. I will deliver it,’” Brogan said. “What’s crazy is that Elon actually does it. Every time he’s fired someone and taken their job, he’s delivered on whatever the project was.”
We’re trying to have a really big impact on the space industry. If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules.
Shotwell had not expressed a major inclination toward the sciences and knew only one version of an engineer—the guy who drives a train.
SpaceX has never had any interest in doing the five-minute tourist flights to low Earth orbit like Virgin Galactic and XCOR. It does, however, have the ability to carry researchers to orbiting habitats being built by Bigelow Aerospace
“Elon is changing the way aerospace business is done,” said NASA’s Stoker. “He’s managed to keep the safety factor up while cutting costs. He’s just taken the best things from the tech industry like the open-floor office plans and having everyone talking and all this human interaction. It’s a very different way to most of the aerospace industry, which is designed to produce requirements documents and project reviews.”
One former SpaceX executive described the working atmosphere as a perpetual-motion machine that runs on a weird mix of dissatisfaction and eternal hope.
For those who are under the impression that they are so clever that they can outsmart public market investors and would sell SpaceX stock at the “right time,” let me relieve you of any such notion. If you really are better than most hedge fund managers, then there is no need to worry about the value of your SpaceX stock, as you can just invest in other public company stocks and make billions of dollars in the market. Elon
Next time a car ad appears on your television, pause for a moment and really listen to what’s being said. When you realize that the Volkswagen sign-and-drive “event” is code for “we’re making the experience of buying a car slightly less miserable than usual,” you’ll start to appreciate just how low the automotive industry has sunk.
It’s worth pausing for a moment to meditate on what Tesla had accomplished. Musk had set out to make an electric car that did not suffer from any compromises. He did that. Then, using a form of entrepreneurial judo, he upended the decades of criticisms against electric cars. The Model S was not just the best electric car; it was best car, period, and the car people desired.
Musk had never run a car factory before and was considered arrogant and amateurish by Detroit.
Whether Musk was a founder of Tesla in the purest sense of the word is irrelevant at this point. There would be no Tesla to talk about today were it not for Musk’s money, marketing savvy, chicanery, engineering smarts, and indomitable spirit. Tesla was, in effect, willed into existence by Musk
Drivers would tap on this screen for every task except for opening the glove box and turning on the emergency lights—jobs required by law to be performed with physical buttons.
He had fancied himself a scholar of the Soviet Union and its foreign and economic policy and had studied these areas at UVa. “But then, in 1988 and 1989, they’re starting to close down the Soviet Union, and, at the very least, I had a brand problem,” O’Connell said.
Musk, the ultimate long-term thinker, would face constant second-guessing from investors looking for short-term returns.
“The first prototype was finished at about two A.M.,” Javidan said. “We were so excited that we drove it around without glass, any interior, or a hood.”
We told him that if he wanted the car in thirty days it would require hiring some new people, and we presented him with a stack of resumes. You don’t tell Elon you can’t do something. That will get you kicked out of the room. You need everything lined up. After we presented the plan, he said, ‘Okay, thanks.’ Everyone was like, ‘Holy shit, he didn’t fire you.’”
You did what Musk asked or were prepared to burrow down into the properties of materials to explain why something could not be done. “He always said, ‘Take it down to the physics,’” Javidan said.
“Anyone can make a car big on the outside. The trick is to make it big on the inside.”
Musk went from one rival’s car to the next, illuminating the vehicles’ flaws for me and von Holzhausen. “It’s good to get a sense for just how bad the other cars are,” he said.
Musk, though, approaches everything from a Platonic perspective. As he sees it, all of the design and technology choices should be directed toward the goal of making a car as close to perfect as possible. To the extent that rival automakers haven’t, that’s what Musk is judging. It’s almost a binary experience for him. Either you’re trying to make something spectacular with no compromises or you’re not. And if you’re not, Musk considers you a failure. This position can look unreasonable or foolish to outsiders, but the philosophy works for Musk and constantly pushes him and those around him to their limits.
“I may have been optimistic with respect to the timing on some of these things, but I didn’t over-promise on the outcome,” Musk told me during an interview after the Model S launch. “I have done everything I said I was going to do.”
“It’s not really like there was a rush to this idea, and we got there first,” Straubel said. “It is frequently forgotten in hindsight that people thought this was the shittiest business opportunity on the planet. The venture capitalists were all running for the hills.” What separated Tesla from the competition was the willingness to charge after its vision without compromise, a complete commitment to execute to Musk’s standards.
Lyndon and his brothers, Peter and Russ, wanted a new challenge—something that not only made them money but, as Lyndon put it, “something that made us feel good every single day.”
During one open discussion session, representatives from a handful of the world’s largest solar installers were sitting onstage, and the moderator asked what they were doing to make solar panels more affordable for consumers. “They all gave the same answer,” Lyndon said. “They said, ‘We’re waiting for the cost of the panels to drop.’ None of them were taking ownership of the problem.”
Much of this criticism was fair. It’s just that there was this Elon Musk guy hanging around who seemed to have figured something out that everyone else had missed. “We had a blanket rule against investing in clean-tech companies for about a decade,” said Peter Thiel, the PayPal cofounder and venture capitalist at Founders Fund. “On the macro level, we were right because clean tech as a sector was quite bad. But on the micro level, it looks like Elon has the two most successful clean-tech companies in the U.S. We would rather explain his success as being a fluke. There’s the whole Iron Man thing in which he’s presented as a cartoonish businessman—this very unusual animal at the zoo. But there is now a degree to which you have to ask whether his success is an indictment on the rest of us who have been working on much more incremental things. To the extent that the world still doubts Elon, I think it’s a reflection on the insanity of the world and not on the supposed insanity of Elon.”
SolarCity, like the rest of Musk’s ventures, did not represent a business opportunity so much as it represented a worldview.
Some of Musk’s opponents started to fear being on the wrong side of history or at least the wrong side of his glow.
What’s fascinating is that Musk remains willing to lose it all.
Both companies were designed with this vision of motivating a critical mass of talented people to work on inspiring things.”
Brown often felt like an extension of Musk—the one being who crossed over into all of his worlds. For more than a decade, she gave up her life for Musk, traipsing back and forth between Los Angeles and Silicon Valley every week, while working late into the night and on weekends. Brown went to Musk and asked that she be compensated on par with SpaceX’s top executives, since she was handling so much of Musk’s scheduling across two companies, doing public relations work and often making business decisions. Musk replied that Brown should take a couple of weeks off, and he would take on her duties and gauge how hard they were. When Brown returned, Musk let her know that he didn’t need her anymore,
Even in social settings, Musk might get up from the dinner table without a word of explanation to head outside and look at the stars, simply because he’s not willing to suffer fools or small talk.
One of Smil’s latest works is Made in the USA, an exploration of America’s past manufacturing glories and its subsequent, dismal loss of industry. Anyone who thinks the United States is making a natural, clever shift away from manufacturing and toward higher-paying information-worker jobs will want to read this book and have a gander at the long-term consequences of this change.
“I’ve learned that your intuition about things you don’t know that much about isn’t very good,” Page said. “The way Elon talks about this is that you always need to start with the first principles of a problem. What are the physics of it? How much time will it take? How much will it cost? How much cheaper can I make it? There’s this level of engineering and physics that you need to make judgments about what’s possible and interesting.
Page holds Musk up as a model he wishes others would emulate—a figure that should be replicated during a time in which the businessmen and politicians have fixated on short-term, inconsequential goals.
“I don’t think we’re doing a good job as a society deciding what things are really important to do,” Page said. “I think like we’re just not educating people in this kind of general way. You should have a pretty broad engineering and scientific background. You should have some leadership training and a bit of MBA training or knowledge of how to run things, organize stuff, and raise money. I don’t think most people are doing that, and it’s a big problem. Engineers are usually trained in a very fixed area. When you’re able to think about all of these disciplines together, you kind of think differently and can dream of much crazier things and how they might work. I think that’s really an important thing for the world. That’s how we make progress.”
“Elon came to the conclusion early in his career that life is short,” Straubel said. “If you really embrace this, it leaves you with the obvious conclusion that you should be working as hard as you can.”
Recently, we went to the Monaco Grand Prix and were hanging out with the prince and princess of Monaco. It all seemed quite normal to the kids, and they were blasé about it. They are growing up having a set of experiences that are extremely unusual, but you don’t realize experiences are unusual until you are much older. They’re just your experiences. They have good manners at meals.”
It bothers Musk a bit that his kids won’t suffer like he did.
“They might have a little adversity at school, but these days schools are so protective,” he said. “If you call someone a name, you get sent home. When I was going to school, if they punched you and there was no blood, it was like, ‘Whatever. Shake it off.’ Even if there was a little blood, but not a lot, it was fine.
The rule is they have to read more than they play video games.
I had decided that this propensity for risk had little to do with Musk being insane, as he had wondered aloud several months earlier. No, Musk just seems to possess a level of conviction that is so intense and exceptional